Free Republic

"Whenever some whack job commits a violent act, the Obamunist media tries to spin the story that the perp is somehow a “right wing extremist” and then attempts to tie him to the Tea party movement. It happens every time. They did this with Joseph Stack, who flew his airplane into the IRS building in Austin, even though in his suicide note, Stack dissed capitalism and quoted the father of communism Karl Marx."

The House adopted a resolution labeling the Feb. 18 suicide plane attack in Austin, Texas, terrorism. The resolution condemns the attack on a building that housed offices of the Internal Revenue Service, and it honors the IRS employee killed and other workers injured, as well as rescue workers. The wording of the resolution is notable in light of the debate about why the Obama administration didn’t call the event a terrorist attack, in part because of the lack of connection to international terror groups such as al Qaeda. The resolution passed H. Res. 1127 on a 408–2 vote, with “no”...

When most Americans think of terrorism, certain images come to mind: airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. Muslim men with long beards in Afghanistan. Dark-skinned people trying to set off bombs on airplanes. But is Islamic-based terrorism a primary threat? Maybe the face of terrorism is more diverse than that. Perhaps it is also a middle-aged white man. Perhaps it looks like Joe Stack. On February 18, Stack, an Austin, Texas man with tax problems, flew his personal airplane into the Internal Revenue Office Building in Austin. He killed one IRS employee and himself. His manifesto explained that the...

(CNN) -- The widow of an Internal Revenue Service employee killed when a disgruntled taxpayer flew his plane into a seven-story building in Austin, Texas, last week is suing the pilot's wife, according to court documents. Valerie Hunter, the wife of Vernon Hunter, is accusing Sheryl Stack, wife of Andrew Joseph "Joe" Stack III, of negligence, alleging she she knew or should have known that her husband was a threat to others and, thus, could have prevented the attack, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Travis County District Court.

CALLER: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. RUSH: That doesn't describe capitalism to me at all. Gullibility and greed? Here it is. Here it is. Here it is. I found it. Somebody, one of our FReeper friends has got a great post with this guy's quotes, the anti-IRS screed from the Austin wacko Joseph Andrew Stack, and under a picture of Lenin is this: "The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- The daughter of a man who crashed his small plane into an Internal Revenue Service building called her father a hero for his anti-government views but said his actions, which killed a tax service employee, were "inappropriate." Joe Stack's adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America" from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: "Yes. Because now maybe people will listen." Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin last week, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself,...

In the hours since a man enraged at the government slammed his small plane into an Austin, Tex., IRS building, white supremacists and their fellow travelers have elevated Joseph Andrew Stack into an icon of resistance to tyranny. “The Guy is a true HERO!!!” wrote “northroad” on Stormfront.org, the largest white supremacist Web forum in the world. “God bless him,” chimed in “Rudyard,” following a comment by “suepeace”: “This was quite heroic. There is a gradual awakening underway. I wonder how racially conscious he was.” Shortly after Stack slammed his Piper PA-28 into the IRS building Thursday morning, killing himself...

Joseph Stack's flight into the side of an Austin office building Thursday was a crime of vengeance by a man clearly angry at the Internal Revenue Service. But should it be called terrorism? Judging from the rambling manifesto he left online, academics and terrorism experts said Friday that they doubt that Stack's attack was more than a "cathartic outburst of violence." The plane crash echoed other attacks over the years by lone criminals with a violent anti-government bent, which one expert called a distinctly American phenomenon. To be an act of terrorism, "there has to be some political motive and...

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- We've all heard of road rage, but plane rage? If you've ever tried to figure out an IRS notice or clear up a problem with your tax bill, you may understand Joseph Stack's sense of helpless frustration. However, if you read his final letter, you will not understand what his tax problem really was or how IRS was at fault. A close reading of his sad rant seems to show that his most recent problem was caused by his accountant, who omitted $12,700 of Stack's wife's income, causing an audit. Perhaps that office building housed both...

Did some searching after reading this article on the NYPost that mentioned Joseph Stack was in an alternative country band: "Ric Furley, who played with Stack in an alt-country band. "He had the airplane. He had a lot of nice musical equipment," said Pam Parker, who managed Stack's band, which was fronted by her husband, Billy Eli. While Stacks internet pages have been removed, his bandmate Ric Furley's myspace page is still up at this time. From his pic links we see these images of Joseph Stack:

WASHINGTON—The federal agency charged with ensuring the safety of IRS employees said it has seen an uptick in the past several years in threats against agency personnel. In the past four years, there appears to have been a "steady, upward trend" in the number of threats against IRS employees, said an official with the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration. That assessment, offered in response to an inquiry from Dow Jones Newswires, is based on preliminary data, the official cautioned. On Thursday, 53-year old Andrew Joseph Stack crashed his private plane into an Austin, Texas, office building that housed...

Jon Stacks was a very angry, emotionally disturbed man. His problem with the IRS was just a personal as political. I’m not going to say that Joe Stack was a Tea Party member. Although his rant definitely included some rhetoric that could be right out of a Tea Party manual, he also had some crazy ideas that weren’t necessarily part of the Tea Party manifesto. Even Glenn Beck, the court jester of the Tea Party was quick to point out that while Stacks left some rhetoric in his manifesto that could be considered “communist,” When you read his anti-tax ravings...

The crazed pilot who launched a kamikaze air attack on a Texas IRS office hid his anger so deeply, friends say they had no idea of his anti-establishment rage or the money woes he said were behind it. Joseph Stack, 53, had a nice home in middle-class Austin, Texas. He owned a single-engine airplane and had enough money to pursue a passion for country music that led him to produce his own album several years ago, pals told The Post. "We didn't think he was struggling financially, the way he presented himself. He never aired any grievance. He was real...

Authorities have positively identified an Internal Revenue Service employee killed when a plane flew into his office building Thursday, family members said today. Larry McDonald said officials from the Travis County Medical Examiners office called the family of Vernon Hunter, 68, just before noon. Hunter (pictured right) worked for the IRS for more than 20 years and is believe to have been on the fist floor of the Echelon I building in Northwest Austin when a man flew his single engine plane into the building. FBI officials said they suspect the man was Andrew Joseph Stack III (pictured below right)....

I just got through reading the online suicide note of Joseph Stack, the software engineer who flew his single-engine Piper Cherokee into an Austin, TX, office building. Apparently he not only killed himself but took another person's life as well and injured a dozen more. And he missed the IRS office he was aiming at in the first. This was not only suicide but also murder and assault. But before setting foot in the cockpit, he sets fire to his house - apparently with his family yet inside! Was he trying to kill them also?

There are some fundamental differences in the motivation between the act of domestic terrorism committed by Joseph Stack on Feb. 18 as he flew his single-engine plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, and the act of religious terrorism and war committed by Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001 – but there are also underlying similarities: Both had a pathological hatred of an enemy power that drove them to use their body and an airplane as lethal weapons against that power; Both were willing to take many innocent lives in their cause; Both were driven to demonic insanity that...

After 9/11, cockpit doors were sealed, air marshals were added and airport searches became more aggressive, all to make sure an airliner could never again be used as a weapon. Yet little has been done to guard against attacks with smaller planes. That point was driven home with chilling force on Thursday when a Texas man with a grudge against the IRS crashed his single-engine plane into an office building in a fiery suicide attack. One person inside the building was also killed. "It's a big gap," said R. William Johnstone, an aviation security consultant and former staff member of...

Hours after a pilot’s suicide plane crash into a federal building in Austin, Texas, local talk-radio host Jon Alvarez created a tribute Internet page for the dead pilot. In less than a day, Facebook, the social networking Web site where Alvarez created the page, took it down and issued him a warning: He could lose Facebook privileges if he violated its policy again. “The Joe ‘Take my pound of flesh’ Stack fan page” included the killer’s manifesto, which is an angry rant against big government, big business and the Catholic Church. It quickly drew about 40 fans, Alvarez said. He...

Liberal TV show host? Eager to guarantee that the post-Stack finger will be pointed at conservatives? Choose as your sole guest on the subject someone from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. That's precisely what Chris Matthews did this evening, with utterly predictable results. Right on script, SPLC director Mark Potok twice associated Austin plane-bomber Andrew Stack with "the radical right." How fraudently did Matthews stack the deck? He described the SPLC as a group "which monitors extremists"—as if the SPLC looks for wackos on the left as well as the right. View video here.

Is the Tea Party-connected group, the Oath Keepers, an "extremist right" group as the partisan bomb-throwers on the left have been fond of alleging? That's the proverbial question of the day as Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, made an appearance on the self-proclaimed "humble correspondent's," Bill O'Reilly's, No-Spin Zone. His appearance was the direct result of O'Reilly opening up this question of so-called "radicalism" among Tea Party supporters by hosting committed left-winger, Mark Potok (handsome devil, if you call overly gelled, curly hair and overly big eyeglasses "handsome"), of the Southern Poverty Law Center on his show a day before....