State Senator/AG candidate Mark Herring (starting at around 15:55 of this audio):
Something else that is important to have is an Attorney General who helps foster a more forward looking image [for Virginia]. If you look at one of the very high-profile actions our Attorney General did was to sue a UVA researcher. He did it because he disagreed with the researcher’s ideas and conclusions, and that is downright unAmerican. It was very costly to taxpayers, and it was costly to our state’s reputation, because it sent a signal to people around the country that Virginia was anti-science or not welcoming to researchers and technology. If we want to attract top researchers to Virginia, if we want to attract technology companies to Virginia, we can’t have an Attorney General who’s suing researchers at our universities because he disagrees with their ideas and their conclusions…
…We’ve seen a number of actions where our current Attorney General’s actions have really been outside the mainstream. I’ve talked a little bit about his action against the researcher who studied climate change. He’s also really, I think, misused the powers of the office to intimidate the board of health in adopting regulations that were onerous and restrictive on women’s health centers, that will make it more expensive for women to get health care, will make it less accessible for women. I think the things that I have worked for in the Senate show that I am much more in the mainstream.
Great stuff, all 100% true.
By the way, John Fredericks tried to hype this segment by claiming that Sen. Herring somehow ” breaks ranks with his fellow Democrats on keeping taxes low and reducing red tape in order to advance business development in the Commonwealth.” I listened carefully to the interview and heard nothing of the sort. All Sen. Herring said, in fact, was that he didn’t want to draw any lines in the sand when it comes to transportation. Wow, shocker huh? LOL
Anyway, great job by Sen. Herring in this interview, especially since it was with two Republicans/right wingers who have no love for the “Democrat” Party (as they like to call it, 7th-grade-adolescent-boy style), and who love to pretend that extremists and science deniers like Ken Cuccinelli are somehow “in the mainstream” (they are not!) or analogous to people in the Democratic Party (nope again!), when nothing could be further from the truth. No matter how you look at it, Ken Cuccinelli’s an extreme outlier, on the far fringes of John Bircher/tinfoil hat Loony Land. And no, there are most definitely no equivalents on the Democratic side of the aisle in Virginia, certainly not anyone running for statewide office in 2013 (or 2009, or 2005, or 2001…).
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