On Monday, the Kansas City Star reported that a Missouri farmer had painted the side of a 45 foot-long semi-truck trailer with the contentious banner “Are you a Producer or Parasite, Democrats – Party of Parasites” and placed the trailer on his property near busy highway U.S. 71. The farmer, David Jungerman, is protesting people (Democrats, apparently) who don’t pay taxes and instead “always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them.”

Throughout the entire ordeal unleashed on the residents of the Gulf Coast since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded, the main priority has been to, as President Obama put it, “plug the damn hole.” But now some geological experts believe that making an attempt to keep the oil from rushing to the surface may put so much pressure on the seafloor that the well may collapse into itself, making the situation worse than it is now.

This morning, BP confirmed rumors that it would be handing off the leadership of the Gulf oil disaster cleanup to Managing Director Bob Dudley from CEO Tony Hayward, who turned out not to be so much of a “people person.” Within a matter of hours, two cleanup workers were reported dead and the containment cap partially subduing the gusher was knocked off by a robot submarine. Not the best first day on the job, by far.

It seems that every time someone in the GOP expresses some radical libertarian idea, the rest of the party scatters as far from the person as possible. And like a brave firefighter to a burning building, John Stossel rushes in to save the embers of his beloved philosophy. He arrived on the O’Reilly Factor tonight with fistfuls of red-hot free market capitalism, calling the $20 billion BP escrow account a “thuggish Chicago shakedown,” by “Vladimir Obama.”

Darryl Willis is the Vice President of resources at BP America. More recently, he became the face of the corporation as advertisements featuring CEO Tony Hayward failed to connect for some reason. Willis visited The Situation Room today to explain further his role in the company, and how victims of the oil disaster can claim some of the $20 billion the company has set aside for those most affected.

Congressman Steve Scalise, as many in the Louisiana delegation, has been making the media rounds to discuss both the general status of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and, specifically, Texas Rep. Joe Barton‘s apology to BP (and meta-apology to America). On Hardball tonight, Chris Matthews challenged Scalise to condemn Rep. Barton’s comments which, coincidentally, happen to align with Rush Limbaugh‘s.

There is such a thing as looking too hard for the upside to things, and BP has apparently discovered it. Benoit Faucon at The Wall Street Journal somehow got a look at an excerpt from Planet BP, an online publication exclusively for BP employees, in which a “BP reporter” put one of the most outrageous [...]

On the evening of the day that Joe Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hawyard for having been “shaken down” by the White House for $20 Billion, Jon Stewart sort of explained Barton’s obtuse behavior by putting him on the cover of Disdainful Asshole Digest. But last night Stewart revealed that there was more hay to be made with Barton’s comments, or more specifically how many GOP leaders had gone back and forth on the sentiments expressed by the Texas congressman.

Texas Congressman Joe Barton‘s apology to BP– and apology for his apology to BP– somehow managed to be the most egregious statement in an event that featured five hours of BP CEO Tony Hayward speaking. And after being scolded by mostly everyone in both the media and his home turf of politics, Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer gave him an award for his achievement: the Most Politically Stupid Statement of the Year award.

As convenient and tempting as it is to blame BP CEO Tony Hayward exclusively for the corporation’s reputation as a needlessly cruel money-making machine, here’s more proof that Hayward may actually be one of the better ones: a BP spokesman described Hayward’s pleasant little field trip to the Isle of Wight to watch his yacht, Bob, at a race as “well-earned private time.”

BP CEO Tony Hayward really, really wanted his life back, and now that he has it, he’s making the most of it on the Isle of Wight, where he is attending a yachting event to watch his boat “Bob” race across the clean, crystalline waters of Europe. Remember when it was possible to “yacht” around in the Gulf of Mexico?

Kevin Costner has gotten a fair amount of press lately for his oil spill cleanup project that is 17 years in development and counting. Costner, who has been working on a centrifuge system to clean up oil spills since the Exxon Valdez disaster, spoke to Anderson Cooper last night to discuss his machine’s ability and the road bumps keeping it from getting it to in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fallout from Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton continues, and now some of his Republican colleagues are asking for him to step down from his ranking position on the House Energy and Commerce committee. The Congressman leading the charge, Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, represents a district that has been affected significantly by incoming oil on their shores.

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said today in an interview that BP CEO Tony Hayward would be handing over day-to-day gulf clean-up duties to Managing Director Bob Dudley.

Looks like Tony gets his life back!

This week, Rachel Maddow got so fed up with the way the people in charge of handling the oil disaster in the Gulf are handling it that, one by one, she seems to be taking over and doing their jobs herself. First, of course, was her not-too-shabby fake Oval Office address set to undo the damage she thought President Obama had done with his. Last night, she helped out the BP PR team with a dramatic reading of their latest press release.

Jon Stewart took a break from criticizing President Obama last night, opting instead to train his sites on the oil executives that appeared before a Congressional committee hearing yesterday. But surprisingly, the oil industry fat cats weren’t the best fodder for the The Daily Show last night; the best bit of the following segment focused on Rep. Joe Barton’s odd apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday.

The American media been unequivocal in condemning BP CEO Tony Hayward for everything from his negligence and insensitive comments, but on the other side of the pond, it has been a little more difficult to disown a man who was once their geological boy genius with a “disarming smile” set to save one of the nation’s greatest companies from an administration wrought with ethical breaches.

It took a few hours, but Congressman Joe Barton has finally come out and retracted his apology to BP for having had to put up $20 billion in an escrow account for claims. After stating that his comments, in which he said he was “ashamed” of the White House for “shaking down” BP were ‘misconstrued,’ he announced that “I want to apologize for that misconstruction.”

Texas Rep. Joe Barton used up his opening statement at today’s BP hearings to make a apology to CEO Tony Hayward for the Obama administration’s “$20 billion shakedown.” As the possibility was, at best, questionable, Iowa Democrat Bruce Baley took the question to Hayward himself: “Do you think BP was shaken down by the Obama administration to come up with this $20 billion compensation fund?” Hayward replied with a strange choking noise and a standard non-answer.

Sitting before Congress as if standing before a firing squad, it only took about five minutes of the House committee’s opening statements for BP CEO Tony Hayward to stop looking like the sort of man who has the will to live. But amid the barrage of scolding and stark reminders of his company’s negligence, someone threw Hayward a lifeboat: an apology.

On Tuesday, former Clinton staffer and Fox News analyst Dick Morris was blaming the BP oil disaster on his old boss, citing a 1995 law that gave oil companies incentives to drill far offshore. On last night’s O’Reilly Factor, Morris went after President Obama for lacking the executive skills necessary to find solutions to the cleaning the Gulf, and noted that liberals have turned on the President because they take environmental matters “very personally.”

As has been repeated extensively in the past 30 hours or so, President Obama’s first Oval Office Address was not quite received with open arms. Some were left unsatisfied; others wondering what the president could have possibly done differently to make things better. But it’s safe to say few actually did anything about it. Rachel Maddow, on the other hand, went ahead and gave the speech she wanted to hear herself, fake Oval Office background and all.

Keith Olbermann‘s criticism of President Obama’s Oval Office address last night took many by surprise, not the least of which was Twitter user @jawillie, who wondered whether Olbermann would choose as a Tweet of the Day one that questioned his disapproval. He ended up choosing that tweet in particular, and reiterating on TV as well as on Twitter that, while he would be sad to lose viewers over it, those who leave were “watching for the wrong reason.”

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann made possibly the most favorable comments towards BP the company has heard in the past 57 days, suggesting they refuse to “be fleeced” by the Obama administration. Tonight she sat down with CNN’s John King to defend those comments, opening her defense with “I’m not here to shill for BP.” Instead, she argued, she was defending the greater free market from the big government tendencies of the Obama administration.

BP CEO Tony Hayward has proven to be the kind of spokesman that the company can’t let veer too far off-message. Tomorrow, Hayward will stand before the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce to explain the Congress what happened and what his company is doing to solve the problem and, in opening statements published recently by CNN, Hayward is sticking to the original script of his PSA fairly strictly.