With full awareness that next year could be worse (can you imagine!?) I want to wish every one of you a happy healthy New Year full of self-awareness and revolution. And here’s to less influence from right-wing bigots and the panderers thereto.

I dunno why so many people are acting so weird about that picture that wound up on Mr. Weiner’s Bookfaced site or Witter or whatever it was. Funny, when Mr. Vitter’s nanny talked about how he still wuvvvs wearing diapers, the WaPo didn’t invite Chris Lehane to spend a few hours talking to people online about it.

Practically the entire Senate Democratic caucus has written a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, asking the company to create the same kind of $20 billion dollar escrow account that the President will reprortedly seek to pay for economic damages and clean-up costs associated with the Gulf oil spill. The letter was signed by 55 of the 59 members of the caucus: only Mary Landrieu, Robert Byrd, Jeff Bingaman and Kent Conrad failed to add their names.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was not a tragic unavoidable accident, it was an inevitable consequence of weak regulation coupled with corporate corner-cutting and greed.

The idea that David Vitter can say with a straight face that he supports legislation to “remove” the liability cap for BP’s oil spill, and hold them accountable, only makes sense on the surface. You have to ignore a host of past experience, as well as the flawed legislation he’s actually pushing, to arrive at that conclusion.

Both Robert Menendez and David Vitter offered legislation on the Senate floor to alter the liability cap on oil companies who damage American land through spills, but both were denied unanimous consent, as members of the opposite party objected.

The unfolding disaster has dramatically reduced support for offshore drilling among Democrats and independents. It dropped by 13 percent since February. Yet, over the same time period, Republican support for drilling has remained strong (76 percent in May, compared with 74 percent in February). Overall, 54 percent of Americans still support more offshore drilling, but that’s significantly less than the 63 percent that approved of it in February. There is now a large and growing divergence between Republicans and other Americans.

While some are celebrating the Sanders’ Audit the Fed compromise as a victory, Ron Paul isn’t one of them. And according to the Matt Hawes of the Campaign for Liberty, David Vitter will be offering up the original Grayson-Paul amendment as a stand-alone amendment.

Mary Landrieu and David Vitter, the two Senators from Louisiana, speak out in favor of continuing oil drilling as the Horizon oil slick threatens their state’s environment and livelihood. Lieberman backs them up from his perch in the Senate. Pelosi signals no resistance from the vaunted House Democratic majority.

Ryan Grim reports that a bipartisan group of Senators is backing an amendment that will restore the Grayson-Paul “audit the fed” language to the Senate Financial Reform bill after Chris Dodd gutted it.