Michael Mann threatens to sue National Review for comparison to Jerry Sandusky

From politico.com:

Penn State University global warming researcher Michael Mann is lawyering up to counter attacks by conservatives who have referred to him as the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science.”

Mann’s lawyer wrote Friday to National Review Executive Publisher Scott Budd demanding a retraction and apology for a July 15 blog post that compares Penn State’s mishandling of years of child sexual abuse to the university’s investigation of “Climategate.”

The charged reference to Sandusky, the convicted child molester and former assistant coach, originated with a July 13 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog, OpenMarket.org. The National Review Online post quoted from a now-deleted line by CEI’s Rand Simberg, who wrote: “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”

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Ken Cuccinelli’s Witch Hunt

Ken Cuccinelli’s witch hunt against climate scientist Michael Mann was stopped by the Supreme Court.  Good for UVA for failing to roll over and play dead.  However, in the wake of this law suit are a lot of unpaid  bills.  UVA had to raise about $600,000 to cover its legal costs .  Then there are the bills generated from the State Attorney General’s office.  Let’s hear Cuccinelli try to tell us to ‘stop the spending.’   He has lost his fiscally conservative street cred. 

This witch hunt was motivated by Cuccinelli’s own personal political agenda rather than from anything real that happened or any reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing while Dr. Mann was in residence at UVA. The newly elected attorney general  had a bug and he rashly wasted the taxpayers’ money pursuing his own silly paranoid  anti-scientific endeavors.

According to the Washington Post:

Mr. Cuccinelli’s inspiration appears to have been the conspiracy theorizing that emerged from the so-called Climategate scandal, in which global-warming opponents stole scientists’ e-mails — including a few of Mr. Mann’s — and then misinterpreted them to justify their activism.

Now that the Supreme Court has shut Mr. Cuccinelli down, what’s left is a range of consequences that can only hurt the commonwealth. The university had to raise nearly $600,000 for legal fees — money the cash-strapped university should have been able to use for something productive. On top of that are the public resources of the attorney general’s office that Mr. Cuccinelli wasted. Scientists in Virginia now have reason to wonder whether they will suffer similar pressure if they publish research government officials don’t like. And, because of some of the Supreme Court’s legal findings, the powers of the attorney general to pursue actual fraud have been clipped.

How many scientists will not want to work at UVA because of the climate of fear inspired by Cuccinelli?  Virginia has a long history of enlightenment that goes back to the time of Jefferson, Washington, and even further.  To have Cuccinelli try to ride his wave of anti-intellectual hocus pocus through the state at our expensive is simply unacceptable.  Mr. Jefferson would not like his school under attack and Virginians are tired of this administration causing them continual embarrassment.