Jazz Shaw:
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.
Hayes tries his very best to repeatedly get Fiore to agree that Bundy is a criminal of one sort or another and goes the extra mile in slyly trying to get the Assemblywoman to say she agrees with Bundy that the federal government has no authority. She’s having none of it, and drives the conversation back to a few key points like a jackhammer.
Ok, from now on no free-market rancher has to pay anyone for grazing rights, and, if anyone objects, he/she just gets a bunch of people with guns to point them at federal agents.
@rockybutte:
The land is not part of the 85% of Nevada land owned by the Federal government. It is owned by Clark County and the State of Nevada, who only allowed the BLM to manage the land to protect the endangered and threatened species from human molestation and from development. The grazing cattle and wild horses, never posed a threat to these protected creatures. Instead, their grazing helped to protect the land from overgrown vegetation which in spring dries and becomes flammable to the point that a mere lightning strike will create range fires.
Bundy has always said that he would pay the proper fees to the state and county governments, but he refuses to pay to the BLM because it doesn’t own the land, and because it is trying to drive him out of a business that his family has owned and operated since 1870. The BLM began jacking up the fees and severely restricting the number of grazing animals in 1993, their continually expanding restrictions drove all the other nearby ranchers out of business, leaving the Bundy ranch as the sole remaining one. The BLM ordered Bundy and the other ranchers to reduce their herds, (in Bundy’s case from slightly over 900 head, down to 150, which according to Bundy would put him out of business.
That means that a very large large parcel of land, which thousands and thousands of grazing cattle and untold numbers of other grazing native creatures kept for decades from becoming overgrown tinderboxes, will end up as a home to raging range fires that will wipe out the desert tortoises and all other endangered species living on it. (Not to mention the wild horses that the BLM also has culled from the land in round ups and often committed “humane euthanasia” on.) And everything will die, all in order for the Reid’s and their crony capitalist alternative energy friends to come in, buy the destroyed land at below market value, and build solar and wind farms, and to hell with the desert tortoise.
Only, it seems that many from Nevada and elsewhere, including some with political clout, have woken up, and they have serious questions about what has really been going on with the BLM’s management, and the Reid machine’s behind the scene land schemes.