10.12.11
Graham-Talent sock puppet team for bioterror defense returns
The United States remains largely unprepared for a large-scale bioterrorism attack or deadly disease outbreak, according to the WMD Terrorism Research Center.
The finding are in a report card released Wednesday, which gave the country 15 failing grades in categories ranging from detection to medical countermeasures.
The report card gave 15 F’s,15 D’s and no A’s in its assessment of current bio-defense capabilities in the United States.
The bipartisan center, headed by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, and former Sen. Jim Talent, R-Missouri, did find improvements since the 9-11 2001 attacks, but its analysis suggests the nation’s readiness to respond to various levels of biological disasters remains a work in progress.
Longtime readers know the Graham-Talent lobby for biodefense has regularly issued reports on the US government’s (read the Obama administration’s) readiness for bioterror. And they always give out bad grades for the sake of repeating publicity stunts.
Then they proceed to opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers and write the same script they have always written: Calamity is coming if we don’t spend more of bioterror defense. And anyone can make biological weapons. Easy.
Today’s news is no exception to the rule of sock puppet procedure:
The report points out “advances in biotechnology have now enabled a small team of individuals with college-level training to create biological weapons.”
Since the Graham-Talent sock puppet lobby never varies in its presentation, simply cutting and pasting the same old stuff into whatever new publicity campaign it has lined up, DD feels no regret in simply cutting-and-pasting from old blog posts on them.
Their greatest hits:
Ex-famous politician Graham remade himself as a fugleman for increasing spending on bioterror defense, mostly by planting the same opinion pieces over and over in the nation’s press over the last decade.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research??? something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror …
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything.
Graham’s lesser Siamese twin in this matter is ex-GOP Senator Jim Talent, whose only legislative contribution came during the Clinton administration as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On For America and its subsequent Welfare Reform Act.
Jim Talent’s signal contribution, bless his heart, was to make it harder for the poor to get food stamps. This made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation on the subject of entitlement.
Like Graham, Jim Talent is nothing but a shill for the bioterror defense industry. And in that role he recently contributed horrible, what amounts to virtually fraudulent testimony, to Congress.
[Jim Talent argues] with distinctly unusual illogic that Bruce Ivins, one of the nation’s foremost experts on anthrax, working in the nation’s foremost laboratory on biodefense, with the best access to gold standard anthrax spores in the world … proves that anyone — those completely without training — could do the same.
Here’s a fellow who has never had a single serious course in microbiology in his entire life, a man who wouldn’t know a Gram stain from a grass stain, as an “expert??? on bioterrorism and how one makes diseases into weapons before Congress of the allegedly most advanced country in the world.It’s flabbergasting in its audacity.
Compared to [big lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce], and other standard GOP-aligned [agencies], like KochPAC or AHIP, WMD Center is very small beer.
Anyway, the website of the WMD Center is not particularly informative — this from a group allegedly about educating the public on the pressing danger of bioterrorism.
It publicizes only that it’s in the process of preparing a report card on the Obama administration’s progress in buttressing the nation against bioterror.
These report cards are rigged exercises, designed to give the government crappy grades. And they’ve done it before.
Last year, when Graham and Talent were still funded by the US government as part of the old WMD Commission, they gave the president an F on bioterror defense. Just before their funding from the US government ran out.
They were booted, anyway.
Bob Graham and Jim Talent, a bioterror defense lobbying duo, are the very definition of nuisance astro-turfers …
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby is upset because the Obama administration wants to spend money on the middle class. It wants to use two billion dollars from Project Bioshield to save middle class jobs in this very bad economy.
The most in-the-news duo of fuglemen for the US bioterror defense industry, the small operation known as the Graham-Talent WMD commission, will no longer be the Graham-Talent commission when its federal lease on life is not renewed this year. In short order.
It couldn’t come soon enough.During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
Writing here in December, we summarize:
More accurately, [the commission’s public faces] — Bob Graham and Jim Talent — are little more than fuglemen for the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a small consortium of biodefense firms called the Alliance for Biosecurity. And the ‘commission’s’ top two staffers are indistinguishable from the Center for Biosecurity.
The special interest group known as the Graham-Talent commission, though, does have a script it efficiently delivers.
It’s an apocalyptic one, a dire and extreme claim delivered free of correspondingly extreme or convincing evidence in support of it. It lives on the idea that if enough people can be rounded up to repeat it in press, it will be taken as fact by others who should perhaps know better.
And that script, delivered through the end of 2009 for the purposes of bonking the Obama administration over the head on the nation’s unpreparedness for bioterrorism was this, as taken from an example in USA Today:
“[Anthrax spores] released by a crop-duster could ‘kill more Americans than died in World War II’ and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in cleanup and other costs.???
An anthrax attack, in other words, would make World War II and the economic collapse seem like walks on a sunny day.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby regularly astro-turfed this substance-free meme into the mainstream press.
Synopsis: In 2009 the Obama administration kicked Bob Graham and Jim Talent’s group of biodefense lobbymen off the government payroll. They saw it coming and came up with a report to give the administration an F. Ever since, they’ve been generating more F-rated reports as payback.
Wait! There’s more! The Graham-Talent sock puppets — from the archives. Oh my God!
Jason said,
October 12, 2011 at 11:39 am
Just noticed that their old web site – http://www.preventwmd.org/ – isn’t active any more. Did they lose funding for that also? Shame, I liked being able to throw their own words against them.
George Smith said,
October 12, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Who knows. Now just another humorous anecdote in a long history of sock puppetry nuisance making.