[M. Dodge Thomas]

"Boehner's statement followed comments last Friday by US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue who said he opposes efforts to stick BP, a member of the Chamber, with the bill. "It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game," he said. "Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it. We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that."

Well, there you have it, the new "American Way", courtesy of the US Chamber of Commerce:

When a big enough company screws up, "everybody" is going to have to contribute so that "we" can "get money from the government" to help cover their costs.

TARP redux, except this time 100% our "contributions" will be going to bail out a foreign-based company.

Pretty consistent pattern here: first, these businesses spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and publicity to convince the taxpayers that they are "over-regulated" and that "burdensome government bureaucracy" standing in the way of progress, and then all of a sudden when they start to reap the consequences of their own mismanagement and relentless pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of safety, it's all the government's fault because they weren't sufficiently regulated to prevent the screw up.

And interesting how for politicians like Boehner the last bailout was always an abuse of the system and a ripoff of the taxpayers, but the current bailout is always the necessary and proper thing to do...

And it's why solicitations from the USCC and the Republican Party have been going into my wastebasket for years.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

I see that Boehner now claims that he did not understand the question, and has referenced an earlier quote where he stated that BP should be responsible for the entire cost, so I may have been too cynical, too soon.