Clive Bundy calls on all Patriot and Militia members to join him at his ranch to take on the government in an all out war or what he terms invasion of his property. Seems like he wants another Ruby Ridge or Waco to happen. What will be next for these guys, all out war with the government? Much like older groups like The Order, and The Republic of Texas, these guys probably won’t have anything left but a trail of dead bodies and or long terms in prison ahead of them if they keep it up.
Pete Santili speaks about what is going on. Feds prep for Waco style raid of Bundy Ranch?
I jsut saw a RWer saying it’s worth a firefight against the government to help this wonderful millonaire avoid his land fees.
I really hope when this is over, social services takes his kids.
We got a note to go look at Twitter a little while ago. It was pretty awful.
Really? This again?
What’s it been, 20 years?
To put things into perspective as to what is going on in this country I recommend that everyone watch this youtube video. It’s very disconcerting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFesKJRz8bQ
Let me help you with that. It’s a video from a Washington ballot issue backed by out-of-state interests that lost badly in 2006. It’s created by a pretty well-established ‘movement’ opposed to land use and zoning ordinances of all kinds, not just the BLM. Said movement is largely paid for by real estate developers, with grassroots lunatics and aggrieved property owners providing the face of the movement. Its propaganda is rife with climate change denial, ‘patriot’ memes, and the sort of raving lunacy normally associated with Alex Jones.
I first cottoned to this trend in 1990, when I saw a guy picketing city hall in Maryville, Tennessee with a sign that declared a zoning code “communist rule.” But reading the city paper, I learned that Mr. First Amendment was not loved by his neighbors because he’d been running a sawmill in his backyard at 3 AM, and the city had invoked the ordinance to shut him down at their instigation. Doubtless that man is an avid talk radio listener now, if he’s still alive. He might even be in a video like this, muttering his tale of woe for a bunch of delighted one percenters with an agenda.
No, it’s a video that was created by property owners, like me, and like the rancher in Nevada, who invested in his property to make a profit. There were no outside special interest groups involved in the I-955 initiative, and my family paid for the t.v. spot in support of the initiative. I’m not sure what you mean by “one percenter’s” since the vast majority of Americans are property owners. Perhaps you would prefer living in one of the socialist countries, where they tell you what color you can paint your house, the size of your home, and redistribute wealth to the point where industry sets up shop in countries that understand that poor people do not create jobs.
You can stop arguing against the straw man, and you can quit gainsaying the facts just because you don’t like them. Federal, state, and local laws that affect property (such as zoning ordinances and land use regulations) have been repeatedly validated by the courts. Just because something is yours doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want with it. My car goes much faster than 45 mph, but I still don’t get to drive like a bat out of hell on surface streets.
Furthermore, Mr. Bundy does not own those BLM lands. He has tried to claim them for two decades, but more than one federal judge has said “no, this is not yours.” So your property developer-generated ad doesn’t even apply to the situation.
You are missing the point. Zoning laws do establish land use, which is the lawful way of informing potential buyers whether or not a property is suitable for a specific purpose. For example, how many houses can you build per acre, is it residential, commercial, industrial or farming. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats tend to make up loosey goosey regulations, with no basis in law, to suit their ideological agendas. These battles are fought on a daily basis around the country. The commercials we produced in support of I-933 were not staged or made up, and are a very small sampling of what ordinary people in our state face as a rule, not the exception. One property owner, for example, was fined for mowing his lawn because the city determined that lawn mowing may affect the habitat of a particular microbe. Absurd, you may say. Of course it is. In this instance, however, they picked on someone who was capable of fighting back and eventually the city council and mayor were thrown out of office by the voters as a result. That rarely happens because voters tend to ignore the plight of others, unless it happens to them. I became interested in property rights, when I too became a victim. My question for you is, what would you do if one day you went to your computer and were denied access to your 401K because it had been confiscated for public use?
Your question isn’t even relevant. It’s like we were arguing Coke vs Pepsi and you suddenly asked me what I thought about horse racing as if it would change my mind on soda.
I’m not missing any points, either. If you don’t like a mayor or city council’s decisions, you are free to vote them out of office. In the meantime, the law sees zero difference between fines for mowing a lawn in WA state and citations for not having three sides of your Cape Cod house covered in cedar siding. I’ve seen communities ticket people for drying clothes on a line instead of in a dryer, and while that sounds stupid and un-American it is also completely, perfectly legal.
Would you like to see what a completely unregulated community looks like? One without codes or zoning or government bean-counters telling everyone what they can do with their homes? Try visiting a Third World slum. But I guarantee that any nice neighborhood with high property values anywhere in the world WILL have zoning and codes, and that some of them will seem silly to us when we examine them.
I think its easy to see that zoning laws, and especially code compliance, is an important part of city functions. I have seen great neighborhoods ruined very quickly by lack of code compliance officers to patrol the neighborhoods. Next thing you know people start putting trash outside the house or on the side of the house, and then next thing they start parking junk cars all over the street, and pretty much an entire street gets wind that they too can do the same. Next thing you know the entire neighborhood has trailer parks in their yards and monkey cages to house wild animals all over the place. I think strict adherence to zoning laws is what keeps people happy in their neighborhoods.
Same issue with taking your cows out to get fat on federal lands. You end up profiting off of it because you don’t have to pay for feed. Then when you sell you earn 100 percent of that cow in profits because you never had to pay to feed it. Same issue goes for water rights. If you started watering on someone else’s land they would kick you off it. You can’t use squatters rights to profit from it. I could see it if you had one cow and were a small family unit who had no money and needed to eat and so forth, but Bundy has much more than that, and he makes money off of it, so in a large way its stealing and he knows it.
Your analogy is absolutely correct and I agree with you fully. My point is more along the lines of extremes. Unfortunately, we now have government bureaucracies that will make up regulations to suit their agendas, rather than enforce them, and they do it with impunity. I don’t know the details of the Bundy dispute, but I did get into the weeds on a similar dispute in Tonapah, involving a cattle rancher by the name of Hage. In this instance, the family complied with BLM regulations, paid the grazing fees only to be harassed by the BLM because an environmental group made an issue out of a non-issue. In my neck of the woods, there was Maddy’s goats. The family had 2.5 acres zoned for livestock. Their young daughter, a 4-H club member had a couple of goats on the property. A neighbor complained and everything escalated from there — almost like one of those improbable movies. As an aside the home, probably worth $750,000, and grounds were maintained impeccably. Police came with guns drawn pointed 12 year old Maddy, and her parents were arrested. The family ended up spending $250,000 in legal fees and won court battle after court battle, but the damages were beyond repair. Our previous code enforcement officer understood proportionality and his role in serving the community. Unfortunately, his successor did not.
Great story and I do understand it. It is that random element that comes into play in everyone’s lives that makes it impossible to view things as they should be. There is always some random element in life where one sees one thing and then comes to believe that this must be the way it is for everyone else or it could happen to you if you don’t do something about it now. Very apt, it can, but so can boarding an airplane that disappears. It could happen to me or you or anyone, but as a course of daily life it probably won’t. But if we live in fear of it then it overtakes our reality and makes a new reality, one that says airplanes are going to start disappearing more and more so don’t get on them. I know that sounds crude, but in a way it reflects how small movements can get started based on one persons reality.
I agree with that, as well, but the one thing to keep in mind is that success has many father’s. Government programs breed more programs, along with a lot cottage organizations and industries that rely on those programs for their longevity. In 1976 Morris Udall ran for President. He was a Teddy Roosevelt environmentalist who campaigned on a platform of expanding the national parks, cleaning up the air and water, roadside litter, among numerous other beneficial programs. As a Democrat he was even able to get Nixon to sign a bill bringing the EPA into effect (unlikely to happen today). But like all good things it spawned lobby groups like the Sierra Club and others that perpetuate their existence by buying politicians who expanded those laws, creating an over-regulated bureaucratic environment. So, what started out as a good thing, has become a nightmarish boondoggle for the benefit of politicians and special interest groups — which brings me full circle to the Bundy standoff in Nevada. Do I agree with Bundy’s position? I really don’t know the facts, which are generally anemic when it comes to media coverage. What I do know is that Harry Reid is behind it, and not for altruistic reasons.
Let me get this straight. This is Reid’s fault because he said something about it a couple of years ago?
And let me say something about that “over-regulated bureaucratic environment.” I have seen communities destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. Increased unemployment and public health hazards follow strip-mining everywhere it goes, and this travesty against the American commons is most severe in the reddest of red states, so the activists who organize against it in Appalachia tend to be shockingly conservative in their opinions. The poisoning of the Eastern seabord’s main watershed an ongoing, and only recently-noticed, disaster of the coal industry’s bad habits. And all of this has gotten a lot worse since the Bush administration changed the wording of an obscure regulation in the middle of the night.
I have watched 135 people line up to get arrested in front of the White House — in front of a crowd of thousands — to protest this continued mockery of a regulation. These are salt of the Earth folks, as red-blooded American as you or I, who would rather go to jail than be ignored. But to date, their efforts have failed to get the attendant regulation fixed by the Obama EPA. They have started enforcing their regulations more strongly, but the moonscaping of America’s oldest mountain range continues.
So I take exception to this notion that Sierra Club and Harry Reid are in cahoots to use the land for turtles and fracking. I think that’s nonsense, and I think Cliven Bundy should have paid his bloody grazing fees.
Why is it when these kooks start screaming about freedom the first thing they want to do is encroach on mine?
Bundy is just a common thief. He is a moocher living off the largess of the American people. He is no better than the welfare recipients that his worshipers profess to hate. I’m sure we’ve attached everything he owns and we will get our money back in the end.
Looks like its the spoiled rotten, crybaby anti-environmentalist, so-called “Christians” threatening violence if they don’t get their way, 1, Desert Tortoise 0.
What’s pathetic is these rightwingnuts jumping to this guy’s defense don’t even realize they are being used by Bundy. The guy’s nothing more than a con with cowboy hat sputtering patriotic platitudes to get the fanatic flag wavers on his side for no other reason than he wants a free ride. He’s trying to get away with not paying his grazing fees. Fees that thousands of other more honest cattle ranchers pay.
I’m a right winger…. I’ll leave the name calling to you left wingers. You seem to be good at that. Anyway, I agree that Bundy needs to pay for his grazing rights. It’s the law. I refuse to get on his bandwagon. As for the tortoise, there’s nothing that the cattle can do, short of relieving themselves on them, to upset the environment of the turtle. BLM was using that as a veiled excuse to run Bundy off. BTW… I’m sick of the environmentalists trying to save insignificant species such as the darter minnow, desert tortoise, spotted owl… by disrupting commerce and other peoples way of life.
Cows step on tortoises. Cows also change the ecology of a pasture. Sure, you might not care about one or two or three “insignificant species,” but the ecology will care very much. Remove the wolf from Yellowstone, and the elk will keep new stands of aspen and cottonwood from growing up. You can create a trophic cascade just by letting go of one species that you didn’t think was significant.
He was STEALING from the rest of the citizens of the USA for not paying the fees he should have. $1.35 per cow per year? I mean WTF that is peanuts for what he got out of it. He stole from all of US, that’s you me and the morons who supported him. He’s nothing more than a Koch clone in a cowboy hat.
What do Christians have to do with this you devil? It has nothing to do with Bundy using us…this is about sending a message to all those Federal scumbags.’We’re not going to take this shit from them,corporations,internationalist,Luciferian illuminati want to be gods controlling everyone & trying to globalize America into a 1 world dictatorship’ for their want to be God,their daddy-Satan!!! The Fedral govt is an ILLEGAL entity & has been since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was illegally ratified because 30 of the 48 state senators weren’t even there to vote.Therefore the Fedevils are void & we don’t answer to THEM!!!
So who do you answer to? Question, do you drive on roads? Do you shop at the grocery store? Do have utilities like water or gas or electric? Do you drive a car? If you say yes to any of the above then its obvious you submit to the government. You pay taxes if you work right? You pay for registration on your car correct? If you have water gas or electric service you pay for that right? So in effect the government is ok for providing or subsidizing said services so you can enjoy basic amenities in America. Yet you bitch and moan that America is the devil? Are you a socialist or a communist by chance?
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Man I own 2 houses, if I don’t pay my property taxes they take my houses, PLAIN and SIMPLE! Make this POS pay what is owed like everyone else in the World!!