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Somebody better wake up the FBI. It looks like these people mean business:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

(Sighs) I've been wondering how long it would be before some of the younger hotheads in the church started issuing non-threatening communiques. As I've said before, extremist movements tend to become progressively more radicalized over time. And the Unitarians obviously are no exception.

For the record, I should note that church members generally refer to themselves as Unitarian Universalists, although some of the more wacked-out splinter sects prefer the term Universalist Unitarian. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Clearly Unitarian Jihad has undergone some kind of savage internal purge. (By majority vote, no doubt, with minority views fully noted for the record.) That would also explain the wild rhetoric about "calm" and "moderation," and the ominous hints of future symbolic protest actions. What we have here is a ticking time bomb of thoughtful dissent, which could explode at any time.

I know, because I myself am a "rainbow diaper" baby, raised in a family of softcore Unitarian Universalists. I can see now that my parents were actually agents of a foreign power (reality) who should have been executed as traitors and spies. But for many years I was also a semi-hardened moderate activist, dedicated to the cause of world evolution.

Eventually, though, second thoughts (plus a generous grant from the Sarah Scaife Foundation) led me to see the church for what it really is: a non-dogmatic, non-authoritarian institution sincerely, if politely, opposed to those traditional moral values -- hatred, intolerance, cruelty -- that have helped make Bush Country what it is today.

The closer I looked, the more I realized what a threat "UUism" posed to our red-state way of life. It hardly took a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing inside the church: Potluck suppers, youth camp singalongs, respect-in-the-sanctuary training -- the whole liberal totalitarian tool set. So I got my family out, while there was still time.

Now I see how right I was. It seems some religions (Unitarian Universalism, Christian Science, the Teletubbies) just have a fatal attraction towards rationality. It's a disease -- a symptom of a backward culture in deep crisis, unable to cope with the xenophobic bigotry and fundamentalist superstitions of modern society.

Some people say we should destroy these intellectual terrorists -- invade their churches, kill their discussion leaders and convert them all at gunpoint to our mainstream conservative values. But that would be futile. Force is useless against the rational mind. The only thing these terrorists understand is cold, hard reason.

That's why the only solution, I'm afraid, is to hunt them down, one by one, and persuade them -- with massive, overwhelming logical firepower -- that resistance is futile, and that the archaic Enlightment values they hold dear are now as obsolete as democracy itself.

It won't be easy: Unitarian Jihad is cunning, and can count on the support of Bush Country's other mortal enemies: the Democrats (except Joe Lieberman, of course), the French, the liberal arts majors. But with time, and a relentless religious witch hunt, I'm sure this war can be won.

So just remember, Unitarian Jihad: You can run, but you can't hide. We're going to smoke you out of your holes, dig you out of your caves, pull you out of your overstuffed armchairs at Starbucks. Then we'll see how skeptical you really are -- when you have to face the brilliant arguments of our Grand Inquisitor:

You probably already knew that…assuming you know who Rick Steves is, of course. Well, have you checked out Rick Steves site lately? Probably not. But you might be surprised how much stuff he has here. He has links that describe his famous tours, to his radio and TV stuff and to much of his writing. Steves writes a column for USA Today and often pontificates on matters both cultural and political in Europe. He’s also a good guy. I actually got to interview him a while back for a story I did for MSNBC and he was really friendly and thoughtful.

Whether you like him or not, you have to admit he’s done a brilliant job building himself as a brand…a brand related to all things travel.

Cunning Realist rails against the "intellectual dishonesty" of Wall Street pundits on TV: "For them, stocks are always 'poised for an imminent rally,' every weakness is a buying opportunity, and every January they confidently assert that the market will rally between 10% and 15% over the next year. One financial website I read calls them 'teletubbies.' They are human stopped clocks. They are often wrong, but never in doubt.

"And increasingly, they equate their bullishness with patriotism."