A Haz-mat (Hazardous Materials) team was called into an Internal Revenue Service office this morning in Utah.

The FBI is investigation the call in — it will be interesting to find out the results.

H/t Standard.net via @BreakingNews

Congressman James Clyburn admonishes Steve King (IA-5) for saying the Austin Plane terrorism was a noble act. I’ve detailed my thoughts on the Austin event here.

Interestingly enough Vernon Hunter, the man killed in the terrorist act, was a two-tour Vietnam Veteran.

Update I To finish the thoughts on Vernon Hunter, generally politicians from both sides are quick to praise military service members sacrifice. In this instance, the plight of Vernon Hunter and his family, a federal worker doing his job has been largely ignored by both the media and both Republicans and until recently Democrats. I seriously doubt Vernon Hunter’s family will receive millions of dollars like the victims of other terrorist attacks have received.

Talkingpointsmemo.com has an interesting catch from this weekend’s CPAC convention:

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could “empathize” with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to “implode” other IRS offices, according to a witness. source: TalkingPointsMemo.com

As I said later last week I believe it is incredibly dangerous to hold different standards of terrorism based on relatively minor attributes of the perpetrator of the violence.   If Republicans want to reduce the tax burden on citizens, do the obvious reduce the size of government — all government including military spending, as Ron Paul advocates.

[...]

An interesting phenomena (or perhaps more accurately a “meme”) has happened in the American Media complex (I say that because there seem to be many implicit rules about how events are covered, and what subject matter is deemed worthy of discussion) — essentially any Muslim act of violence against the government has become a terrorist event.

However, as we notice with the Austin plane suicide event, the media has allowed the Austin authorities to downplay the terrorist intent of the perpetrator. That’s interesting given the perp essentially wrote a manifesto against the United States government and committed a suicidal act of violence against what he thought were government workers in a federal building.

[...]