Crony capitalism is alive and well in Barack Obama's Washington. Business for lobbyists on K Street is booming as never before. Green energy promoters are raking in our tax dollars, often for wasteful "investments ."

Al Gore is certainly raking in the green. He is a global warming myth profiteer on a robber baron scale. Democratic sugar daddy George Soros, whose investments in the green energy industry amount to over one billion dollars and counting, has made parallel investments in bringing about Democratic dominance in Washington. Soros also has a friend in the Oval Office to help assure his investments pan out.

Now comes word that the Obama administration's Department of Energy has engaged in some "monkey business" to rebut a study that showed investments in wind energy costs far more jobs than they create.

A Spanish university study had calculated that government subsidies for the wind power industry killed more jobs because they diverted money from more efficient private businesses

A wind power industry group tried to refute the study and, lo and behold, who helped out? The Department on Energy:

On May 12, 2009, more than a month after the study was released, a group of climate activists scheduled a conference call to discuss how to refute the Spanish researcher's claims. The group included officials from the American Wind Energy Association - a wind industry trade group, known as AWEA, which spent millions of dollars lobbying last year in Washington.

The call also included researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a division of the Energy Department, which produces often-highly-technical papers on renewable energy potential and development in the United States, including exhaustive research on renewable energy jobs.

Shortly after the call, the researchers began to devise what would become an unusual "white paper" for the Laboratory: a direct rebuttal of the Spanish study.

"I think it might make sense for us to pull together some proper analysis in the near term" on the Spanish study, one of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers wrote on the afternoon of May 12, in an email obtained by the Tribune Washington Bureau. "AWEA policy people are quite concerned." A colleague replied: "We need to come up with an appropriate response to these criticisms soon. I just spoke to a few people at AWEA about this."

The Department of Energy seemed to be doing some front-running to help out friends of the administration in the wind power industry. That looks bad. But it gets worse.

Energy Department officials never disclosed the wind group's role in the generation of the rebuttal report, telling an inquiring member of Congress last month only that the Laboratory researchers "felt compelled to post the response... due to the high media interest in green jobs creation."

The Spanish researchers criticized the Department of Energy' machinations " It is almost impossible to know who is the government and who the lobbyists. They have merged into one single animal with different faces"

Christopher Horner has done some further digging and he found some investigative gold. The Obama administration's attack on the Spanish study was written by two non-economist, pro-wind activists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This is a part of the Department of Energy and is overseen by Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi , who previously served as the CEO of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. Al has a pal to protect his vast investments in renewable energy. But so does George Soros because it appears that Zoi turned to the Center for American Progress to help in the attack on the Spanish study (there is also a study from Denmark affirming the conclusions of the Spanish study). The Center for American Progress is a "think tank" "idea factory" and "hiring hall" for the Obama administration-and it was founded and primarily funded by George Soros.

What happened to the most transparent administration in history? What happened to the promise of reform? What happened to the fiscal sobriety candidate Obama promised and President Obama has violated? All of those pledges were just so much hot air.

The renewable energy scam and the crony capitalism that is enriching its promoters is thriving as never before.