Month: May 2009

Hello, my fellow DHS-designated extremists.

Whether or not you agree with my politics, don’t worry: you’re probably in here somewhere.  It’s a report from last month called the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” and it’s quite comprehensive.  Did you know that anti-abortion protesters and animal rights activists are domestic extremists?  Yes, the same sloppy language as last time. So bad, in fact, that they tried to bury it…

Hot Air and The Daily Beast are both covering this one, and I agree with both that the categories are disturbingly broad, and cross-spectrum. The phrase “[members of group X] have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism to advance their extremist goals” appears far too often for comfort.  The reason that this is discomforting is that it strongly implies that DHS isn’t distinguishing between (for example) animal rights activists who don’t intend to break the law to further their agenda and animal rights activists who do.  Why, in fact, does DHS even care about animal rights activists who aren’t breaking the law? Or anti-abortion activists? Anti-technologists? Green anarchists?  Heck, they even know that there’s several different flavors of skinheads, and they lump them all together in one big ball anyway.  What gives?

Well, what gives is that we’re talking about DHS, which was created in haste: we are apparently starting to hit the ‘repent in leisure’ point.  The real problem is not any one particular memo, of course.  The problem is the mindset that created those memos, and I’ve yet to see any indication that people are working on fixing that mindset.  This should alarm you, no matter where you stand on which status quo to disrupt: apparently just wanting to change it at all is enough to worry Homeland Security in the Obama era…

Moe Lane

PS: Unlike Ed Morrissey I am not automatically upset at the rather gaping lack of any discussion of Islamist (or Muslim) extremists in the lexicon: I’ve read the introduction, and it suggests that there’s a separate report out there that specifically handles that issue.  This would be logical, given that the threat from Islamist extremists to this country is greater than that of every domestic extremist group combined… but the longer it is before that report gets leaked, the worse PR it’s going to be for this administration.
Crossposted to RedState.

‘The Trillion Dollar Fix.’

I hope you meant that as a drug reference, Megan.

R.S McCain summarizes Megan McArdle’s post about our current economic strategy in three words: “It won’t work.” Which is a fair assessment, both in what Megan’s analysis and in her conclusions. Personally, I would have preferred it if Stacy could have been able to summarize both with one word, though: “Oops.”  Not to be a broken record about this, but I didn’t need Megan to tell me that we enjoy, ah, suboptimal economic oversight. I already knew. Or that the current administration seems to default to style over substance. I already knew that, too. Or even that we are going to have to raise taxes on the lower and middle class to pay for all of this. A lot of us knew this already.

But apparently, we just weren’t trendy enough to satisfy a sufficiently large portion of the electorate.  To those of them reading this and smirking, at this point: real quick.  You know that tax cut that some of you college kids received?  Yeah, the $13 dollars a week thing that didn’t even register with most people.  Anyway, turns out that the IRS messed up:

— A single college student with a part-time job making $10,000 would get a $400 boost in pay. However, if that student is claimed as a dependent on a parent’s tax return, she doesn’t qualify for the credit and would have to repay it when she files next year.

Continue reading ‘The Trillion Dollar Fix.’