BP made waves when they made an issue of using the $20 billion escrow fund only for “legitimate” claims from workers in the Gulf coast, making skeptics concerned with what the company will deem legitimate. Well, how’s this for legitimate? Strippers from the Gulf coast region are demanding payments from the company, claiming that the fall in tourism in the region has devastated their industry. Bill O’Reilly investigates.

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.

Over the weekend, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel drew fire from Sarah Palin when he remarked at length that Rep. Joe Barton‘s (R-TX) apology to BP was representative of her party’s governing philosophy. At today’s White House briefing, I asked Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton (Robert Gibbs was watching the World Cup) if he could give us a relatively uncensored readout of Rahm’s reaction. Before responding, he said “If only Vice President Biden were here today…”

The drama surrounding executive pay czar Kenneth Feinberg‘s Thursday round-robin interviews with the press pool just keeps going and going. Mediaite reported Saturday that Fox News claimed the White House had apologized for a “mistake by a low level person at the Treasury Department,” a claim which the White House now refutes.

Mediaite has learned more about what happened with the decision by the Treasury Department to exclude Fox News in a round-robin of pool interviews Thursday.

But more importantly – there are more details emerging about the uproar over the initial decision, causing the Treasury Department to reverse their decision.

On Thursday night, Fox News reported that the “Obama administration” had taken its “first concrete step” in treating Fox News Channel like it’s not a real news organization, excluding them from a press event. Through our own reporting, Mediaite has learned that Fox News’ report of this incident was, at best, incomplete and self-serving, and serves as a neat encapsulation of what Robert Gibbs told us the first time we asked him if the White House was “bullying” Fox News.

We reported earlier that when Fox News was banned from a round-robin interview with Obama administration “Pay Czar” Kenneth Feinberg, the bureau chiefs of the other major networks banded together to thwart the White House.

Now, Mediaite has learned exclusively that the Treasury Department, who set up the interviews, denies the story.