"Show me the Money!! "

Why do I have this image of Rahm bouncing on the Oval Office furniture -- from couch to desktop and back again -- juicing up Obama to go into that meeting yesterday with BP execs to DEMAND justice be served?

"C'mon. That's all you got? History-making, Nobel-Prize winning president -- no cap that P = President! -- of the United States, and you give me a half-hearted request?"

"Um ... Show me the money! ... Better?"

"This is for all the marbles. The small people. The dying dreams. The generations losing a livelihood -- maybe never fish again..."

"Show me the Money!!"

"More, harder, this is your job on the line too, you know!"

"SHOW ME THE MONEY!!"

"Good. Now get in there and do some negotiating! Yes We Can!"

Gail Collins in the NYT approves, though her logic comparing this to the successful healthcare passage is a bit suspect (talk about money transferring, and too big to fail):

Obama held back on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, he and the BP chairman announced that the company — which is, in theory, only liable for $75 million in economic damage payments — was forgoing its dividend and setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate the workers and businesses who have been harmed by the spill.

In the negotiations, Obama said, he had stressed that for many of the small business owners, families and fishing crews “this is not a matter of dollars and cents, that a lot of these folks don’t have a cushion.” His brief remarks were more effective than his 18-minute effort the night before, particularly when coupled with all that cash.
...
As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Adler over at the Volokh blog agrees with the Univ. of Chicago's Richard Epstein that going forward, there should be no statutory liability limits effectively making a pay-as-you-go cost calculation accepted, as industries often do, as merely the price of doing business:

BP may have agreed to pay all legitimate claims, despite the Oil Pollution Act’s statutory limit on damages, but we should not assume future tortfeasors will act in a similar fashion. And while there are serious questions about the advisability and constitutionality of altering BP’s liability after-the-fact, there is no reason not to remove statutory limits on damages going forward. A more sensible — and strict — set of liability rules can do more to safeguard environmental values than muchprescriptive regulation.