Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto.

Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger, along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants).  All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices...

UPDATE: I want to add one point:  the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of the violence wasn't Muslim.  But if Stack's manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it's likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote...

In general, the "threat level" hasn't proven itself very useful, except for political purposes. But if it is useful, it is only in the context of known enemies and organizations whose activities are being monitored and tracked.

There is and always has been plenty of domestic terror activity in this country -- from lynchings to bombings to highway snipers and shooting spree mass killings in schools and other public places. They may be sponsored by organized groups or reflect individual resentments, but they are no less acts of terror, or less intended to be acts of terror, simply because the government hasn't color coded them. They are unpredictable but often not unfamiliar in terms of ideological origins, themes, patterns of resentment, etc.

We do know that Stark spent time with an organized group that promoted the belief that the tax system was unjust and that citizens like himself should not, and were not legally required to, pay taxes. His situation wasn't simply that he was a victim of the IRS -- he had ideological objections to taxation. There are lots of others who share that belief, resentment and sense of victimhood -- and his manifesto makes it clear he hoped they would follow his lead.

If a terrorist is anybody who kills with some kind of political motive in their warped mind then yeah, this guy would qualify.  In the past we seemed to use the term with more discretion...we were more apt to label this type of guy a simple homicidal maniac pre 9/11.  Terrorists were the IRA, the KKK, or Black September...now its every lunatic with a political angle.  Am I wrong?

Gotta say though, as someone who considers the tax code a scheme of sorts in and of itself, whats wrong with one good scheme deserving another?