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| Clive Bundy (with Constitution in his pocket) |
The first reports I heard informed me that the feds were trying to run a man off his land, and private militia showed up to push back the Feds.
And the Feds fled..
Another win for federalism.
Was this outcome justified, though?
What is going on?
In 1993, the Bureau of Land Management targeted the region in Nevada, where Bundy and his ancestors had been grazing their cattle for generations. The federal government also charges that Bundy owes $1 million in grazing fees.
Because of his prior claims to the land, Bundy stopped paying grazing fees for his cattle.
Following court orders and other legal sanctions, the Bureau of Land Management sent in troops to round up the cattle.
Citing federal overreach into a state matter, private militia from other states showed up.
Another standoff between the states and the federal government.
The states won.
That's the way it seems to be.
From Fox News:
BLM faced criticism when police used stun guns on one of Bundy's adult sons during a Wednesday confrontation on a state highway near the Bundy melon farm in the Gold Butte area.
Whoa!
From one of the militia:
"Our mission here is to protect the protestors and the American citizens from the violence that the federal government is dishing out,” Jim Landy, a member of the West Mountain Rangers, who made the journey from Montana to Nevada, told Fox News Channel. “People here are scared."
The Huffington Post (from the Associated Press) reported earlier that Senator Dean Heller objected to the BLM's approach to handling the matter:
Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada said he told new U.S. Bureau of Land Management chief Neil Kornze in Washington, D.C., that law-abiding Nevadans shouldn't be penalized by an "overreaching" agency.
Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval pointed earlier to what he called "an atmosphere of intimidation," resulting from the roundup and said he believed constitutional rights were being trampled.
The Post then outlined the conflict thus:
The current showdown pits rancher Cliven Bundy's claims of ancestral rights to graze his cows on open range against federal claims that the cattle are trespassing on arid and fragile habitat of the endangered desert tortoise. Bundy has said he owns about 500 branded cattle on the range and claims the other 400 targeted for roundup are his, too.
The federal government wanted to step in and take the cattle away from a rancher grazing his cattle. Democratic lawmaker Steven Horsford of Las Vegas claimed that the Federal Government was enforcing a decades-long court order.
Sandoval sounded off on the treatment of First Amendment protestors:
"No cow justifies the atmosphere of intimidation which currently exists nor the limitation of constitutional rights that are sacred to all Nevadans," the governor said in a statement.
Sandoval said he was most offended that armed federal officials have tried to corral people protesting the roundup into a fenced-in "First Amendment area" south of the resort city of Mesquite.
Granted, a legal disputed brought on this conflict, but over a desert tortoise?
I was most impressed by the incoming militia, which showed the might and right connected with the Second Amendment, thus demonstrating the reason why the Framers put the Second Amendment in the Constitution: to protect the citizenry from the government.
In effect, Bundy and private supporters shouted at the Feds: #GetOffMyLawn and the Feds complied. Other reports indicate that they gave back the confiscated livestock, too.
The plot thickens, however, when connecting this stand-off with US Senator Harry Reid:
“Well, it’s not over,” he told Reno’s KRNV. “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and just walk away from it, so it’s not over.”
Other sources allege that the federal government was trying to force Bundy of the land in order to prepare the way for solar panels. The green lobby strikes again?
Whatever the case may be, the presence of federal forces rounding up cattle as well as tasering Bundy's son, should alarm us, no matter what the circumstances.
President Obama refuses to defend the borders, or to uphold limits with foreign leaders, yet he has no problem with federal bureaucracies dispatching law enforcement to Western farmers' grazing lands?
Time for the American People to tell President Obama and the federal government #GetOffMyLawn
He's a fucking criminal. Republicans claim they love the rule of law; this guy doesn't believe in the fucking EXISTENCE of the United States. Throw his fucking ass IN JAIL.
ReplyDelete“Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.”
ReplyDelete― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Except it's not working for Lee or for the other Lib-trolls. Keep hating. It's not working. What a Catch-22 for all of them!
An inconvenient truth for Artie and his nutty buddies:
ReplyDeleteBundy's claim that the land belongs to Nevada or Clark County didn't hold up in court, nor did his claim of inheriting an ancestral right to use the land that pre-empts the BLM's role. "We definitely don't recognize [the BLM director's]jurisdiction or authority, his arresting power or policing power in any way," Bundy told his supporters, according to The Guardian.
His personal grievance with federal authority doesn't stop with the BLM, though. "I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada," Bundy said in a radio interview last Thursday. "I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing." Ironically, this position directly contradicts Article 1, Section 2 of the Nevada Constitution:
All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for the protection, security and benefit of the people; and they have the right to alter or reform the same whenever the public good may require it. But the Paramount Allegiance of every citizen is due to the Federal Government in the exercise of all its Constitutional powers as the same have been or may be defined by the Supreme Court of the United States; and no power exists in the people of this or any other State of the Federal Union to dissolve their connection therewith or perform any act tending to impair, subvert, or resist the Supreme Authority of the government of the United States. The Constitution of the United States confers full power on the Federal Government to maintain and Perpetuate its existence, and whensoever any portion of the States, or people thereof attempt to secede from the Federal Union, or forcibly resist the Execution of its laws, the Federal Government may, by warrant of the Constitution, employ armed force in compelling obedience to its Authority.
Artie's Outrage du Jour (maybe a new name for your blog, huh?) isn't firing up all the nuts out there on Bullshit Mountain:
ReplyDeleteSo far, all signs suggest that national Republicans and tea party officials aren’t about to jump on the Bundy bandwagon. After all, if they want to rally voters against big government, they already have Obamacare for that.
But they also have to talk about a guy who didn’t pay his grazing fees for more than 20 years, in a state where the federal government owns 86 percent of the land, and where other ranchers just go ahead and pay the fees.
At that point, it’s not such a powerful rallying cry anymore.
“It’s like, really, Glenn Beck? This is the issue you want to get behind?” said one Nevada conservative activist who has followed the story for years. “People who aren’t in tune with the story just jumped all over it. And then you go back and read the facts of the story, and then you go, ‘Uh oh.’”
A quick recap: the Bureau of Land Management released about 400 cows it had rounded up from Bundy this weekend after hundreds of protesters, some reportedly armed with handguns and rifles, took Bundy’s side and demanded that the agency return the cattle to him.
The agency declined to comment Tuesday, but it released a timeline of its 20 years of efforts to get Bundy to pay his grazing fees — dating back to 1993 — including court orders. Bundy insists that he doesn’t recognize federal authority over the land and that his family has run a ranch there since the 1870s.
Top Republican operatives said they haven’t really followed the Bundy story that much. Officials at the top Republican campaign organizations, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Top lawmakers were silent.
And a spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots said there was no one available to talk about the rancher issue on Tuesday. They had other battles on their hands — including suing the IRS for documents on the scrutiny of nonprofit groups — but when the group is outraged enough to get involved in a big-government fight, you usually know it.
It’s almost as if they haven’t been watching Hannity.
The Fox News host rallied his viewers to get mad about an overreaching federal government flexing its muscles. “I mean, we have rapist and murderers and bank robbers and pedophiles out there, and they’ve 200 agents, you know, surrounding your ranch because your cows are eating grass on land that they don’t even want or need and that you’re arguing isn’t even theirs,” Hannity told Bundy during the interview. “So they realized, I think, at some point, politically, that this was going to backfire on them.”
Democrats don't seem worried about whether the issue will galvanize conservative voters — at least outside Nevada. “The right’s biggest problem is its own echo chamber, which convinces them to focus on stuff like this instead of issues that matter to most middle-class Americans,” said one Democratic aide.
And while the conservative activist said some Nevada Republicans will run on “the Bundy ranch” in the upcoming state elections, it’s not a good issue for outsiders who haven’t been following the story from day one.
“This is one of those things that got way out of hand,” the activist said. “It just feels like something that should have been handled a long time ago.”
What a fucking coward:
ReplyDeleteAn uprising of militia members who were planning an “armed response” to federal enforcement of trespassing law ended peacefully Saturday after the Bureau of Land Management stopped rounding up cattle that a federal judge found have been illegally grazed on federal land for years.
But some allies of rancher Cliven Bundy were prepared to make as much of a media spectacle as possible if violence were to erupt, saying they would put women on the front lines in the event federal officials turned to deadly force. Former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack told Fox News Monday:
"We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front. If they are going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers."
Bundy is a taker....take, take, take off Federal land. Take him to jail.
ReplyDeleteIf the man owes money, fine. But federal forces descending on the property, tasing his son, and trying to round up the cattle? No! Allegations of green lobby pay-for-play very disturbing, too. #ImTiredOfThis #CultureOfCorruption Thank You Bundy for shouting #GetOffMyLawn
ReplyDeleteIt's not his lawn, you stupid fucker.
ReplyDeleteHey Cliven: get you ass off MY lawn.
ReplyDeleteSigned,
The U.S. people