Al Gore believes in extending the hand of government to nurture promising technologies. The case of Bill Haney and his toxic-waste washing machine shows the Vice President knows how to get a hand in return. In Washington it's often hard to line up the quid with the quo. But what this Massachusetts entrepreneur apparently got for the $82,000 he and his executives gave to Gore and the Democrats since 1994 is not hard to decipher: a fat contract from the Energy Department that kept being renewed over the objections of government scientists.
Since the Vice President took office, the Energy Department's...