Yesterday, on the fifty-seventh day of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama finally found time to meet with executives from BP - even though the official schedule released by the White House showed the President only giving 20 minutes of his time. Today, however, the President found more than an hour in his schedule to meet with progressive pundits:

President Obama met for lunch on Thursday with a group of predominantly progressive columnists to discuss a range of topics, chief among them the oil spill in the Gulf.

Attendees included Gail Collins of the New York Times, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Gerald Seib, the Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, all of whom were spotted leaving the West Wing at roughly 1:45 p.m.

The lunch lasted more than an hour, said a White House spokesman. But no further details were offered. For full disclosure, Huffington Post co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington was invited to attend but could not make it due to a scheduling conflict.

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