This is an interesting development.
Quote:Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is invoking a state anti-fraud law to demand the University of Virginia turn over years worth of documents related to climate scientist Michael Mann, targeting about $500,000 in grants that funded Mann's studies.
Cuccinelli, a Republican who is separately suing the federal government over regulation of carbon emissions, issued the school a civil subpoena late last month probing "possible violations" of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by the former U.Va. professor. Mann, now a professor at Penn State, is famous for creating the controversial "hockey stick" graph charting a spike in global temperatures.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Cuccinelli-targets-grants-to-climate-scientist-92723669.html
Good likelihood of this investigation going forward since voters put both the Governor and Cuccinelli in office last year. Good thing too, the more info about this theology of, so called, Global Warming the better for our citizens. I have yet to see a believable cost/benefit analysis that justifies such measures that have been proposed that drastically increases the cost for energy for every person on earth, leaving aside the fact that in the next half century, India and China will not be joining such an effort. For that matter, the best attempt at this analysis that I have seen shows just the opposite (
http://vladenblog.tumblr.com/post/536694174/a-rational-look-at-climate-science ). I suspect this Cap and Tax effort on the part of the left is merely to set up another government run slush fund the left would use to further their socialistic goals by indirectly buying votes (thru entitlements and support of big labor unions) and further pursuit of their crony capitalism agenda (GM, Chrysler, Big Pharma, Google, ethanol and windmill producers, etc) to increase their political power over the private sector.
Seems Obama has now chosen politics even over his socialistic “Change” for America. Perhaps Americans sense his ultimate goals and he feels the need for a change in tactics. Fearing a Lindsay Graham RINO move to pursue bipartisan legislation for carbon emissions I was going to write him with the hope my lone voice might help dissuade him from any such attempts until, at least, the November elections. However Obama beat me to the punch and effectively threw Graham and his bipartisanship under the bus in favor of trying to make the GOP look bad by stirring up the prospect of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (i.e. put some form of amnesty in the bill then point out how mean the GOP is when they insist that we get control of the borders first). Before that it was Dodd’s legislation for “Wall Street Fat Cats” and their so-called urgently needed regulation. When the GOP balked and pointed out the legislation’s bad points that provided for future and continuing bailouts for a chosen few large institutions and the possibility that its wording included many, many businesses that were not even banks, Obama started his populace rant that the GOP was trying to protect those evil Fat Cats. Of course Obama never mentioned that a Goldman Sachs that donated 69 percent of their total employee political contributions to the Dems would get any favored treatment by the government (you know like Goldman getting back 100 percent of their AIG originated Credit Default Swaps’ with taxpayer’s money).
I guess the Arizona law was just too much of an opportunity for the left's (and Obama’s ) political ambitions to try and label yet more Americans as racists. Now whole states are statists’ targets. But we have seen increasing numbers of formerly politically inactive citizens paying attention to what this Democratically controlled Federal Government has wrought. The Health Care debate (and stimulus) bills brought many more citizens into the subset of those paying political attention and then, self informing through media outlets sans the MSM's leftist bias. Will we see a larger proportion of our citizens taking a closer look at the issues? Will we see a voting populace with pricked ears every time the president goes populace and tries to demonize various “special interest groups”? After all, we have seen a large number of, not only conservatives, but independents join the Tea Partiers. Some of these voted for the party (and President) that now seeks to, if not demonize, certainly marginalize them and their political views. Will there come a point when the citizens of America start to identify with such “special interest groups” and come to wonder whether those groups are just like them only with different and/or more narrowed interests but share a common statist tormenter? Will Americans then logically conclude that the only demons present are those that demonize and obfuscate rather than argue the merits of their own efforts towards greater political power while continually invoking the utopian end goal of "The General Welfare”?
Indeed, how many demons can this administration create before it runs out of future voters that will be sympathetic to its cause, no matter what that cause may be or how viable ?
JM
