At the risk of appearing to bite the hand that's been kind enough to feed me not once, but twice recently, I'd like to take issue with John Cole a bit here. An administration that can be plausibly presented as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Oil just can't conduct official business with industry reps in an off-the-record setting. It's bad public policy and, frankly, bad politics, as well, for just as most Republicans would never take a Democratic president's crime proposals seriously if they knew he'd secretly hammered them out in a back room with Barbra Streisand and a gaggle of lawyers from the ACLU, we Dems can't be reasonably expected to give President Bush's energy initiatives a fair hearing when they appear to have been presented to the veep on stone tablets at the top of Mount Exxon.

As I'm sure this president knows better than most (since it's an area of special interest to him), any successful effort to change the tone in Washington will require a veritable boatload of the kind of trust that can only be built on a foundation of real transparency. Which is why a little more of it would be so greatly appreciated by those of us who share his concerns about both the nation's energy woes and the angry partisan divide in Washington.