It didn’t take long for the mainstream media and liberal bloggers to get their crazy wheels spinning last week. In less than 24 hours after Joseph Stack flew his plane into an IRS building, they began working every possible angle that might link the disturbed software engineer to the conservative Tea Party movement. To hear liberals tell it, Stack had all the makings of a quintessential right wing Tea Party prototype. It took some inventive leaps of logic, but they managed to construct some lame comparisons.

If you go by Joeseph Stack’s lengthy and meandering suicide manifesto, he didn’t like Catholics, George Bush, big business, or capitalism. He didn’t even like the city where he was living. In fact, if his angry and bitter 3,000 word coup de plume is any indication, Stack didn’t like much of anything. Is this what the Left is using to make their case for a Tea Party connection? Sort of, but in a weak and unconvincing way. Stack was angry and frustrated, supposedly like the Tea Party followers. But the clincher is that he also hated the IRS. Ah ha! There’s your classic radical right wing wacko: An angry white guy who hates the IRS.

It’s liberal deductive reasoning that’s more Clouseau than Columbo. And leftwing pundits and bloggers have since been feverously at work trying to make their contrived conclusions stick, by connecting random dots into a confusing diagram of liberal aberration. Joseph Stack has become the Left’s latest right-wing booger bear: a paranoid construct of biases and misperceptions designed to satisfy their bigotry against conservatives. But that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

It seems these days that everyone is demanding an apology for something. You can’t open your mouth without offending someone somewhere. But if you mean what you say to begin with, there’s no reason to apologize, is there?. That works the other other way too. If someone insults you, why demand an apology when you know they meant it?

Although this video has a strictly historical perspective, I couldn’t help but see the parallels to today’s liberal elites–those overly-sensitive politically correct sob sisters on the Left. It’s a righteous video.

Replacing Ted Kennedy was supposed to be a slam dunk for Massachusetts Democrats. They should have been able to run a cocker spaniel and still walk away with a double digit victory. In a state that is arguably the bluest in the Union, Ted Kennedy had been a permanent fixture in the U.S. Senate since the Pleistocene age, in a state that’s as liberal as they come. Well, stuff happens.

Enter Scott Brown, a virtual nobody who had the upstart temerity to challenge a political establishment that until now, was as immovable as the northern star. How did this happen? That depends largely on whose explanation you’re buying into.

The White House is blaming Democrat candidate Martha Coakley for running a weak campaign, while the Coakley people are blaming the White House for their lukewarm support. And Democrats in general are all over the map blaming anyone they think will put some distance between themselves and what they claim was a flawed campaign.

There are plenty of valid reasons why Coakley lost, and the specifics will certainly be the subject of discussion among media pundits and politicians alike. But looking at the bigger picture will give political strategists a map of the political landscape for the coming elections in November 2010 and 2012.

Democrats did an incredibly inept job of assessing the strength of Scott Brown and his supporters. Along with their liberal media pundits, they did little more than mischaracterize, ridicule and vilify Brown, Republicans, conservatives, the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin—anything to minimize the opposition. Their over-the-top attacks showed such arrogance and gross negligence of sound political tactics that purposeful self-denial may be the only logical explanation.

As any true strategist knows, victory over an opponent is usually the result of a thorough understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of the opposition. How the Democrats respond to this defeat will show us whether or not they’re prepared to face political reality. GOP strategists better be paying attention.

All we know is something happened in the dark of night under the cloak of secrecy. What exactly it is, they won’t tell us. But Harry Reid has assured Americans that whatever it is, we’re going to like it. I think that’s what Mark Twain had in mind when he said, “If you don’t get what you like, you have to like what you get.”

So what are we talking about here? Incredible as it may seem, not even Harry Reid knows for sure. But he insists that whatever it is, it won’t cost much. With a sales pitch like that, it’s no wonder that so many people are concerned about what we might get stuck with in the end. And I do mean, in the end.

No one in their right mind would buy a car the way Congress is trying to sell their health care legislation. It would be like buying an automobile sight unseen, not knowing the model, the year, or the price tag. And if you don’t like those terms, tough luck; you have to buy one anyway. And by the way, even though you’re going to love driving it, there’s no warranty.

I don’t think I have adequate words to describe our current administration’s approach to health care. Phrases like “Feeble-minded,” “insanely warped,” “autocratic power grab”—all words that fall a bit short of the reality of this tyrannical lunacy. And the lunacy may have only just begun.

Now that the House and the Senate have each approved their own version of health care reform, Congress has to come to an agreement as to what bill they’re going to submit to the President to sign. Whichever version prevails, or even if it becomes a hybrid of the two, the final result will be a little like being given a mysterious venereal disease. Even if you don’t know what you have, you know you’ve been screwed.

Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano got it right when she said, “When it came right down to it, the system worked…Once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have happened.” She was unwittingly explaining how a terrorist from Nigeria who was already on one terrorist advisory list managed to board a plane in Amsterdam without a passport and successfully smuggle and ignite a chemical explosive aboard a plane in Detroit. Yes, the system works; it’s ineffective by design.

Fortunately the explosion was a dud. According to one report, the detonator hidden in the suspect’s underpants was too small, resulting in a fizzled explosion that merely scorched the man’s own little detonator.

In fairness to Napolitano, our airport security system is not her creation. It was established in 2001 by politically correct liberals and skittish conservatives who thought it would be unfair to profile those most likely to blow up airplanes. As a result, we’ve been fighting a terrorist group for nearly a decade, yet we still dare not speak their name: Muslim religious fanatics. Meanwhile, the random search method has remained virtually the same since 9/11 and remains a misguided policy that’s more public relations than public security.

Profiling potential terrorist suspects based on what we already know is going to get a better result than any system that uses random factors. That’s a mathematical fact. But isn’t it unfair? Yes–that’s why it’s effective. The more unfair, the better the results. In sports it’s called gaining an edge over your opponent. In Las Vegas it’s called playing the odds. In warfare it’s called military strategy. Random searches might be more foolish than trying to draw an inside straight. It’s certainly more deadly.

Being nice to radical Muslims may rate us points at U.N. cocktail parties, but it’s no way to confront the very real and very dangerous situation in which we find ourselves. We know our enemy, their ideology, and their intentions. The time is way overdue for a more realistic approach. Profiling won’t be the end all to the war against Islamo-fascism, but it’s the right place to start.

If you’ve got money, the government will find you no matter where you go. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed the idea of a global tax on stock trades and other financial transactions. It’s not enough that American taxpayers have to deal with the IRS. In order for this new plan to work, all major financial centers – Asia, the EU, U.S., and U.K. – would all have to pass a similar transaction tax to avoid disadvantaging one country’s stock exchange. In effect, a global tax bureaucracy. I doubt they surveyed any investors on this.

The idea came about from the financial transactions tax (HR4191) currently before Congress which Pelosi believes would need to have global jurisdiction in order to keep U.S. investors from taking their business overseas and out of taxable reach. This is the absurd game that our government plays: We figure out ways to circumvent the arbitrary dictates of an out of control bureaucracy, and they come up with new laws and regulations in an effort to foil our ingenuity.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to look for new ways to fleece taxpaying wage earners whose only crime is trying to make a buck. The real crime is being perpetrated by an administration obsessed with controlling its citizens means of income. And if Pelosi has her way, we’ll be seeing government interference on a worldwide scale. It’s a crime scene only a tyrant could love.

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Many critics of the global warming movement are under the impression that the recent “climategate” revelations mark the beginning of the end of the climate change agenda. On the contrary, I predict that environmentalists and their media allies are now going to dig in deeper than a cave full of Japanese soldiers on Okinawa.

These environmental fanatics will concede nothing, and will go to whatever extremes to preserve their sacred “science.” The global warming movement is not so much a scientific consortium as it is a fanatical belief system. It’s really not that much different than what you might find within a religious cult.

When Pat Buchanan confronted Eleanor Clift on last week’s McLaughlin Group with the fact that there was no evidence for man made global warming, Clift hysterically shot back: “There’s no evidence for God’s existence either.” Interesting analogy don’t you think?

Some questions remain: How far will the environmentalists go to preserve their holy crusade? How close will they get to the Kool-Aid table? How much will they be willing to sacrifice? Will they have their Kamikaze moment? Whatever their ultimate fate, I just hope that when the Hale-Bopp comet returns with the mother ship, that these weather wing nuts leave the rest of us off the boarding list.

Sarah Palin sets off liberals the way Klingons set off tribbles. And the result is just as amusing. There’s nothing like watching liberals squeal and chatter like hysterical monkeys when a strong female conservative saunters into the political jungle.

Why is Palin perceived as such a threat? I think the explanation is simple. Palin is a decent human being guided by strong personal values that don’t bend easily to compromise. As a person, she’s everything the Left is not. They resent and despise her the same way the well behaved, teacher’s pet, straight-A student  irritates the underachieving child—especially when mom asks, “Why can’t you be more like Sara? She’s such a nice girl.”

Sarah Palin irritates liberals everywhere she goes—and on such a fundamentally visceral level. What better evidence can there be to keep her in the game? She holds no political office, and is not a candidate for anything. Yet she has this peculiar ability to draw the bitter bile right out of our friends on the Left. That’s got to count for something.

One thing you can say about politicians: Their tax policies are simple and easy to understand. That’s because it’s always the same two step program.

1) Find out where the money is.
2) Figure out a way to take it.

It’s a tried and true method that I suppose goes back to Medieval days when the Sheriff of Nottingham was earning a living shaking down Sherwood Forest citizens. It seems little has changed since.

The most recent scheme of government sponsored thievery comes from California, and from all accounts it is, if nothing else, inventive. To help close yet another gaping budget deficit, Sacramento lawmakers have authorized a 10% increase in the amount of taxes withheld from worker paychecks starting November 1 and through 2010.

Now here comes the wacky part. Lawmakers say this isn’t a tax increase. It’s more like a compulsory interest-free loan from taxpayers to the state. The government is obliged to return this overpaid money next spring when workers get their tax refunds. It would be like Eddie the Leg Breaker coming to your door and demanding that you fund his loan shark racket. Which raises a question: How do we collect on our loans next year? I’m unclear on the procedure, but I hear that Lead Pipe Lombardi is looking for work.