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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest for the 18th of June 2010.

I'm John Dickerson in Washington with David Plotz.

Emily Bazelan is in New Haven.

Today we're going to talk about the British BP, formerly known as British Petroleum,

before one of those name changes that doesn't hide anything.

And then we're going to talk – we'll also talk about the President's remarks from the Oval Office.

Then we'll talk about the Prop 8 trial in California.

And then Alvin Green, the curious candidate of South Carolina's Democratic senatorial candidate,

who just continues to be more mysterious, most recently in an interview

with Time Magazine, thinking that he might be a possible candidate for person of the year.

First, let's start with BP on Thursday. Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, was in front of the House

committee explaining all of apologizing, but he was beaten to his

apology or his apology was overshadowed by Joe Barton, Republican congressman from the

6th district in Texas, who said that the $20 billion fund that BP has set up with the White

House was really a shakedown and that he apologized to Hayward for the White House forcing him to set up that fund and that he said that this was a tragedy of the first order that this fund had been put into effect.

In a remarkable act of cleaning up a mess, which by 4 o'clock the afternoon, the entire leadership of the Republican

Party had denounced, essentially, Barton. He had apologized at least twice, and it was kind of

that sort of how the day ended. Anyway, much more happening on BP this week, but I want to, I want to, I guess, go back to the Oval Office speech, which was a big deal this week. Emily, did you watch the president's remarks from the Oval Office on Tuesday? And what did you think of them? I did watch. I was, it was blah, wasn't it? I mean, everybody agreed with this, so I don't feel like it's that

interesting a point to make anymore. But he just didn't take, he said the obvious things that he had

to say that, you know, he was going to get BP to pay. But he didn't use the kind of really

...