BP's motto might as well have been: "Safety first, except when it comes to everything else." NYT:

Internal BP documents, including an e-mail message calling the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon a “nightmare,” show a pattern of risky choices made to save time and money in the weeks before the disastrous April 20 blowout, according to a letter sent to the oil company by the leaders of a House committee on Monday. The leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce cited five areas in which the company had made decisions that “increased the danger of a catastrophic well,” including the choice for the design of the well, preparations for and tests of the cement job and assurances that the well was properly sealed on the top. Taken together, the documents offer the strongest case yet that BP bears much of the responsibility for the catastrophic explosion that killed 11 workers and the still-unchecked leaking of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Among the decisions by BP that led to the disaster:

BP saved $7 to $10 million by using a cheaper -- but less reliable -- method to complete the well casing. The so-called "tapered string" meant the well had less capacity to resist upward pressure caused by gas bubbles.

BP ignored advice from Halliburton to deploy devices that would have given the well additional stability because they would have taken too long -- 10 hours -- to install.

BP did not fully circulate drilling mud which would have created better conditions for doing cement work. The reason: fully circulating the drilling mud would have taken 12 hours.

BP did not run a comprehensive test on the cementing job even though its own engineers had grave concerns about the quality of the cement work. Again, the reason was time: the test would have taken 12 hours.

Clearly, BP and its employees were optimizing their decisions around short-term goals. They were willing to take huge risks to achieve near-term objectives and weren't particularly concerned with potential downsides. In this respect, they were operating very much like the traders at AIG who took bigger and bigger bets until they brought the house down. Of course, every time the AIG traders made a bet, they pocketed some of the proceeds, and when they brought the house down, the government was their to prop them back up.

In recent days, BP has tried to follow in Wall Street's footsteps by positioning itself as "too big to fail," arguing that pensioners in Great Britain depend on its dividends, and saying that if it goes bankrupt, it won't be able to pay any damage claims.

That line of reasoning is nonsense. Sure, if we go easy on BP they can pay a big dividend. But the notion that they will pay more in damages if we don't ask them to cover the cost of all the damages that they have inflicted is bizarre, at best.

Worse, going easy on BP would set a precedent that what they did was acceptable, a simple "accident" as Rand Paul would put it. If we want to prevent future disasters like this, we must hold BP accountable, forcing them to pay every dime they owe and to face punishment for whatever laws they may have broken.

The goal isn't to put BP out of business, but if holding them accountable puts them out of business, so what? Other oil companies will come in and fill the market void, and they'll do so with the full knowledge that if they screw up like BP, they'll face the same consequences.

To reduce the risk of future disasters, there's no question that we need to improve regulation and to develop alternatives to oil, but BP must also suffer the consequences of its actions. For the most part, the Administration is now saying all the right things, and tonight's Oval Office address should be no different, but the real test will be in the coming months: will BP be forced to pay, or will they be allowed to walk away?