Saturday Open Thread: Alamo Edition
by PubliusToday, in 1836, the Alamo fell after a 13 day siege.

ACORN and its affiliates are content to impose crippling big-government laws, regulations, and taxes on Americans, but when called upon to obey those same rules, ACORN’s network of scofflaws and deadbeats simply refuses to comply.
ACORN and its affiliates currently owe more than $2.3 million in long overdue back taxes to all levels of government.
It's deathly quiet at the former funeral home at 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans. (photo: Kevin Kane)
As of Nov. 11 the exact figure was $2,328,596.95.
ACORN owes money to the IRS, Arkansas, California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and to the cities of New York and Philadelphia.
Like everybody else, when I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood I immediately rushed to judgment, assuming that anybody opening fire on soldiers on an army base in Texas expected to die. Thus the shooter was either 1) a soldier who had cracked or 2) a priapic jihadist aroused by the thought of all those virgins in paradise. Reasoning that an armed Islamist would struggle to penetrate Fort Hood’s security, I concluded that the shooter was probably an unfortunate soldier gone berserk. A few hours later however I discovered secret option 3) that the “alleged” shooter Nidal Hasan was both a soldier and a jihadi nutbag- an entirely new hybrid, in other words.

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in. Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)
Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.
Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.
As the federal government continuously churns out ideas and policies that drive our nation deeper and deeper in debt, citizens and taxpayers are right to be worried. From federal “stimulus” bills that force state governments to change laws, raise taxes and increase spending, to cap and trade proposals that will run our energy industry into the ground, to emerging plans for an unprecedented and unsustainable expansion of government health care, it is clear that the swollen river of our federal government has overflowed its banks.
Washington is increasingly out of step with folks out here in flyover country who do not share the inside-the-Beltway belief that a benevolent, all-knowing government can expand and encroach without limit, because individual Americans simply cannot be trusted to make right choices.

This mindset has driven the explosive growth of the size, spending and intrusiveness of the federal government. Our founding fathers would be appalled at the way their successors are ignoring individual liberties, contemplating more tax increases and interfering further into private enterprise.
Washington bureaucrats must be reminded that America is not some windowless laboratory where they can tinker with theories with no regard to consequences. Real harm is resulting from policies that are disastrous for America’s future, bankrupting our country, and mortgaging our children’s future. Fear of this emerging future and frustration with an administration run amok are fueling the resurgent interest in the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. “We the people” are standing up and demanding an audience.