Bundy vs. BLM

Nevada rancher has a land use dispute with the Bureau of Land Management. His cattle graze on either federal or state land, depending on who you ask, and the BLM apparently tried to take some of his private land about 20 years ago as protected habitat for the desert tortoise. Guy's family has ranched in the area for more than 100 years.
Pretty ho-hum stuff until recently.
After 20 years of not getting their grazing fees (totaling about $1.1 million), the Feds have decided to do something about it. They've started rounding up and confiscating his cattle.

Now this thing is threatening to blow up into something much, much bigger -- largely because of the hamhanded way the BLM is handling it. The Tea Partiers are using it as a states rights rallying cry, which is leading to people driving in to protest, which is leading to the usual issues with protestors. A couple of them got tazed the other day, and the BLM tried to set up "First Amendment Areas" for protestors. As you might expect, that went over about as well as a wet fart in church.

On the one hand, the guy might be a deadbeat. On the other, he might be a hero standing up to idiotic government policies. And, on a third, you have a government agency that is either just doing its job, is way over its head in dealing with this sort of thing, didn't expect it to escalate to this level, or completely oblivious to the politics in play and inadvertently creating another Ruby Ridge type situation.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/bundy-vs-blm-interest-cattle-dispute-widens

 

Or on the other hand it may be another pack of the fuckin shrieking anti-government nutjobs just itching to precipitate Ruby Ridge situations -- nothing 'inadvertent' about it.

 

The tazing is funny -- I wonder how many of those folks have heretofore found all instances of tazing to be quite appropriate and downright YouTubeLarious.

 

I love the line from this story from Dean Heller about "law-abiding citizens". Only problem is, Bundy has been breaking the law.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/militias-mobilizing-support-embattled-clark-county-rancher-clash-federal-rangers

The trash-talking by the "patriots" also reminds me of the trash talking during the Elian Gonzalez episode. They kept defying the law, then they whined because the law-enforcement agencies got tough with them.

 

The government isn't at fault for anything here. They let Bundy go for two decades without paying for anything. The government leases grazing land for pennies on the dollar, then ranchers expect the government to maintain it. It's federal property, not state not private. They are getting a great deal and are essentially welfare queens. Frankly, if I owed $300,000 in fines to the government over two decades, I doubt they would be just grabbing my trespassing cattle when they wandered about.

 

You wonder what kind of response the rancher would get if he asked his "allies" to help him with the bill.

 

So, you're saying, "F___ the Rancher," gets a bigger response than, "Help the Rancher?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBuC_0-d-9Y

 

No no no no no, you've got it all wrong, in shrieking rightwinger land (and also the land of their MSM dupes and enablers), THE GUVVMINT is always 100.0000% wrong in any dispute about anything.

 

Tea Party sites are calling this the moment that "ignites the Second American Revolution." More like the moment the tea party went past sheer self-parody to terminal boredom.

 

So, the BLM has already spent greater than a million dollars, to try and collect a million dollars from a guy who likely doesn't have a million dollars?

 

Second American Revolution.

Second Amendment Solution.

It's a Tea Party rap!

 

No, they spent more than million getting a few hundred head of cattle off Federal lands (including Lake Mead National Recreation Area) where they had no right to be.

And the BLM was more than patient with this guy. He doesn't pay his grazing fee for 21 years, he runs even more cattle than the 600 he originally could and he's not tagging or branding them ... but then he acts like a victim of the big bad government.