Weakening America, Suppressed EPA Report: No Global Warming, NK Cyber Attack, The Mark of the Beast?

1) Arms Control Amnesia  The new talks with Moscow could put the U.S. nuclear deterrent in jeopardy. Here are the facts. Beyond the bad negotiating principle of giving up something for nothing, there will be serious downsides if the U.S. actually reduces its strategic launchers as much as Moscow wishes. The bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission — headed by former secretaries of defense William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger — concluded that the U.S. could make reductions “if this were done while also preserving the resilience and survivability of U.S. forces.” Having very low numbers of launchers would make the U.S. more vulnerable to destabilizing first-strike dangers, and would reduce or eliminate the U.S. ability to adapt its nuclear deterrent to an increasingly diverse set of post-Cold War nuclear and biological weapons threats. President Obama should recall Winston Churchill's warning: "Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving peace are in your hands." There is no need for the U.S. to accept Russian demands for missile-defense linkage, or deep reductions in the number of our ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers, to realize much lower numbers of Russian strategic systems. There is also no basis for expecting Russian goodwill if we do so. See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124693303362103841.html 2) Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into 'Suppressed' Climate Change Report A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.  The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined. …According to internal e-mails that have been made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Carlin's boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue. The draft EPA finding released in April lists six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that the EPA says threaten public health and welfare. …"It was reassigning you or losing my job, and I didn't want to lose my job," Carlin said, paraphrasing what he claimed were McGartland's comments to him. "My inference (was) that he was receiving some sort of higher-level pressure."  …Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been "greatly diminished."  See: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/gop-senator-calls-inquiry-supressed-climate-change-report/ 3) US officials eye North Korea in cyber attack WASHINGTON – U.S. authorities on Wednesday eyed North Korea as the origin of the widespread cyber attack that overwhelmed government Web sites in the United States and South Korea, although they warned it would be difficult to definitively identify the attackers quickly. The powerful attack that targeted dozens of government and private sites underscored how unevenly prepared the U.S. government is to block such multipronged assaults. While Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission Web sites were shut down by the software attack, which lasted for days over the holiday weekend, others such as the Pentagon and the White House were able to fend it off with little disruption. …The widespread attack was "loud and clumsy," which suggests it was carried out by an unsophisticated organization, said Amit Yoran, chief executive at NetWitness Corp. and the former U.S. government cybersecurity chief. "This is not the elegance we would expect from sophisticated adversaries."  Officials agreed, however, that the incident brings to the forefront a key 21st century threat. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090709/ap_on_go_ot/us_us_cyber_attack 4) Stimulus Spending Is Making Things Worse Not Better (Do you even need someone to tell you this?) It isn't that President Obama's policies aren't working. It is just that the economy was so much worse off than anyone realized. -- Or so the Obama administration claims.  Vice President Joe Biden repeated the mantra again this past Sunday on ABC's "This Week." Host George Stephanopoulos asked him how the 9.5 percent unemployment rate in June squared with the administration's prediction that if the stimulus package was passed, "unemployment will peak at about 8 percent." Biden replied: "we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there." Translation? The economy being much worse than ever predicted isn't Obama's fault, the Bush administration supposedly left us a worse economy than anyone realized. Even to Stephanopoulos, the alternatives were only two: "either you misread the economy [that the economy was worse than Team Obama realized] or the stimulus package is too slow and to small." A low and behold, here's this headline in today's Wall Street Journal reports "Calls Grow to Increase Stimulus Spending." …The alternative explanation should be obvious: the stimulus made things worse. The notion that "the stimulus package is too slow and to small" implies that massive government spending helped the economy. But the resources the government spends has to come from some place. Spending almost a trillion dollars on various stimulus projects means moving a lot of resources from where the private sector would have spent it, eliminating the jobs many people currently have. …Rewriting history may work for Media Matters, but it would be nice to hold the rest of the media to higher standards. Not all documents have conveniently disappeared down the memory hole. But if they are going to invent history they might start with finding a single example where massive government spending has worked in the past. See: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/07/07/stimulus-spending-making-things-iworsei-better/ 5) Ginsburg: I thought Roe was to rid undesirables Justice discusses 'growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of' In an astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it "populations that we don't want to have too many of." See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=103457 6) Bill banning forced identity-chip implants clears House HARRISBURG - Invasion of privacy is an issue that really gets under State Rep. Babette Josephs' skin. That's why the Philadelphia Democrat introduced a bill, passed unanimously last week by the House, that would ban the forced implantation of computer chips in humans. Conjuring Orwellian images, Josephs worries the identification devices - the size of a grain of rice - could lead to a real-life Big Brother nightmare. "I'm doing, I think, what the legislature does too little of," she said. "This is a problem on the horizon, and I want to address it before it becomes a societal disgrace." Though the technology hasn't debuted in Pennsylvania, VeriChip, a company in Florida, received federal Food and Drug Administration clearance in 2004 to market the implanted microchips, which were tested on 200 Alzheimer's patients. Injected into the triceps, the chips have unique 16-digit codes and GPS capabilities that allow nursing homes to find wandering patients. …The technology can also be used for security, as in a widely reported case in Mexico. There, the implants were required for some government employees to enter restricted buildings. A bar in Scotland even offers to implant patrons with chips that allow them to purchase pints without a credit card, according to news accounts. Despite the technology's potential usefulness, Sultzbaugh said, some Christian groups liken the identification devices to the "mark of the beast," a Satanic mark described in the Book of Revelation and represented by the number 666. Josephs said electronic ankle bracelets could keep track of someone in a less-invasive manner. But for some "murderers, killers, and rapists," ankle bracelets won't do the trick, said State Rep. Dan Moul (R., Adams). Moul amended Josephs' bill to allow chips to be implanted by court order. The bill also would allow the chips to be implanted in Guantanamo Bay detainees who end up in Pennsylvania (emphasis mine). See: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20090702_Bill_banning_forced_identity-chip_implants_clears_House.html