K4V.net BLOG

When men like Joe Stack and John Bedell launch their kamikaze attacks, you won’t learn much by trying to discern if the would-be killers are “right-wing” or “left-wing,” writes Managing Editor Jesse Walker. They have less in common with the organized right or left than they do with George Metesky’s one-man bombing campaign against Con Edison, Samuel Byck’s feckless attempt to assassinate Richard Nixon, or the Luddite crusade of the Unabomber.

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New at Reason: Jesse Walker on Lone Wolves

Last night Hollywood held its most rigidly predictable exercise in conventional wisdom : the Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, established to honor the worst films of the year

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Raspberry Cliché

• Another earthquake hits, this time in Taiwan. • Scandals keep causing trouble for Rep. Charlie Rangel and Gov

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Reason Morning Links: Scandals, Weapons, and Countereconomic Food

The Southern Poverty Law Center , which would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise funds, has issued a new ” inteligence report ” announcing that “an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.” To illustrate how dangerous these groups are, the Center cites some recent arrests of right-wing figures for planning or carrying out violent attacks.

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Fearmongering at the SPLC

Jerry Brown officially entered California’s gubernatorial race today. Last year, after it became clear that Brown wanted to take back the job he had held from 1975 to 1983, I wrote an article about his career and the mixture of idealism and opportunism that has always fueled it

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Hey, Ho! Go With the Flow!

Kim Scarborough passes along this survey from an old Batman comic book: Source: Detective Comics #403, September 1970.

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Historical Document of the Day

• The House votes to extend the expiring elements of the PATRIOT Act without adding any privacy protections. • Joe Biden proposes new regulations on retirement savings

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Reason Morning Links: Killer Cops, Incompetent Teachers, Joe Biden, and Other Public Servants

A bunch of right-wing heavyweights (and middleweights, and lightweights) have put together the Mount Vernon Statement , purportedly a manifesto for “constitutional conservatism.” Glenn Reynolds writes that it’s “heavy on small-government stuff, and light on social-issue meddling,” and he suggests that “this supports the notion of a libertarian shift on the right.” I suppose it’s significant that the authors felt their agenda would be more appealing if it were framed with somewhat libertarian language, and if that’s all that Reynolds means then I don’t disagree. But the rhetoric here is so all-inclusive and platitudinous as to be practically meaningless.

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Mount Vernon Mush

Howard Barrell, who I interviewed last week about the end of apartheid, has passed along an amendment to one of his remarks: Kurt Schock has pointed out to me — and I accept — that I misrepresented the argument he puts forward in his book Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies ….I implied in the interview that Schock had suggested a deterministic argument regarding the decline of violent revolutionary movements and the ascendance of nonviolent “people power” movements.

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More on Unarmed Insurrections