BP to be Probed Over Lockerbie Bomber Release?

Quite rare for us to agree with anything these Senate Democrats have to say, but this is one of those occasions.

A group of U.S. lawmakers have called for an investigation into whether BP may have played a role in lobbying for the release of Abdelbaset al Megrahi to secure an oil contract with the Libyan government.

Megrahi, now 58, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

He was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds in August after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

"Reports have surfaced indicating that a 2007 oil agreement may have influenced the U.K. and Scottish governments' positions concerning Mr. Megrahi's release in 2009," wrote Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey in a letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Monday.

"The families of the victims of Pan Am flight 103 deserve to know whether justice took a back seat to commercial interests in this case," Lautenberg said.

Well, while we give props to Lautenberg for pursuing this he's still way late on this story.

BP, which plans to begin offshore drilling in Libya in the coming months, touted the 2007 oil agreement as "the single biggest exploration financial commitment an international energy company has ever made to Libya," according to the company's website.

The troubled oil giant stands to earn as much as $20 billion from the deal, according to Lautenberg.

Megrahi, who only served eight years of his life sentence for the bombing, was released by a Scottish court on "compassionate" grounds, citing a doctor's opinion at the time that he was dying from prostate cancer and had only three months to live.

In a letter to the British government last week, Lautenberg was joined by Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer of New York and Bob Menendez of New Jersey in calling the validity of such a prognosis into question.

"Mr. Al Megrahi is still alive and reportedly living in luxury," the letter said. "The doctor responsible for the key medical opinion has told the media that not only could Mr. Al Megrahi live another 10 years, but that the Libyan government had commissioned the doctor to make his assessment."

Does BP Stand for Beyond Parody?

The folks who released this game ought to update it to include the current cast of characters. There'd have to be a part where the man who's focused like a laser on plugging the hole draws a card and is sent to the golf course.

They were trouble-free times when oil barons were dining out with rich sheikhs and counting their profits.

But little did they know their drilling exploits would come back to haunt them.

Up to four would-be tycoons can compete at exploring for oil, building platforms and laying pipelines to their home countries.

But BP Offshore Oil Strike players must also avoid the dreaded ‘hazard cards’, which state: ‘Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1million.’

Unhappily for BP, that is just one per cent of the amount it has spent each day tackling the very real Deepwater Horizon leak, which has seen millions of barrels of oil gush into the Gulf of Mexico and hit the southern US coast.

The mint-condition game, made by Scottish company Printabox, was donated by a private collector to The House On The Hill Toy Museum in Stansted, Essex. It was very rare and ‘obscure’, said museum owner Alan Goldsmith, who added: ‘The parallels between the game and the current crisis... are so spooky.

‘The picture on the front of the box is so reminiscent of the disaster, with the stormy seas, the oil rig and an overall sense of doom. I was just knocked over by how relevant this game is, despite being made some 35 years ago, to BP’s troubles today.

‘It’s amazing when you think that their own game predicted this big oil slick – although, sadly, not the extent of the cost involved.’ The game was worth only about £75, he said, adding it was not popular at the time of its release.

Libya Looking to Bail Out BP?

Looks like we were on to something when we noted the connections between Libya and BP. Seems to Libyans are looking to invest heavily in the trouble British oil giant.

Share in BP rose 3.5pc to 333.3p in London, following weekend speculation that the company had been in contact with sovereign wealth funds about them buying stakes.

Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Corporation, told a newswire that: "BP is interesting now with the price lower by half and I still have trust in BP. I will recommend it to the Libyan Investment Authority."

He later added: "I think that BP shares are good value for bargain hunters,"

BP denied that it was planning to issue any new equity, but a weighty shareholder buying up stock on the open market could still help provide a floor on the company's plummeting share price. It declined to comment on any talks with sovereign wealth funds.

The oil giant has lost half of its market value since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank on April 20, triggering a catastrophic leak. Qatar, Abu Dhabi and the Kuwait Investment Authority, which already holds 1.8pc of BP, have also been linked to the company as possible investors.

One City analyst with a buy rating on BP said any formal deal with Libya would "most likely alienate the US even further" and potentially annoy big shareholders if the deal was done as a placing that dilutes the stock.

The US lifted trade sanctions against Libya in 2004, but still has a fractious attitude over the country's links to the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people on a US Pan Am jet.

It would come at a time when BP is trying to rebuild its relationship with Capitol Hill, since the oil spill eroded trust in the company's safety record.

More here.

Terrorist Given Three Months to Live Now Will Probably Last Ten Years

Seems everyone knew the gig was up after those first three months came and went about eight months ago. Now it appears this creature will never die.

The doctor who predicted the Lockerbie bomber would die within three months of his release from prison faced calls to apologise to victims' families last night.

There was outrage after it emerged Professor Karol Sikora had admitted Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi could live for another ten years or more despite diagnosing him with terminal cancer.

Campaigners reacted with fury to his comments which they said raised new questions about the decision to send him back to Libya.

Tory MP Ben Wallace, a former member of the Scottish Affairs Committee, said: 'The doctor that carried out this diagnosis owes his regret to the families of the victims.

'He should apologise to the victims for contributing to the release of a mass murderer, who is clearly alive and well in Libya.

'Throughout this whole sorry affair the victim has been put last behind trade deals, Scotish Nationalist posturing and dubious medical diagnosis.'

Megrahi's release from his Scottish prison cell last August - on the orders of Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill - was mired in controversy.

Some relatives of victims of the 1988 bombing claimed Megrahi was never as sick as he claimed to be, and criticised the release on so-called 'compassionate grounds' as an unforgiveable mistake.

The Scottish Government claimed there was a 'firm consensus' among medical experts that he would die within twelve weeks.

But there was widespread speculation the move was in fact part of an Anglo-Libyan trade deal - and unrelated to his terminal prostate cancer - after it emerged UK government ministers had pushed for his release.

I guess this might not be a good time to remind folks of this, is it?

Tony Blair has been accused of agreeing a 'blood money' deal involving the Lockerbie bomber with Colonel Gaddafi just hours before BP unveiled a £500million oil contract.

The then Prime Minister laid the foundations for the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi during a meeting with the Libyan leader in a desert tent two years ago.

The pair thrashed out a controversial prisoner transfer deal just before BP chairman Peter Sutherland announced the firm was investing $900million - about £545million - to search for oil in Libya. If the firm strikes rich, it could be worth £13billion.

The Scottish Government confirmed that its justice secretary Kenny MacAskill would announce Megrahi's fate at 1pm today.

It is widely expected that the terminally-ill 57-year-old, the only person convicted of the December 1988 bombing, will be freed on compassionate grounds.

Let's hope BP struck it rich there. They'll need the money.

BP Chairman Busy Plugging Another Hole

Some headlines just write themselves.

Talk about getting himself into another slimy mess.

BP boss Carl-Henric Svanberg isn't feeling the heat just because of the massive oil spill threatening the Gulf of Mexico -- he's reportedly also the bad guy behind the breakup of another couple's marriage.

In legal documents obtained by The National Enquirer, Louise Julian and her hubby of 18 years filed for divorce on May 24 after Svanberg had been wooing the 51-year-old mother of three since last year.

The couple originally separated in July 2009 due to "serious and irreconcilable differences."

The National Enquirer reported the bombshell love triangle in this week's edition.

Svanberg the slimeball even vacationed with Julian on his private luxury yacht in Thailand just days after BP's Deepwater oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people and causing a massive disaster off the coast of Louisiana, the tabloid reported.

The 58-year-old Svanberg, who hails from Sweden, divorced his wife of 26 years in November 2009. They have three children.

According to the court papers, Louise Julian will keep the couple's home in Brookline, Mass., in addition to two homes in Stockholm. Her husband, Gary Julian, will keep the family's condo in Colorado.

Two weeks ago, Svanberg apologized after calling those affected by the oil spill as "the small people."

'I Am Ashamed of What Happened at the White House Yesterday'

As an American, I'm ashamed of what's been going on at the White House for the past 17 months. Let's hear it for Rep. Joe Barton of Texas who, I'll remind people, is speaking for himself.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Arlington, apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward on Thursday morning for the "political pressure" his company is facing.

Barton condemned the White House's handling of a meeting Wednesday with BP officials, in which President Barack Obama pushed the company to create a $20 billion escrow account for damage claims from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The congressman called the account a "slush fund."

The statement drew a rare and forceful denunciation from the White House.

Barton made the remarks at a House Energy and Commerce committee hearing that is ongoing. Hayward is before the committee to testify about his company’s handling of spill.

"I am ashamed of what happened at the White House yesterday," said Barton, the top Republican on the committee. "It is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown – in this case a $20 billion shakedown."

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said he could "not disagree more strongly" with Barton’s statement.

"This is not a shakedown," Markey said. "This is the American government and President Obama ensuring that this company is held accountable…In my opinion, this is the American government working at its best."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called on other members of Congress to repudiate Barton.

Aww, the poor babies can't handle the truth.

Waaah!

John Boehner is weak in the knees, naturally.

Instapundit links. Thanks!

Update: Assorted fallout via Memeorandum. Ironic how it took Obama eight weeks and about eight rounds of golf before he addressed the spill to a national audience and about five minutes for the White House to react to Barton.

Update: Even more fallout. Barton walks it all back. More here.

Obama Devotes 20 Minutes to BP Executives

He spends about 12 hours a week on the golf course and he devotes 20 minutes to meeting with BP executives? How can anyone take this guy seriously?

BP executives, including Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO Tony Hayward and BP U.S. boss Lamar McKay, were seen walking into the West Wing of the White House just before 10 a.m. ET for talks with Obama that were scheduled to last 20 minutes.

Looking serious, they barely glanced at photographers and camera crews recording their arrival. It was their first meeting with Obama since the start of the nearly two-month old crisis.

If you need any idea what a charade this whole thing is, look who was also in attendance.

The BP executives were accompanied by the company's legal counsel Rupert Bondy and noted Washington lawyer Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.

Nobody need scratch their head and wonder why his approval ratings keeps tanking.

'Politicians Have No Sense of Reality'

It's come to this with Barack Obama. His failed presidency has so unraveled he's deluded himself into thinking his mess in the Gulf is somehow comparable to 9/11.

He's losing his marbles.

- President Obama, in a stark and striking comparison, said the devastating impact of the BP disaster on the national psyche "echoes 9/11."

The endlessly spewing oil rig off the Gulf Coast - like the terror attacks of 2001 - will influence the nation's future long after the crisis passes, the President said in a provocative Oval Office interview with Politico.

"In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come," Obama added in language that underscored his new sense of urgency about the disaster.

The interview, conducted Friday, was released Sunday - and sparked an instant debate among some 9/11 family members.

"I think he's off-base," said ex-FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches, whose son died at the World Trade Center. "These were terrorist attacks, these 9/11 murders, not something caused by people trying to make money."

Sally Regenhard, who also lost a son, said she could see some validity to the comparisons.

"Just like on 9/11, there were no plans for emergency preparedness, coordination of response," she said. "It's a failure of the system and the government. I'm not offended by the comment."

But Jack Lynch, whose firefighter son Michael was killed in 2001, felt Obama misspoke.

"To compare an environmental accident, if that's what you call it, to a premeditated terrorist attack is ridiculous," he said. "Politicians have no sense of reality."

Obama wasn't the first to draw parallels between the terrorist attacks and the still-spreading Gulf of Mexico spill, with columnists and others describing the disaster as an "environmental 9/11."

So traumatized is Obama by his own 9/11 that he went golfing yesterday before heading down today to the Gulf for photo-ops in three different states.

Time for Another Obama Apology Tour?

Remember Obama's apology tour last year when he tried to garner favor with every two-bit despot and street hustler overseas by repeatedly demeaning his own country on foreign soil?

Well, now he is starting to anger some of those same folks due to his bashing of BP.

UK industry expressed alarm yesterday at the “inappropriate” and increasingly aggressive rhetoric being deployed against BP by Barack Obama, US president, and warned that the attacks on the oil company could damage transatlantic relations.

The concerns come amid mounting political unease in Britain that attacks on BP for its handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are being dictated by the politics of November’s midterm elections rather than normal regulatory considerations.

Repeated references by senior US politicians to “British Petroleum” – which has not been the company’s name since 1998 – have fuelled fears of a wider backlash against UK companies.

The potential cost of the crisis and fresh fears over whether BP will pay its dividend has continued to hit its shares, with the company’s American Depositary Receipts falling nearly 16 per cent yesterday. Since the accident in late April, the value of BP’s ADRs has halved.

Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, the UK employers’ group, said the presidential attack was “obviously a matter of concern – politicians getting heavily involved in business in this way always is”.

So all the ass-kissing of and bashing of the US done by President Obama done to suck up to the European socialist and Marxist set that Obama seems to so strongly identify with is not cutting much ice now that BP's stock has dropped like a rock. Looks like the folks overseas are finding out what the US has already learned about Obama, which is he will throw anybody--and I do mean anybody--under the bus to protect his own political future. Rather than show leadership and provide a cooperative effort to help with the capping of this historic well leak, Obama is busy pointing fingers and lying to the MSM that he was on top of this situation a month ago. Of course,the MSM swallowed that lie whole cloth and did not point out the obvious time line contradictions with that yarn, and did not challenge his lack of willingness to work with BP management on a solution.

So to the socialist/Marxist crowd in Europe, get used to Obama knifing you in the back. If he does it to his own country, he will do it to you, too.

It was often said by friends of Bill Clinton that the only thing Slick truly believed in was his ability to "get away with it." Well, it is becoming very clear that the only things Obama truly believes in are his own political career and the willingness of the MSM to whore themselves out for him.

More here.

Mr Johnson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I do think there's something slightly worrying about the anti-British rhetoric that seems to be permeating from America. I would like to see a bit of cool heads rather than endlessly buck-passing and name-calling.

'When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves. It was an accident that took place and BP is paying a very, very heavy price indeed.'

Writing on his website, Lord Tebbit said Mr Obama’s attitude was explicable but ‘despicable’.

‘The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill - so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political Presidential petulance against a multinational company?,' he said.

Financial experts accused Mr Obama - who is due to make another visit to the stricken region next week - of threatening British pension investments in BP.

Echoing the president's own pledge last month to keep his 'boot on the throat' of BP to make sure it met the costs of the spill, Mark Dampier, of financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown, said the President actually had 'his boot on the throat of British pensioners'.

'Obama is obviously trying to show how tough he is but the trouble is he can't really do anything,' said Mr Dampier. What's going on in the Gulf is pretty horrible. But he is playing politics and I don't think it's a very helpful game.

Most British companies hold BP shares in our pension funds, so a dividend cut is not great news.'

Captain Kickass Discovers More Gulf States

With no end in sight and his poll numbers in free fall, America's superhero, Captain Kickass, has decided to take his weak photo-op tour to more Gulf states affected by Obamatrina, a noble gesture considering there's a strong possibility he may miss a few live minutes of a possible Game 6 of the NBA Finals.

Who said this man isn't sacrificing for us?

Under fire for his handling of the oil-spill crisis, President Obama is returning to the Gulf Coast for an update on the disaster.

The White House said yesterday that Obama will travel next Monday and Tuesday to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida -- three states whose shores and economies are being affected by the worst environmental catastrophe in US history.

The trip will be Obama's fourth to the region since the deep-sea leak began April 20 with the explosion of an oil rig leased by BP.

Obama's extended stay in the region comes as a poll earlier this week found that a majority of Americans believe his handling of the crisis has been even more bungling than President George W. Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The ABC News/Washington Post survey showed that 69 percent of voters disapproved of the White House's handling of the oil spill, compared with 62 percent who gave thumbs-down during the aftermath of Katrina.

Let's hope by next week our Golfer-in-Chief finds a moment to chat with BP's CEO.

Tiny Sportswriter: Subpoena Cheney Over BP Spill or Something

Poor little Mikey Lupica. So heartbroken his hero Obama has turned out to be an empty suit. Still that doesn't deter him from going on some rant about Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Frankly, I'm amazed he somehow avoided taking a swipe at Rush Limbaugh for the BP mess. On the upside, even this most strident of Obama Kool-Aid slurpers has noticed the clay feet.

Barack Obama helps nobody, certainly not himself, biting his lip and doing some bad Bill Clinton impression. If he wants to channel a past President in his continuing response to the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, it ought to be Harry Truman. Obama ought to start giving people hell instead of just talking about doing that.

The people in the gulf sure don't need an acting job from him, and a pretty bad acting job at that. Already over the past couple of months there have been too many times when the vacant look on the President's face has reminded you of a starlet trying to summon up the proper emotion to seeing something very, very sad.

Yesterday, Obama sent out another e-mail to the country, something else that helped him get elected. In it he is still trying to defend his administration's actions, as if somehow he knew from the jump that this explosion would poison the gulf for a generation.

"From the beginning, we have worked to deploy every tool at our disposal ..." the President writes.

No, he has not. This now sounds as pathetic as Bush desperately trying to bring himself back from "Heck of a job, Brownie." That ship has sailed, even as Obama talks about the 1,900 vessels he has in the water down there.

Then it's on to some cheap shots at the real enemies: The Republicans.

It is why the most shameless hypocrites on this thing, led by pep-squad captain Sarah Palin, are those from the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd. Most are hypocrites, anyway. The rest are probably criminals, those who have prospered in the culture of deregulation.

The rest are probably criminals. Nice to see thousands of people publicly indicted by a guy whose knowledge extends about two feet past the last locker room he's just inhabited.

So continue to give BP a much, much worse time, even after having spent too much time looking the other way on drilling like this the way Bush-Cheney did. Go after BP with every resource the government has, not just fines. Tell them that even if there are no criminal charges, they will never be allowed to drill so much as a golf hole in the waters of this country ever again.

Just wondering: How many major oil spills occurred during the evil Bush-Cheney reign?

Then hire a special prosecutor to look at every single step of the deregulation process of the past 20 years, all the way back to Clinton. The compassionate, feel-your-pain lip-biter.

Have that prosecutor finally disclose who participated in the National Energy Policy Development Group that Dick Cheney convened as vice president in 2001. Find out what special interests were represented and what deals were made and who might have gotten rich off them, just because nobody has been able to find out in nearly 10 years. Maybe a subpoena will make Cheney be more forthcoming.

I don't doubt for a second Obama and Holder would love to do just that. Anything to deflect attention from their incompetence.

One thing Lil' Mikey doesn't demand? That Obama give his BP money back. Probably has no clue about that, of course.

Wonderful: Obama's Katrina May Last Until Christmas

Or as some on the left call it, Winter Holiday.

BP Plc’s failure since April to plug a Gulf of Mexico oil leak have prompted forecasts the crude may continue gushing into December in what President Barack Obama has called the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts.

“The worst-case scenario is Christmas time,” Dan Pickering, the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston, said. “This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines.”

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University.

So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results, said Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

BP, based in London, says it can’t guarantee the success of its attempt now underway to capture the flow of oil and divert it to a ship at the surface. Thad Allen, the U.S. government’s national commander for the incident, said operations may need to be suspended to allow for an evacuation ahead of a tropical storm or hurricane, during which oil would continue to gush into the Gulf.

The so-called relief well being drilled to intercept and plug the damaged well by mid-August might miss -- as other emergency wells have done before -- requiring more time to make a second, third or fourth try, Dave Rensink, President Elect of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, said.

Robert Wine, a spokesman for BP, declined to detail the company’s own worst-case scenario.

In its original exploration plan for the Macondo well about 40-miles from the Louisiana coast, BP estimated the worst-case scenario for an oil spill was 162,000 barrels of crude a day, according to a filing with the U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service.

No word whether the statute of limitations on blaming Bush for Obama's mess expires by the end of this year.

Seems Obama's mess, among other mounting messes, is taking a historically unprecedented toll on Democrats.

There's any number of reasons for this: the public's perception of Obama's response to the oil spill, the shaky stock market performance last week, continued concern about the economy and spending.

That ObamaCare scam and Joe Sestak are also factors, don't forget.

'It Was All His Fault'

Honestly, I'm surprised Obama and his media lackeys haven't blamed Joseph Hazelwood for the BP oil disaster.

The man held responsible for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-tanker crash -- which had long been dubbed the nation's worst environmental disaster -- feels no relief that the gushing BP spill could soon make his fiasco pale in comparison.

"What's mine is mine," Capt. Joseph Hazelwood told The Post, recalling the crash in Alaska's Prince William Sound that happened under his watch 21 years ago.

The wreck, in which the tanker struck a reef, pumped 11 million gallons of oil into the ecosystem.

"I had to deal with it the best I could," said Hazelwood, now 64 and living on Long Island.

He was convicted of a misdemeanor charge of negligent discharge of oil and fined $50,000.

Watching BP execs blame one another for the toxic mess, Hazelwood was reminded of how he was singled out as the sole culprit in 1989.

"Exxon could point at me, the state of Alaska could point at me, the government could point and me and say, 'It was all his fault,' " he said.

Now it appears the leak could spew throughout the summer. This is really bad news for Obama. The NBA season will be over in a couple of weeks. What will he be able to talk about then?

Pathetic: BP Buses in Temps for Obama Photo Op

Shouldn't the media be waving these pom-poms?

Maybe the alternate photo caption should read something like "I can see the end of my presidency from here." Well, we all figured this would be a carefully choreographed photo op for the current occupant of the White House, but little did we know having their boot firmly on the neck of BP meant the folks at BP were obliged to send in some stooges for the visuals. I guess the goons from SEIU were off harassing some bank workers or getting an early start on the holiday weekend and weren't available. Or maybe Organizing for America didn't factor stuff like this into their budget. I saw a report earlier from Grand Isle and the place was a virtual ghost town. Seems they have to pay the folks to show up.

Perhaps you saw news footage of President Obama in Grand Isle, La., on Friday and thought things didn't look all that bad. Well, there may have been a reason for that: The town was evidently swarmed by an army of temp workers to spruce it up for the president and the national news crews following him.

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, whose district encompasses Grand Isle, told Yahoo! News that BP bused in "hundreds" of temporary workers to clean up local beaches. And as soon as the president was en route back to Washington, the workers were clearing out of Grand Isle too, Roberts said.

"The level of cleanup and cooperation we've gotten from BP in the past is in no way consistent to the effort shown on the island today," Roberts said by telephone. "As soon as the president left, they were immediately put back on the buses and sent home."

Roberts says the overnight contingent of workers was there mainly to furnish a Potemkin-style backdrop for the event — while also making it appear that BP was firmly in command of spill cleanup efforts.

New Orleans NBC affiliate WDSU reports that the workers were paid $12 an hour and came mostly from neighboring Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

News of 11th-hour spruce-up brigade spread rapidly Friday afternoon and infuriated locals. One popular radio host, WWL's Spud McConnell, suggested that the Coast Guard and the White House may have been involved in setting up the "perfect photo op."

Thanks to Ace, Allahpundit and Instapundit for the links.

Special added bonus: The bused-in workers making things pristine for The One.

And yes, it gets better.

How To Attract Foreign Investment

The Soviets Russians are busy re-writing the rules regarding foreign investment in that model republic.

The Russian government is pressing a bold strategy this spring to secure for Gazprom, the state natural gas company, a monopoly on exports of the fuel to Asia.

In the latest onslaught, Moscow is threatening one of the crown jewels of BP's global investments: the Kovykta gas field. And it is using methods similar to those deployed last fall to force Royal Dutch Shell to sell a controlling stake in another Far Eastern Russian energy development, the Sakhalin-2 project. In that case, too, Gazprom was the beneficiary.

On Monday, BP, which operates through a Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, moved closer to losing its license to the Kovykta field when a Siberian court declined to hear the company's arguments.

Kovykta is BP's largest natural gas project in Russia and valuable because it is within pipeline range of industrial cities in northeastern China.

At play, energy analysts say, is a Russian strategy to form a government monopoly on natural gas exports through Gazprom to Asia similar to what exists in Europe, with the scope and range to dictate prices and eliminate competition.

President Vladimir Putin has discussed playing the two markets off against each other in a grand form of haggling - though one that would depend on government control of the export routes.

That did not bode well for private energy companies operating in the country's Far East, like TNK-BP. Shell's ill-fated development, too, was aimed at the Asian market.

And some consider Putie a reformed communist.