BP and federal responders continue to battle the petroleum company’s oil spill as it continues to devastate the southeastern coast of the United States. Now, a group of fire chiefs from Baldwin County, Alabama, which is located along the state’s coastline, are alleging that the oil giant is complicating this battle by “purposely keeping trained local officials away from the spill response”:

Fire chiefs along Alabama’s coast are complaining about BP’s response to the Gulf oil spill crisis. The 36-member Baldwin County Fire Chiefs Association sent a letter Wednesday to the unified command and Alabama Gov. Bob Riley saying the company appears to be purposely keeping trained local officials away from the spill response. They also say they’re getting far too little official information about what’s going on.

Addressing BP, the fire chiefs write in their letter, “Interestingly our services are free or at most cost reimbursable. [Y]ou have chosen to use commercial operations at exorbitant costs. … To be kept totally out of the loop in this disaster makes no sense. Our citizens have come to expect a high level of response from us. With us having no information for them we are not meeting their needs. They deserve better than they are getting.”

Local Alabama news station WKRG reports that the chiefs had planned to meet with the oil company last week to relay their concerns, but “company officials cancelled the meeting at the last minute.” The chiefs say “their experience in hazardous material situations and knowledge of the region could be beneficial in the cleanup. But so far, BP has done a terrible job of communicating with local agencies.” Watch it:

BP Spokesman Ashley Babb denies that the company ever agreed to meet with the fire chiefs. “Since Day 1, we’ve tried to contact these people to say we’re available. We’re here,” Gib Hixon, president of the Baldwin County Fire Chiefs Association, told the Mobile Press-Register. “We’ve offered our facilities for logistics, staging, training. They have totally ignored us.”

Senate Democrats have been having a devil of a time this week drumming up votes to pass their version of a tax extenders package that extends unemployment benefits, vital social safety net programs, and a handful of popular tax credits and infrastructure programs. Deficit hysteria has led the entire Republican caucus, as well as some Democrats like Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), to oppose the package, despite the fact that unemployment is at 9.7 percent and 46 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more.

The House has already passed its extenders package, but due to consternation from Blue Dogs about the cost, critical funding for Medicaid as well as COBRA subsidies to help laid off workers purchase health insurance were cast aside. But those unfortunate decisions to cut critical funding look like child’s play next to the version of the bill that Senate Republicans unveiled today:

The GOP bill drops provisions in the Democrats’ proposal such as $24 billion for state Medicaid funds, $4 billion to extend Build America Bonds, $2.5 billion for state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families budgets; agriculture disaster assistance and settlement funds for Native American and black farmers.

To sum it up, to Senate Republicans Medicaid, a successful bond program that helps states and localities build infrastructure, and assistance to aid needy families in finding jobs and weathering the Great Recession are all expendable. And at the same time, the GOP bill drops several revenue raisers, including those that close tax loopholes for multinational corporations and wealthy hedge fund and private equity managers.

These loopholes allow multinational corporations to claim U.S. tax credits on earnings that they keep overseas and help hedge fund managers to pay the much lower capital gains rate on income that they receive, even though it is exactly like any other salary or hourly wage. These are loopholes that only help to further enrich the already rich and have no business being in the tax code — but Republicans (and some Democrats) keeping fighting to preserve them.

As I’ve pointed out before, with the labor market as weak as it is, it is highly appropriate to deficit spend and concerns over the short-term deficit (not to be confused with the long-term, structural deficit) should be secondary to job creation. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told me this week, “we do not have a short-term deficit crisis, we have a short-term jobs crisis in this country.”

With their bill, Republicans have coupled stunning indifference to putting people back to work with the preservation of unnecessary corporate welfare. It’s a very blatant pronunciation of priorities. (The bill does include $1 billion to help fund a summer youth employment program. So that’s something, I guess.)

Earlier today, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) told TPMDC that he thinks it’s appropriate for taxpayers to foot at least part of the bill for cleaning up BP’s oil spill in the Gulf. But that wasn’t his only misstep today, as he also managed to produce the absurd claim that the Bush tax cuts didn’t help produce the deficits that the country is currently facing, but that they actually boosted growth and employment:

“It’s not the marginal tax rates…that’s not what led to the budget deficit,” he told reporters, adding, “The revenue problem we have today is a result of what happened in the economic collapse some 18 months ago”…He also said that slashing marginal tax rates has actually buoyed revenue levels. “We’ve seen over the last 30 years that lower marginal tax rates have led to a growing economy, more employment and more people paying taxes,” he said.

There’s so much wrong here that it’s hard to know where to begin. But for starters, the Bush tax cuts played a huge role in our short-term deficit, and they are one of the primary drivers behind our long-term deficits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, the Bush tax cuts will cause $3.4 trillion in deficits over between 2009 and 2019. In fact, “just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019.” (See chart at right.)

And for Boehner to claim that the giant tax cuts, which predominantly benefited the already wealthy, contributed to a growing economy and more employment is laughable. In fact, as Josh Picker found, following the Bush tax cuts, the country “registered the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period”:

Overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967. Women reversed employment gains of previous cycles. And for African Americans, the worst job growth on record was matched by an unprecedented increase in poverty.

As for economic growth, GDP increased faster following the tax increases of 1993 than following either the Bush or Reagan tax cuts. In fact, “over the seven-year periods after each legislative action, average annual growth was 3.9 percent following 1993, 3.5 percent following 1981, and 2.5 percent following 2001.”

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke chided House Republicans who want to start cutting spending immediately (despite 9.7 percent unemployment), “because the economy is still in recovery mode and needs that support.” But its no surprise that House Republicans want to take such destructive steps, since even their leader is completely disconnected from economic reality.

On Tuesday, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina won the Republican Senate primary in California, setting up a general election matchup between her and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). And it’s becoming clear that a key selling point Fiorina intends to focus on is her time as a chief executive, despite the face that the centerpiece of her tenure — HP’s merger with Compaq — has been described as a “total flop” and “disastrous.”

Yesterday, Fiorina said that “of course” she would still cut 10,000 jobs if she were the HP CEO today, like she did in 2003. Last night, on CNBC, she doubled down, saying that she had to make “tough choices” at HP because “China is fighting for our jobs.” She also claimed that the economic recovery act “has done nothing” for unemployment in California:

We know here in California that the stimulus bill, $800 billion worth of taxpayer money, has done nothing to alleviate the suffering in this state. We have two and half million people out of work here in California, many hundreds of thousands for more than six months and many hundreds of thousands more have quit looking for work altogether. The facts are we’re destroying jobs in this state through bad government policy. During my time at Hewlett Packard, yes, I had to make some tough choices like families and businesses all across California are making tough choices. China is fighting for our jobs. North Carolina fights for our jobs…We know what it takes to create jobs: cut taxes.

Watch it:

CNBC’s Larry Kudlow asked Fiorina if her time at HP qualifies her “to go after the government payrolls…to make the spending cuts in their salaries and their benefits.” Fiorina said “sure.”

Let’s unpack these one at a time. First, Fiorina’s comment shows that she is not backing down from her staunch defense of offshoring American jobs. In fact, she’s fully embracing it! As Zaid Jilani pointed out, she has referred to the practice as “right-shoring” and in 2004 she proclaimed that “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”

Second, it is not true that the stimulus has done nothing in California, even though that state is undeniably in terrible shape when it comes to the labor market. According to employer reports, more than 70,000 stimulus jobs have been created in the Golden State. Overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the recovery act saved or created 2.8 million jobs, and an estimated 3.7 million by September.

Finally, Fiorina is jumping on the bandwagon of right-wing politicians demonizing public employees. And while public employees do, on average, have higher salaries and benefits than private sector workers, it’s because they’re more highly educated and the government doesn’t pay its employees below poverty-line wages (which drags down the private sector average). Once you look at the top-end, public employees make far less than their private sector counterparts. As CAP’s Lawrence Korb and Jacob Stokes pointed out, “this makes sense: why do so many senior officials leave to take lucrative positions at private firms if not for the money?”

And of course, Fiorina’s only real solution to anything is to cut taxes. But that doesn’t do much good for those who are already out of work and have no taxable income, and it doesn’t spur demand that will give businesses more customers and thus a reason to expand.

Before continuing to bash the steps Congress has taken, Fiorina should take a look at Ronald Brownstein’s article noting that, “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.”

BP has embarked on an aggressive campaign to repair its public image in the wake of its disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has repeatedly run full-page ads in major newspapers, retained high-powered lobbying and public relations firms, and launched a series of television ads with CEO Tony Hayward looking apologetic. The company has even hired Anne Womack-Kolton, a former top aide to Vice President Cheney, to be its new spokesperson.

Now, joining Womack-Kolton in helping BP repair its image is former chief of staff to President Bush, Josh Bolten:

The former European Commission president Romano Prodi is understood to be assisting BP in its attempt to restore its battered reputation in the United States.

The Times understands that Mr Prodi, who twice served as Italy’s prime minister, is a key member of an “international advisory board” assisting BP that also includes Josh Bolten, the former chief of staff to President George W. Bush. Both Mr Prodi and Mr Bolten are former employees of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that advises BP. BP’s former chairman Peter Sutherland also held a senior role at Goldman.

The group has been helping the oil giant to defend its interests against a fierce onslaught from the US Government, which intensified yesterday as it emerged that 44 US Senators have signed a letter demanding that BP does not pay a dividend next month.

Bolten became most famous during the Bush administration when the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Bolten and former Bush counsel Harriet Miers in contempt after they refused to cooperate in an investigation into the administration’s firings of U.S. attorneys.

This aggressive PR campaign by BP may actually be having the opposite effect of what the company is hoping for. Last week, President Obama chastised BP for devoting its resources in this area instead of to the people along the Gulf Coast who are struggling to maintain a living because the spill took away their occupations:

My understanding is, is that BP has contracted for $50 million worth of TV advertising to manage their image during the course of this disaster. In addition, there are reports that BP will be paying $10.5 billion — that’s billion with a B — in dividend payments this quarter.

Now, I don’t have a problem with BP fulfilling its legal obligations. But I want BP to be very clear, they’ve got moral and legal obligations here in the Gulf for the damage that has been done. And what I don’t want to hear is, when they’re spending that kind of money on their shareholders and spending that kind of money on TV advertising, that they’re nickel-and-diming fishermen or small businesses here in the Gulf who are having a hard time.

BP shares “plunged” in London today, with investors “shaken by the prospect that the British oil giant might cut its dividend.” UK business leaders are upset at the criticism the Obama administration is directing at BP, and Prime Minister David Cameron will be speaking with Obama about BP this weekend.

In response to its tumbling stock prices on the New York Exchange last night, BP said it was “not aware of any reason which justifies this share price movement.”