[pavlik]

Tax Revolt ...

Joseph Stack Suicide Note - Manifesto from Texas Plane Crash Suspect?

The National Ledger
By Mary Browning
Feb 18, 2010

What is said to be a "suicide note" and a bit of a manifesto and rambling rant against much of the US government, including the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is online, said to be written by Joseph Stack, a man identified as the suspect in the small plane crash in Texas.

Was it intentional? Many news outlets are speculating as much. This much is known, authorities responded Thursday morning in Austin where the plane had crashed into the Echelon building. Heavy smoke could be seen coming from the building at 9420 Research Boulevard.

***

That particular building houses 190 IRS employees and the last note that is said to be from the pilot directs serious anger towards the government. Witnesses say the plane was flying low and fast and appeared to be in control and others said it was full throttle when it hit.

Is it a suicide note? The Smoking Gun website reports the diatribe as a manifesto, and has that six-page note here and adds it is dated "2/18/10" and is signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010).

One person is said to still be missing in the aftermath of the crash.

[bubbachew14]

From The Smoking Gun (Stack's "Manifesto" website reportedly has now been taken down by order of the FBI) ...

Plane Crash Suspect's Online Diatribe

Posting rages at IRS, claims, "I have had all I can stand"

FEBRUARY 18--The man suspected of intentionally crashing an airplane into a Texas office building today appears to have posted a lengthy online diatribe attacking the Internal Revenue Service and declaring that, "I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand." The manifesto, which you'll find below, is dated "2/18/10" and is signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)." Andrew Joseph Stack, 53, has been identified as the man who flew a small plane into an Austin building housing IRS offices. The statement was uploaded to the front page of a web site that was registered in 2003 by a Joe Stack, who listed an address in San Marcos, Texas, which is about 35 miles south of Austin. The online posting is titled "Well Mr. Big Brother IRS man... take my pound of flesh and sleep well." Cached versions of Stack's web site, which described his software development consulting business, noted that he founded the firm in southern California in 1983, and eventually relocated to the Austin area to "lend a hand to the growing high technology industry in South-Central Texas." Alex Melen, whose firm hosts Stack's site, told TSG that Stack last changed his web site this morning at 10:12 AM (Eastern). His Piper Cherokee crashed into the Austin building at around 11:30 AM (Eastern). Until Stack uploaded his suicide note, his site consisted of a handful of pages describing his business, Embedded Art, and its history. Melen said that Stack paid his annual hosting fee with a credit card, and last year changed his billing address from San Marcos to an address on North Mopack Expressway in Austin. Prior to speaking with TSG, Melen said he had been contacted by FBI agents in Austin and New Jersey, where his hosting business is located. At 2:40 PM today, Melen deleted Stack's web site at embeddedart.com. He replaced it with a statement noting that, "This web site has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI." (6 pages)

Stack's 6-page "Manifesto" starts ...

"Well Mr. Big Brother IRS man take my pound of flesh and sleep well" ...

[Faumpiggueria]

How soon before Mr. Stack becomes the official Tea Party martyr?

[sasquatch999]

Let them.

I will LOVE the opportunity to compare them to Al Queda.

[forextradinginfo]

NH: Did you see that Stack was a disgruntled Engineer?

[heilyprollecyspor]

I thought that all sounded too suspcious to be an accident.

Here are some pics of the burning building and the remains of the plane used in the attack.

[qQVXpYM6]

Those fearful Domestic Terrorists are where the immediate threat lies.

How will this effect the upcoming Texas elections?

Calling the secessionist Gov. Perry for comment ...

[Ternneowns]

This latest tragedy is an erie & very powerful one that's familiar with and similar to the one on 09-11 when one of the hijacked planes was flown into the Pentagon.

Only diffence is in this one, not as many people were killed.

In fact, in the areal photo, the structure almost has the shape of the Pentagon!

[Diandaplaipsy]

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

NY TIMES
By FRANK RICH
OP-ED COLUMNIST
February 28, 2010

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

In the days after Stack’s Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

[Gastonleruanich]

This story is such a tragedy, I wish the best to the families whom lost their loved ones and I am sure the suicider's family is also heartbroken. Now I feel only people who have employment should get taxed, not people who has no employment.

@Daquan13
Good point, and it also resemble the Pentagon because of it's proximity to the Highway but this is not because of nation-2-nation problems, it is person-2-IRS problem.

[mygalinasoo]

Taxation on things like Medicare, Welfare or Unemployment has never made any sense.

Hell, taxation on LOTTERY WINNINGS does not either (you pay post tax, a portion of that money goes towards another intitution like education, then you have to pay tax on it again if you win?), but that is just a drop in the bucket compared to other things.


Back on topic. This guy was a genuine nutcase. Running a small plane into the side of a building will do nothing but force more spending, now on IRS buildings, against "terrorist attacks". His misguided act will cost us all more money now, the opposite of what he intended or wanted.