Oil, Twinkies, and Casting Lead, again: Today's links (11-16-12)

1. Small, very small, victories, the DoJ edition: The Justice Department extracts $4bn from BP to settle criminal charges in the Gulfwater Horizon disaster, payable over 5 years. BP's profits last year alone were $40bn. And the damage is many orders of magnitude worse than $4bn. We'll see what happens with the civil suits.
2. Get your hands off my twinkies, you dirty commie capitalist: If you've heard about Hostess' plans to shut down and you, like Hostess' CEO, want to blame the striking workers for taking away your Twinkies, not so fast: "as the company was preparing to file for bankruptcy earlier this year, the then-CEO of Hostess was awarded a 300 percent raise (from approximately $750,000 to $2,550,000) and at least nine other top executives of the company received massive pay raises. One such executive received a pay increase from $500,000 to $900,000 and another received one taking his salary from $375,000 to $656,256." There's more.
3. Poking the bear, Hamas edition: Given Israel's eagerness to rain lethal violence on the occupied territories at the slightest provocation, you might be wondering why Hamas would fire rockets across the border. Well (and for the moment granting this 'they started it' frame for the sake of argument), it probably wasn't Hamas to begin with, and taking out Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari will likely make things worse instead of better. (Though 'worse' is relative in this astoundingly asymmetric struggle.) It turns out that Israel's leaders are highly motivated to ignore this complexity and gin up a conflict. It's election season, and, as Ahmed Moor puts it, death in Gaza is an effective Israeli electoral strategy. (Helena Cobban provides interesting background on Hamas here and here, from around the time of Operation Cast Lead.)