Free Republic

“So, go back 20 years to when I quit paying grazing fees to the federal government. The administrative regulatory pressure at the time was being used to run myself and my neighbors out of business. They came along with a full force and effect decision on the basis of an endangered species, and said we couldn’t graze for three to four months in the peak of the spring. That was followed by another full force and effect decision that said the land was totally closed to grazing. In that process my neighbors, 52 ranching families in Clark County and hundreds...

It is tempting to compare racists. That's especially true when you look at what's happened in the last week, when two white men—Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling—have drawn massive and warranted scrutiny over abhorrently racist remarks. Those lines are already being drawn. Cliven Bundy's story is well-known by now. The Nevada rancher, who had become a cause celebre among some conservatives for fighting the federal government over overdue grazing fees, went on a rant last week about "the Negro," suggesting that life for black Americans may've been better under slavery. Donald Sterling's case is...

Has the audacity of the Obama Administration and the sanctimonious stooges; Reid, Pelosi, and Biden pushed America to the Concord Bridge of the Twenty-First Century. Our Concord Bridge is no wooden bridge over the Concord River in Massachusetts, a bridge barely big enough for a small wagon to pass: today’s Concord Bridge is a huge overpass, high above the desert on Interstate 15, a four lane divided highway, cutting through several Western states and connecting Canada and Mexico. Yes, we have come a long way, but once again we are confronting tyranny and an overbearing government more interested in the...

Overt acts of obvious racism have been in the news lately. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, Frazier Glenn Cross’s anti-semitic shootings in KC and now recent revelations of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling prohibiting his girlfriend from publicly associating with blacks. We can count each of these as classic definitions of racism: prejudice against another based on skin color and race. This classic definition of racism has been said to be behind us, buried in the time of Jim Crow, lynchings and Bull Conner. We were wrong to ever believe they were “behind us.” But I’m less concerned about those overt...

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman are undoubtedly on opposite sides of America’s political spectrum. But the conservative commentator and liberal economist came to a rare point of agreement on Sunday: regardless of his comments on race, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s law-breaking stand against the federal government is inexcusable. Kristol and Krugman appeared on ABC’s “This Week” to discuss Cliven Bundy’s racially insensitive comments published earlier this week. Once seen as a right-wing folk hero for his stand against the Bureau of Land Management’s push to reclaim grazing fees he owed the Feds, Republican...

A freshman Nevada congressman said the militiamen need to leave the area around Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch because they’re scaring kids trying to walk to school. Rep. Steve Horsford (D-Nev.), who represents the recently created 4th District of central Nevada, told MSNBC that he spent Thursday in Mesquite, “meeting with residents who actually live in Bunkerville, who are neighbors of Cliven Bundy, who live in the Moapa Valley community.” “And they, like myself, are extremely frustrated by the fact that we have these armed militia in our community, the fact that children in Bunkerville, which is a community of only...

Neighbors of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy have had enough of the celebrity attention and want his gun-toting militia defenders gone, while his supporters say he is no racist. They are accusing The New York Times of deliberately editing the interview to portray him as such. Congressman for farmer Bundy’s district, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), spoke with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on the situation. He said he had spent Thursday meeting with the people who actually lived close to Bundy, adding that the neighbors were extremely frustrated with the band of armed militia that swooped down on their town. The small Bunkerville...

On Friday, John Jacob Schmidt of Radio Free Redoubt said that according to Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, Attorney General Eric Holder has approved drone strikes against the Bundy ranch to take place some time in the next 48 hours. According to Schmidt, the information came from a source Oath Keepers has within the Department of Defense. That source, according to the report, allegedly said Attorney General Eric Holder authorized what is known as a "hot drone strike" against the ranch. Such a strike, he added would effectively kill everyone at the ranch. Schmidt said that as far as...

The biggest lesson in Nevada’s Bundy Ranch standoff is how it’s angered conservative America, conservative commentator Ann Coulter said, urging Republicans to channel that passion in the most effective way possible. “Republicans and conservatives ought to learn, be careful before you choose a mascot,” Coulter said Friday in an interview with CNN’s Bill Weir. In a comparison sure to anger some of rancher Cliven Bundy’s most vocal supporters, Coulter likened the Nevada cattle battle to the ineffectual Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, when thousands of unwashed, unemployed and unhappy young people took to the streets to protest not getting...

Like everyone else, Gavin McInnes has weighed in on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's observations on "the Negro". Mr McInnes concludes: This isn't about some old guy's views on slavery. It's about government control. We're not saying Bundy is the messiah and we accept him as our personal savior. We're saying the government is wrong. Let's stipulate that Cliven Bundy is a racist. Let's also assume, if only to save time, that he's Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic. So what? Does that make criticizing the Bureau of Land Management "racist" or "homophobic"? During my battles with Canada's "human rights" commissions, defenders of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)BUNKERVILLE, Nev. — The first thing you see on the drive to Cliven Bundy's ranch are the American flags — tied to roadside guardrails, flapping in a hard desert wind. At a bend in state Route 170 sits the so-called Patriot Checkpoint, evidence of the tense power play raging between the rebellious 67-year-old cattleman and the federal government. Then there are the guns. Scores of grim citizen militiamen in combat fatigues — semiautomatic weapons slung over their shoulders, ammunition magazines at their belts — patrol from a base they call Camp Tripwire. "State sovereignty is what we're fighting for," reads...

 A citizen observer reports from the Bundy Ranch in Nevada that the volunteers guarding the Bundys are responding to Harry Reid's labeling of them as "Domestic Terrorists".   They are wearing name badges with  "Hello, my name is "Domestic Terrorist". It would be funny if totalitarian regimes had not used this tactic for the last 80 years.   Most people remember how Stalinists labeled anyone who opposed them as "Enemies of the State".    The phrase was even popularized in books and a movie.    Here is the report: I just returned last night from 5 days in Bunkerville.  Many of the patriots...

I haven’t been following the Cliven Bundy case because, believe it or not, southwestern grazing disputes have never been among my interests. I know the Daily Caller has done stories about him because I’ve seen the headlines, but I haven’t followed the whole thing. I haven’t written a word about him before today. I don’t care. But now that this Bundy fellow has publicly said things that have offended a lot of black people, suddenly, he represents everybody to the right of Karl Marx. Suddenly I’m obliged to have an opinion about him. If you want to know what I...

Cliven Bundy’s racial rhetoric is indefensible, and it has inspired a lot of half-bright commentary from the left today directed at your favorite correspondent, mostly variations on this theme: Don’t you feel stupid for having compared him to Mohandas Gandhi? Short version: No. There is a time to break the law, and the fact that the law is against you does not mean that justice is against you. The law was against Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., too. That does not mean that what is transpiring in Nevada is the American Revolution or the civil-rights movement; it means that...

Majority Leader (D-Nevada) Harry Reid is threatening Cliven Bundy with the ominous words “something is going to happen.” “ “It’s obvious that you can’t just walk away from this. And we can speculate all we want to speculate to what’s going to happen next,” Reid told KSNV-TV. “But I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow that something is going to happen, but something will happen. We are a nation of laws, not of men and women.” If it weren’t so scary, it would be funny. Reid’s manner of speaking is like the person that says “No offense meant, but…”...

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is being portrayed by some as a man of principle, an iconoclast who should be admired for his willingness to stand up to the federal government. But in fact he's a petty scofflaw who seems to think that he has the right to pick and choose which rules must be obeyed. Bundy is the cattleman who grazes his herd on federal land operated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, but unlike more than 15,000 other ranchers, he refuses to pay the associated grazing fees. After 20 years of disagreements and court battles, the U.S. government...

The Fox News host grills a member of the militia movement on why it's OK for Bundy to break the law but not OWS.To a significant degree, American politics is a story of insiders vs. outsiders, so it’s inevitable that people among the latter group would be lumped together, even if they’re quite different by any other measure. Still, it’s probably fair to say that when most people think of Nevada renegade rancher Cliven Bundy, the Zuccotti Park protesters of Occupy Wall Street don’t immediately — or eventually — come to mind. Yet on the Tuesday night edition of his...

SOURCE First Solar Media press release: “First Solar is thrilled to celebrate this important milestone with Sen. Reid and distinguished guests, and honored to work with the Moapa Band of Paiutes on this landmark project,” said Jim Hughes, the CEO of First Solar. Signaling the first day of construction of the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project, which is about 35 miles from the Bundy homestead in Bunkerville, Nevada, Sen. Reid (far right) hoists shovel, joined by representatives from the Moapa Band of Paiutes, executives from First Solar, Inc. and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for the groundbreaking...

Former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich, now a prominent author and commentator, blasted Bundy on his Facebook page on Monday. “In what world is Cliven Bundy, the 68-year-old rancher who refuses to pay his tab for grazing cattle on federal lands, a patriot?” Reich wrote. “He drapes himself in the American flag but says ‘I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing,’ while attracting a collection of thugs with assault rifles in the Nevada desert to force the Bureau of Land Management to back down from a court-ordered confiscation of his cattle.” The comment from Reich, who now...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan summed up the armed federal standoff between agents with the Bureau of Land Management and cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, his family and his supporters: It was all over an unpaid bill. “You don’t send the Seventh Cavalry to collect a bill, and that’s exactly what happened,” he told Sean Hannity on his radio show Monday. He went on, Breitbart reported: “And when they put all those forces out there — that’s what attracted all the others, the history of what happened at Waco, Ruby Ridge. And so these folks came to that rancher’s defense. But the...