Sunday, November 25, 2012

A message from one of Obama's mislabeled opinionaires: Obama’s energy chairman paints rifles a ‘terrorist threat’ for Bloomberg group

Nov 25, 2012

Has anyone noticed the clouded job descriptions of Obama's commissions, his Czars and chairs? Don't believe the overlaps are accidental. In fact, many of the names of the commissions and job titles are intentionally misleading...

FERC Chairman Wellinghoff invents a rifle threat just in time for breakfast.
 Credits: U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission  
Rifles, even .22 caliber models many young people receive as their first gun, are “among the greatest threats to the reliability of the nation’s power system,” U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff claimed at a Tuesday Bloomberg Government Breakfast, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.

Citing “inadequately protected” transformers as easy targets, Wellinghoff told the group that terrorists in "coordinated" actions committed to destroying them “could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out.”

His proposed solution, a “couple hundred bucks” of “metal sheeting to block the view of transformers” hardly seems comprehensive, realistic, or even sober or sane when his further assertion that it will keep people from seeing through fences presupposes the entire perimeter must be covered. That would seem to be a very expensive proposition, especially when multiplied by the thousands of utility substations throughout the U.S. And it’s not like ladders aren’t plentiful enough.

But the damage has been done, and not to transformers. Wellinghoff has managed to inject an anti-rifle scare into the energy debate that Bloomberg News, in thrall to its billionaire anti-gun zealot master, has the means to disseminate to the general public to manipulate and gin up the fear needed in order for planned “solutions” to be introduced.

That environmental activist Wellinghoff has done practically nothing to improve actual grid security, focusing instead on three “top priorities,” renewable energy, advanced technology and “demand-side … practices,” makes his newly-expressed hoplophobia curious. It’s made all the more inexplicable when considered against a Department of Homeland Security-sponsored report on “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System,” actually referenced in the Bloomberg News piece, evidently to give the desired conclusions an air of authority. Written in 2007 but declassified and released this month by the National Research Council, the report talks about major physical, cyber and personnel vulnerabilities. Tellingly, a search for the term “rifle” produces “0”hits in all chapters (and is remarkably difficult to find references to, if they exist, on the FERC website). That makes the chairman’s characterization of them as “among the greatest threats” seem, kindly stated, more agenda-driven than empirical, and makes the Bloomberg “Authorized Journalist’s” report, again as kindly put as it merits, a fraudulent propaganda hit piece masquerading as straight news.


source: Examiner

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