So Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is suing the EPA over gas mileage standards and the agency's right to regulate greenhouse gases.
And now he's demanding a decade's worth of documents from a University of Virginia climate researcher, Michael Mann, to see whether any of Mann's research might have violated the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli's latest quixotic quest puts science at the mercy of politicians' whims.
"The potential for harm is vast in terms of the chilling effect the investigation could have on Virginia scientists whose work is funded by state grants," writes Roanoke Times columnist Dan Casey. "God forbid that one of them reach a scientific conclusion that Cuccinelli could find objectionable."
Whatever the voters of Virginia thought they were doing when the elected Ken Cuccinelli, the new attorney general came in on a mission to roll back civil rights, handcuff the federal government and empower the voices that tell us the work of thousands of scientists over many decades is a load of bunk. That's what he's in office to do.
Just look at his choice for a messenger.
When you call Cuccinelli's office for a comment or information about his latest trip to Medieval Land, you talk to his spokesperson, Brian Gottstein -- as in Casey's column on the climate scientist investigation: "Brian Gottstein, a spokesman for Cuccinelli, confirmed the investigation but said he could not comment on it."
In this case, Mann was a key part of creating the hockey-stick graph of world temperatures. And look who was blogging that very story on the tenther website Tertium Quids before he became Cuccinelli's spokesperson. "There has been no global warming since 1995," Gottstein reports a "Climategate scammer scientist" as admitting. See also "The myth of global warming - Part 1" and "Part 2" and "More global warming lies exposed."
The attack on the science of climate change is not a hidden agenda on the part of Cuccinelli's office. The campaign against reason and government was right out there in the open, before he put his team together. Gottstein, writing in February on why people call for attention to climate change:
They realize they can accomplish this using the guise of global warming to sway people and governments to be sympathetic to regulations that will drive industries out of business, make private automobiles extinct, and get citizens to give up their incomes and freedoms to support government programs to "save the earth."
And Gottstein again, in January:
My question is, why are no world leaders -- including our president -- calling into question the whole global warming hysteria? Why are they ignoring all of this damning evidence that is emerging that shows global warming is a hoax? Why are teachers still teaching global warming fiction to our children? Why are states, including Virginia, still talking about stopping global warming through new regulations? Why is the American economy-killing cap and trade legislation still on the table in Congress?
How long will this apocalyptic charade go on?
That's his question. For most of us, the bigger question now is how long rational thinking can go forward unimpeded in Cuccinelli's Virginia. The fox has gotten the keys to the henhouse.
