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Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports on the loophole -- big enough to drive the White House visitor's log through -- in the Obama administration's "transparency" policy:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies.

Of course, the "dismayed" goody-two-shoes in the public-interest crowd should have expected this, as the Chicago Tribune's John Kass observes:

The use of political muscle may be prohibited in the mythic transcendental fairyland where much of the Obama spin originates . . . But our president is from Chicago. . . . David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel come right from Chicago Democratic machine boss Mayor Richard Daley. They don't believe in fairies . . .
It's the Chicago Way. Now, formally, it's also the Chicago on the Potomac Way. . . .

The Examiner's Michael Barone similarly sees the Chicago Way at work in the White House. The question is whether the leg-thrillers in the White House press corps -- who react to Obama like 13-year-old girls react to the Jonas Brothers -- will let their rock-star president get away with being Mayor Daley of America.

Are the fawning lapdogs who do stenography for Robert Gibbs goody-two-shoes idealists? Or are they cynics? How otherwise to explain why the unexplained resignation of Fred E. Weiderhold -- the inspector general for AmTrak, Joe Biden's pet program -- has scarcely been noticed by the D.C. press corps? You'd probably get more hard-hitting investigative reporting from the Jonas Brothers fan-club newsletter.