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Yesterday, Reuters reported that Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey McClendon “also ran a lucrative business on the side: a $200 million hedge fund that traded in the same commodities Chesapeake produces.”   Today we have yet another case of highly questionable, if not potentially criminal, wrongdoing in the fossil fuel industry.

Documents obtained by The Huffington Post also indicate that Kurt Mix, a senior BP engineer charged April 24 with obstruction of justice, shared information with more senior BP executives during the [2010 Deepwater Horizon/Gulf of Mexico oil] spill, including a senior vice president, Jonathan Sprague, who formerly managed BP’s Gulf of Mexico operations.

Legal experts said criminal convictions for covering up the size of the spill could land senior BP personnel behind bars and swell the company’s civil liability by billions of dollars.

Two days, two major scandals — one in the natural gas industry, one in the oil industry. Sensing a pattern here?

Simon Mui of NRDC breaks down how much profit the oil industry makes every time you fill up your gas tank.

…Our updated estimate shows that 23 cents of every dollar you spent on gasoline in February went to the oil industry’s after-tax profits.[1] If you’re like the average driver, you pay about $60 to fill up your gas tank, meaning the oil industry makes about $14 in profits. [2] That’s a lot of lunches you’re buying.

Amazingly, as NRDC explains, the American Petroleum Institute (API) – the oil industry’s main lobbying group – is now claiming that “oil industry profits have been “well in line with the rest of the U.S. manufacturing industry, averaging about 7 cents for every dollar of sales.”

How do the flacks for the oil industry manage to go from 23 cents in profit to just 7 cents for every dollar you spend at the gas station? Simple: they “[leave] out a large portion of the oil industry profits by excluding earnings from companies that supply the majors with crude oil.”

To put it mildly, as Tom Kloza “of the esteemed Oil Price Information Service” explains, this is “disingenuous.” To put it less mildly, it’s blatantly dishonest. You might want to keep that in mind the next time you come across an oil industry representative spouting their intentionally misleading talking points.

As you can see in this video from ThinkProgress, Rep. Dan Benishek somehow manages to keep a straight face while lying through his teeth to his constituents. What Benishek claims, that “There are no government subsidies of oil” and that “The government does not give oil companies money,” is categorically, unequivocally, and laughably false.

In fact, as Christopher Mims of Grist points out, oil companies get so much money from the government that “If fossil fuel subsidies were distributed to every person, we’d each get $58/year. Or, as we’ve previously pointed out, there have been counts of how much federal largesse goes to dirty oil executives like Rex Tillerson and Gregory Boyce. They range from $10 billion a year by the Environmental Law Institute, to the more comprehensive, $52 billion a year by  Doug Koplow of EarthTrack.

No matter how you look at it,  these subsidies are unjustifiable for an industry that’s raking in enormous profits -  the five largest oil companies making “a record-high $137 billion in profits in 2011…[and] more than $1 trillion in profits from 2001 through 2011.”  Unless, of course, you believe Rep. Benishek’s big lie that the oil industry gets “no government subsidies” at all. No, we didn’t think you did.

P.S. Not surprisingly, Rep. Benishek has received tens of thousands of dollars in oil and gas industry contributions over the years.

To put it mildly, this is bizarre.

“Have you ever read Franz Kafka’s The Trial?”

That is the first thing that Patrick Shea, a member of jailed climate activist Tim DeChristopher’s legal defense team, says to me when I call him this morning to ask him about reports that DeChristopher has been pulled out of his minimum security camp at Herlong federal prison in California and thrown into isolated confinement in an 8 x 10-foot cell. His latest crime?  Sending an email to a colleague with a “threat” to give back a $25,000 donation to his legal defense fund because DeChristopher, one of the most principled people I have ever encountered, discovered that his donor was exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs.

If you don’t know the backstory to DeChristopher’s imprisonment, you can read about it here. (Short version: He was sentenced to two years in prison last July for having nonviolently disrupted a federal auction of oil and gas leases in 2008.) This case was a sham before it took this latest turn.  If there were any justice in the world, DeChristopher would have been pardoned before he ever set foot in jail.  The fact that it is now possible he will serve out the rest of his sentence in a tiny cell with only one break a week to go outside is an outrage, and one that should have everyone who cares about justice and the abuse of political power in America marching in the streets.

In short, this is Alice in Wonderland time. That’s right: the guy who stood up for saving taxpayers money gets thrown in jail - now in solitary – while a bunch of oil-funded clowns in Congress stand in the way of cutting wasteful welfare checks to oil companies, yet are living it up on Capitol Hill. Personally, I think there are far better candidates for jail time than Tim DeChristopher!

This is mildly amusing, that is if you have a dark, ironic sense of humor.

Fox News’ business commentator Stuart Varney scolded President Obama yesterday for saying that oil companies enjoy “subsidies” at the expense of taxpayers. We shouldn’t use the word “subsidies,” Varney said, because they’re actually tax breaks. He added: “Drilling deductions are an encouragementto drill. Take them away? Less encouragement. Less drilling”…

[...]

Less than a year ago, Varney not only called the oil tax breaks “subsidies,” he agreed we need to “get rid of them” and specifically rejected the notion that oil companies would be less inclined to drill without the tax preferences.

Got that? According to Fox News commentator Stuart Varney, oil tax breaks were subsidies less than a year ago, but somehow in the past 300+ days they’re not subsidies anymore. What changed since then, other than higher gasoline prices due to a recovering world economy and tension in the Middle East?  Maybe someone should ask Stuart Varney, because we’re stumped.