Most interesting posts of the week: #1

...as a precursor to tomorrow's Sunday Blogroll piece, I thought I'd point our 6 loyal readers to the two posts made this week that I found the most interesting. Not surprisingly, one's from Digby and one's from Billmon.

The first comes from Digby on Wednesday: "Terro-Hippies."

I think we may have underestimated Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney. All this scary dirty hippie talk isn't just rhetorical:

Last February the Department of Homeland Security oversaw a large-scale international cyber terror simulation involving 115 public and private organizations in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, all testing their ability to coordinate with one another and respond to computer-driven attacks. It was called Cyber Storm.

Nobody's said much about the results, or the details of the exercise scenario. But a newly-published DHS PowerPoint presentation on the exercise reveals that the real terrorist threat in cyber space isn't from obvious suspects like al Qaida types or Connecticut voters; it's from anti-globalization radicals and peace activists.

Wow. It's always an interesting day when neocons actually manage to surprise me, but this really did. But that wasn't the only surprise of the post.

According to the FBI, these hippie peace extremists are the most serious domestic terrorist threat we face. As opposed to, for instance, this guy.

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

This guy was arrested in November '03, by the way. I'd never heard of him. Gee. I wonder why that could be. Wouldn't want the world to be reminded that right-wingers can occasionally be murderous crazies. No, they're all good Christians. Every single one of them. As Digby says at the end...

There's no reason to make a big deal out of some white supremecist with a WMD in his living room when you have these SUV vandals on the loose. It's a much better use of government resources to run sophisticated war games and concentrate large numbers of resources on vegans.

Next up: Billmon and the housing market.