…and weaken the Republican party. The McCain toady is in bed with Obama and GE will push the renewable energy bill.

Sellout Senator Lindsay (Gramshi) Graham (R-SC) is working with GE lobbyists to draft “the Clean Energy Act of 2009,” which will mandate that 20 percent of electricity come from “clean energy sources” by 2020 and 50 percent by 2050.

GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, bet the farm in developing “green” energy-generating products and Graham has been out front among Republicans regurgitating the myth that fossil fuels destroy the planet to undercut free markets and increase energy prices on the American people. Tom Borelli writes in Lindsay Graham Seeks to Bail Out General Electric and Rescue Obama’s Energy Policy:

Immelt does not want to compete in the open marketplace. Rather, he wants to game the political system by working with Congress to mandate demand for GE’s products, either by increasing the price of fossil fuels through a cap-and-trade system or via a Graham-type bill that requires power generation from renewable energy sources.”

From the rubble of the anthropomorphic global warming scam, America does not need to dig out renewable energy laws. But GE needs mandates to push its wind and solar power products, and South Carolina’s gelding appears to have been for sale. His clean energy definition mirrors GE’s business strategy for renewable energy, clean coal technology, and nuclear energy. The New York Times reports:

Several sources said General Electric Co. helped Graham in crafting the legislative language. GE has the world’s largest gas turbine manufacturing plant, in Greenville, S.C., and the company also is leading development of new nuclear reactors and a “clean coal” technology known as integrated gasification combined cycle, which has the capacity to capture and permanently sequester carbon emissions.

John McCain has mentored his toady well, i.e., wait until victory is at hand; then board your ass, cross the aisle, insert your dagger deep in the back of your party leader, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory to the chant of “Maverick! Maverick!” from the adoring gaggle of gathered propagandists commissioned to praise your heroic deeds.

Graham has been a patsy for the political left since his days on the Hyde Committee, which processed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He double-crossed Henry Hyde and was the only Republican to join with Committee Democrats and vote against the perjury charge, the keystone article of the three articles of impeachment.

Gramshi is a big-government, self-promoting RINO who is out of step with the beliefs of most Republican voters, but he won’t be up for reelection until 2014, which means the party must endure another five years of his treachery. But it’s not too late to do something about the treacherous actions of his mentor.

Megan’s faux conservative daddy is facing a bona fide conservative challenger in J.D. Hayworth for the senate seat in Arizona. If Arizona Republicans are serous about saving their party and ridding the country of the tyrannical policies of the progressive Democrats, they will send Graham’s maverick mentor home to spend time with his insufferable daughter.

Our electric power grid is vulnerable to missile attack, and Congress is doing nothing about it, according to the author of the book One Second After. The detonation of a small nuclear warhead above the center of the country would create an electromagnetic pulse sufficient to take out the national grid. (Remember what one little surge did in August 2003?)

From the National Review, here’s how it would work:

…one missile, properly targeted, could degrade the electronic grid of the entire continental United States… …even North Korea has weapons capable of doing this…

Rather than target the warhead at land, enemies deliver their payloads from 25 to 300 miles above the Earth’s surface. There, radiation from a nuclear explosion would interact with air molecules to produce high-energy electrons that speed across the earth’s magnetic field as an instantaneous, invisible electromagnetic pulse. Such an explosion would release a pulse strong enough to disrupt power grids, electronic systems and communications over the lower 48.

The United States never has prepared for this threat because experts long assumed it wouldn’t matter. An EMP attack, the theory goes, would come as a precursor to a full-scale nuclear exchange with our Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. At that point, the state of the power grid would be the least of our problems.

But today, we must consider a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) a significant threat on its own. The congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, calls EMP “one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in defeat of our military forces.” ….

During Bush’s presidency when the EMP commission did its research, United States Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, to which the commission reported. He had this to say:

[EMP is] a major threat to the United States, not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack over American soil, one of the expert witnesses at the hearing said, is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorist or otherwise. A single nuclear weapon, detonated at the right altitude, would produce an electromagnetic pulse that — depending on its location and size — would knock out power grids and other electrical systems across much of the country, for months if not years.

Few if any people would die right away. But the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Communication would be almost impossible. Powerless refrigerators would leave food rotting in warehouses, marooned by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still operable simply run out of gas (which can’t be pumped without electricity). The unavailability of clean water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention leave the inevitable fires raging unchecked. As we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, this kind of scenario often results in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.

Our society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles’ heel of vulnerability, ironically much more so than less developed nations. Deprived of power in occasional blackouts, we are in many ways helpless. Typically, power is restored relatively quickly, but a large-scale burnout caused by broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment. Transformers for regional substations, for example, are huge and are no longer manufactured in the United States (emphasis mine).

Recent missile tests by North Korea and Iran involved trajectories over open water. Average citizens in the western world brushed them off and were not alarmed, because these did not look like the successfully targeted down-range tests we are familiar with. But that is because we always think of missiles as being aimed at a target. If the goal of rogue nations is simply to detonate a nuclear warhead over the continental United States to create an electro-magnetic pulse, then the delivery system only needs lauch and distance capability, not the technological refinement necessary for aiming. Iran declared its last test a success. For their purposes, most likely it was. This is not to say that Israel has no cause for concern, but that we should also.

The book One Second After by William R. Forstchen is fiction. But it is predicated on a very real situation. Its current popularity serves as a wake-up call to a dangerous threat.

Related:

Book website — One Second After

Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack — Website

Report of the Commission — Executive Report, 2004 (PDF)

Report of the Commission — Critical National Infrastructures Report, April 2008 (PDF)

Wall Street Journal — What a Single Nuclear Warhead Could Do

Heritage Foundation — The risk of electromagnetic pulse devastation is greater than ever. Why does Washington dismiss it?

CNN Inside Politics — FBI concerned about threat of terror-induced blackouts.

Wikipedia — Northeast Blackout of 2003

Tail wag: Larry Braden