If there is an alternative illustrative definition to the word persistent in the dictionary, it is the Cult of EMP Crazy.
It is a fringe group of GOP politicians and staffers who are the most extreme among the extremists. They encapsulate the worst aspects of our political culture (the new normal, in other words) — stubborn ignorance and the relentless pursuit of personal agendas and idee fixe at the expense of their constituents.
This at a time when the GOP has vowed to block all legislation in the Senate for the duration of the lame-duck Congress, or until it gets what it wants.
And so, while the majority of the government tries to focus (or at least create an illusion of focus) on the pressing issues of restoring the economy, reducing mass unemployment, and keeping the jobless spending a little over the holiday season, two GOP congressmen have written H.R. 6471, a piece of nuisance legislation aimed at squeezing a report out of the intelligence community on the threat of very frequently notional electromagnetic pulse weapons.
Why? Because such a report would afford more opportunity to warn of electromagnetic pulse doom — the US-civilization-ending catastrophe Roscoe Bartlett has regularly announced is coming upon us … for at least the last ten years.
Bartlett and Franks are kooks … as is everyone in the Cult of EMP Crazy. Bartlett is also an anthrax-denier, a member of another fringe group which strongly believes Bruce Ivins was not the perpetrator of the bioterror attacks which killed five.
He has previously introduced legislation in an attempt to compel the intelligence community to divulge whether the anthrax mail attacks had foreign involvement.
His colleague, Trent Franks, is a notorious birther — one of those who does not believe the president is an American citizen.
More recently, in Congress he was chosen to be one of the recipients of the Team B report issued by Frank Gaffney — another member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and notorious Islamophobe/retired military man, William “Gerry” Boykin.
In short, there is nothing to recommend the legislation of Bartlett and Franks.
It is reprehensible work from hardened political nuisances, designed only to keep the issue alive in Congress. Or to perhaps give Bartlett a report which he can use in future attempts to create more legislation promoting defense against electromagnetic pulse attack and ballistic missiles.
Bartlett has never been successful. Most recently, Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski wiped out pet legislation from him aimed at promoting hardening of the nation’s infrastructure against EMP attack. This blog mentioned it last week here.
A video of Roscoe Bartlett’s latest attempt, in June, to get defenses against electromagnetic pulse doom instituted is here on YouTube.
He stands before an apparently almost empty room.
Like previous legislation, Bartlett’s HR 6471 will probably not get very far. However, the Congressman will inevitably return next year, at the earliest opportunity, with more pestering potential legislation on the menace of electromagnetic pulse attack.
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements. Over the past few years it’s not difficult to find such who write things like what I’m about to excerpt. Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right.
Here’s a symptomatic piece, from around the web and inspired by the Heritage Foundation which works in lockstep with Bartlett on the matter, picked up in the Google news tab this week:
The time to [mount a defense against EMP] was actually yesterday, but since yesterday is gone, the time to prepare and prevent an EMP attack is now!
My point in reporting this information to you is not to cause you fear or distress. I want us not to despair, but to prepare. Be armed with knowledge, and make your own disaster plan. You may consider stockpiling food, water, guns, ammunition and other supplies as best as you’re able. This is not always easy, since many of us don’t have the space or money to be able to stockpile very much. Plus, we have no way of knowing how much we would need and for how long.
Regardless, we know that this world is a dangerous and deadly place and always will be. The only source of true, eternal “safety??? is in God through Jesus Christ. In the event of something like an EMP attack, the Lord is more than able to give us what we need and even to keep us alive against all odds, but even if we do perish, those of us who cling to Him know we’ll be A-OK in the very end.
The puckishly named website, youngerthanroscoe.com, states that — among many other things — Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
For the past couple weeks, DD and a couple colleagues who’ve been known to cover the subject of bioterrorism have been mailed notices of a recent meeting in Washington, DC, on the matter of Bruce Ivins.
And because of the way the anthrax investigation was handled, it generated a body of lore perfectly suited as fertilizer for conspiracy thinking and accusations of government cover-up.
A group of about 25 scientists, professors, writers, terrorism experts and more convened Monday afternoon to discuss the particulars of the investigation and to debate who the real perpetrator may have been.
“James Van de Velde, a consultant on terrorism issues, added that Ivins, as a prominent anthrax researcher, would not have been dumb enough to use anthrax from his own beaker in an attack,” adds the newspaper at one point.
Everyone’s a consultant on terrorism issues.
In any case, the new reporter mentions an appearance by John Ezzell, a retired colleague of Ivins’ at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases( USAMRIID/Ft. Detrick).
The newspaper concludes:
Because of his involvement in the investigation, Ezzell had been under a gag order until he recently retired from USAMRIID. In what he said was his first time speaking out about the issue, Ezzell stood up toward the end of the panel’s presentation to address a question. When those in the room realized a true expert was among them, audience members and panelists tossed question after question his way …
When Van de Velde asked Ezzell if he thought Ivins could have done it, Ezzell responded with a hesitant “possibly yes.”
Astonishingly, today’s e-mail brought a despicable missive from barackobama.com’s honcho, Mitch Stewart. It was a blandishment to astro-turf for the rightness of freezing the pay of middle class federal government workers.
Here:
Will you take a few minutes and write a letter to the editor today to set the record straight?
Using our letter-to-the-editor tool is easy, and we’ll provide tips and talking points to get you started.
Yesterday’s announcement is simply the latest in a series of steps taken by this administration to cut costs and stretch federal dollars.
On his first day in office, President Obama froze the salaries of all senior White House officials — a freeze he later extended to other political appointees. And, in his 2011 budget, he put forward more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction, including a three-year freeze in non-security, discretionary spending.
But if we’re going to tackle the deficit and continue to keep the economy moving in the right direction, we’re far from finished.
As the President said, yesterday’s announcement is not a decision he made lightly. He knows firsthand that the people affected by this pay freeze work hard and sacrifice out of love for their country and in the name of serving their fellow Americans. They are doctors and nurses who care for our veterans. They are scientists researching better treatments and cures for disease.
But if we’re serious about cutting costs, it will require a shared sacrifice from all Americans. It is going to require both sides of the aisle working together. And it is going to require an open, honest debate — one in which partisan politics takes a back seat to the task at hand.
So the next time a friend or family member repeats the untruths about “reckless spending and big government,” tell them the truth about the President’s fiscal leadership and his decision to freeze federal pay for two years.
You can start helping get out the facts by writing a letter to the editor of your local paper today …
It’s eye-watering in its pure evil. Write a letter to your editor saying what a swell guy the prez is for freezing pay to average Joe’s while Wall Street and corporate America enjoy the best year, ever.
The organization formerly known as Obama for America is asking supporters to write letters in support of a federal pay freeze.
“Obama Runs Play from the GOP Book” read the headline on the frontpage of today’s LA Times.
Could have added as subhed: “Adopts policy of sworn enemies, gets kicked in teeth, anyway. Loses even more supporters.”
If there’s a website that’s asked for a DDoS attack today, it’s barackobama.com
Ted Nugent, before Thanksgiving, from the Detroit News:
Far more belt-tightening is in order. We need to make the belt-tightening painful if we are going to climb out of this deep financial hole and save America …
Fedzilla must be put on a strict diet. With the exception of the Defense Department, all federal departments, agencies and organizations should receive 6 1/2 percent less in their budgets for the next four years …
Motorcyclists attached bombs to cars carrying two of the country’s top nuclear scientists early Monday, detonating them from afar. One scientist was killed and the other injured.
Iran immediately accused the United States and Israel of again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved. ??? He also publicly acknowledged, apparently for the first time, that the country’s nuclear program had been disrupted recently by a malicious computer software that attacked its centrifuges.
Good advertising, though, for contractors wanting to enlarge their portfolios into cyber-warfare.
It’s bad news for everyone who harbors even a slight hope for reason.
More Stuxnets, faster stronger Iranian advancement toward the bomb, more instability, even less incentive for non-violent outcomes.
In this sense, Stuxnet could be seen as counter-productive, since it did not actually shut down the program but was more of a harassment.
In other words, it’s a kind of argument which gives you the sub rosa idea that the extreme right GOP wants Iran and nuclear proliferation to advance quickly because it enhances recommendations for ballistic missile defense spending. So it’s in their interest to see that things gets gummed up.
The president should dump the New START treaty — its one-sidedness makes the U.S. look like a lousy negotiator in the eyes of the world … and a patsy in the eyes of the Russians. — some Heritage employee who writes about every rotten idea the foundation wants pushed
And, of course: “The President should also make it a publicly top priority to hunt down any American connected with these leaks and prosecute them.”
The real Ted Nugent showed his usual colors just before entering the Thanksgiving weekend.
In the Detroit News, his usual totally-lacking-in-any-semblance-of-human-charity thing, an opinion piece full of irritation over ‘entitlements,’ having to pay taxes, and anything for future old people (not him):
We need to make the belt-tightening painful if we are going to climb out of this deep financial hole and save America.
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Roughly 50 percent of all Medicare costs are spent in a person’s last six months of life. When a person is terminally ill or without hope of getting better, forcing taxpayers to keep them alive isn’t fair. If the terminally ill individual or his family wants to keep him alive for as long as possible, then they should pay for it, not taxpayers … Last time I checked, churches have a few billion dollars worth of gold, silver, jewelry, art, real estate and other assets. Maybe they could use some of it for such compassionate causes. Maybe not.
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We should put Social Security on a path to extinction. How about this: Anyone over 45 will receive Social Security. Anyone under 45 will not receive it, but they will be forced to continue paying into Social Security to pay for those over 45.
Suggesting churches give up what he implies is loot in gold and silver is an unusually new and surprising low, even for someone like Ted Nugent.
When I started the Ted Nugent tab months ago I wondered what had shriveled him so much.
Here was a guy who had everything in the Seventies (and for a chunk of the Eighties). And as his career declined he folded like cardboard. Unable to reinvent himself gracefully in old age, he turned into a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s most vicious social policies, nothing more than a convenient gasbag for the Washington Times, or someone good for three minutes on Fox News.
Nugent fled Michigan for Crawford, Texas, starting a column for the Waco Tribune, where he was also run off for being uncharitable and rude.
Those who have read the entries on Nugent in this blog have seen the man in his words, ranting on obscure Internet radio programs and television shows. There he is, the strict law-and-order dude and mighty hunter, complaining bitterly and vituperatively over trivial troubles that were entirely his own doing in California. Opining that he’s been victimized by various conspiracies.
What motivates Ted Nugent is vindictiveness. And it is why he so identifies with the Tea Party.
Over the weekend, Paul Krugman pointed to an essay on the failure of US economic policy-making written by economist Brad DeLong. It is here.
Near the end, the author invokes “Nitzschean Ressentiment” to explain a common prevailing attitude.
It translates to ‘because (I or we) have suffered, it is appropriate and good that even more suffer.’
“Nietzsche talked about the losers, or about those who thought they were losers,” DeLong writes. “He discussed their tendencies in various ways to transvalue their values — to say what was thought to be bad was in fact good because it was thought to be bad.”
That’s Ted Nugent in a nutshell. He never recovered from losing his place at the top of the heap, a process all rock stars must inevitably go through. Many handle it with struggle and embarrassment. Others deal with it quietly and gracefully. A few die from it.
However, Ted Nugent decided he’d take it out on the values of the people who put him in the arenas during the high tide of classic rock. And he lost even more, gaining only a reputation as a panderer for people with fortunes which make his place in life look very small.
Krugman appropriately shits on the president for pandering — this morning.
Glad to see the FBI continue its trend of entrapping brown-skinned US citizens with crimes of attempted terrorism. They’re almost as good as the police detectives in “Minority Report” when it comes to arresting people for crimes they were thinking of committing.
He also opines:
Mohamud became “radicalized” when he was 15 – in 2006, just when things were getting nice and hot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not really a shock. I get it, he was a bad guy, but he was also exceptionally stupid. I really have to disagree with the WaPo journalist’s suggestion that there are “extremist cells” and “a wave of homegrown terrorism” in the United States.
Over the same period of time, there have been two arrests in California, of older men with their own home ‘bomb factories.’ But they’re white guys and fucked up in a different way, flavors the newsmedia and reporters interested in radicalism and alleged Islamic homegrown terrorism are not so interested in.
Explosives experts have pulled out of a northern San Diego County home with a large quantity of bomb-making materials because it’s too dangerous.
The Sheriff’s Department says “proactive operations on site have been suspended” and local, state and federal explosives experts are making plans to re-enter the home and remove hazardous materials.
No further action is expected until Dec. 1, at the earliest. Investigators say there is no immediate danger to the community.
Among other things, bomb technicians found what is believed to Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, which was used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt as well as in last month’s airplane cargo bombs.
Fifty-four-year-old George Djura Jakubec is in jail after pleading not guilty on Monday to running a bomb factory at his home.
Jakubec is a naturalized American citizen from Serbia, said to be an unemployed computer programmer who was also into bank robbery. He was apparently found out when a gardener set off an explosive at the residence in question.
A San Diego County man accused of robbing banks and having the largest cache of homemade explosive compounds ever found in one spot on U.S. soil was ordered by a judge Monday to remain in custody on $5 million bail.
Deputy District Attorney Terri Perez told Judge Marshall Hockett that after a gardener was injured in an explosion at Jakubec’s unincorporated Escondido home last week, a large amount of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, was discovered.
Investigators with the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and San Diego County Sheriff’s Department also came across other explosive compounds known by the acronyms of ETN and PETN, the prosecutor said.
PETN was the highly volative explosive used by the shoe bomber in 2001, the underwear bomber and in last month’s cargo plane plot where computer printers loaded with the explosive were placed on planes bound for the United States.
Escondido Police Lt. Craig Carter says officers responding to neighbor reports that 45-year-old Richard Hinkel was screaming obscenities in his backyard Sunday morning found 18 explosive devices, fireworks, 12 rifles and 10 handguns on the property and arrested Hinkel.
A bomb and arson unit from the sheriff’s department confiscated the devices and guns.
Carter says it appears Hinkel was turning fireworks into more powerful explosives.
The home is in the same area as that of George Djura Jakubec, who last week was charged with running what authorities called a bomb factory in his home.
Carter says the explosives found Sunday were far less potent and investigators do not believe the two cases are connected.
And it’s purely malicious to note that both “bomb factories” where in one of the few southern California places to vote GOP in November.
This means the releasing of a report, just before Thanksgiving, warning of all the standard horrors due from approaching electromagnetic pulse doom. And what must be done to stop it. Namely, the putting of said “report” into the hands of GOP Congressman who can be persuaded to add something noxious as an appendix to legislation to be done before the end of the year.
This new thing is the work of the Heritage Foundation, the far right group/organization useful for the gathering of various suspect ideas — that healthcare reform must be defeated, that the welfare class is getting too much in entitlements and undeserved stuff, that the rich are being taxed too much, that global warming, while no longer a cruel hoax, if dealt with will result in diminished US business, poorness for the wealthy and a much weakened military — and employs its stable of bought-and-paid-for experts to craft pieces which exhort readers on the excellence of such beliefs.
Today’s Heritage menu, for example, features blandishments to raise the retirement age, a short video on why START should be opposed, an argument that since China isn’t really green — the US shouldn’t need to go green, either, and how food stamp programs need abolition because the people who use them are parasites usurping money that could be used for ballistic missile defense to save us from EMP attacks.
Well, not the last one. I made it up. But Heritage will probably get around to it, sooner rather than later.
The first place to go to get a good GOP/extremist right astro-turf campaign going is World Net Daily.
Two national-security experts have issued a report through the Heritage Foundation that warns Obama administration officials to start working now to prevent – and mitigate the damage from – an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States because of the potential for “unimaginable devastation.”
“Not even a global humanitarian effort would be enough to keep hundreds of millions of Americans from death by starvation, exposure, or lack of medicine. Nor would the catastrophe stop at U.S. borders. Most of Canada would be devastated, too, as its infrastructure is integrated with the U.S. power grid. Much of the world’s intellectual brain power (half of it is in the United States) would be lost as well. Earth would most likely recede into the ‘new’ Dark Ages,” states the report by James J. Carafano, the deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, and Richard Weitz, senior fellow and director of the Center for Politial-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute.
The report, which is described by the Heritage Foundation as a “backgrounder,” is titled “EMP Attacks – What the U.S. Must Do Now” and was released just days ago, says what is needed right now is for the government to “prevent the threat,” by pursuing “an aggressive protect-and-defend strategy, including comprehensive missile defense; modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent; and adopting proactive nonproliferation and counterproliferation measures.”
Unimaginable devastation.
Next, Clifford May to write an opinion piece saying the same thing for the Ventura Star or a couple other little newspapers in various Bumblefucks scattered across the nation. To be followed by another piece in USA Today, like the piece about four weeks ago.
Maybe they could step up the game a little and enlist Ted Nugent to write about it for the Washington Times. That’s if he could be pried away from recommending the elimination of Social Security, Medicare and all taxation for a minute or two.
Whenever the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy sees its plans go down in flames, you never hear much in the mainstream.
The only stuff you do see is when it’s busy astro-turfing the issue. Which can be seen in all the opinion pieces on the country being thrown back into the Dark Ages, appearing like mushrooms on the manure pile after a wet spell, in the same media.
So you had to search for this one.
Lisa Murkowski, the GOP senator from Alaska, slew the Cult beast, for the time being, in mid-October.
In a surprising election-year gambit, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has gutted legislation with strong bipartisan support that would protect the U.S. power grid from solar flares and Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons, to benefit a “clean??? energy bill backed by Senate Democrats.
The original bill, known as the GRID Act, authorized the federal government to take emergency measures to protect some 300 giant power transformers around the country. It passed the House of Representatives by a unanimous voice vote in August, an unusual show of bipartisan support in this Congress.
But when it went to the Senate, the bill was gutted of the measures to protect the power grid from EMP attack by Murkowski and committee chairman Jeff Bingamon, D-N.M., while other portions of the bill were added to her own energy bill, S. 1462, the American Clean Energy Act of 2009.
“Sen. Murkowski stripped H.R. 5026 of the main elements designed to protect our infrastructure and did not add them to her bill,??? said Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition.
An aide to Murkowski said that Murkowski voted for stripping out the EMP provisions of the bill on practical, not political, grounds.
“The bill was going nowhere. The administration opposed it, and favored a government-wide effort, not a piecemeal approach.??? He added that blaming Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Energy Committee, for altering legislation being managed by the majority Democrats was “an election-year gambit by far right wing groups. Murkowski did not place a hold on the House bill.???
Murkowski recently declared victory over the Tea Party kook, Joe Miller, in a write-in campaign after the latter unseated her in a primary.
“A Colorado man thinks he’s found a way to protect your private parts from unwanted radiation and government peeping at airports,” it begins.
“Jeff Buske of Larkspur is selling tungsten-lined underwear on-line …”
Where on-line?
Ah, you have to wait for it.
Infowars.com, the creation of fringe radio personality Alex Jones. The newspaper declines to helpfully inform readers that people who visit infowars.com are nuts.
Besides the ads pushing golbuggism, colloidal silver snake oil, and fluoridation contaminating your precious bodily fluids, today’s big stories on the website include an expose on how the RAND Corporation is behind the outbreak of hostilities between the Koreas and how the “US military industrial complex armed North Korea with nuclear weapons.”
In other words, the people allegedly “buying” tungsten-lined underwear are the same people DD occasionally mentions as part of the longstanding US extremist fringe.
Now, we’re not just talking Tea Partiers here.
It’s the real cream of the damaged crop, those who exchange e-mail newsletters on how the US has set up death camps, that electromagnetic pulse doom is about to rain from the sky, and that the collapse of US civilization is imminent. So one needs to harden and prepare the bunker in the pasture for the time when the hordes — the rest of us — coming storming out of the cities, desperate to take their stuff.
Somehow you don’t get that from the Los Angeles Times, despite the mildly tee-hee quality associated with talk about shielded bras and “nipples.”
One is tempted to call it a new low for the newspaper. But it’s not.
I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.
And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession, yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans. I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic, but it’s not healthy in any republic.
Saw it during the taking of the census. In review, all here.
So the GOP, and the usual Blue Dog fake Republicans, stopped extension of unemployment benefits, just in time for the holiday season. Of course, it’s well known they detest the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.