Fed up with Washington’s inaction, at least 12 states are moving to protect their electric grids from the type of devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) — either from a solar flare or nuclear attack — that concerns federal authorities.
“Let’s start insisting that we protect the grid,” said State Rep. Andrea Boland of Maine, which became the first state to require power companies to harden their electric lines and transformers to protect from an EMP.
“It’s pretty much common sense,” she told Secrets. “It’s a terrible urgency.”
The effort led by Maine comes a little more than a year after the sun blasted out a huge “coronal mass ejection” that, if directed at earth, could have knocked out East Coast electric grids and GPS systems for months. It was the latest of several recorded in the last decade.
“We just kind of got lucky,” said William Murtaugh of the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “These things are happening quite regularly on the sun.”
When coupled with fears that North Korea or Iran might launch an atmospheric nuclear blast that would have the same impact as a sun burst, the potential for disaster, chaos and deaths has many in Washington urging action. But because the federal government doesn’t have the power to force electric companies to protect the grid, the fight is moving to states that do.
“The states get it,” said Peter Vincent Pry, a former staff member of the now-defunct Congressional EMP Caucus.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said that the costs to hardening the lines are tiny, maybe .20 cents per home per month. But, Woolsey added, power companies don’t want to spend money on it.
Besides Maine, Boland and Pry said that the states considering some kind of EMP resolution or law are Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Utah, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Washington, New York and Kentucky.
“We’re not sweeping the country yet,” said Pry, “but it’s certainly headed that way.”
OBAMA WANTS HOSUE TO LEAD ON IMMIGRATION
President Obama wants House Speaker John Boehner to take the lead on immigration reform, even if that means a piecemeal approach, believing that a more comprehensive White House plan would die in the GOP-controlled Congress, according to sources familiar with the strategy.
“The president is giving Boehner wide latitude,” said a business leader who has attended several White House meetings where the president’s team laid out its strategy. “They believe that the only chance of passage in the House is to let Boehner write the plan and for the White House to offer support from the sidelines.”
The White House is so hopeful that the speaker and his immigration leaders can get elements of a plan through the House next year that it has been telling those at the meetings something rarely heard in public: praise for Boehner.
STUDY: CONVICTS MOSTLY DEMOCRATS
A new study of how criminals vote finds that most convicts register as Democrats, a key reason in why liberal lawmakers and governors are eager for them to get back into the voting book after their release.
“Democrats would benefit from additional ex-felon participation,” said the study, which was provided to secrets and which is being published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
The authors, professors from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, found that in some states, felons register Democratic by a ratio of more than six to one. In New York, for example, 61.5 percent of convicts are Democrats, just 9 percent Republican. Another study they cite revealed that 73 percent of convicts register Democrat.
But despite recent moves in states to notify convicts that they can vote again, the study finds no evidence that they do.
VIRGINIA BESTS IOWA FOR CORN KING TITLE
Virginia, long known as tobacco country, has a new title: Corn King.
A farmer from near Richmond broke the 12-year-old Iowa record of 442 bushels of corn per acre with 454 bushels, nearly three times the average of 160 bushels nationally. It was declared the world record by the National Corn Growers Association.
“That kind of gets your heart,” said Charles City grain farmer David Hula. “When you think of growing corn, you sure don’t think of Virginia,” he added.
Even more shocking than his production is that it was done with special organic soil treatments to the farm, which used to be the site of a sand and gravel mine.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
