BP catastrophe: Where were the regulators?

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, British Petroleum’s favorability rating now stands at 6%,

That's worse than the favorability rating of Congress, presently standing at 12%.

Here are some numbers from Daily Kos that might take that 12% figure even lower:

Since 2006, Senators have received $3.39 million from the oil industry. 97.5% of that went to Republicans. 70% of it went to Senator John McCain. Some details:

John McCain (R-AZ, $36,649 from BP and $2,428,287 from Big Oil since 2006)
Mary Landrieu (D-LA, $16,200 from BP and $329,100 from Big Oil since 2006)
Mark Begich (D-AK, $8,550 from BP and $85,958 from Big Oil since 2006)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK, $8,500 from BP and $223,326 from Big Oil since 2006)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY, $8,500 from BP and $408,400 from Big Oil since 2006)

In the House of Representatives, it's been downright crazy. Rep. Joe Barton of Texas actually apologized to BP, claiming that President Obama had subjected the company to "a $20 billion shakedown." And she-who-endlessly-talks-crazy, Rep.Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, said that the Gulf escrow fund was "extortion."

The hugely catastrophic BP spill that began on April 20, when the 11 rig workers were killed, is presently flowing at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

So where were the regulators? ABC News reviewed federal records and reported on Thursday that "despite chronic safety problems, the Minerals Management Service, or MMS, imposed paltry fines that often took years to collect. In the overwhelming majority of cases where workers were actually killed, there was no record of fines being paid. Where fines did occur, the maximum penalty was only $25,000.. In a 20-year period, MMS has only fined the oil drilling industry $21 million for hundreds of serious safety violations -- about a million dollars in fines per year for an industry that made $800 billion in profits in that timeframe."