Links and Minifeatures 2009 04 17 Friday

I'm still playing catch up from four days doped up in bed. I'm working on an article about how changes in lender policy are effecting consumers and what the best practices under the changed circumstances will be. If I can finish it, it will be up Monday.

Disgraceful: Afghan women pelted with stones during rape law protest

Glenn Reynolds on the Tax Day Tea Parties

There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP. When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: "With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around."

I'd say that the time has probably passed for the Republicans to lead the tax revolt, and having missed the opportunity, will become targets themselves.

Bill Whittle

These men signed a document knowing that was their death sentence, should their ramshackle collection of farmers and brewers and smiths fail to prevail against the most powerful military force the world had ever seen. A death sentence. They did that, not because they craved money, or social position, or political power - as with all revolutions before or since. Most of them had that in abundance. This was a risk they took not to gain everything, but to lose it.

They did it because they believed that men should be free: free from the petty tyrannies of other people telling you what to do for your own good. They risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for you. If we cannot take two hours out of work to repay that debt, then we deserve everything that is coming to us.

Ed Morrissey

At some point, we have to start paying these bills, and when we do, it will hammer the middle class.

That's what drives the Tea Parties -- not taxes today, but all of the spending that will eventually require crushing taxes to resolve. The Obama administration plans a spending spree unlike anything outside of world wars in our history, and wants to sell a fantasy that only the rich have to pay for it. It's ridiculous on its face. The amounts are staggeringly high, and even 100% confiscation wouldn't begin to cover it.

Actually, the Obama administration campaigned upon the fantasy that "the rich" would be forced to pay for it all. People making $250,000 per year or more can't pay for all of it - there simply aren't enough such people. In fact, these people (less than 1% of the population) already pay more than 40% of all income taxes. But people who were intent upon having others pay for all of the goodies they wanted from the government didn't care that the math did not support Obama's campaign promises.

Furthermore, there are places on earth - quite pleasant places as long as you're wealthy - where the people the administration wants to tax to pay for the populist goodies can keep 90% plus of what they make. In most cases, there is no reason whatsoever that the profitable moneymaker cannot relocate to those places. What do you think is going to happen once these highly productive people make that move?

Here's a little historical context: The fascist state anti-Jewish policies caused Albert Einstein, Johann Van Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and a host of other brilliant central and eastern european Jews to emigrate. What development did these men all have a hand in? Answer: If the fascists had not frightened off these comparatively few brilliant men, men who didn't make the same mistakes the scientists left behind in central europe did make, Germany would have developed the Atom Bomb sometime around 1942. So when everything looks darkest, England still just holding on, Rommel and Montgomery fighting in North Africa and the Germans in control of most of european Russia, Allied cities start vanishing under mushroom clouds and major allied troop concentrations are obliterated by one bomb each. Prognosis for the allies and for the world?

The men and women the Obama Administration will economically persecute out of the country under the his campaign promises will make no less of a difference to the future of the world than the Jewish refugees of the 1930s.

When Fascism Comes To America

It's here. People so afraid of the arguments that others will make that they prevent those others from speaking.

Federal agency warns of radicals on right

Q and O gives the warning its due deconstruction.

Me, I think I'm seeing the beginning of the next Emmanuel Goldstein campaign.

The document itself is here

Having been in a profession where I occasionally was required to read and apply law enforcement directives, this thing stands out as shoddy work. Yes, there are right wing crazies out there - but this is so vague as to enable the targeting of whomever the authorities want to target.

The report uses debunked reports as its basis

As Michelle Malkin notes, in the past, these documents identified specifically named groups and had said specifically named groups not been exactly what was alleged, they had recourse in the press, in the courts, etcetera. But without naming specific groups, DHS keeps from being held responsible. They also do not name specific activities, but rather a host of things that sound a lot more like political dissent and disagreement.

There's no hackneyed left-wing stereotype of conservatives left behind in this DHS intelligence and analysis assessment. I asked both DHS spokespeople to tell me who, specifically, the report was accusing of "rightwing extremist chatter" and which "antigovernment" groups are being monitored as "extremists." They say they'll get back to me.

I have here in my hand a list of 205...

Here's the report of Left-Wing groups for comparison. Fewer specifically named groups than I recall from similar documents, but still a model of precision compared to the previous document, and they name specific terrorist strategies and things to beware of.

Hot Air:

In other words, it does not treat all animal-rights criticisms as indications of terrorist thought. It fails to paint all opponents of free trade as potential national-security threats. Global warming activism does not get treated in this instance as federalism does in the execrable DHS report on conservatives and libertarians. In other words, in this report, the DHS actually focuses on threats, not becoming the Thought Police.

This report differs from the latest in another key way. Instead of rambling on about how organizing for political change represents a threat to the US, this report focuses on the nature of potential attacks. Their choices are interesting in and of themselves. Instead of remarking on potentially violent threats from these groups, which have used violence in anti-globalization protests around the world, torching car dealerships for environmental causes, and destroying laboratories to free research animals, DHS mainly focuses on the threat of cyber attack from these groups. In fact, that's practically all it discusses, along with a specific list of targets that require protection, including the now-defunct Wachovia Bank.

DHS sees no potential for violence in groups with proven track records of violent terrorism? Cyber attack is really the greatest threat we can see from Recreate 68, ELF, and ALF? Really?

Even some die-hard liberals are demanding an explanation.

Watch this:

Staged Military Photo Ops: Then and Now

Snakes on a plane. For real. Baby pythons escape during flight in Australia

Glad they weren't something poisonous. But it's like a bad movie attacking in real life.