Free Republic

Cyber Attack On Utilities Would Be A 'Katrina-Like Disaster Affecting Cities For Days, Months' Geoffrey IngersollMay 22, 2013, 12:49 PMHurricane Katrina NASA The possibility of a cyber attack on U.S. infrastructure is a bigger risk than ever, as utility companies report a record amount of vulnerability probing from outside sources in recent months, according to Bloomberg. The attack on critical infrastructure could be as bad as Katrina, experts say. Risk assessment professional Robert Bea warns of a cascading effect: “Should one piece of a system fail, you end up with these cascades, sort of like a game of dominos,” he...

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said Tuesday that her state will rebuild, and she asked for prayers to aid the rescue and recovery.

... Obama will be meeting with his disaster response team, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, on Tuesday before delivering a statement on the devastating tornado that tore through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday. Obama has declared a major disaster in Oklahoma, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.

The Gang of Eight — four Democratic and four Republican U.S. senators — have been meeting behind closed doors since January to produce "comprehensive immigration reform." That will mean a multi-thousand-page bill that no one reads. You know the saying "fool me twice." Americans got bamboozled in 2010 when the 2,572-page Obama health law was rushed through Congress unread. The surprises buried in that law are causing havoc. Let's not repeat the mistake of "comprehensive" reform Congress needs to fix immigration one step at a time, passing individual bills in plain English on border security, hiring, access to benefits such...

In a town like West, almost everyone knows the missing and the presumed dead, among them, Joey Pustejovsky, West’s city secretary and a member of the volunteer fire department. “We have a mayor and we have Joey,” said resident Laura Bettge, who said she spent Thursday morning praying and crying. “He’s a friend to everybody, but he’s also our leader. “‘Secretary’ doesn’t really describe what he does,” she said. “We don’t have a city manager, so he kind of just helps run everything.” The only victim publicly identified Thursday was Capt. Kenny Harris of Dallas Fire-Rescue, a 52-year-old father of...

You May Be A Dangerous, Paranoid Doomsday Prepper If… Tom Chatham April 15th, 2013 Project Chesapeake Commentators are always quick to link guns and emergency stores to dangerous and paranoid actions that they consider to be tell tale signs someone is going to commit a crime. They always focus on these areas because it is a trait mostly seen in conservatives that know enough to question the governments’ ability to take care of every problem that emerges. In short, if you are not a Liberal that needs the government to make all of your decisions for you and care for...

Rick Santorum appears to be eyeing the White House again, with the former Pennsylvania senator telling Newsmax TV’s Steve Malzberg that he may run for president in 2016. “I’m certainly leaving the door open for that,” Santorum revealed on “The Steve Malzberg Show” Wednesday afternoon. … “The same advisors who botched these last two campaigns are now saying, ‘Well, you know, since we can’t win with moderate Republicans, we have to now try to be liberal Republicans to win instead of standing up for the values that made our country great,’” he said. …

Sen. Rand Paul R-Ky. delivered an effective speech at Howard University, even though he rhetorically stumbled at points. The audience was mostly silent through Paul’s prepared speech, which highlighted traditional Republican policies such as school choice, free markets, and limited government. Paul’s more libertarian ideas, however, appeared to resonate with the audience, as they applauded for his views on reduced jail penalties for non-violent drug users and a more humble foreign policy. “Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning of kids who make bad choices,” Paul said. “I, for one, plan to change that.” Paul admitted that Republicans had...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joined President Obama for his second closed-door dinner with Senate Republicans on Wednesday. Rubio had been invited but had not committed for most of the day of the dinner. The Florida Republican's office said immigration meetings might get in the way of him going to the dinner, but later said he would attend. Besides Rubio, Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), John Boozman (Ark.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Deb Fisher (Neb.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Johnny Isackson (Ga.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), John Thune (S.D.) Roger Wicker (Miss.) dined with Obama. Obama's first meeting with...

Professor Vernon Briggs, a Cornell labor economist, tells WND that “[a]mnesty for illegal immigrants sanctions the overt violation all of the nation’s worker protection laws.”

A landslide on Whidbey Island in Washington state pushed one home 200 feet out into the water and forced the evacuation of about 20 people, officials said. Early Wednesday morning a 1,000-foot-wide section of a cliff on the island fell away, blocking the beach-side road below, The Seattle Times reported. Police evacuated about a dozen people from homes below the cliff by boat because of the road blockage, KOMO-TV, Seattle, reported.

Ten years ago, U.S. air, sea, and land forces attacked Iraq. So, how now does the ledger read, 10 years on? Of the three goals of the war, none was achieved. No weapon of mass destruction was found. While Saddam and his sons paid for their sins, they had had nothing at all to do with 9/11. Nothing. That had all been mendacious propaganda. Where there had been no al-Qaida in Iraq while Saddam ruled, al-Qaida is crawling all over Iraq now. Where Iraq had been an Arab Sunni bulwark confronting Iran in 2003, a decade later, Iraq is tilting...

These islands, a U.S. territory just north of Guam in the Western Pacific, are known to be attractive to wealthy pregnant Chinese women wanting to give their babies U.S. citizenship.

During my remarks today I have exhaustively documented the case against the confirmation of Mr. Lew. I have detailed his disastrous budget plans, rebuked by editorial boards across the country and unanimously rejected by Congress. I have discussed his repeated, knowing, and deliberately false statements about those budget plans—most notoriously his claim that “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing...

As Krauthammer says in his 'Hail Armageddon!' column in today's WaPo, Barack Obama DESPERATELY needs for affects of sequester spending cuts to be harsh on the American public -at least in their minds- or he loses. Thus, the bizarre claims from congressional drones i.e. Maxine Waters' "170M jobs will be lost!", White House staff threatening journalists who dare speak the truth, and of course the panic-mongering propaganda tour... This isn't just some right-winger-clinger theory, a Democratic strategist came right-out and said it himself: “The worst-case scenario for us,” a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Post, “is the sequester hits and nothing...

An amendment to remove a reference to firearms from Carroll County’s disaster and emergency ordinance was passed by the Board of Commissioners Tuesday without discussion. The decision to change the ordinance was made to avoid conflicting with Second Amendment issues raised by a Georgia gun rights organization. The action eliminates the word “firearms” from a list of items whose sales could be suspended in case of a local disaster declared by the county commission chairman. The wording was questioned in a Jan. 18 letter, hand-delivered to commission Chairman Marty Smith, by James Camp of Temple, representing GeorgiaCarry.org. Read more: Douglas...

With tomorrow being the inauguration of the disastrous 2nd Obama Administration(a/k/a the 3rd Jimmy Carter Administration that never was), what could be more appropriate for today's MFASA pick than a disaster film released the same year as the inauguration of the Carter presidency? A plague infected terrorist stows away on a passenger train which gets rerouted to a quarantine camp that will have to cross a rickety bridge with a good chance of not being able to sustain the train's weight. Come to think of it, the innocent train passengers probably have more reason to be optimistic about their fate...

The exodus of senior aides from the White House continued as Gen James Jones, Barack Obama’s head of National Security, resigned. His departure, which comes a week after Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, resigned, removes one of the few senior officials not belonging to the US president’s coterie of long-time advisers. Brought in originally for his vast experience and independent voice, it had been clear for some time that the former Nato supreme commander had failed to gel with the president’s inner circle. Gen Jones is being replaced by one of those close aides, his former deputy Thomas Donilon....

I am reading so many pundits and other talking heads analyzing the disaster that was this year's elections. I am adding my own ten cents. Here goes: 1. We are outnumbered. We accurately foresaw the enthusiasm, the passion, the commitment, the determination, and the turnout. Married women, men, independents, Catholics, evangelicals - they all went for Romney in percentages as high or higher than the groups which voted for McCain in 2008. It wasn't enough. What we saw in the election on Tuesday was a tipping point: we are now at a place where there are legitimately fewer Americans who...

A few days ago, I posted this blog: Doomsday Preppers are Socially Selfish. The role of a blogger is to foment discussion an it certainly appears that’s what I did. I very much appreciated most of the 150+ comments – except perhaps the ones that called me ‘stupid’, ‘nuts, ‘arrogant’, ‘ignorant’ – and a few personal emails that were much more graphic. I wrote this for the emergency management community, who pretty much misunderstood what I was saying. Social media is certainly powerful and I had no idea this would be so controversial. FIRST .. let me offer a heartfelt...