In recent weeks, reporters and photographers for major news organizations around the country have been speaking out about the attempts by BP to prevent them from getting a first-hand look at the Gulf Coast oil spill. A CBS News crew was threatened with arrest when it tried to photograph the spill, and a BP representative in Louisiana told a Mother Jones reporter that she couldn’t visit the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge without a BP escort.

On Monday, journalists from the New York Daily News were also “escorted away from a public beach on Elmer’s Island bycops who said they were taking orders from BP.” However, they managed to get a covert tour of the Queen Bess barrier island from a BP contractor who is fed up with the oil company’s attempt to cover up the disaster:

“There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It’s important to me that people know the truth about what’s going on here,” the contractor said.

“The things I’ve seen: They just aren’t right. All the life out here is just full of oil. I’m going to show you what BP never showed the President.” [...]

The grasses by the shore were littered with tarred marine life, some dead and others struggling under a thick coating of crude.

“When you see some of the things I’ve seen, it would make you sick,” the contractor said. “No living creature should endure that kind of suffering.”

“BP is going to say the deaths of these animals wasn’t oil-related,” the contractor added. “We know the truth. I hope these pictures get to the right people — to someone who can do something.”

Today, the International Bird Rescue Research Center released new figures on the number of animals that have been reported to the Unified Area Command from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the affected region. The numbers include 779 dead birds, sea turtles, or mammals (not all showed visible oil signs), and another 108 that were “visibly oiled” but still alive.

A new CNN report shows some disgusting images of the oil on the shore of the Gulf Coast, and notes that some people — including children — are still unaware of the dangers of the oil and are swimming in the polluted water:

During the financial regulatory reform debate, an amendment from Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was adopted without much fanfare. The amendment mandates that big banks with riskier profiles need to hold more capital against losses and that bank holding companies (like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America) be subject to the same capital requirements as banks. It generated so little controversy that it was approved via a unanimous consent request.

However, since then, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have been working behind-the-scenes to kill the amendment.

As Kevin Drum wrote, “we can set reasonable floors [for capital], and when both Treasury and the banks are fighting those floors tooth and nail it doesn’t bode well for how seriously they take this stuff.” Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair, however, seems to take this stuff very seriously, as she has penned a letter in strong support of the Collins amendment. Bair argued that the amendment will prevent financial conglomerates from treating their federally insured depository arms as a backstop in an emergency, which leaves the FDIC on the hook if the firm goes bust:

The thrust of U.S. law and regulation governing holding companies is to ensure that risks undertaken by the parent company and the nonbank subsidiaries do not compromise the safety and soundness of insured banks…As we saw during the crisis, the source of strength doctrine was turned on its head as insured banks often had to come to the aid of their holding companies — holding companies that in too many cases also required substantial federal support…[T]he Collins amendment would constrain the Federal Reserve’s discretion to lower capital requirements below levels that would be implied by the source of strength function expected of holding companies.

While not eliminating regulatory discretion, the amendment does ensure that there’s a floor for capital requirements below which regulators can’t go. It also more closely correlates capital requirements with risk profile, and ensures that financial firms that aren’t traditional banks (but want to act like banks) get regulated like banks. These are all good things. As Mike Konczal wrote, “ultimately, here’s the big question: is the way we measured leverage and the amount of capital we asked banks to hold in 2007, one year before the massive crisis that has devastated our real economy, good enough? Or do we need to get serious about increasing it?”

As Tim Fernholz noted, the Collins amendment “speaks to the broader concern that we want banks taking less risk in general and focusing less on trading and more on lending.” As financial reform moves into conference committee, those shaping the bill should be taking Bair’s advice by giving the Collins amendment serious consideration.

Fox News has a history of deriding and distorting the economic recovery act (the stimulus package), not only by making outlandish claims about its effectiveness, but by allowing guests to uncritically air their own favorite falsehoods about the bill. Today, during Fox and Friends, Fox’s Steve Doocy went for the double-whammy, as both he and his guests (a panel of Republican and Democratic strategists) perpetuated a series of debunked myths about the recovery act, including that it only created or saved government jobs, cost hundreds of thousands per job saved, and didn’t help with underemployment. Watch it:

Let’s unpack these one by one.

– MYTH: The recovery act only created government jobs. — The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 290,000 jobs were created in April, 230,000 of which were in the private sector. More than half a million private sector jobs have been created in 2010 alone. April saw the strongest job growth in manufacturing since 1998, and the manufacturing sector has expanded for 10 straight months.

– MYTH: The recovery act costs hundreds of thousands per job. — This derives from a tactic that Republicans relied on early in the stimulus debate, which involves crudely dividing the spending portion of the bill by the total jobs created. The Associated Press has called such “grade-school arithmetic” “satisfyingly simple but highly misleading,” as it doesn’t take into account any of the effects of the tax cuts in the stimulus (which spur demand) or that “cost-per-job figure pays not just for the worker, but for material, supplies and that worker’s output.” It also assumes that all hiring for a contract lasting months or even years is already done.

– MYTH: The recovery didn’t help alleviate underemployment. — An underemployed worker is a worker who wants to be working full-time but can only find part-time work. According to the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the recovery act increased the number of full time equivalent positions (FTEs) between 1.8 and 4.1 million. FTEs incorporate jobs that went from part-time to full-time or that added overtime hours.

Fox’s gang even managed to distort the only concrete example of a stimulus project that it cited — construction on the Brooklyn Bridge — as the data comes “from a report that was released before the project really got underway.”

According to the CBO, the recovery act has raised GDP by between 1.7 and 4 percentage points, lowered the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points, and created up to 2.8 million jobs, which is 250,000 to 500,000 more jobs than was initially projected for this point in time. CBO estimates that the stimulus will be responsible for up to 3.7 million jobs by September. As National Journal has pointed out, “if the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.”