Kicking The Ball Down The Field.

Presidents have been kicking the ball down the field for years when it comes to N Korea's threat.

Obama not only kicked the ball down the field when it came to Iran and Syria but respectively he bought the ball for Iran and simply painted the desert sand red when it came to Syria .

Now it is up to Trump, the president a growing number of Democrats and their radical ilk want to impeach, to save our nation from a potential catastrophic/crippling event.

For several years I have been posting former CIA Director, James Woolsey's warnings, about a cyber attack on America's electrical grid.  Contrast the consequences of this with the emphasis by Greens on the climate change threat. While everyone is exercised over cutting the grass they are failing to protect the entire house burning to the ground.  But that is what government and politicians do.  They generally focus on small things while missing the big picture.

Frightening, yes. An overstatement, perhaps. Worth ignoring?  Yes, if you want to kick the ball down the field some more. (See 1and 1a  below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe 4th.

I suspect N Korea's launch of their intercontinental, on the day before the 4th, was intentional.
++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++
1) North Korea: Shocking

Warning To America

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Pentagon is scrambling to protect America's power grid amid fears of attack by North Korea. Former CIA Director James Woolsey:

"According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year - killing nine of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse."

President Trump is facing this threat head-on and he is not backing down. He told Reuters, "There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely."

North Korea realizes they can't beat us with brute military force on the conventional battlefield. We are way too strong for that.

However we do have a weakness that North Korea or other foreign terrorists can use against us...

Our crumbling electric grid.

Former CIA official Dr. Peter Pry warns, "There is an imminent threat... to the national electric grid and not just to a single U.S. city."

When our electric grid fails, it will be like watching America have a heart attack right before your eyes. Because when the heart stops pumping... everything shuts down and the patient flat lines.

Our enemies could cripple our great country in a matter of minutes, without having to fire a single bullet. They could just sit back and watch as we self-destruct through looting, rioting and the targeting of police officers.

It's a frightening idea, but worst of all...

It may already be happening.

On April 21, three major U.S. cities – New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco – experienced virtually simultaneous power outages. Businesses emptied. Schools closed. Subway commuters were stuck underground in the dark.

Rumors immediately started flying that a cyber-attack had caused all three blackouts.

The "official" word in San Francisco was that the outage was caused by a fire in a substation. In Los Angeles, high winds were blamed. In New York, an equipment failure was the announced culprit.

Perhaps those were the real causes. Or maybe these simultaneous blackouts were dry runs for future attacks.

We may never know the truth.

But former CIA official Dr. Peter Pry says that attacks on just 9of the nation's 55,000 electrical substations could result in nationwide blackouts for up to 18 months.

Our government is woefully unprepared.

It seems like the government has been fixated on taking more and more away from people who worked hard to earn it, while doing virtually nothing to secure our nation's infrastructure.

They've ignored dire warnings from experts about the grid's vulnerability to physical, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cyber-attack by North Korea, Russia, China and even ISIS and other terrorist groups.

"Our death toll would be staggering" reports FOXNews.We're all fine when the power goes out for a few hours and even days. But an extended blackout would be devastating.

Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy predicts, "... should the power go out and stay out for over a year, 9 out of 10 Americans would likely perish."

When North Korea strikes the U.S.

Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Your life would be frozen in time right at the moment the power fails. Lights all over the country would go out, throwing people into total darkness.

Without access to a generator, your fridge, electric range and microwave would be dead. All the food in your fridge and freezer would spoil.

Your well couldn't pump any fresh water into your house. And even if you don't have a well, a total grid failure means no fresh water to drink, cook, or clean with.

You wouldn't be able to operate your radio or TV, or charge your cell phone, so you'd feel isolated and cut off from your friends and family.

Sadly, this is NOT science fiction or some crazy doomsday theory...

And retired CENTCOM General Lloyd Austin says, "It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."


1a)Confront Iran the Reagan Way

In 1983 he abandoned ‘containment’ and adopted a plan to roll back Soviet expansionism. It worked.

By Mark Dubowitz

One message of President Trump’s is popular at home with his political base and embraced abroad by key Middle Eastern allies: The Islamic Republic of Iran is imperialist, repressive, and—unless we adopt a new strategy—on its way toward possessing nuclear weapons. To keep the threat at bay, Mr. Trump should take a page from the playbook Ronald Reagan used against the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, President Reagan shifted away from his predecessors’ containment strategy toward a new plan of rolling back Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and revolutionary yet internally fragile regime that had to be defeated.

Reagan’s policy was outlined in 1983 in National Security Decision Directive 75, a comprehensive strategy that called for the use of all instruments of American overt and covert power. The plan included a massive defense buildup, economic warfare, support for anti-Soviet proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive against the regime’s ideological legitimacy.

Mr. Trump should call for a new version of NSDD-75 and go on offense against the Iranian regime. The administration would be wise to address every aspect of the Iranian menace, not merely the nuclear program. President Obama’s myopic focus on disarmament paralyzed American policy.

Under Mr. Obama’s deeply flawed nuclear accord, Tehran does not need to cheat to reach threshold nuclear-weapons capabilities. Merely by waiting for key constraints to sunset, the regime can emerge over the next decade with an industrial-size enrichment program, a near-zero breakout time, an easier clandestine path to a nuclear warhead, long-range ballistic missiles, access to advanced conventional weaponry, greater regional dominance, and a more powerful economy, increasingly immunized against Western sanctions. You could call this scenario the lethal Iranian end-state.

A new national security directive must systemically dismantle Iranian power country by country in the Middle East. The Europeans, traumatized by foreign fighters returning from Syria and massive refugee flows, may support a tougher Iran policy if it means Washington finally gets serious about Syria. The early signs of the return of American power are promising: 59 Tomahawk missiles launched in response to the Assad regime’s most recent chemical attack, military strikes at Iran-backed militias in southern Syria, the downing of a Syrian fighter plane and Iranian-made drones, and 281 Syria-related sanctions in five months.

Washington should demolish the Iranian regime’s terrorist networks and influence operations, including their presence in Europe and the United States. That means working closely with allied Sunni governments against Iranian subversion of their societies. The American offensive has already begun: CIA Director Mike Pompeo is putting the agency on an aggressive footing against these global networks with the development of a more muscular covert action program.

All of Washington’s actions to push back against Tehran hinge on severely weakening the Iranian regime’s finances. Robust measures should target the regime’s praetorians, the Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, a dominant force in Iran’s economy. New sanctions legislation designating the IRGC for terrorism—which the Senate recently passed with 98 votes—and the more than 40 Iran-related sanctions imposed this year are a good start. But much more is still needed: The IRGC’s transfer to Hezbollah of industrial-size missile production capability based on Lebanon soil could trigger the next Israel-Hezbollah war. Massive economic sanctions on Iran to stop these transfers may be the only way to head off this war.

Last but not least, the American pressure campaign should seek to undermine Iran’s rulers by strengthening the pro-democracy forces that erupted in Iran in 2009, nearly toppling the regime. Target the regime’s soft underbelly: its massive corruption and human-rights abuses. Conventional wisdom assumes that Iran has a stable government with a public united behind President Hassan Rouhani’s vision of incremental reform. In reality, the gap between the ruled and their Islamist rulers is expanding.

The odds that a moderate government will emerge in Tehran before the nuclear deal’s restrictions expire are poor. Washington needs to block the Islamic Republic’s pathways to gaining nuclear-tipped missiles. While aggressively enforcing the nuclear agreement, the administration should present revised terms for a follow-on deal. These must address the current accord’s fundamental flaws, including the sunset provisions that give Tehran a clear pathway to nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, and the inadequate access to Iranian military sites that blocks effective verification.

The administration should present Iran the choice between a new agreement and an unrelenting American pressure campaign while signaling that it is unilaterally prepared to cancel the existing deal if Tehran doesn’t play ball.

Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy, the Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on the mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal nuclear Iran is less than a decade away.

Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++