Free Republic

Harry Reid did it again. The Senate majority leader who called President Bush a “loser” and a “liar,” declared former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a “political hack” and asserted that all Obamacare horror stories are “untrue” has now called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “domestic terrorists.” The comparison is as noxious as it is absurd. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. The Unabomber was a domestic terrorist. Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph was a domestic terrorist. To equate Bundy and his supporters with these murderers is, quite simply, appalling. It was the federal...

Given the de minimis coverage by the self-gelded mainstream media, you may have missed the altogether remarkable events that recently unfolded in southern Nevada. For decades, rancher Cliven Bundy has grazed his cattle on government land, which has been designated habitat for the desert tortoise, one species on an ever-lengthening federal list of endangered creatures. Compounding the offense, despite two court orders, Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees to the federal Bureau of Land Management because, as he points out, his family's use of that land goes back to the 1870s, i.e., well before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife...

As he moves from lobbyists to the golf course, from press conferences to the tanning bed, he remains oblivious to all that is around him. He has power, incredible power, and yet to this day he has no understanding of the election that made it so. Moreover, all around him are astonishing opportunities for him to be an historic figure -- one who could and should be the man who did more than any other single person in turning back the red tide of Obama. It’s all there for Speaker of the House, and yet John Boehner manages to miss...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)OKLAHOMA - A dispute over land in Nevada between rancher Cliven Bundy and the Federal Government began decades ago. Bundy says his family’s cattle have grazed on the land without interference since 1870. The Bureau of Land Management says Bundy hadn’t paid his grazing fees since 1993, owing the government more than 1 million dollars. The B.L.M. says Bundy was allowing his cattle to graze illegally, which triggered a forced round-up of about 400 of Bundy’s cattle just last week. The cows were later released. Organizers with the Oklahoma Militia say they have members in Nevada who say Bundy’s cattle...

The thing that needs to be said in respect of the rebellion that has gathered at the ranch of Cliven Bundy is that it is as American as apple pie. At the rate things are going the Nevada ranchers are going to write themselves into American history right alongside Daniel Shays and the Pennsylvania backwoodsmen who confronted the federal government over taxes on whiskey. The echoes are uncanny — complete with the sanctimonious lectures from the federal government over the law and the righteousness of the anger of the rebels. Shays mounted his rebellion in western Massachusetts even before we...

An Ohio woman has recounted the moment an act of kindness in helping a perceived pair of broken-down strangers left her being dragged, beaten and robbed on the side of a road. "Before I could finish asking him if they were OK he grabbed me by the hair and said, 'if you scream I'll hit you even harder,'" 19-year-old Caleigh Roelfs recalled to the Daily News Thursday. It was 2 p.m. Monday along Napoleon's Route 6 when the engaged criminal psychology student spotted a van with its emergency lights flashing on the side of the road. "My dad and brothers,...

On the Friday, April 18, All In show, during a discussion of the firing of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for simply donating to a political campaign opposing same-sex marriage, guest Richard Kim of the far left The Nation magazine intoned that he found it "disturbing" that gay activist friends of his have expressed interest in "targeting" more people who have made similar donations, and who have declared they should "find out where they live." Kim: Here's a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, "Look, here's a list; 6,500 people gave the...

Of all the many absurdities of the great climate change non-crisis which has been pointlessly obsessing our planet this last three or four decades, surely the most egregious is the way it has ignored one basic fact: global warming is good. No really, it is. As a few bold heretics - such as Australian geologist Ian Plimer in his book Heaven And Earth - have long been trying to tell anyone prepared to listen, the human species is designed for warmth not cold. Ice ages are something we should naturally fear; warming periods are something which for which we should...

In 2013, freshmen senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) seemed like two peas in a pod. Both railed at the NSA, backed the government shutdown, opposed intervention in Syria and championed the tea party faithful. But 2014 has been a different story. Cruz has become a serious, vocal proponent of a tough foreign policy and harsh critic of President Obama’s approach to Iran and Russia. He gave serious speeches on the importance of standing up to Vladimir Putin and on the folly of expecting Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program without stringent sanctions and/or the threat...

BUNKERVILLE — A GMC pickup motors across a bridge over the Virgin River, kicking up a cloud of desert. The door swings open. This is my ticket inside the militia that’s become rancher Cliven Bundy’s fighting brigade. Brandon Rapolla, a 39-year-old concrete mixer from Oregon, steers the truck toward the militia camp that’s assembled to support Bundy’s battle with the Bureau of Land Management. There’s an assault rifle propped between Rapolla’s knees. A .338 Magnum rifle, designed to take down big game at a distance the length of three football fields or more, rests within arm’s reach on the back...

For two decades the US government has tried to get Cliven Bundy to remove his cows from federal land, and for two decades the Nevada rancher has steadfastly refused, defying court orders and attempts to negotiate a settlement for the $1.1 million he owes in federal grazing fees. Finally, last week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) took matters into its own hands and started seizing cattle that had been illegally grazing on government property. Things went downhill from there. What began as an arcane land dispute rapidly escalated into an armed standoff in the desert. A ragtag band of...

BUNDY RANCH | You saw his proof. (below) 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.(TWO-VIDEOS-AT-LINK)Since the Bundy Ranch story broke last week and culminated in a tense standoff with Federal agents on Saturday resulting in the release of the Bundy Ranch cattle we have been following the money. On the 10th we reported the Militia arrived in the area and cited a former BLM volunteer and Nevada Land Broker who revealed to us the true value of the...

We don’t know who’s right in the case of the Nevada rancher vs. the federal government. But we do know that the government is losing the public relations battle, and for good reason. When the government moved to seize Cliven Bundy’s cattle for his failure to pay grazing fees on public land, a growing group of supporters came to his defense – literally. On April 12, after a tense and heated standoff with them, heavily armed federal agents released the cattle back and retreated. The situation was eerily reminiscent of past ill-fated federal standoffs, such as Ruby Ridge and Waco,...

Today, in the year 2064, as we look back over the last 50 years, it might seem as if the Abundance Revolution was inevitable, since so much wealth was involved. After all, it was wealth just waiting to be unleashed. Yet paradoxically, on the eve of the Abundance Revolution, many of America’s leaders, on the right as well as the left, were preaching a strict doctrine of overall austerity. Indeed, as we look back and study the events of 2014, we can see the results of the Green elite’s ideologically-driven effort to squelch even the relatively small amount of prosperity...

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...

*Famed film director Spike Lee has expressed his desire to see the Trayvon Martin story told on the big screen. During an interview with theGrio, Lee commended 27-year-old new director Ryan Coogler for bringing his acclaimed independent film, “Fruitvale Station,” the Oscar Grant story, to the big screen. He expressed his admiration for the film while stating that the film business isn’t built in favor of young directors like Coogler to succeed. “Love it…. It’s great,” Lee said of Fruitvale Station. “But it’s something that I have been doing for 15 year [sic]. I teach film. That is my job...

Israeli police arrested 16 Palestinians at one of Jerusalem's most revered and politically sensitive holy sites on Sunday as they dispersed protesters opposed to any Jewish attempts to pray there. A police spokesman said officers used stun grenades to disperse dozens of rioters, who threw rocks and firecrackers at them at the site revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's walled Old City. Two officers were slightly injured and treated at the scene in the brief clash, the spokesman added. Five Palestinians were also slightly hurt, a Muslim clergyman said. Police...

New York City has roasted a man to death. Jerome Murdough, like a very large share of New York City’s homeless, was mentally ill. According to his family, he suffered from both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, along with what his mother gently describes as “beer problems.” He was a former Marine who was in and out of homeless shelters, hospitals, and the occasional jail cell, with eleven misdemeanor convictions for trespassing, public drinking, drug possession, and the like. During what was an unusually bitter winter in New York, Mr. Murdough sought shelter in an unsecured stairwell in a Harlem housing...

File this under the early bird gets the worm. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week that he plans to spend $50 million of his vast wealth to create a “gun safety” group that he hopes will “outmuscle” the NRA, according to The New York Times. But the new group, “Everytown for Gun Safety,” was a little too slow on the draw when it came to getting control of the group name on Facebook, with pro-gun activists acquiring the name first, BuzzFeed reported. A Facebook page has been set up under the same name as Bloomberg’s new...

Alert shoppers are accustomed to watching food prices go up and down. But a string of forces—from droughts to diseases—is raising the cost of a trip to the grocery store at a rapid clip. And it looks like it will be a while before the price pressure eases. Some of that pressure is coming from California—the source of roughly half the nation's fruits and vegetables—where a long-running drought is forcing farmers and ranchers to cut production. After the driest year on record, large sections of farmland are expected to lay fallow this year as the Golden State copes with an...