“Scientific misconduct” within key federal agencies has given rise to counterproductive regulatory policies that further burden an already beleaguered economy and erode the public trust, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) warns in a letter addressed to the White House.

At issue, is a report from the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI)’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that describes how the agency manipulated and altered a 30-day report from the National Academy of Engineers. Sen. Vitter and several House colleagues, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), called for the OIG investigation in response to allegations that officials with Interior had deliberately misrepresented scientific opinion on the merits of the deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We’ve seen facts manipulated and science ignored across the administration while they’ve developed policies with huge negative effects on the economy,” Sen. Vitter said. “We want the public to be aware of the administration’s misconduct, but we also want agencies to be transparent and explain their methods.”

The letter from Vitter co-authored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.). is addressed to John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, is co-authored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.).

“The IG investigation showed that not only had Interior violated the Information Quality Act (IQA), but there was direct involvement by the White House, specifically Carol Browner, to manipulate the summary documentation in violation of peer-review protocol,” the letter says. “…The investigation revealed blatant political influence, on what should have been an independent scientific assessment, to inaccurately represent the views of a particular team of scientists.”

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The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental communication accounts, which a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA requests. This “cloud” serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978. (more…)

John Holdren, Obama’s top science adviser, when asked how to deal with climate change skeptics said it’s an “education problem” and “we have to educate them”. Secondly, he said human activity, particularly fossil fuel burning, is overwhelmingly likely to be the primary cause of the “changes we’re experiencing.” Keep in mind this is coming from a man with some questionable and radical views.

What exactly are some of his radical views? For one, he wrote forced abortions and mass sterilization is needed to save the planet. He also said we should use Cap and Trade taxes- if it were passed- and give it to other countries.

So essentially not only does he advocate for the destruction of the American economy during a down period, but then taking those taxes and just handing them away to other nations. Hmm.

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National Journal ran a piece yesterday (behind a paywall) by the German Marshall Fund’s Bruce Stokes, making the arguments that will be ratcheted up in the Senate beginning on Monday in favor of mandating windmills and solar panels: if we don’t mandate them, we not only won’t be using them but we won’t be making them either! This dire situation will leave the Chinese only themselves to sell the things to. Carry the one and you see how that harms our competitiveness.

Where to begin? At the root of this ritual case is a strange notion that being a leader in something – here, it’s windmills or solar panels – is intrinsically a desirable end. As I discuss in “Power Grab”: if we’re not the world’s windmill king…so what? It’s a windmill. It is not, as President Obama said, a new technology”, one of his rhetorical repetitions the curiosity of which should require no elaboration. Windmills are not a strategic industry. We have centuries of fossil fuels.

And after all this time windmills have come about as far as they can and will come with the possible exceptions of improvements in efficiency at the margins(solar is spectacularly worse). The laws of physics will not be repealed, the wind cannot be made to blow any more or regularly, and you will not decrease the host of very troubling NIMBY and other issues elaborated here by George Will.

Even rabid demander of such mandates, Obama’s Science Czar” (and population nut) John Holdren implicitly acknowledges the falsehood of the sales pitch that we can replace energy sources that work with windmills and solar panels. This leaves us with the principal argument in favor of these costly schemes, reported by E&E News last week as even acknowledged by Brookings Institute economist Adele Morris, as “the immediate need to reduce emissions”.

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The video vault has now provided us another glimpse into the fever swamp occupied by President Obama’s moonbat science czar John Holdren. Holdren of course is the man brought in to put a scientific imprimatur on the Left’s latest excuse for much of its economic agenda, wrapped as it is in the cloak of averting environmental crisis.

First, the merely good news arising from Holdren’s odious openness: it floated to the surface just in time for my new book coming out Monday (but available for pre-order now, before today’s ’s Ways and Means Committee “green jobs” hearing causes a run on them! Really.). In these pages Holdren, Carol Browner and a few others receive close inspection, particularly in Chapter 3 “Van Jones Was No Accident: Obama’s Radicals” (also relevant to this discussion is Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’”).

More on all of that, including some pretty startling internal documents, in a few days.

Now for the even better news. As detailed in “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America“, Holdren is a longtime global-cooling-then-warming alarmist who’s also on record advocating the constitutionality of sterilizing the public through the drinking water supply to address the “population crisis” when it reaches the point that his kind believe is just  too much to bear.

As is also detailed, he and his ilk like to see (and shriek) crisis pretty much everywhere they look, and transparently as an excuse for their real obsession with massive government usurpations of individual liberties — or, ahem, Power Grabs. So to them that point where statist seizures are urgently required is always right…about…nnnow.

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Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama’s words, an America that begged “re-making.”  In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science.

Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database.  Immediately upon your child’s birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a “Unique Health Identifier” (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn’s fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded.

Sex.  Weight.  Length.  Race. APGAR score.  Health appraisal at birth, including any disfigurements or handicaps, identifying traits or birthmarks, and DNA markers.   Information about the child’s parents, such as names, age, race, number of prior pregnancies, number of prior births, number of prior abortions, education attained, occupations, finger prints and criminal records, if any, are also stored.  Almost anything can be included in the database for future government needs, whatever those might be.

Imagine that all constitutional safeguards for an individual’s privacy are deemed to have been complied with, when compiling this database, because healthcare is an interstate activity that the Feds can regulate and government access to the information improves the “general welfare.”  Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed.  The implanted microchip can then be accessed with a scanner by anyone who has a scanning device, with or without parental consent.

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I am told that, at this morning’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Global Warming, the Ranking Republican Jim Sensenbrenner (WI) requested that the two administration science witnesses — White House science advisor John Holdren, most recently seen in the ClimateGate emails defending the erasing from history the Medieval Warm Period, and NOAA administrator and longtime activist Jane Loubchenco — be sworn in before testifying.

Chairman Ed Markey conferred, then denied the request.

Could lead to all sorts of unpleasant things. Like the truth. Or consequences.

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