BTW, according to Kos, what this story is really about is not cattle but oil, and in particular the business interests of the Koch Brothers, whose organizations twittered up the story into national news.
If Bundy wasn’t a freeloading jackass hiding behind half-baked conspiracy theories this wouldn’t be a story.
Check out the right wing pages on Facebook, these guys are becoming the darlings of the Tea Party types. I don’t doubt that the Kochs are looking for this and any other excuse to make it easier for them to wrest some federal lands for themselves.
By corralling them into a tiny fenced in “free speech zone” area in the middle of nowhere? By tasing protestors and sicking police dogs on them? By threatening to use tear gas on the protestors?
This is not how enlightened governments should treat people, regardless of their citizenship or criminal “potential”. Unless someone threatened violence, the government should not respond with violence.
Nobody wants another Ruby Ridge or Waco during an election year. Let Bundy have his temporary “win” place a lien on his cattle and his real property and then collect it when he either dies or tries to sell or lease it. Either way, he’ll have to pay something to make this matter “go away.”
As for the ding-dongs out there protesting: Wait a few days (or a week) and they’ll go home. Arrest the ones who violate the law and the remainder will simply fade away when the television cameras do. Being from Nevada, I can tell you that standing outside in the desert is extremely unpleasant and most people aren’t willing to do it for more than a week or so.
The ranch and disputed lands are in the middle of nowhere. Where the hell else where they going to go? 
As for the rest, I asked for a citation earlier about any mistreatment of the protestors or the Bundys and didn’t get one. Maybe you can do better.
Cite?
It was right there in the Wikipedia page.
I have no dog in this fight. I’m just calling it like I see it. Certainly the BLM here acted with more restraint than the FBI at Waco, for example. I just see no reason to provoke a bunch of armed protestors over some grass.
Send Bundy a bill and let everyone go home. Or better yet, send him a bill before all this got started.
I don’t understand. When/if I owe the government some money, they don’t bring out armed men with helicopters to take my stuff. What made this bill so damned important that they had to go to all this trouble?
If it was money – garnish Bundy’s checks. If it was that they wanted to use the land for other purposes now – put up a fence. Why provoke a riot?
This is more a case that an ever encroaching government, combined with a rather soft view of the role of government, has created a problem: all people have to do is put up minimal resistance and they’ll win. There are two ways to handle that problem: recognize that the government is encroaching on too much and roll it back, or start killing a lot more people.
Of course, since some other common property trespassers are illegal immigrants, we’ll have to start shooting them too.
From Wiki:
You can’t be serious. Law enforcement officials who defended themselves from aggressive protestors with minimal force were treating them as “criminal scum”?
Yeah-Here’s the rest of the story.Not as cut and dried as you make it out to be, is it?
BTW, I wasn’t totally clear about what I meant by a soft view of the roll of government: libertarians have what could be called a “hard” view. Law is force, and for any law to have meaning, the government must enforce it, by killing people if necessary. For crimes like murder, rape, burglary, etc., this is justified. For not paying grazing fees on federal land it’s just not.
The mistake advocates of activist government have made is to forget that law is force, and assume compliance because they are just so darn well-meaning. Or they find ingenious ways ot make compliance something you have to go out of your way to avoid(see: payroll deduction of taxes). So when people do make a choice to not comply, a choice has to be made about how far you’re willing to to go see them brought to heel. Since in the past such confrontations were rare, the government could survive the PR damage of being heavyhanded. But as the movement of resisting this kind of thing becomes bigger and bigger, the government is going to basically have to go to war with its citizens to enforce these rather arcane laws.
So you have a choice to make. How many people are you willing to kill over issues like these? Amnd are you willing to live with the consequences of a 50-50 nation divided over ideas now seeing that one side is willing to use the government to kill the other side?
Ah, the guns are just for show? If the government wasn’t contemplating deadly force, why did they send an army of armed agents?
The concept of government land is hardly new. Having ranchers pay fees for the right to graze on government land so that the land can be maintained and rights revoked in times of drought seems to me a good idea. Because one guy thinks he gets to have his cattle eat government property for free, all the whack-a-doodles are up in arms to defend him. Screw that- he hasn’t paid his bills, garnish his property.
By contrast, most immigrants simply want to pass over the government land in search for a better life. Their enviromental footprint is neglible.
They did.
I’m not sure if you’re misunderstanding the geography or what. The cows were on public land, the gov’t had a legal court order to seize the cows. Elsewhere, a bunch of armed protesters blocked a highway by driving an ATV in front of a civilian dump truck. BLM agents moved in to protect the civilian driver of the impeded dump truck from the mob. They were acting 100% defensively. The goddamn dump trucks weren’t even involved in the cattle seizing, they supposedly had irrigation parts in them.
So temporarily blocking a convoy in order to ask a question is worth throwing people on the ground, sicking police dogs on pregnant women, driving a dump truck into a privately owned ATV, and tasing people repeatedly?
That’s the ideal response in this situation?
To protect themselves from the armed mob that was already there.
About this dog you don’t have?
Civilian agents of the government don’t get to kill in order to enforce criminal statutes, be they murder, burglary, or illegal cattle grazing. Outside of imposition of the death penalty (which is limited by SCOTUS to crimes against the state, and crimes where the victim died), agents of the government can only use deadly force in response to an immediate threat, not to enforce statutes. That’s what the courts are for.
You’re describing something more like Judge Dredd’s universe, where the police shoot burglars for being burglars, rapists for being rapists, and so forth. That’s not how it works in the U.S.