Good, strong statement from Mann:
An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann.
Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli can investigate whether fraud has occurred in university grants, as the attorney general had contended, but ruled that Cuccinelli’s subpoena failed to state a “reason to believe” that Mann had committed fraud.
The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli, a global warming skeptic who had maintained that he was investigating whether Mann committed fraud in seeking government money for research that showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann, now at Penn State University, worked at U-Va. until 2005.
According to Peatross, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, under which the civil investigative demand was issued, requires that the attorney general include an “objective basis” to believe that fraud has been committed. Peatross indicates that the attorney general must state the reason so that it can be reviewed by a court, which Cuccinelli failed to do.
Here’s Mann:
“I’m very pleased that the judge has ruled in our favor,” he said in a statement. “It is a victory not just for me and the university, but for all scientists who live in fear that they may be subject to a politically-motivated witch hunt when their research findings prove inconvenient to powerful vested interests.
El Cid
This ivory tower elitist scientist is not making bipartisanship easier with his extremist, secularist stands.
Mumphrey
Cuccinelli, I’m ashamed to say, is my attorney general. I really don’t understand why so many of these people take climate change so seriously. I don’t know why they feel somehow insulted or affronted or personally wounded by the subject, but they sure seem to. I mean, I can see how people with a vested interest in coal or oil or something would feel economically threatened, but all these assholes can’t be so heavily invested in these industies that their livelihoods or savings are at stake. They just seem personally angry about it, and I don’t understand it.
PeakVT
Activist judges!
ETA: D’oh! Already a tag.
kay
@El Cid:
Hah! No, he’s not. I like ” politically motivated witch hunt” a lot.
Well, then. That about covers it!
Woodrowfan
@Mumphrey:
the left believes it, and they hate the left. There’s no rational reason for it, it’s just an excuse to “hippy bash.”
oh, and Al Gore is fat…
eemom
Yaaaaaaay!!!! Huzzah huzzah!! Wooooohooooo!!!
A small victory for justice, yes……but a Big. Fucking. Victory. for those of us with the misfortune to LIVE in the state that elected this despicable clown.
“Major blow to Cuccinnelli” — you have no idea how SWEET those words are.
El Cid
@kay: It also sounds like he’s making the divisive, radical suggestion that he’d rather we didn’t hunt witches.
Nutella
What, the judge didn’t accept “because I said so!” as an objective basis for the complaint?
Yeah, Mumphrey, it seems weird how personally offended wingnuts are by this particular scientific work until you realize this work supports the idea that resources are not unlimited. They get the same way when anyone points out that we have reached and passed global peak oil production. It is personally offensive to them to think that if they were rich they would be limited in any way at all.
vtr
Yeah, but Gore is still fat.
Mnemosyne
@Mumphrey:
IMO, they feel like they’re being told that they were wrong, and they can’t stand it.
As a straight woman, I will say it’s not an uncommon phenomenon for a man to refuse to admit he was wrong even when presented with evidence. In fact, presenting that kind of guy with evidence is likely to make him dig in his heels and double down on what he was wrong about. Hence all of the chatter from right-wingers about how they went out and revved the engines of their SUVs all day on Earth Day.
(Edited to be more specific — it’s not all men who are like that, but a specific subset sure as hell is just that stubborn.)
kay
@El Cid:
He got it all in there, which always brings me great joy.
Powerful vested interests, witch hunts, academic freedom, the whole 9 yards.
They’re probably so tired of sitting back and listening to these liars. Good for him.
andrew
I hate using the word skeptic at this point. They are global warming deniers.
PeakVT
@Mumphrey: Some of it is religious (the Bible says God will provide if one has enough faith, and to think otherwise might challenge their faith). Some of it is tribal (believing the opposite of liberals is a signal of loyalty to the tribe). But mostly it’s a challenge to the mainstream post-Cold War mental framework – we won the Cold War, so everything we do must be right. They just can’t handle such a radical change in their worldview, so they push back. Which is kind of pointless, of course, because a new worldview will be forced upon them by reality, possibly in rather unpleasant ways. The reality-based community is stuck on the same planet, unfortunately, so we will share any future unpleasantness.
djheru
I bet Coochie is gonna have to go down to the local Whole Foods parking lot for some DFH punchin’ to blow off steam.
WereBear
I’m sure you’re right; I’m pretty much in line with the consensus which states the motivations of wingnuts are that they just know they would be rich if it weren’t for the DFH’s.
I have a twist on it: it’s a fantasy, they kind of know it, but their lives are so bereft you wrest it from them at your own peril.
eemom
@Mnemosyne:
It is a large subset.
JGabriel
OT, but AK Libertarians have voted to deny their ballot line to Murkowski if she loses the GOP primary and applies for it. Joe Miller, her opponent in the primary, basically called Murkowski a “whore” for even considering it.
I believe, given the way fate likes to screw with expectations, we can now confidently predict that Murkowski will eventually win the primary, and Miller will change his tune and run on the Libertarian ticket. Because it’s different when he does it.
.
roshan
I hope everyone here has seen this amazing smack down of Lord Monckton by John Abraham of Univ. of St. Thomas, Minnesota. It’s a longish presentation, about 74 mins, but well worth it if you follow Monckton’s global warming distortion crusade in the United States. Monckton got so furious about the presentation that he asked it to be removed from the university’s website (the university didn’t comply).
NonyNony
@Mumphrey:
When you find something that the hard-core conservatives do or believe that just leaves you scratching your head wondering WTF is up with it, just ask yourself a couple of simple questions:
What stance would the conservative take to piss off a liberal?
Is there a big moneyed interest group that might have a stake in propagating that stance?
If the answer to the second question is “yes” then you’ve found your answer. There’s a certain stripe of conservative who just love the idea of pissing off liberals, and there are groups that know how to manipulate conservatives to their own ends. If a liberal-hating stance coincides with a big money interest, the synergy creates a conservative meme.
arguingwithsignposts
@PeakVT:
I think there’s some young earth creationism in the mix too.
Nutella
@WereBear:
That’s the reason why they keep buying lottery tickets, too.
Tone In DC
@PeakVT:
Some of it is religious (the Bible says God will provide if one has enough faith, and to think otherwise might challenge their faith).
The book of Leviticus also says the earth will vomit us out after we despoil it for long enough.
Just sayin’.
morzer
@El Cid:
Mann has to make things right. That means denouncing Al Sharpton, stat!
Martin
@Mumphrey: Keep in mind that a fuckton of these folks on the right are natural law proponents – either consciously or otherwise. They believe homosexuality is wrong because it goes against natural law, and so on.
Manmade climate change is a HUGE blow to natural law thinking as it provides evidence that positive law (shit people do) can prevail over natural law. They can’t cope with that. Their entire worldview is that public policy shouldn’t go against what they perceive as a fundamental truth, and one of the biggest truths is that God made this world specifically for our use and that only He can control it. Climate change puts the lie to that line of thinking, and that line of thinking holds a lot of their other arguments together.
Nick
So the state attorney general for Virginia:
1. Failed to describe alleged fraud with sufficient particularity to obtain a subpoena, and
2. 4 of the 5 grants were awarded by the federal government, and thus outside the purview of the state law, and
3. The 5th grant was awarded 2 years before the state law was enacted, making it also outside the purview of the law–UNLESS, funds awarded were paid after 2003.
I’d be embarrassed if I received this bench memo back.
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
Whatever he believes, he’s way out of bounds.
He can’t justify this, in terms of his job. He repeats over and over that he “doesn’t believe” in global warming. The thing is, that doesn’t matter. He wasn’t hired to weigh in on his “beliefs”. He’s acting as a legislator, hiding behind this thin veneer of law enforcement, and that isn’t his role.
It’s outrageous. It’s an abuse of power. That it’s coming from an ostensibly “conservative” lawyer, and he doesn’t see that, should make people doubt the whole dogma.
Steve
There’s an important and helpful nuance here. The Court seems to be saying that for Mann to have committed fraud (or to be investigated for fraud), the fraud has to be in the grant application itself. Allegations that you falsified your results, or whatever, wouldn’t be an appropriate subject for investigation.
El Cid
Via Oliver Willis, Jonathan Turley notes that in the same poll which has 60% of Americans surveyed not thinking Sarah Palin is qualified to be
an oxygen breathing life formPresident, it is revealed that 2% think she is a Muslin.anon
@kay:
Wrong. His job description clearly includes a line about striking right-wing ideological poses so as to increase his national profile among other right-wing nutjobs.
Bokonon
Let’s see if Cuccinelli’s next move is to investigate the judge, and issue the JUDGE a subpoena … while saying dark things to the media about “possible improprieties” and bias.
Don’t put it past Cuccinelli. Just don’t.
roshan
OT,
Rumor People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan Has Defected From China After Suffering Half A Trillion In UST-Related Losses.
Is something big going down?
stuckinred
@eemom: nanny nanny na na
eemom
@El Cid:
tee hee. I bet that’s because they think Mooslim has something to do with mooses.
Anoniminous
@Nutella:
Lottery tickets are a self-inflicted tax on innumeracy.
In that sense, I’m glad lotteries are widely available and the money is going, mostly, to/for education.
Michael
It was an activist liberal judge in the pay of George Soros.
He probably voted for Obama, too.
When concocting excuses as to why righthole ratfuckery isn’t working the way it was anticipated, always channel your inner Freeper for excuses.
Cacti
Good call by the judge.
This was about as clear cut a case of a prosecutorial fishing expedition as you’ll find.
stuckinred
@eemom: In other news, a man was killed by a goat here this weekend.
morzer
@roshan:
In brief, no. Think of the amount involved in such losses, and who the winners would be. No-one is talking up such a huge coup, and they would be by now. File under: Loch Ness Monster Has No Birth Certificate.
The likely story, if there is anything to this beyond inventive internet gossip, is that Zhou Xiaochuan is thought to be politically ambitious, and on the inside track for future glory due to good guanxi with the Shanghai faction of the PRC leadership. It’s just possible a rival tried to spook Zhou, or smear him. There have been endless rumors about him over the years – house arrest that wasn’t etc. This is more of the same.
Cermet
Cuccinelli is the lowest of the low and I very much hope he is soon killed in a car crash but it takes a few days (awake) to die … wait, I am thinking cheney … I just hope he dies in a car crash. What a pig.
stuckinred
@Cermet: How bout in a goat attack?
Catsy
@Mnemosyne:
As a male veteran of one marriage, 15+ years of dating, and 7 years in a LTR-with-child, I can assure you that my anecdotal experience is that this trait is one that knows no gender lines. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who get pissed off at you as a result of miscommunication or wrong assumptions, and continue being pissed off long after it’s become clear that the original source of their ire was in their imagination, exactly as if you had still wronged them.
Cermet
@stuckinred: I like it!
andrew
@Anoniminous
Actually lottery tickets aren’t always a bad investment. MegaMillions often has a high enough jack pot that your expected return is actually greater than the cost of a ticket.
eemom
@Cermet:
Ah, a fellow Cheney death wisher. Everybody always yells at me when I say stuff like that.
He won’t get the end he deserves, but the end may well be nigh. That two-dollar watch that passes for his “heart” is, reportedly, finally running out of ticks.
Roger Moore
@Mumphrey:
Because it goes a further than the energy industry. I think that Conservatives see climate change as being something like the Liberal version of Communism or Terrorism. It’s a big threat they can use to justify drastic action on a whole range of long-term Liberal priorities.
Larry Signor
@Cermet: I agree with Cheney, but being a Virginian, (I’m hanging my head, looking for that drop), I think Cuccinelli needs to go first.
I’m a pig farmer, too. I find the hogs much better company than McDonnell or Cuccinelli.
Larry Signor
@eemom: It’s almost like waiting for Santa Claus, or Godot, sometimes. Maybe Harry would like a shot at him.
eric
@Woodrowfan: I think you are correct, but there is a further point to be made. For many on the Right being correct is an all or nothing proposition. So, if a Liberal can be right on global warming, then a liberal can be right about other things. The converse is more pointed: if a conservative can be wrong about global warming, then a conservative can be wrong about other things.
This matters most when “arguing’ to the rest of the public. It is why they make things personal (see Gore, Al; Ritter, Scott) to obscure the deficiency in their arguments.
To give ground on one argument is to give ground everywhere and that just cannot happen.
Fallsroad
I really wish they would stop characterizing Cuccinelli as a “skeptic.” He is nothing of the sort – he is a straight up global warming denialist. There is a gigantic gap between the two.
“Skeptic” presumes rationality and reason and a factual basis for questioning the existence of global warming. Cuccinelli isn’t interested in science or reason, but in faith, the faith of big business and its short term wants and desires. Those who reject evidence in favor of paid propaganda are denialists, not skeptics.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
So it’s basically an admission on their part that they deliberately exaggerated the “threat” of Global Communism (and now Global Terrorism) to try and get the government to initiate policies that would put money in their pockets?
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think it’s an admission of anything, or at least not a public admission. I just think that Conservatives see it as a potentially effective issue for Liberals. Since Liberals winning is a problem for Conservatives of all stripes, they all want to fight AGW to keep the Liberals from running them over. Conservatives seem to be much better at the collective resistance to Liberal initiatives; if the situation were reversed, some of the Liberals already would have sold out the rest to avoid getting hammered on the issue.
SiubhanDuinne
Mann was my maiden name. I hope he’s a cousin or something.
Go MENN!!
frosty
@Martin: Very interesting answer. Ties together a lot of anti-science thinking.
My take is this: Once you accept global warming, you come to the realization that your generation and the past 1 or 2 have irrevocably screwed things up for your children and grandchildren. That’s a hard, hard thing to accept. Much easier to turn away and blame it on sunspots.
My father rode a camel
I drive a car
My son flies a jet plane
His son will ride a camel
(Saudi origin)