Anyone Following the Bundy Ranch Decades War With the BLM?

[V-Tach]

It would seem way more complicated than I originally thought....seems Harry Reid had friends or business partners that had property that was to be for the turtles and the BLM changed the original property boundaries to accommodate Harry's friends to develop their property...which impacted Bundy's ranch and grazing deal with the State...

At least that is what I think I heard on Fox earlier this evening...

 

[TheDan]

Yeah... so those turtles they are so concerned about; the BLM euthanized 800 or so of them. Real concerned for the turtles aren't they?

Here's a great video on the situation. The guy also touches on what I was talking about earlier on the topic of owning the land through your labor.

 

[benenglish]

there are fumes in the air and all it takes is a spark.
no matter what level of "bad" you may think we are in, it's still bad.

I am very sad to say I think both those sentences are correct.

 

[benenglish]

If his family has been working the land since the 1800s, I'd be inclined to agree with him. Common law tends to dictate that if you start working a piece of land that no one else claims, then that land is yours. It becomes yours through your labor.

Adverse possession does not apply to public land. Even if it did, I have seen nothing that indicates Bundy did any of the filings required to take adverse possession of the butte.

Homesteading is (and as far as I know, always has been) regulated with specific boundaries and time windows to begin working the land.

 

[benenglish]

He may not legally be in the right but when you look at tbe federal government and how they selectivy enforce laws, it is enougb for some to draw lines in the sand.

That makes no sense. All law enforcement is selective. It violates our sense of fairness but it's just impractical to view it any other way.

I don't think we really want everyone doing 56 in a 55 to get a ticket and they don't. Thus, by definition, speed limits are selectively enforced. To a greater extent within a range of resource expenditures, all laws are treated the same way.

Why? Because no law enforcement agency has the resources or will to enforce even half the laws they're responsible for. I firmly believe that that, by itself, is a huge problem. It leads to a lack of respect for the law (because they aren't enforced) and a lack of respect for law enforcement (because when they do enforce, they're viewed as capricious). We need a lot fewer laws.

That's still not a good reason to complain about selective enforcement.

Now (and this is, according to some, relevant to the Bundy case), if that selective enforcement is a political favor, then that is, by definition, corruption. It should be resisted by all legal means and exposed whenever possible.

Look at how many IRS employee's owe back taxes yet continue to not pay them.

This is a red herring and an old wive's tale. I guess I should address it, even though it's a mild threadjack.

Here goes:

In the mid 1990s, there were allegations of IRS misconduct that led to hearings. Included in the allegations were numbers about employee noncompliance with tax laws. Noncompliance of IRS employees was somewhat less than the general population but, still, IRS employees should comply not just a little better but WAY better than the general public.

The result was the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 which inserted Section 1203 into the Internal Revenue Code. Known by employees as "The Seven Deadly Sins", 1203 outlines actions that are presumed to warrant dismissal. It was fully implemented by 2001. By 2005, thousands of IRS employees had been fired.

The provisions of 1203 were and are draconian. An IRS employee who files their return a day late, even if it's for a refund, is almost always fired. An IRS employee who owes taxes at filing is given a quick hearing and if they can't point to a spouse or devastating personal circumstances as the cause, they're fired. They get no extensions and almost no excuses. The only employees allowed to remain employed while being noncompliant are those for which no element of intent can be proven as a contributing factor in their noncomliance. If an employee is driving to the office on April 15 to file and is injured in a car wreck, they can probably remain employed. Short of something like that, they're gone.

Results?

In general, the population of the U.S. is noncompliant with tax laws at a rate of about 8%.

The Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, is under 1%. Most of the noncompliance in Treasury is due to bureaus other than the IRS. The IRS, last time I saw numbers, was well under 0.5%.

In other words, the average citizen is roughly 16 times more likely than an IRS employee to be noncompliant with tax laws.

The old accusation that IRS employees commonly owe back taxes was never really true but what noncompliance did once exist has been reduced to little more than a statistical blip, all of which is attributable to unintended circumstances.

Your accusation is commonly heard and people want to believe it...but it's just plain wrong as wrong can be.

Look at how many in congress deal at insider trading and are millionaires and owe taxes but are never held accountable.

Congress passing laws that the people don't want but yet they are exempt from them.

Yeah, that crap really pisses me off, too.

You wanna talk about tax noncompliance? Look at Congressional staffers and lawyers. Hoo, boy, it's enough to send your blood pressure through the roof.

 

[benenglish]

It would seem way more complicated than I originally thought...

Yep, I've heard similar stuff.

However, Bundy had a chance to successfully resist all the moves against him. He completely blew it when he decided that the federal government had no authority over him and he "fired" the BLM.

If you're going to allege that political corruption is causing your troubles you'd be well advised to not cause any more trouble for yourself. Bundy did exactly that.

Let's assume this is a vast political conspiracy against him. If that's the case, then his failure to follow the letter of the law provides cover for corrupt forces to move against him without their true motives being uncovered.

Am I supposed to be supportive of this guy because he stupidly paved the way for government corruption to be carried out without any hope of it being caught and punished?

I think that's more of a reason to be angry at him.

And that best case scenario only applies if the corruption being alleged is actually true. It may be, but by stupidly choosing to break the law to show the BLM that they're no boss of him, Bundy has so muddied the waters that the real truth will probably never be clear to anyone.

That's a damn shame.

 

[breakingcontact]

The federal government is picking and choosing which laws apply and to whom. Millions of illegal immigrants...gov says they have civil right to citizenship. Guy grazing cattle on land his family has used for generations? Thats the criminal.

This is what people should be totally pissed off about. Capricious enforcement of laws, Obamacare violating the Constitution, just deciding not to enforce some laws such as basic immigration and citizenship laws, all 3 branches of government operating outside the Constitution, Americans being killed in Benghazi and our gov lying to cover it up, giving guns to cartels in Mexico then blocking the investigation, oh and the insanity of unending deficit increases. Yes I think this deal with the rancher can and should be handled differently and better but if people want something to be pissed about...the buffet is open.

 

[Kennydale]

I want to thank the Moderators for keeping this conversation open. In other forums this would have been closed down. Kudos to TGT it is the home of Free Dialog.

 

[Mreed911]

I want to thank the Moderators for keeping this conversation open. In other forums this would have been closed down. Kudos to TGT it is the home of Free Dialog.

Because it's remained civil. And I think that's Ben's point... from a distance, we can be more civil. Were it our family, our land, and one more straw on our backs from an "infringing, encroaching government," we might be on the videos, too.

 

[benenglish]

Here's a great video on the situation. The guy also touches on what I was talking about earlier on the topic of owning the land through your labor.

Yeah, that's an informative video. Seriously, it is.

Very close to the beginning, it makes it clear that Bundy blew it 5 years before the whole turtle issue came up by "firing" the BLM. After that, things kinda go downhill.

It seems clear to me that anyone who keeps bringing up the tortoise as an object of ridicule or symbol of government incompetence and corruption in this case (only) is engaged in rampant intellectual dishonesty. That rampant intellectual dishonesty, as well as some very clever, very snarky inflammatory language, then goes on to fill up the majority of the video.

As an aside - There are plenty of examples where the protection of endangered species has come at costs that are arguably too high...but that has nothing to do with the Bundy case.

By the 12:00 mark, he's equating the federal government with the mafia. I don't find hyperbole like that persuasive at all.

By 17:30, he's talking about a lack of moral standing on the part of the government in the most cloying terms, denying that governments can morally own land unless they live on it. Or something. Then, again, he returns to the tortoises. Sheesh.

Out of a sense of fairness to which I feel obliged, I watched the entire thing and listened carefully. It was, however, a tough slog to get to the end. The rampant false equivalencies, by themselves, made it almost impossible to get through it.

A few slightly off-kilter final thoughts -

• I'd love for a qualified botanist to have a go at criticizing this video. There's a bunch of pseudo-scientific language wrapping up stuff that I think is plain wrong but I'm not qualified to comment on the science.
• I started to run a transcript of this video against Carl Sagan's Bologna Detector but I think that would result in a melt-down of my brain. There's just too much.
• Finally, if anybody knows someone seeking an advanced degree in Rhetoric, send 'em a link to this video. I feel sure there's a thesis in there, somewhere.

 

[benenglish]

...if people want something to be pissed about...the buffet is open.

Agreed. And just like when I give in to temptation and visit Golden Corral, there's enough on the buffet to make me sick.

 

[benenglish]

And I think that's Ben's point... from a distance, we can be more civil. Were it our family, our land, and one more straw on our backs from an "infringing, encroaching government," we might be on the videos, too.

Yes, I feel that way. I'm glad that came through in what I was writing, even though I was mostly writing about other specifics.

I'm really not trying to rag on this particular guy or this particular situation too much. He hasn't been smart, he has blown his chances to successfully resist by legal means, and he has done harm to the fight for more freedom by being such a poor ambassador for freedom-loving people. Still, I'll bet that if I got a chance to meet him, well away from all this controversy, he's probably a great guy.

Ultimately I feel that this particular juxtaposition of issues, events, and players is really, really, even heartbreakingly unfortunate. Despite how much we might want to root for the downtrodden citizen, it turns out that there are no unalloyed good guys or bad guys in this little play. Without them, I fear that the opportunity for learning is lost for everyone. Very few people will dig enough to learn something close to the truth and without ethical clarity (which is missing on all sides), the players become merely fodder for whatever spin any commentator wants to put on them.

The situation has devolved to the point that people will use everything about it simply to sell ideologies; facts be damned.

It's all very sad.

 

[benenglish]

Follow the money.

...seems Harry Reid had friends or business partners that had property that was to be for the turtles and the BLM changed the original property boundaries to accommodate Harry's friends to develop their property...which impacted Bundy's ranch and grazing deal with the State...

If anybody has followed the money successfully enough to document political corruption like this, please post links to sources. The quoted text above is something I feel a real need to learn more about.

I kinda doubt there are any smoking guns to be found but I'm interested in the search, anyway.

 

[benenglish]

I want to thank the Moderators for keeping this conversation open. In other forums this would have been closed down. Kudos to TGT it is the home of Free Dialog.

I was a bit hyperbolic in the beginning but I've consciously toned that down. Other than that, the posters here have been sincere and polite. This is the kind of heartfelt disagreement that friends can have. Then they buy each other beers.

This is precisely the sort of low-butthurt, high-content discourse that brings me back to TGT daily.

If other forums are so afraid of honest adult conversation that they'd shut down a thread like this, well, then, that's just proof of the superiority of TGT.

Mods - Have I filled my sucking-up quota for the day?

 

[jrbfishn]

You suck up very well indeed.
Actually, the arguments on both sides, give cause to consider.


from a non-recovering coffeeholic

 

[TheDan]

Carl Sagan's Bologna Detector Kit... lol... I hadn't seen that before. Good axioms in there.

So Ben, you don't think the federal government has some mafia-esque tendencies? Now you're the one being intellectually dishonest. I do agree with you the whole tortoise thing is silly and besides the point. What is interesting to me is the nuances between public land and federally owned land. I used to be under the impression that BLM land is public, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The federal government owns this land to what purpose? The issue comes down to what ownership in something really is. Is it a piece of paper endorsed by the most recent government to conquer that area, or is it a right created through using your labor to create value in something? Governments don't have rights; people do.

 

[Kennydale]

Mafia-esque I like that analogy. Andrew Wilkow (Serious/XM Conservative commentator) described it like this. A man comes to you asking WILL YOU help someone he has his hand outstretched palms open... that's called charity. When Government comes to you with same request but puts it YOU WILL. The Government makes it a mandate, and they give it with a clenched fist. I'd call that Mafia-esque.

 

[Sapper740]

You sirius?

 

[shooterfpga]

52 of his neighbors were pushed out by the government and hes being called a criminal.... reminds me once again of the native americans

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk

 

[ZX9RCAM]

lol

Awesome discourse fellas....