Minority Leader McConnell basically ended the president's one method of bypassing a broken Senate confirmation process, by getting Red to keep the Senate officially in session during their upcoming six-week recess. This deal getting struck this time basically means that every future Senate minority leader will hold up every future president's nominees until getting the same deal -- which means that, in lieu of Senate rules reform, we've just seen the end of recess appointments. (Unless future Democratic minorities are spineless enough to give in to future Republican presidents, which is certainly possible.)

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Reid's bill lacks caps of anything and has no renewable energy mandate but because it removes the $75 million liability cap on oil companies drilling in our waters, Republicans and two -- two! -- Democrats may not support it. One of those Democrats is, of course, Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana.

The Reid bill needs the support of every Democrat and one Republican to have any chance at passing, and to win that support Reid would probably need to add some sort of reverse-carbon cap, in which the bill would call on the government to pay companies to emit as much carbon as they can, for fun. (The House passed cap-and-trade already, a long time ago.)

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Citing unidentified sources, the BBC and Sunday Telegraph said detailed talks regarding Hayward's future had taken place over the weekend. The BBC said a formal announcement on Hayward's exit is expected in the next 24 hours; the Telegraph said it would be made in the next 48 hours.

The Sunday Times reported directors are "considering a plan under which (Hayward) would leave as soon as the ruptured well is sealed."

Hayward, 53, has come under heavy criticism for his leadership following the April 20 fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. He has repeatedly apologized and expressed sorrow for the oil leak, but in May, he shocked some U.S. residents when he said "I'd like my life back," and weeks later went yachting.

BP is due to release its second quarter results on Tuesday, and the board of directors is scheduled to meet before the earnings announcement.

Asked about the reports, company spokesman Toby Odone said, "Tony Hayward remains BP's chief executive, and he has the confidence of the board and senior management."

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A 48-hour test of the Taiwanese vessel dubbed "A Whale" began Saturday and was to continue through Sunday.

TMT Shipping created what is billed as the world's largest oil skimmer by converting an oil tanker after the April 20 explosion sent millions of gallons of crude spilling into the Gulf.

The vessel was expected to cruise a 25-square-mile test site just north of the Macondo Deepwater well site, company officials said.

The U.S. Coast Guard and BP are waiting to see if the vessel, which is 10 stories high and as long as 3 1/2 football fields, can live up to its makers' promise of being able to process up to 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water a day.

The ship works by taking in water through 12 vents, separating the oil and pumping the cleaned seawater back into the Gulf.

"In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart," TMT spokesman Bob Grantham said in an e-mail.

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It is still too early to tell exactly where Tropical Storm Alex might go, or how it might affect oil on and below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters said. An armada of ships is working on the spill. That includes those drilling two relief wells, projected to be done by mid-August, which are the best hope for halting the crude that has been gushing since an April 20 explosion touched off the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

BP's effort to drill through 2 1/2 miles of rock is on target, the oil giant said Friday. But BP's stock tumbled anyway over the mounting costs of the disaster and the company's inability to plug the leak sooner.

The crew that has been drilling the relief well since early May ran a test to confirm it is on the right path, using a tool that detects the magnetic field around the casing of the original, blown-out well.

"The layman's translation is, 'We are where we thought we were,'" said BP spokesman Bill Salvin.

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Spokeswoman Sheila Williams said Hayward took a break from overseeing BP efforts to stem the undersea gusher in Gulf of Mexico to watch his boat "Bob" participate in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.

The one-day yacht race is one of the world's largest, attracting hundreds of boats and thousands of sailors.

In a statement, BP described Hayward's day off as "a rare moment of private time" and said that "no matter where he is, he is always in touch with what is happening within BP" and can direct recovery operations if required.

That is likely to be a hard sell in Gulf states struggling to deal with the up to 120 million gallons of oil that have escaped from a blown-out undersea well.

A pair of relief wells that won't be done until August is the best bet to stop the massive spill that was set off by an oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers on April 20. BP has been hammered for its response, in part because of comments by Hayward that Gulf Coast residents horrified by the spill consider insensitive.

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Obama, set to visit the Gulf Coast on Monday and Tuesday, also plans an Oval Office address Tuesday night after his return to Washington. He meets at the White House with BP executives, including the oil company's chairman, on Wednesday.

"This is an ongoing crisis, much like an epidemic," David Axelrod told NBC's "Meet the Press."

BP's board was to meet on Monday to discuss deferring its second-quarter dividend and putting the money into escrow until the company's liabilities from the spill are known.

"Our mission is to hold them accountable in every appropriate way," Axelrod said.

The White House wants an independent, third party to administer the escrow account and compensate those with "legitimate" claims for damages, he said. The amount of money set aside will be part of the White House discussions, but Axelrod said it should be "substantial."

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O'Keefe now says he was filming a video that would've proved that Landrieu's office phones worked. That video would've put the lie to the claim that they didn't work -- a claim I'm not sure anyone ever made. (The problem was, people who were instructed by websites and talk radio to call her offices occasionally got busy signals, I think?)  But when his make-believe phone company workers asked to enter the office's telephone closet, they were all arrested by U.S. marshalls.

O'Keefe's gang that couldn't sting straight was quickly dubbed the "teabuggers," even though web publisher and classic cocktail enthusiast Andrew Breitbart insists no one intended to bug anything. O'Keefe's partners-in-crime included the son of the acting U.S. attorney for the western district of Louisiana and a couple other standard-issue Young Republican rabble-rousers.

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The most prominent activist, James O'Keefe, was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service and fined a $1,500 fine. The 25-year-old is known for wearing a pimp costume in a video that embarrassed ACORN.

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III sentenced the three others to two years probation, 75 hours of community service and fined them $1,500.

The FBI has said O'Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of two men who posed as telephone repairmen and asked to see the phones. The fourth allegedly waited outside in a car with a listening device.

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In February, two months before the Deepwater Horizon spill, 19 members of Congress called on the agency that oversees offshore oil drilling to investigate a whistle-blower's complaints about the BP-owned Atlantis, which is stationed in 7,070 feet of water more than 150 miles south of New Orleans.

The Associated Press has learned that an independent firm hired by BP substantiated the complaints in 2009 and found that the giant petroleum company was violating its own policies by not having completed engineering documents on board the Atlantis when it began operating in 2007.

Stanley Sporkin, a former federal judge whose firm served as BP's ombudsman, said that the allegation "was substantiated, and that's it." The firm was hired by BP in 2006 to act as an independent office to receive and investigate employee complaints.

Engineering documents -- covering everything from safety shutdown systems to blowout preventers -- are meant to be roadmaps for safely starting and halting production on the huge offshore platform.

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The four men initially faced penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Now, the maximum punishment they can receive is six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

As the Associated Press notes, the way these charges were reduced seems to indicate that a plea deal is on its way, and a lawyer for one of the men essentially confirmed that to the AP.

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After saying that reform is "on life support, unfortunately," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., told reporters Thursday that Obama hadn't done enough with his speech to change that. "He should have been more clear, and I am hoping that in the next week or two he will because that is what it is going to take if it is at all possible to get it done. Mailing in general suggestions, sending them over the transom, is not necessarily going to work.”

Landrieu also criticized the president for having called out the Senate for being slow to pass legislation already approved by the House, saying it was "a little strange, a little odd." It's hard not to hear her talking about herself when she went on to say, "Moderate Senate Democrats, who give the Senate the 60 votes, come from states that have to appreciate a broad range of ideas." She's got a tough political situation in Louisiana, and has been slow to join her Democratic colleagues in supporting the president's agenda for just that reason.

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James O'Keefe, the 25-year-old who became a hero on the right by dressing as a pimp and filming himself and a female partner, Hannah Giles, exposing apparent malfeasance in ACORN offices, has gotten himself back in the news. This time, things aren't going quite so well for him: He and three others have just been hit with federal charges in an alleged plot to wiretap the phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

According to an FBI press release, two of the men who've been charged, 24-year-olds Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, posed as telephone repairmen and "requested access to the main telephone at the reception desk ... then manipulated the telephone system." They also "requested access to the telephone closet because they needed to perform work on the main telephone system," the release says. O'Keefe was allegedly "already present in the office, holding a cellular phone so as to record Flanagan and Basel." A fourth man, 24-year-old Stan Dai, is -- like O'Keefe -- charged with having assisted Flanagan and Basel. All four face a maximum of 10 years imprisonment, along with a fine of $250,00 and three years of supervised release.

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But this is just one procedural vote. The more daunting hurdle of the cloture vote to break a filibuster and hold an up-or-down vote on the bill itself still lies ahead, and there Reid may have serious trouble, especially if a plan to create a government-run insurance provider -- the public option -- remains in it.

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As just one notable example, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that he can't "dictate how people vote" in the Democratic Senate caucus and that "We have 60 votes on paper ... But we cannot bulldoze anybody."

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Two weeks ago the second-term senator, who faces a spirited but uphill challenge from state Democratic Party chairman Jim Pederson, charged into the Phoenix offices of the Arizona Republic, the state's largest newspaper. He told the newspaper's editorial board that he anticipated an imminent assault from VoteVets, which had started running a dramatic television ad in Virginia, accusing Sen. George Allen of failing to provide adequate body armor to thousands of American troops in Iraq. Four days later, the paper dutifully ran an editorial criticizing the ad as "deceitful."

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Katrina relief may be more "pressing," in the temporal sense, than the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. But it's hard to imagine that there's anything pending in the Senate that will have greater long-term consequences for the nation than Alito's confirmation will, just as it's hard to square a lot of campaign tough talk about judicial nominees with the rather complete rollover the Democrats seem prepared to perform now.

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Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Landrieu said she was tired of hearing people -- including George W. Bush -- blame local officials for the slow response to the hurricane. "If one person criticizes them or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me," Landrieu said. "One more word about it after this show airs, and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."

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The unusual public opposition from moderates in his own party and from centrist Democrats who supported his 2001 tax cut appeared to get the attention of the White House, and spokesman Ari Fleischer was already signaling Wednesday that Bush was ready to compromise. And while some analysts had suggested that Bush's first draft was designed mainly to score points with big GOP contributors, some past allies in the Senate said Bush had no choice but to back down.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said she was pleased with some of the smaller-ticket items in the Bush plan, like the acceleration of the child-care tax credit and some targeted business cuts. But she balked at the $364 billion centerpiece of Bush's plan -- the elimination of the tax on corporate dividends -- citing the worrisome federal deficit.

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