This is reprinted with permission from my colleague Mitchell Anderson who wrote the original post.
The climate denial echo chamber is again in high gear trying to assassinate the character of respected scientist Michael Mann of Penn State. Their latest ruse is to squawk that Dr. Mann is the indirect recipient of federal stimulus dollars.
That is not at all surprising since last year $3 billion in federal stimulus funds was provided to the National Science Foundation in addition to their normal budget of about $6 billion. That means that about one third of all research grants from the NSF nation-wide benefited from stimulus money.
Lets drill a little deeper into this smear campaign. Penn State and the University of Hawaii both shared a grant of $770,000 for a research project called “Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model”.
Of this money, Dr. Mann received $57,000 (or 7.5%) over a three-year period, or $19,000 a year. Clearly these climate scientists are in it for the money…
Doing the math, Dr. Mann personally received 0.0006% of the total NSF budget, or more fairly, 0.0002% since it is spread over three years.
You would never know that of course reading the tripe being trotted out by carbon cheerleaders of the world. The charmingly titled website Frisk-a-Liberal.com thundered that “a half a million dollar grant awarded to Penn State Professor Michael Mann.” How they arrived at this $450,000 error is unknown – it is puzzling when such free market capitalists clearly can’t operate a calculator…
The National Center for Public Policy Research chimed in, demanding that the funding be returned to the US taxpayer. "It's shocking that taxpayer money is being used to support a researcher who seemingly showed little regard to the basic tenets of science - a dispassionate search for the truth," said Tom Borelli.
Since Mr. Borelli brought up funding, who is paying his salary? ExxonMobil has granted the NCPPR at least $100,000 since 2002, including $30,000 for their 'global climate change/EnviroTruth website.
It’s also interesting that Borelli mentioned the principle of “dispassionate search for truth” in science. 
That personal conviction must have served him well when he was the manager of Philip Morris Corporate Scientific Affairs Department in the 1990’s.
The tobacco industry is renowned as a bastion of dispassionate scientific inquiry as well as corporate responsibility.
Many of these are the same people that presumed to question the science behind the so-called “hockey stick” graph published by Mann and others in the journal Nature in 1998.
Besides being published in the most respected scientific journal in the world, this research was later assessed and exonerated by the National Research Council. However it seems that some interests have little interest in the truth, instead relying on repetition rather than reality.
And who were the main critics of this research? Steve McIntyre, who holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and spent his career in the mining and petroleum industries, and Congressman Joe Barton who accepted $834,386 from oil companies between 2000 and 2007, and another $121,050 from the coal industry.
But as I often ask, what does money have to do with anything?
Follow Kevin Grandia on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kgrandia
"The AP found that "the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked"; PolitiFact stated that "[i]ndependent of CRU's data, agencies and academics all over the world are coming to essentially the same conclusion: Climate change is happening"; FactCheck stated that "many of the e-mails that are being held up as 'smoking guns' have been misrepresented by global-warming skeptics eager to find evidence of a conspiracy. And even if they showed what the critics claim, there remains ample evidence that the earth is getting warmer.""
"A December 2 editorial in the science journal Nature stated: "Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.""
http://mediamatters.org/research/201001150049
In a gambling casino, if the house rigs the roulette wheel to always stop on the house, but the customers are told the outcomes are random, that is considered a con.
In climate research, if Dr. Mann creates a computer program that will always produce a hockey stick graph regardless of the inputs, but the public is told the outcome is based on the historical climate data inputs, that also is a con.
Mitchell and Kevin are talking about the wrong grant, and Kevin, at minimum, must have known this before he posted this here. Their article here links to the National Center for Public Policy Research (which employs me) press release (partially reprinted by Friskaliberal.com, also linked to here), which calls for a return of a grant of $541,184.
Kevin wrote us Thursday to ask about the grant. We IDed the grant for him as National Science Foundation award #0902133, which is for $541,184.
So Kevin knew, before posting this here, that "the climate denial echo chamber" (as he so charmingy calls us) wasn't talking about an entirely different, $770,000 grant to Penn State/ U of HI, of which Mann received a small portion.
The real story: in June 2009, Penn State accepted a $541,184 grant, to cover three years, to Michael Mann's work. Climategate then exploded. Apparently believing Climategate to be serious, Penn State opened an investigation into Mann's work. Our position is that under these circumstances, the grant should be returned to the National Science Foundation, so the funds can be awarded to another scientist.
Kevin and Mitchell seem to think this would be awful. I'm not sure why. Maybe just because we're the ones who suggested it.
http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf
Read the NSF award abstract. It says the grant pays for postdocs and graduate students who will conduct the research. So even if you doubt Dr. Mann's conduct, proposing to pull the grant money would primarily punish students who were never accused. That's not right.
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0902133
I couldn't have said it any better.