Free Republic

Cliven Bundy's standoff with the BLM is over a paltry monthly grazing fee. But it's also over more - the idea of the public interest.Perhaps the most remarkable feature of American democracy is the magnificent estate of public land that it reserved from the very beginning for the use of all citizens, rich or poor. There is nothing like it in the democracies of Europe, which came into being with nations already carved up into private fiefdoms. The Great Idea that hundreds of millions of acres of forests, deserts, rivers and prairies should be owned by, and managed for, the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy “domestic terrorists” Thursday, turning up the rhetorical heat on the already tense situation at the Nevada cattle operation. “Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” Mr. Reid in remarks at a luncheon, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which sponsored the event. “… I repeat: What went on up there was domestic terrorism.” The Nevada Democrat was referring to the hundreds of Bundy backers — some armed, some from out of state — who congregated at the ranch last...

This story comes to us courtesy of The Right Scoop. (Which makes sense since I don’t watch any of the cable news evening lineup and haven’t seen Chris Hayes on the small screen in ages.) While people gathered at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in protest of the BLM’s handling of affairs there, the protesters were joined by Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore. This prompted MSNBC host Hayes to interview her, and the Scoop captures the video for us. Let’s just say that Fiore wasn’t about to have the conversation steered to any Left side talking points.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Hayes tries his very best to...

"Born August 27, 1929 and reared on the family farm in Bunkerville, Nevada."

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)BUNKERVILLE, Nev. -- Armed civilians continue to guard the Cliven Bundy ranch. They have traveled from afar, are camped out, and remain at their posts for hours in an effort to provide security for the cattle rancher. Bundy supporters drove to Bunkerville from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other states to show they believe in Bundy's cause. The rancher has been in a battle with the federal government over the illegal grazing of his cattle for the past two decades. "I'm just here to help them sleep easy and rest at night," said Booda Cavalier, who says he is providing security...

BUNDY RANCH | You saw his proof. Now meet BLM Whistleblower Rusty Hill who uncovered the corporations and shady land deals connected to Reid Bunkerville LLC, Zion Bank Corp, and BLM lands surrounding the Bundy properties.

Flat on his belly in a sniper position, wearing a baseball cap and a flak jacket, a protester aimed his semi-automatic rifle from the edge of an overpass and waited as a crowd below stood its ground against U.S. federal agents in the Nevada desert. He was part of a 1,000-strong coalition of armed militia-men, cowboys on horseback, gun rights activists and others who rallied to Cliven Bundy's Bunkerville ranch, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, in a stand-off with about a dozen agents from the federal Bureau of Land Management. The rangers had rounded up hundreds of Bundy's...

On Wednesday night’s broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow discussed the recent events surrounding Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in detail. Not only did she address the standoff between Bundy’s supporters and federal agents, she placed this incident in the context of recent history. On top of that, she reviewed all of the coverage Bundy has received from the conservative media and contended that these ‘journalists’ are ‘playing with fire.’ Below is video from the show:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Maddow began her show by contrasting the recent events surrounding Bundy and his supporters, who state that they do not recognize the...

Not surprisingly, the FOX News van carried the only media members covering an unfolding story in which dozens, possibly hundreds of Americans were facing death at the hands of Barack Obama’s, armed Bureau of Land Management mercenaries. And make no mistake, Nevada BLM personnel also escaped the possibility of thousands descending upon their offices, only because cooler heads prevailed. The video which follows shows just how close this fraudulent tale of the habitat of “desert tortoises” came to being a disaster. Whether Harry Reid and his sniveling son were involved in engineering the week-long, federal intimidation of Cliven Bundy and...

The cattle-ranch protest in Nevada was an armed insurrection by the Tea Party. One thousand Tea Party, so-called “patriots,” came to Bunkerville, NV, brandished weapons and the government backed down. Other mass protests in America have either ended in arrests or violent clashes between authorities and protesters. There is an obvious double standard here because the government relented and turned away. Why did the government do this? The main difference between many other mass protests and the cattle-ranch protest is that the cattle-ranch protesters were armed with handguns and assault rifles. Is American in such a state where the new...

The Feds may have set a troubling precedent by allowing a Nevada rancher and his band of armed followers to win a standoff with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The rancher refused to pay more than $1 million in fines for letting his cows graze on government land It could have been a catastrophe. For several days last week, hundreds of angry protesters faced off with federal workers on an arid ranch near Bunkerville, Nev. Militiamen squatted among the sagebrush and crouched on a highway overpass, cradling guns and issuing barely veiled threats at the government officials massed behind...

Harry Reid seems to have taken the Bundy standoff rather personally: "Well, it's not over. We can't have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it's not over," Reid said. It is a very scary thing when a government officer takes such things personally -- given that the government can and does order the use of lethal force against citizens. What is the rationale for Reid's We-Must-Not-Let-This-Insult-Pass attitude? Were Reid talking about a slight from a hostile foreign power -- such as Russia, or, for that matter, al-Qaeda -- he's more than...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)KRYSTAL BALL: Next Monday is Patriots' Day in Boston and thousands of modern patriots will take to the streets to run, to celebrate and to come together out of tragedy, proving true the words of our pledge, one nation, under God, indivisible. That word though, patriot, has become a really loaded one. To see what I mean, consider Cliven Bundy, the rancher who has refused to pay the people of the U.S. what he owes for use of our land because he views the U.S. federal government as a foreign interloper. Mr. Bundy denies the legitimacy of our republic. And...

It was a tense standoff in rural Nevada with armed protesters closing I-15 for a while and facing off against even more heavily-armed federal agents. For now, that volatile Bundy Ranch confrontation has been defused. But it's not over by any means. And we may well experience others that do not pause in non-violence. These are profound disputes illustrative of abiding suspicions among average Americans and their government headed by a man who promised to bring people together but didn't. And it comes in an uncertain economic time when so many have given up big dreams to just keep what...

On Saturday, I wrote about the standoff at Bundy Ranch. That post drew a remarkable amount of traffic, even though, as I wrote then, I had not quite decided what to make of the story. Since then, I have continued to study the facts and have drawn some conclusions. Here they are. First, it must be admitted that legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on. The Bureau of Land Management has been charging him grazing fees since the early 1990s, which he has refused to pay. Further, BLM has issued orders limiting the area on which Bundy’s cows...

The controversy over a Nevada rancher’s decades-long use of public land without paying federal grazing fees has quickly become a national issue — one that Glenn Beck on Monday urged Americans to fully understand before taking a side on. “We did some research online with PsyID today, and found that there’s about 10 or 15 percent of the people who are talking about this online that are truly frightening,” Beck said on his television program. “They don’t care what the facts are. They just want a fight.” Beck said there are many “decent, small-government proponents from groups like the Tea...

As the below document makes clear, Southern Poverty Law Center is Now Officially Part of DHS. The CEO of SPLC now sits on the DHS “Working Group on Countering Violent Extremism” along with the leaders of other So-called Non Government Organizations (but can we really call them such now that they are part of the government?) And select “law enforcement” officers such as the Clark County Nevada Sheriff, Doug Gillespie.

The Bureau of Land Management vowed Saturday that it would continue its legal fight to remove illegal cattle from a rural Nevada range after ending a tense weeklong standoff with a rancher and his supporters. "After 20 years and multiple court orders to remove the trespass cattle, [rancher Cliven] Bundy owes the American taxpayers in excess of $1 million. The BLM will continue to work to resolve the matter administratively and judicially," a statement from the bureau said. "We ask that all parties in the area remain peaceful and law-abiding as the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service...

BUNKERVILLE, Nevada (Reuters) - U.S. officials ended a stand-off with hundreds of armed protesters in the Nevada desert on Saturday, calling off the government's roundup of cattle it said were illegally grazing on federal land and giving about 300 animals back to the rancher who owned them. The dispute less than 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas between rancher Cliven Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management had simmered for days. Bundy had stopped paying fees for grazing his cattle on the government land and officials said he had ignored court orders. Anti-government groups, right-wing politicians and gun-rights activists...

BUNKERVILLE (KSNV MyNews3.com) -- The gathering of rancher Cliven Bundy's cattle in northeast Clark County has been stopped by the director of the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM announcement came as Bundy was meeting with Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie about the week-long dispute. The BLM had been using contract cowboys to round up Bundy's 900 head of cattle that have been grazing over 600,000 square acres in northeast Clark County for more than 20 years without his payment of grazing fees. As of Friday they had secure 389 cattle from the Gold Butte area, nearly 90 percent of...