The Bush administration fought to avoid releasing documents about the development of its "Energy Plan" under the Freedom of Information Act, and with good reason. (In case you missed the details: VP Cheney said it would violate his privilege to get advice in confidence if he had to release details of who he met with and what they said, but environmental groups sued the Energy Department instead of the VP's office. The Energy Department has no executive privilege and had to release the documents this week.)

Despite blacking out ridiculous amounts of information that obviously did not relate to national security, the documents already showed that the Oil industry wrote major sections of the Energy Plan, word-for-word. That's a Republican hallmark going back to the Reagan and Gingrich eras, where lobbyists were invited to Capitol Hill to decide how much their industries should be regulated. Those of us paying the bills were not invited. True to form, as Slate put it in this article, "Both Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham refused to meet with NRDC and related green groups, at best whisking them off to lower-level staffers. By contrast, as the New York Times reported yesterday, the most powerful doors were almost always open to anyone whose hands were dripping with oil."

Today we learn that not only did the Oil industry write the policy, and that the environmental groups the administration said were "heard equally" were shut out, but also that while Bush was calling for research in renewable energy to be cut by 50% he was using that program's own budge to pay for printing his Oil-written plan! Nearly $140,000 of money supposed to be used for solar or wind research was spent to print 10,000 copies of the oil-favoring plan, prepare presentation material to sell it, and to send a Bush aide to Alaska to lobby for drilling in ANWAR.

Any guesses as to what other hypocrisy the administration blacked out to avoid looking like the tools of the oil industry that they are? It's like several cartoons said in the 2000 campaign: to the GOP, a "diversified ticket" is having the heads of two oil companies instead of just one.