Good to know

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Ever vigilant, the F.B.I. lets us know who to look out for:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

They're looking at you, Ron Paul supporters.



Teriffic. That from a federal government that will whack it's citizens overseas without due process, detain those same citizens indefinetely without cause and force religious groups to violate thier conscience.

And it's those audit-the-Fed types that are a threat to our safety and liberty?

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Then again, what would one expect from the curator of the “man-made disaster” paradigm?

Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, is taking quite a bit of grief for a quote she made regarding the Christmas bomber, that being “the system worked”. She later walked that back saying she was being taken out of context and that indeed the system did not work.

But here’s what she said that really puzzled us.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says there is no indication that the man who attempted to destroy an airliner in Detroit on Christmas Day is part of a larger terrorist plot.

Oh, really?

Every single jihadist on the face of this planet be they trained and funded by or affiliated with Hamas, AQ, Hezbollah, the Taliban… even if they are “lone wolves”… whoever, is part of “a larger terrorist plot.”

That larger terrorist plot is called Islamic extremism and every single one of its minions is unified in its hatred for the West and its institutions and belief systems and are fatally committed to its destruction including all who live within it who are not found to be in sufficient compliance to Sharia law.

That Napolitano apparently fails to grasp this concept is, unfortunately, not shocking nor shocking enough combined with the frightening ease by which Abdulmutallab boarded the plane does not give us the warm fuzzies regarding our commitment to stopping airborne terror plots.

Trimming around the edges (UPDATED)

(please scroll to bottom for update)

So, why doesn’t the liberal-Left have nearly the image problem that the conservative-Right does with its disreputable fringe elements? Because the liberal Left doesn’t have any.

While the mainstream Right fights a constant battle to marginalize and otherwise disassociate themselves from the more unsavory elements that are rightly or wrongly ascribed to the conservative movement be they the Birchers back in the 50s and early 60s to the current crop of Birthers , the Left effectively marginalizes their own unsavory elements by… accepting them into the fold.

It’s a brilliant strategy, really. How can one be outside of the mainstream of the left when one is a tenured professor, a respected inner-city pastor, a political action group favored by the speaker of the House or even a registered Democratic poll-watcher?

B-Daddy, who has been blogging up a storm lately, has some thoughts on extremism and the paranoid style of the opposition, here.

Quick side note: Our brief flirtation with greenism (hey, beach chicks dug it) was dealt a mortal blow when some such HMFIC of the Surfrider Foundation admitted without any sense of remorse that we could detect to exaggerating and fudging on claims of damage to the environment in order to be heard above the din.

Sometimes you got to do some digging and perform a little homework of your own to rise above the din of demagoguery and lies.

(UPDATE #1):

Predictable.

Recall how the tea party movement was smeared in an ad hominem fashion with the presence of a few Birthers at rallies and townhalls. And recall how every reputable conservative outlet, including this one, worked to disavow themselves of this tinfoil hat brigade.

Now that the liberal establishment had an anti-government conspiracy kook, themselves, working in the White House, what has been the response? Since hypocrisy appears to be the only sin among the liberal-Left, disavowal is out of the picture. So, it’s bop-bop, co-opt ‘til you drop, baby.

From the New Republic:

Jones was wrong, actually, in disavowing his support for 9/11 conspiracy theory. He signed the document, which can only mean that he supports the idea that 9/11 was planned, or that the Bushies knew something more than they have said, or at least that the charge is plausible enough to require investigation.

But support for that idea is hardly unknown among people of the left – and often gestural in its own way; look one of these types in the eye and ask “Do you really think George Bush and his cabinet engineered the murder of thousands and have kept the secret for eight years?” and watch the nervous pause and the look off into the distance. Speculations in this vein hardly meant that Jones was not sincerely committed to working within the government to do good.

Awesome. Let's toss the Truthers now into the mainstream of the liberal political movement.