Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on April 14, 2014, 10:21:49 AM
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The recent events in Nevada concerning the rancher Bundy, his cattle, BLM, grazing fees to the Feds, and the presence of armed militia have been of great concern to me. Most of us here believe in the Second Amendment, and understand that it is not about hunting or self-defense alone-- It is about defense of the nation from all enemires foreign and domestic, including if need be a government gone tyrannical.
This thread is for matters concerning where where that grey line may be.
In the case of the moment, as sympathetic as many of the apparent facts are for Bundy (his family has been grazing there since 1877, the apparent bull excrement nature of the tortoise story the Feds are putting out (apparently the Feds have bred so many turtles they are now killing some of them) The Feds owning/controlling some 84% of Nevada, etc there are many warning flags here. Apparently Bundy has unique legal theories disregarding settled law regarding the Feds and BLM. He has lost in court for some 20 years now. I doubt hardly anyone on his side could give an accurate summary of the courts' various rulings in the case on what the law is.
And for this militia types are willing to show up talking about shooting it out with the Feds?
As this forum well attests, my loathing for much that is being done to our country by the Federal government is open and obvious. That said, the rule of law is a precious thing, and not to be tossed away lightly. A civil society, a Constitutional Republic, requires that everyone sometimes accept what they believe to be a mistaken court ruling.
As additional facts come to light, I reserve the right to change my mind, but with what I have at the moment, is some people have allowed their passion to override good sense and they came very close to setting off something that would have given the Feds the opening for which they desperately and not always legally search to shut down our freedoms. I am very glad that cooler heads seem to have prevailed at BLM. I am concerned that many regular folks will form negative impressions of the Tea Party and related factions (militia types) based upon the foolish hot-headedness that seems to have been on display here.
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/14/3426222/militia-rancher-behind-bars/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/13/is-harry-reid-involved-seven-answers-to-seven-questions-youre-probably-asking-right-now-about-the-nevada-rancher-situation/
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OTOH
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/04/13/
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Signs in Arizona warn of smuggler dangers
Drivers advised to travel north
By Jerry Seper and Matthew Cella
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The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.
The signs were posted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, a major east-west corridor linking Tucson and Phoenix with San Diego.
They warn travelers that they are entering an “active drug and human smuggling area” and they may encounter “armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed.” Beginning less than 50 miles south of Phoenix, the signs encourage travelers to “use public lands north of Interstate 8” and to call 911 if they “see suspicious activity.”
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, whose county lies at the center of major drug and alien smuggling routes to Phoenix and cities east and west, attests to the violence. He said his deputies are outmanned and outgunned by drug traffickers in the rough-hewn desert stretches of his own county.
“Mexican drug cartels literally do control parts of Arizona,” he said. “They literally have scouts on the high points in the mountains and in the hills and they literally control movement. They have radios, they have optics, they have night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has.
“This is going on here in Arizona,” he said. “This is 70 to 80 miles from the border - 30 miles from the fifth-largest city in the United States.”
He said he asked the Obama administration for 3,000 National Guard soldiers to patrol the border, but what he got were 15 signs.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer condemned what she called the federal government’s “continued failure to secure our international border,” saying the lack of security has resulted in important natural recreational areas in her state being declared too dangerous to visit.
In a recent campaign video posted to YouTube, Mrs. Brewer - standing in front of one of the BLM signs - attacked the administration over the signs, calling them “an outrage” and telling President Obama to “Do your job. Secure our borders.”
BLM spokesman Dennis Godfrey in Arizona said agency officials were surprised by the reaction the signs generated when they were put up this summer.
“We were perhaps naive in setting the signs up,” he said. “The intention of the signs was to make the public aware that there is potential illegal activity here. But it was interpreted in a different light, and that was not the intent at all.”
He said there should be “no sense that we have ceded the land,” adding that no BLM lands in Arizona are closed to the public.
“I kind of liken it to if I were visiting a city I were not familiar with and asked a policeman if it were safe to go in a particular area,” Mr. Godfrey said.
Rising violence along the border has coincided with a crackdown in Mexico on warring drug gangs, who are seeking control of smuggling routes into the United States.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has waged a bloody campaign against powerful cartels, yesterday announcing the arrest of Texas-born Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez - a powerful cartel leader captured outside of Mexico City on Monday evening.
More than 28,000 people have died since Mr. Calderon launched his crackdown in late 2006, and the bloodshed shows no sign of ending. Law enforcement authorities have been warning for more than two years that the dramatic rise in border violence eventually would spread into the U.S.
T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 17,500 of the Border Patrol’s front-line agents, said areas well north of the border are so overrun by armed criminals that U.S. citizens are being warned to keep out of those locations.
“The federal government’s lack of will to secure our borders is painfully evident when signs are posted well north of the border warning citizens that armed and dangerous criminals are roaming through those areas with impunity,” he said. “Instead of taking the steps necessary to secure our borders, politicians are attempting to convince the public that our borders are more secure now than ever before.
“Fortunately, some responsible civil servants are candidly warning the public about the dangers that exist not just along the border but, in some cases, well beyond,” he said. “This situation should alarm all sensible people, and should spur endless demands that our legislators take whatever actions are necessary to restore law and order to these areas.”
Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican and a member of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, said the federal government’s new border security plan apparently is to “erect some signs telling you it’s not safe to travel in our own country.”
“If you are planning on loading up the station wagon and taking the kids to Disneyland, the federal government doesn’t advise going through Arizona - it’s too dangerous and they can’t protect you,” said Mr. Poe. “These signs say to American citizens, the federal government has ceded this area to the drug cartels. Don’t come here; we can’t protect you.”
Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called the signs “an insult to the citizens of border states.”
“American citizens should not have to be fearful for their lives on U.S. soil,” he said. “If the federal government would do its job of enforcing immigration laws, we could better secure the border and better protect the citizens of border states.”
Michael W. Cutler, a retired 31-year U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) senior criminal investigator and intelligence specialist, said the BLM warning signs suggest the U.S. government is “ceding American territory to armed criminals and smugglers.”
Meanwhile, he said, politicians in Washington, D.C., including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, continue to claim the border is now more secure than ever and, as a result, it is time for comprehensive immigration reform.
“How much more land will our nation cede to drug dealers and terrorists? At what point will the administration understand its obligations to really secure our nation’s borders and create an immigration system that has real integrity?” Mr. Cutler said.
“At the rate we are going, the ‘Red, White and Blue’ of the American flag will be replaced with a flag that is simply white - the flag of surrender.”
Ms. Napolitano said this week that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, extending the reach of the agency’s unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the 1,956-mile border with Mexico.
Last month, Mr. Obama signed a $600 million bill to beef up security along the southwestern border. The bill funds 1,000 more Border Patrol agents, as well as 250 CBP officers and two more unmanned aerial vehicles.
Two years ago, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the investigative arm of Homeland Security, said in a report that border gangs were becoming increasingly ruthless and had begun targeting not only rivals, but federal, state and local police. ICE said the violence had risen dramatically as part of “an unprecedented surge.”
The Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, in its 2010 drug threat assessment report, called the cartels “the single greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States.” It said Mexican gangs had established operations in every area of the United States and were expanding into rural and suburban areas. It said assaults against U.S. law enforcement officers along the southwestern border were on the increase - up 46 percent against Border Patrol agents alone.
At the same time, the Justice Department brought a lawsuit to stop a new immigration enforcement law in Arizona, saying it violated the Constitution by trying to supersede federal law and by impairing illegal immigrants’ right to travel and conduct interstate commerce.
Mr. Cutler said it was “outrageous” for the BLM to direct travelers to dial 911 to report suspicious activities since the calls do not go to the federal government but to state and local police. He said the signs are telling Americans to call state and local law enforcement authorities to deal with border lawlessness while at the same time telling Arizona that only the federal government can write and enforce immigration laws.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” he said.
Mr. Godfrey said that just because the signs direct travelers who witness illegal activity to call 911, “that does not mean that only a local agency will respond.”
“The idea is that people will get help as quickly as they can,” he said.
Sheriff Babeu has dealt firsthand with the rising violence in his county since his 2008 election. One of his deputies, Louie Puroll, was shot and critically wounded in April after he spotted five men he suspected of transporting drugs along a remote span of desert near Interstate 8 and Arizona 84.
He said his experience makes him see the issue differently from the administration in Washington.
“The president is only looking at this from a political perspective,” he said. “Everything is not fine. Everything is not OK.”
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/31/signs-in-arizona-warn-of-smuggler-dangers/
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http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-30/news/mn-1258_1_desert-tortoise
Desert Tortoises Threatened With Euthanasia Plan
August 30, 1991|PAUL FELDMAN | TIMES STAFF WRITER
The desert tortoise, a federally protected species since 1989, faces a new threat in the quickly developing Las Vegas Valley--euthanasia.
Under a plan approved by county and federal officials that is due to take effect in early September, tortoises living on Las Vegas-area properties slated for construction will be removed to a Clark County animal care center. Those that are not adopted or relocated within five days will be killed by lethal injection.
Authorities, who say that adequate funding is unavailable to hold the tortoises longer, say that the odds are in favor of most of the reptiles being saved by concerned Clark County residents.
"It sounds worse than it actually is," said federal Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist Michael McGill on Thursday. "There's a pretty good chance they'll get adopted. Most of them will find a home."
The euthanasia plan is part of a larger compromise reached by county and federal officials that will help provide funds and land to preserve a natural habitat for more than 60,000 desert tortoises in more pristine areas of Nevada, authorities said.
For its part, Clark County has agreed to purchase the rights to use more than 400,000 acres of BLM land as a desert tortoise preserve. For the next three years, the land, much of it near Searchlight, would be off limits to off-road vehicles. Authorities would also ward off birds that eat thin-shelled baby tortoises.
More than $6 million would be provided to purchase the land rights and establish a trust fund from fees assessed to Las Vegas developers, who will also be charged $40 per tortoise for the housing at the animal care center.
In exchange, developers will be allowed to remove the tortoises from their own land.
Since 1989, it has been illegal to take, harm or kill a desert tortoise without a federal permit. In the Las Vegas valley, construction was forced to a standstill on properties where the tortoises resided.
Officials said the Las Vegas tortoises--as many as 3,000 are expected to be uncovered by developers in the next three years--will not be relocated in the Searchlight habitat. Doing so could result in overpopulation. Also, they said, many of the Vegas tortoises suffer from a respiratory disease that might be passed on to their rural cousins.
"This was the compromise we felt we had to come up with when there was a limited amount of money to be spent," said Betty Burge, chairwoman of the Tort Group, a Las Vegas-based tortoise conservation organization.
However, the agreement has stirred questions among other tortoise preservationists.
"That's saying that development will take place no matter what and development should be slowed down until you can figure out that 'what,' " said Elden Hughes, chairman of the Sierra Club's California Desert Committee. "You should find a place where you can put the tortoises. . . . I'm sure they have enough money to put researchers on it."
Palm Springs attorney Paul Selzer, who represented Clark County in the negotiations for the federal permit, said the rules occasionally led to bizarre situations.
"You ended up with this weird deal where two pieces of property were next to each other and one had a tortoise and one didn't. So one guy developed and what do you think happened to the desert tortoise next door? The neighborhood kids picked it up, or a dog got it, or it went in the street and got run over."
Selzer said that long-range efforts will be made to relocate Vegas-vicinity tortoises in the wild, but that it is not clear whether the tortoises can be moved successfully in the wild. "You can't just pick these dudes up and corral them and put them back in the desert," he said.
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Signs in Arizona warn of smuggler dangers
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/31/signs-in-arizona-warn-of-smuggler-dangers/
This story is amazing. The Feds concede the loss of control, turn it to state and local authorities and then ban them from any enforcement. If it's not safe or secure 75 miles in, then its not safe anywhere - it's not like we have another line of defense somewhere further in.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/14/defiant-reid-vows-bundy-ranch-confrontation-not-ov/?page=all#pagebreak
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/why-you-should-be-sympathetic-toward-cliven-bundy.php
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/04/15/
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NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
April 15, 2014 4:00 PM
The Case for a Little Sedition
The Bundy standoff reminds us that government is our servant, not our master.
By Kevin D. Williamson
A great deal of the discussion about the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and the BLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John
Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.
Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.
But not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.” And there is a price to pay for that, too: King George not only would have been well within his legal rights to hang every one of this nation’s seditious Founding Fathers, he would have been duty-bound to do so, the keeping of the civil peace being the first responsibility of the civil authority. Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers? The situation was less dramatic during the government shutdown, but every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.
Harry Reid, apparently eager for somebody to play the role of General Dyer in this civil-disobedience drama, promises that this is “not over.” And, in a sense, it can’t be over: The theory of modern government is fundamentally Hobbesian in its insistence that where political obedience is demanded, that demand must be satisfied lest we regress into bellum omnium contra omnes. I myself am of the view that there is a great deal of real estate between complete submission and civil war, and that acts such as Mr. Bundy’s are not only bearable in a free republic but positively salubrious. Unhappily, those views are not shared by many in Washington, and, if I were a wagering sort, my money would be on Mr. Bundy ending up dead or in prison, with a slight bias in the odds toward death.
Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington both were British subjects who believed that their legal situation was at odds with something deeper and more meaningful, and that the British were a legal authority but an alien power. (Washington is not really so much closer to London than New Delhi is.) Mr. Bundy is tapping into a longstanding tendency in the American West to view the federal government as a creature of the eastern establishment, with political and economic interests that are inimical to those of the West and its people. And it is not as though there is no evidence supporting that suspicion. The federal government controls 87 percent of the land in Nevada, something that would be unheard-of in any state east of Colorado. Uncle Sam owns less than 1 percent of the land in New York, 1 percent of Maine, less than 1 percent of Rhode Island, less than 1 percent of Connecticut, but nearly half of New Mexico and Arizona, more than half of Utah and Idaho, and is practically a monopolist in Nevada. And a monopolist is rarely a good and honest negotiating partner. The original Sagebrush rebels objected to conservation rules written by eastern environmentalists who had never so much as set foot in the lands they were disposing of; a century and some later, people travel more, but the underlying dynamic is the same.
There are of course questions of prudence and proportion to be answered here, and though I note that he uses the very strong phrase “lawless government,” I sympathize with Mr. Lowry’s desire that both sides should follow the law. But there is a more important question here: Is government our servant, or is it our master? The Left has long ago answered that question to the satisfaction of its partisans, who are happy to be serfs so long as their birth control is subsidized. But the Right always struggles with that question, as it must. The thing that conservatives seek to conserve is the American order, which (1) insists that we are to be governed by laws rather than by men and (2) was born in a violent revolution. Russell Kirk described the conservative ideal as “ordered liberty,” and that is indeed what we must aim for — keeping in mind that it is order that serves liberty, not the other way around. And it is the government that exists at the sufferance of the people, including such irascible ones as Mr. Bundy, not the other way around.
If the conservatives in official Washington want to do something other than stand by and look impotent, they might consider pressing for legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process. Even the Obama administration has identified a very large portfolio of office buildings and other federal holdings that are unused or under-used. By some estimates, superfluous federal holdings amount to trillions of dollars in value. Surely not every inch of that 87 percent of Nevada under the absentee-landlordship of the federal government is critical to the national interest. Perhaps Mr. Bundy would like to buy some land where he can graze his cattle.
Prudential measures do not solve questions of principle. So where does that leave us with our judgment of the Nevada insurrection? Perhaps with an understanding that while Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action, it is nonetheless the case that, in measured doses, a little sedition is an excellent thing.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/375924/bundy-and-rule-law-andrew-c-mccarthy
Bundy and the Rule of Law
By Andrew C. McCarthy
April 16, 2014 5:04 PM
I agree with David and Rich that John Hinderaker’s Bundy post is very strong. As a matter of law, Cliven Bundy is in the wrong. He is nevertheless a sympathetic figure, and the concerns raised by the standoff in Nevada transcend the illegality of his conduct.
Rich’s recollection of Lincoln’s exhortation that reverence for the law become “the political religion of the nation” triggered my recollection of a seemingly inconsistent speech Lincoln delivered as president nearly a quarter-century later. As the Civil War raged, the president very controversially suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law in states where Confederate operatives and sympathizers were taking seditious action. Addressing Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln defended his suspension of the writ:
Of course some consideration was given to the questions of power and propriety before this matter was acted upon. The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen’s liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?
Now, it was only advisedly that I described this speech as “seemingly” inconsistent with the one Rich excerpted. For one thing, Lincoln did not believe his suspension of the writ violated the law, and he had a very colorable argument. The Constitution provides for the writ’s suspension in cases of rebellion or invasion; it does not say who may suspend it. The Supreme Court’s eventual conclusion (in the 1866 case of Ex Parte Milligan) that Congress must enact a suspension because the relevant clause is in Article I was sensible, but it was not indisputable. Lincoln was not without reason to believe that he had the necessary authority as long as a rebellion or invasion had occurred. Moreover, Lincoln’s passion for the rule of law was evident even in the act of arguably breaking it: He not only vigorously contended that his suspension was lawful; he also urged Congress to affirm the suspension by passing legislation (which Congress did in 1863).
But all that said, Lincoln’s speech does justify law-breaking in extraordinary circumstances. I’d construe his argument as follows: Even if what I have done is unlawful, it was necessary because it was done for the higher purpose of preserving the system that protects our liberties—under dire circumstances where violating the law was more faithful to the Constitution than obeying it would have been.
Many of us think Lincoln was right—I certainly do, and I even suspect the Supreme Court did (note that the suspension was invalidated only after the war was over). This informs our assessment of the situation in Nevada, and explains why Bundy gets our sympathetic consideration even if we cannot absolve his illegal conduct.
The underlying assumption of our belief in the rule of law is that we are talking about law in the American tradition: provisions that obligate everyone equally and that are enforced dispassionately by a chief executive who takes seriously the constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. The rule of law is not the whim of a man who himself serially violates the laws he finds inconvenient and who, under a distortion of the “prosecutorial discretion” doctrine, gives a pass to his favored constituencies while punishing his opposition. The rule of law is the orderly foundation of our free society; when it devolves into a vexatious process by which ideologues wielding power undertake to tame those whose activities they disfavor, it is not the rule of law anymore.
The legitimacy of law and our commitment to uphold it hinge on our sense that the law and its execution are just. As John Hinderaker points out, concerns about the desert tortoise—the predicate for taking lawful action against Nevada ranchers under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—turn out to be pretextual. The ideologues who run the government only want to enforce the ESA against a disfavored class, the ranchers. If you’re a well-connected Democrat who needs similar land for a solar project, the Obama administration will not only refrain from enforcing the ESA against you; it will transport the tortoises to the ranchers’ location in order to manufacture a better pretext for using the law to harass the ranchers.
When law becomes a politicized weapon rather than a reflection of society’s shared principles, one can no longer expect it to be revered in a manner befitting “political religion.” And when the officials trusted to execute law faithfully violate laws regularly, they lose their presumption of legitimacy. Much of the public is not going to see the Feds versus Bundy as the Law versus the Outlaw; we are more apt to see it as the Bully versus the Small Fry.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/19/scalias-students-high-taxes-certain-point-perhaps-/
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second posthttp://youngcons.com/how-liberals-view-benghazi-vs-fort-hood-vs-bundy-ranch-summed-up-perfectly-in-3-pictures/
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Haven't had a chance to look at this yet (clip is 37 minutes!) but it alleges to have found proof of Dingy Harry having direct financial interest in the land around Bundy.
Anyone care to take a look at this?
http://prepperchimp.com/2014/04/20/must-see-video-blm-whistleblower-reid-bunkerville-llc-owns-land-around-the-bundy-ranch/
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http://prepperchimp.com/2014/04/19/awesome-video-bundy-ranch-supporter-crushes-nbc-news-host/
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Revealed: Obama's friend and civil rights firebrand Rev. Al Sharpton was a paid FBI informant who wore wire to trap Genovese, Gambino family wiseguys
Sharpton has been a political ally of Barack Obama for two decades, and the president will speak to his civil rights group this week
That group, the National Action Network, owes the government a reported $1.9 million in back taxes and penalties related to a 2006 tax investigation
New allegations claim Sharpton worked as an FBI informant against organized crime in the 1980s
His work was said to have been instrumental in putting Genovese family bosses in prison
He claimed in an interview on Saturday that he wasn't an FBI snitch but refused to specifically deny taping conversations with a mafia capo
ByDavid Martosko, U.s. Political Editor
Published: 16:27 EST, 7 April 2014 | Updated: 08:44 EST, 8 April 2014
Rev. Al Shaprton, the controversial civil rights leader-turned-broadcaster, was a confidential FBi informant for years and helped the feds put members of the Genovese and Gambino organized crime families behind bars, it was revealed Monday in a sensational exposé.
President Barack Obama will speak this week for the second time at the annual meeting of Sharpton's National Action Network.
New allegations published by The Smoking Gun allege that beginning in the 1980s, Sharpton worked as an informant for many years on mob groups for an organized crime task force made up of FBI agents and detectives with the New York Police Department.
In fact it was some of those investigators who gave Sharpton up, providing the documents to the website known for seeding the Internet with groundbreaking papers exposing details of court cases that embarass celebrities.
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Sharpton has been part of President Obama's inner circle since his days as an Illinois state legislator -- long before the wayward reverend defended his friend nightly on MSNBC
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Vincent 'Chin' Gigante (C) was a Genovese crime family boss who pretended to be mentally ill in order to escape responsibility for his crimes -- but Sharpton helped foil his plot when he taped other mob figures discussing the ruse
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Checkered past: A more hirsute Sharpton (in blue track suit, C) advised the rape-hoaxer Tawana Brawley in 1998 and led marches on her behalf before her claims were unmasked as a fraud
'- ne Gambino crime family figure became so comfortable with the protest leader that he spoke openly – during ten wired face-to-face meetings – about a wide range of mob business,' The Smoking Gun reported Monday.
That included everything 'from shylocking and extortions to death threats and the sanity of Vincent "Chin" Gigante, the Genovese boss who long feigned mental illness in a bid to deflect law enforcement scrutiny.
'As the mafioso expounded on these topics, Sharpton’s briefcase--a specially customized Hartman model – recorded his every word.'
Sharpton denied his law enforcement ties on Saturday when The Smoking Gun asked him point-blank about it.
He claimed his only link with the FBI was related to drug dealing cases in minority communities and recording industry efforts to cheat black artists in the recording industry.
More...
Al Sharpton condemns 'shop and frisk' at Manhattan stores and threatens direct action against Barneys after racial profiling claims
Sharpton leads march over 'stand your ground' law
RFK Jr slammed 'creepy' Al Sharpton and said Andrew Cuomo lacked humanity in diary where he kept a ranking system of all of the women he had sex with
'I'm his girlfriend': Rev. Al Sharpton dating 35-year-old stylist after 24-year marriage
They are violent gangsters who kill, traffic drugs and kidnap...but new research reveals Mafia mobsters are NOT all psychopaths
But when asked whether he recorded his conversations with a Gambino mob family member, he would only say, 'I'm not saying yes, I’m not saying no.'
Veteran investigators who tracked Genovese crime family members for a living told The Smoking Gun that Sharpton, now 59, brought a specially-equipped Hartman briefcase to meetings with that mobster, recording the conversations and later handing the tapes over to the feds.
Sharpton's National Action Network, which will host Obama on Friday, has skirted responsibility for $1.9 million in back taxes and penalties it has owed the IRS since a 2006 investigation into improper tax reporting.
He also owes more than $888,000 in personal debts related to a failed 2004 presidential campaign, and $100,000 more in related debts to the federal government.
There are strong personal ties between Sharpton and Barack Obama, including several Oval office visits on topics as diverse as jobs and education – mostly with other black community leaders.
Sharpton was also on hand for first lady Michelle Obama's 50th birthday party as a guest of hte Obamas. And he had a seat near the guest of honor at a State Dinner this year honoring French President Francois Hollande.
He brought his girlfriend, a woman barely half his age.
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Vincent 'Chin' Gigante died in 2005 while serving a 12 year prison sentence after finally admitting he wasn't insane. This mug shot dates from 1960, when he was convicted at age 32 of helping mob boss Vito Genovese run a narcotics ring
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Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, commands the attention of leaders like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (center R) and police commissioner William Bratton (C) , perhaps because he has helped the city make cases against mob bosses
But court affidavits and other papers The Smoking Gun published on Monday indicate that he also provided information to federal investigators that helped them persuade judges to authorize phone tapping and audio bugs at two Genovese family 'social clubs,' including Vincent Gigante’s headquarters in New York City's Greenwich Village.
They also put bugs in three cars and more than a dozen phone lines, largely because of information Sharpton provided, yielding information used in a major racketeering case against the Genoveses.
One such case targeted Federico 'Fritzy' Giovanelli, a Genovese soldier was drew a 20 years in prison sentence for racketeering; recordings made because of information Sharpton provided were played in open court.
Giovanelli later said he had no idea Sharpton was related to his case. 'Poor Sharpton,' he laughed: 'He cleaned up his life and you want to ruin him.'
The Smoking Gun claimed Monday that Sharpton became an FBI informant after he was 'flipped' – meaning that he was promised special legal treatment - perhaps immunity from prosecution - in exchange for his cooperation.
That case reportedly involved a 1983 sting operation aimed at boxing promoter Don King, who was convicted on second-degree murder in 1966, a host of elected officials, 'and several powerful New York hoodlums involved in concert promotion, record distribution, and talent management.'
+7
President Barack Obama spoke at the 20th anniversary National Action Network Gala on April 6, 2011, and plans to return this week for a repeat performance
+7
Golden boy: Sharpton has been untouchable despite his group's tax debts and his $888,000 in personal debts related to a failed 2004 presidential campaign
The White House did not respond to a question about whether the president will keep his speaking engagement at the National Action Network.
That group also did not respond to a request for comment.
Sharpton claimed in his 2013 book 'The Rejected Stone' that he never informed for the government, saying that any attempt to paint him as a snitch was a ploy to squelch his loud voice in the civil rights movement.
He was once 'set up by the government,' he said, when agents leaked 'false information' that 'could have gotten me killed.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2599214/Revealed-Obamas-friend-civil-rights-firebrand-Rev-Al-Sharpton-paid-FBI-informant-wore-wire-trap-Genovese-family-wiseguys.html
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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http://nypost.com/2014/04/12/sharpton-was-eager-to-sell-coke-in-the-80s-pal/
Sharpton was ‘eager to get slice of 1980s coke deal’: pal
By Frank Rosario
April 12, 2014 | 2:33am
.
Left: President Obama shakes hand with Rev. Al Sharpton at the Sheraton New York Friday. Right: Robert Curington gives The Post his account of how Sharpton ended up recording mob conversations for the FBI. Photo: AP/Sammy Dallal
DURHAM, NC — A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.
“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.
Sharpton has said he showed interest in the drug deal only because he feared the undercover agent was armed. He also claimed that he snitched for the feds — as first reported by The Smoking Gun this week — because the mob was threatening him.
Curington called all of that a tall tale.
He instead provided a detailed account of how Sharpton wined and dined a man he thought was a South American drug lord — and said Sharpton met him not just once, but three times.
Sharpton’s saga began in the Manhattan offices of boisterous boxing big shot Don King in 1983, Curington said.
An unnamed felon trying to duck a 30-year prison sentence promised the feds he could help them nail King on coke-dealing charges.
An undercover FBI agent, using the name Victor Quintana, set up a meeting with King to discuss a boxing match in the Bahamas — but King had a bad feeling about the potential business partner and pawned him off on Sharpton.
Modal Trigger
Don King in 2002.Photo: Reuters
“King was sly — he knew something was off about this,” Curington said. “So he kept him downstairs and let his new best friend Al Sharpton talk to him.”
Sharpton was eager to help, and “would spend cash taking him to dinner and chauffeur him around in a limo, feeling him out,” Curington said.
Then, at a restaurant, “they are talking and cutting their steaks. The agent’s voice changes, midstream, and he says, ‘I know where 10 kilos of cocaine are and we can make some big money on this.’
“Sharpton didn’t roll alone — he had a friend or adviser with him who says, ‘Hold it! This meeting is over. You come in here talking about boxing and now you’re gonna talk about cocaine? Let’s go, Al. We’re not into that.’
“Sharpton was hesitant to leave,” Curington remembered. “I believe he wanted to hear him out, but he listened to his friend.”
Sharpton met with Quintana a second time, in a hotel. Again, cocaine came up, and Sharpton’s pals called off the meeting.
At the third meeting with Quintana, Sharpton made sure to go alone — wearing a cowboy hat and chomping on an unlit cigar, which was made famous in footage from the FBI surveillance leaked in 2002.
“The agent said you would get $3,500 per kilo,” said Curington, who was not at the meetings but was told about them by Sharpton.
“Sharpton moved on it, and they sprung the trap on him right away. They got him.
“Al told me himself. He bit and took the bait.”
“He was like two people. He ran around trying to score money for his National Youth Movement. But you can’t be an activist and an opportunist.”
And once he was caught, he had no choice but to wear a wire to save his ample hide from prison.
“Sharpton said they could do whatever they wanted with him after that,” Curington said. “Because they had him. Either he worked for them or they put that news out there that he was into coke.”
Curington, a former record producer and music promoter who served two years in prison in the late 1970s on drug charges, served as an executive at Sharpton’s National Youth Movement in the 1980s.
Sharpton said on Friday that it is “not true” that he was at three separate meetings with the undercover agent where cocaine was discussed.
“Bob Curington is blatantly wrong,” said Sharpton, adding that if the repeated meetings were true, he could have claimed entrapment by the government.
He also claimed again that he became a snitch not because of the drug sting, but because of threats by the mob.
Curington said the activist put on a good show with his bluster and conviction — but inside, Sharpton was terrified of his FBI role, recording murderous mobsters like Joseph “Joe Bana” Buonanno.
“He was absolutely frightened about the job he had to do for the FBI,” Curington said. The feds trained Sharpton immediately, and “he didn’t know how to handle it.”
“He was really tormented. I told him, ‘You should have just listened to your advisers. Because you’re in deep.’ I said, ‘Why are you talking to these types of people?’ He was just greedy. It was all for money.”
Even as he preached against the ravages of crack cocaine on the inner city, Sharpton loved the white powder, Curington said.
When asked about his cocaine use, Sharpton said, “Absolutely, unequivocally no.”
Curington also said Sharpton only had money on his mind.
“He was like two people,” he said. “He ran around trying to score money for his National Youth Movement. But you can’t be an activist and an opportunist.”
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Woof GM: I'm thinking the Sharpton stuff better belongs in the "Cog. Dis. of the Left" thread.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/04/24/youve-got-to-distance-yourself-bundy-under-fire-for-racist-negro-comments/
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/04/24/youve-got-to-distance-yourself-bundy-under-fire-for-racist-negro-comments/
What a dumbass. What a way to go from sympathetic figure to pariah in less than a minute.
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i don't have the time right now for a proper conversation, but I note that this is going to be used as confirmation by many that the Tea Party is racist. Let's use the Tea Party thread to discuss.
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Second post
http://filmingcops.com/china-police-beat-a-woman-men-begin-killing-cops-on-the-streets/
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http://thefreethoughtproject.com/citizens-baltimore-fighting-speed-cameras-by-disabling/
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http://www.tpnn.com/2014/04/24/eric-holder-cancels-police-academy-speech-after-protesters-demand-new-officers-arrest-him/
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/04/29/glenn-attacked-for-nonviolent-response-to-bundy-conflict-has-a-message-for-critics/
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This sort of stuff sets off a backlash , , , one that we really may not like , , , :cry:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bundy-ranch-militia-checkpoints-horsford
http://gawker.com/nevada-militia-sets-up-armed-checkpoints-demands-to-se-1569203069
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This sort of stuff sets off a backlash , , , one that we really may not like , , , :cry:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bundy-ranch-militia-checkpoints-horsford
http://gawker.com/nevada-militia-sets-up-armed-checkpoints-demands-to-se-1569203069
Keeping the above post in mind, how should law enforcement be armed?
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http://thefreethoughtproject.com/citizens-baltimore-fighting-speed-cameras-by-disabling/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/27/what-activists-did-near-the-nsas-massive-data-center-in-utah-to-demand-an-end-to-mass-spying/
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http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/07/06/SOURCE-FEDS-To-Bring-in-Riot-Squad-Against-Illegal-Immigration-Protesters
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/11/border-militia-plot-evaporates-into-cluster-coitus-as-doubts-arise-over-commander/
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/11/minuteman-project-seeks-recruits-to-patrol-the-border/
What do we think of this?
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"What do we think of this?"
Dunno. But does vent frustration felt by many of us.
Democrats selling us out for votes.
Republicans selling us out for cheap labor.
Billionaires from both sides selling us out for cheap labor.
Church selling us out for new members.
Union bosses ( not members ) selling us out for new members to keep them in power and money.
People here legally are the ones who will suffer from this. What about us?
Drudge reports some stories of American minorities starting to wake up to being sold down the river.
I reject any claims I am racist but one cannot drive around where I live and not see huge numbers of short American Indian looking people all over the place. On the streets, riding bicycles, waiting for rides, going in and out of ERs, Ob floors, often with children in tow. And probably the vast majority of these are illegals. What about all the others from Europe, Africa, Caribbean, Asia, Middle East who blend in more who are amongst us that are less obvious? What about them bringing over family members?
And people still say Obama is a nice guy? Just incompetent, or misled? :roll:
He knows full well what is happening. He will grant them amnesty before he leaves office. He is truly a very angry bitter man.
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Are these guys clowns, patriots, or both?
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/13/are-the-minutemen-returning-to-the-border/
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Are these guys clowns, patriots, or both?
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/13/are-the-minutemen-returning-to-the-border/
Sadly, my money is on clowns.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/baltimore-and-grants-pass_b_7203042.html
Very interesting on many levels. Comments?
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/baltimore-and-grants-pass_b_7203042.html
Very interesting on many levels. Comments?
How many business did the oathkeepers loot and burn? How many assaults occurred? I take it Grant's Pass is a charred shell now.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/05/09/6-reasons-why-pamela-gellers-muhammad-cartoon-contest-is-no-different-than-selma/
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I'm thinking there must be a better thread for that than this one , , ,
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Why? It's resistance to totalitarianism?
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I'm thinking this thread is about action, and not speech.
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http://unsavoryagents.com/?projects=jihad-free-zone
Fight back!
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GM we need the likes Ghandi or MLK (and BHO) to go over to Syria, and Iraq and march with arms locked down the streets singing we shall overcome so as to shame those misguided young men into a reawakening of love, peace on Earth, and mutual respect and tolerance for all their fellow men (and babes).
That will fix this.
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Not advocating this, just sharing this URL:
https://www.rt.com/usa/327762-armed-bundy-militia-oregon-ranchers/
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/03/bundy-brothers-militia-occupy-oregon-wildlife-refuge-building.html
Curious minds want to know: Does "miners getting back to mining" mean they get to pollute the hell out of things?
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Not advocating this, just sharing this URL:
https://www.rt.com/usa/327762-armed-bundy-militia-oregon-ranchers/
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/03/bundy-brothers-militia-occupy-oregon-wildlife-refuge-building.html
Curious minds want to know: Does "miners getting back to mining" mean they get to pollute the hell out of things?
Good thing the Californian economy runs purely on Unicorn based energy and resources! :-D
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Source completely unknown to me:
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/03/full-story-on-whats-going-on-in-oregon-militia-take-over-malheur-national-wildlife-refuge-in-protest-to-hammond-family-persecution/
This one was posted by Frankie McRae on his FB page:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3JqIceKh6I&feature=youtu.be
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BTW, notice the Feds are calling this group "terrorist". Some of us might keep this in mind the next time Big Brother surveillance issues arise.
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BTW, notice the Feds are calling this group "terrorist". Some of us might keep this in mind the next time Big Brother surveillance issues arise.
If they are formally designated a terrorist group, does that mean Obama will give them nukes?
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https://www.oathkeepers.org/the-hammond-family-does/
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As best as I can tell with the info I have available in this moment this makes sense to me:
http://havokjournal.com/nation/playing-war-the-armed-ranchers-in-oregon-know-nothing-about-real-citizenry/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork
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https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2660399-Statement-USattorney.html
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2211350/Attorney-General-Eric-Holder-armed-took-protest-Columbia-occupied-school-office-FIVE-days.
Some are more equal than others.
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http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/04/unbelievable-update-oregon-bundy-militia-standoff-the-federal-prosecutor-at-the-heart-of-the-hammond-family-problem/
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(Famous people who don't need to read the forum)
Stephen Hayward at Powerline had the same first reaction to the Oregon standoff that I have,
The Federal Government owns too much land.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/thoughts-on-oregon.php
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https://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/no-heroes-in-the-west-fire-feds-and-freeloaders/
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The Western Land Revolt
The Bundy siege is wrong, but so is government abuse.
Ammon Bundy on January 5 near Burns, Oregon. ENLARGE
Ammon Bundy on January 5 near Burns, Oregon. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Jan. 5, 2016 7:36 p.m. ET
127 COMMENTS
As the FBI seeks to end the citizen takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it’s worth reflecting on what is behind the rising civil disobedience in the American West. The armed occupation of federal buildings is inexcusable, but so are federal land-management abuses and prosecutorial overreach.
Activists on Saturday broke into an unoccupied building on the 187,000-acre federal refuge in eastern Oregon to protest the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers. The group’s spokesman is Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevadan who in 2014 came to national attention over his standoff with the Bureau of Land Management. The younger Bundy is a political grandstander, and many in Oregon oppose his illegal siege.
The drama is bringing attention to legitimate grievances, especially the appalling federal treatment of the Hammond family. The Hammonds’ problems trace to 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside 89,000 acres around Malheur Lake as a bird refuge. The government has since been on a voracious land-and-water grab, coercing the area’s once-thriving ranchers to sell.
The feds have revoked dozens of grazing permits and raised the price of the few it issues. It has mismanaged the area’s water, allowing ranchlands to flood. It has harassed landowners with regulatory actions that raise the cost of ranching, then has bought out private landowners to more than double the refuge’s size.
The Hammonds are one of the last private owners in the Harney Basin, and they have endured federal harassment over their water rights, the revocation of their grazing permits, restricted access to their property, and prosecutorial abuse.
In 2001 the family told authorities it planned to set a managed fire on its land to fight invasive species. The fire accidently spread over 139 acres of public land before the Hammonds extinguished it. In 2006 the family tried to save its winter feed from a lightning fire by setting “back fires” on its property (a common practice), which burnt an acre of public land.
Years later, in 2011, the feds charged Dwight Hammond and his son Steven with nine counts under the elastic Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A federal jury found them guilty only of setting the two fires they had admitted to starting, and federal Judge Michael Hogan sentenced the father to three months and the son to a year in prison. He said the federal minimum of five years would not meet “any idea I have of justice, proportionality” and would “shock the conscience.” The feds appealed the sentence and another judge ordered both Hammonds to serve the full five years. They also owe $400,000 in supposed fire-related costs.
Many in rural Oregon view this as a government vendetta. Rusty Inglis, who worked for the Forest Service for 34 years and now runs a local Oregon farm bureau, recently told a trade magazine that it’s “obvious” that “the BLM and the wildlife refuge want that ranch.” The Oregon Farm Bureau called the sentences “gross government overreach.” The ideology of “national” land has become the club to punish private landowners who are the best source of economic stability and conservation.
The Bundy occupation of federal land can’t be tolerated, but the growing Western opposition to government harassment of private landowners ought to be a source of political concern. Ted Cruz and others are right to caution the occupiers against their sit-in, but the federal bureaucracy also needs to be reined in.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/08/im-an-oregon-rancher-heres-what-you-dont-understand-about-the-bundy-standoff/
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http://seekingredress.com/2016/01/08/what-the-stand-off-in-oregon-is-distracting-us-from/
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http://www.occupydemocrats.com/all-hell-breaks-loose-in-oregon-as-bundy-militia-is-confronted-by-another-armed-patriot-militia/
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http://gawker.com/angry-militia-leader-stop-mailing-us-dildos-1752580458
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Reliability of this site unknown:
http://www.punkrocklibertarians.com/breaking-oregon-fire-chief-catches-fbi-posing-militia-quits-job-protest/
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The perspective from which this is written speaks for itself.
https://georgepatton325.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/oregon-lessons-learned-or-lessons-you-better-learn/
When fellow travelers like this are telling the Oregon intervenors they are wrong in these terms, , , ,
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-tighten-security-around-oregon-refuge-in-move-to-end-standoff-1453916652
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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/berserk-militant-promises-bloodbath-as-feds-move-in-this-is-a-free-for-all-armageddon/
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second post
Leader Seeks End to Oregon Refuge Occupation
After arrest, Bundy says remaining protesters should leave wildlife refuge
Oregonian/Associated Press
By Tamara Audi,
Jim Carlton and
Alejandro Lazo
Updated Jan. 27, 2016 6:59 p.m. ET
187 COMMENTS
BURNS, Ore.—The leader of a four-week armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge here on Wednesday called for the remaining protesters to end the occupation, a day after he was arrested in a deadly confrontation with authorities.
“To those remaining at the refuge: I love you. Let us take the fight from here,” Ammon Bundy said in a statement released by his lawyer.
“Please stand down. Please stand down. Go home and hug your families. This fight is ours in the courts. Please go home,” the lawyer, Mike Arnold, read in the statement from Mr. Bundy after his court hearing Wednesday.
Mr. Bundy also asked law-enforcement officials to allow the protesters to leave without being prosecuted.
“Let me be clear—it is the actions and choices of the armed occupiers of the refuge that has led us to where we are today,” said Greg Bretzing, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Oregon.
Since the armed group took over the refuge Jan. 2 to protest federal land-management policies, they have insisted they want a peaceful outcome. But some said they were willing to die for their cause.
LaVoy Finicum, who served as the occupiers’ spokesman, indicated in a video interview a week ago that he hoped the protest wouldn’t turn violent. On Tuesday, Mr. Finicum was killed in the roadside confrontation with FBI agents.
The circumstances of Mr. Finicum’s death were being debated Wednesday: Supporters and a witness said he was surrendering when he was shot; authorities said he brandished a weapon.
Eight people linked to the Oregon occupation were arrested Tuesday: top row from left, Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier and Shawna Cox; bottom row from left, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, Ryan Payne, Jon Eric Ritzheimer and Peter Santilli. ENLARGE
Eight people linked to the Oregon occupation were arrested Tuesday: top row from left, Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier and Shawna Cox; bottom row from left, Joseph Donald O'Shaughnessy, Ryan Payne, Jon Eric Ritzheimer and Peter Santilli. Photo: Multnomah County Sheriff
Either way, it was clear that his death changed the tone of the occupation from what had become a media sideshow to the tense standoff locals had long feared—raising the stakes both for law enforcement and the remaining protesters.
“Certainly we’re at a dangerous point,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover infiltrating militia and white supremacist groups in the 1990s.
Federal law-enforcement officials have been under rising pressure from state and local officials to end the standoff. The protesters, meanwhile, received a torrent of social media response from supporters who consider themselves part of a “liberty movement” seeking to resist what they see as an overreach of federal power. Some pointed to Mr. Finicum’s death as proof of their argument, a rallying cry to draw protesters to the scene.
“The resolve for principled liberty must go on,” Mr. Bundy’s supporters said in a statement on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page. “It appears that America was fired upon by our government. One of America’s finest patriots is fallen. We will not go silent into eternity. Our appeal is to heaven.”
In Burns, a town of about 2,700 people, some residents predicted the standoff was nearing its end. Sitting in the Central Pastime Tavern, Melvin Dixon said that he had his 8-year-old son, Dilbert James, call one of the men involved in the standoff, his brother-in-law Danny Williams.
“My 8-year-old son called his uncle crying and they are right there in a meeting” discussing whether to surrender or not, Mr. Dixon said. “They are not going to fight no more.”
For weeks, Mr. Bundy—the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who engaged in a similar standoff with authorities in 2014 over grazing fees—moved in and out of the refuge as he wished, with law-enforcement officials making few overt moves to force an end to the standoff.
That changed Tuesday when agents arrested Mr. Bundy, 40 years old, his brother, Ryan Bundy, 43, and three other supporters as they were driving to a nearby county for a community meeting. Three others were later arrested in connection with the protest.
The eight suspects were arrested on the felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the U.S. from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.
According to the criminal complaint against Mr. Bundy and the others, the protesters “had explosives, night vision goggles and weapons” and “if they didn’t get the fight they wanted out there they would bring the fight to town.”
Nathan Catura, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, applauded the arrests—but criticized federal officials for not making them so sooner. “Had the situation been resolved more quickly via the federal government acting rather than reacting, this conclusion may have been prevented,’’ Mr. Catura said. “We now hope that with the sustained federal-law enforcement presence, the remaining criminals at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will surrender peacefully.’’
Federal authorities generally have been reluctant to engage with armed protesters like the Oregon group, mindful of past violent outcomes like those at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Darrell Kerby, a former mayor of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, who served on a county emergency committee during the Ruby Ridge standoff, said he worried that political pressure might compel authorities to act rashly. “Time is really on the side of the people in authority,” Mr. Kerby said. “Use of force should be avoided at all costs.” Once there is a death in such fraught situations tension “just escalates off the scale,” he said.
Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward on Wednesday said authorities had to arrest Mr. Bundy and the protest’s leaders to help put an end to what he called the disruption of life in the rural area.
Mr. Bundy and his supporters had made numerous trips into Burns, openly carrying guns including at a community meeting in a high school.
“This has been tearing our community apart,” said a visibly distraught Mr. Ward. “It’s time for everyone in this illegal occupation to move on.”
—Devlin Barrett contributed to this article.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGxDWKrjPQ
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Things to consider when mulling domestic insurgency.
https://readfomag.com/2014/12/implications-in-a-domestic-insurgency/
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http://weaponsman.com/?p=29146
Explained well.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/inside-the-moorish-sovereign-citizen-movement-that-motivated-the-baton-rouge-cop-killer/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438039/gavin-long-his-roots-his-racial-ideology-grievance?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt07192016&utm_term=Jolt
http://pamelageller.com/2016/07/baton-rouge-cop-killer-gavin-eugene-long-was-nation-of-islam-member.html/
http://pamelageller.com/2016/07/baton-rouge-cop-killer-was-muslim-convert.html/
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A TIME OF WAR
This is an angry article but it accurately reflects my mood today. Listen carefully and let these words burn into your mind because if the events of the last few weeks do not set your blood afire, I question your validity as a human being.
The videos of the aftermath of this were so horrific that they are being removed from Youtube and Facebook.
I am including a link to it here. Make note that it is horrific, but also illustrative of not only the abject incompetence of the western leaders (its either incompetence or complicity), but also the nature of the heart of our enemy.
AFTERMATH OF NICE ATTACK VIDEO
We Live In A Time Of War!
Donald Trump actually said that today on FOX News. Last night in Nice, France, a 31 year old Islamic Terrorist named Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, drove a large truck at high speed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day killing nearly 80 people by running them down and crushing them. It's just a matter of time before that very tactic is used here in the USA.
I plan to write soon on likely strategies and likely targets of our enemies but today I want to talk about how you live in a time of war versus a time of peace. And you can protest all you wish that you don't want to live like that and that if you change your habits the terrorists win.
Sure, but if they crush you and your family with a truck during a Bastille Day celebration, or capture you and cut your balls off in front of your family like they did at the Bataclan Theater, they also win don't they. So how about we set aside that passive aggressive hippy attitude and wake up to reality.
In a time of Peace you can come and go as you please. You can congregate in the street to watch fireworks and listen to music. You can go to the theater in peace. You don't have to worry about anything really. Maybe the petty criminal is still a concern, but he can be easily avoided with some good common sense. In a time of Peace you can celebrate parades, you can go into a theater or a musical performance, listen to fiery speeches on any topic, and visit any place you wish and feel relative safety.
In a time of peace Islamic Terrorists don't kill their co-workers at Christmas parties, or Nightclubs...or military bases. In times of peace Islamic Terrorists do not target white police officers for assassination. In times of peace you don't have Islamic Terrorists driving a truck into a crowd, or blowing themselves up in a last gasp of death to the infidels.
But we do not live in a time of peace...not any longer. We live in a time of war and we have to make adjustments to the way we live. In a time of war you have to be thoughtful about where you go. You have to analyze whether it is a hard target or a soft target...and you have to understand the difference. You have to avoid large congregations of people either in the open or in enclosed spaces. You have to sit with your back to the wall in the event one of your adversaries walk through the door to kill you and everyone else in the room. You have to profile everyone. In a time of Peace you can overlook someone's appearance, ethnic background, attire, and actions. But we don't live in a time of peace any longer, we live in a time of war and so you have to take note of these things. And you have to look at how they're positioning themselves in relation to everyone else.
In a time of war you cannot afford to relax. You must be ever vigilant specifically of those groups that are most likely to bring the war to you. If that sounds unfair to you, if that sounds like you're being discriminatory, if it sounds like you're not following the American way where everyone is seen as the same, then that is exactly what you're doing. Ask the dead in San Bernardino, and Orlando, and Brussels, and Istanbul, and Nice, how they feel about profiling and non-egalitarian thinking.
Oh wait, we can't. They were killed by those the west wants to be fair towards. We only have one group on Earth that believes that that terrorism is
acceptable and so you must be watchful of that group less you fall victim to their strategies.
But vigilance alone is a sad an empty action without the ability to act upon that which vigilance reveals. In a time of Peace you can leave the house with empty pockets, a smile on your face, a spring in your step and a song in your heart. But we do not live in such times. Today even if it is a violation of the law, a wise man will go armed.
It was once said as a caveat before the carry of a weapon was suggested. "If you can legally get a permit - if you can legally do so - you should get a permit and carry a weapon". Today in the time of war that we live in I will say that you must carry a weapon regardless of legal standing. It has been shown time and again that the First Responders will rarely prevent an event like this. Let this one also burn into your mind for the reality that it is.
You Are On Your Own!
Although I have every respect for the French LE (I've trained with some of them as a matter of fact), 80 some people died at the hands of the terrorist before they were on scene. In Orlando there were 50 people that died before police intervention.
You are on your own - leave the house prepared to do battle - every single day! Leave the house prepared to treat any injuries you may incur - every single day!
These are the concessions that you must make in the time of war that we live today. François Hollande's defeated statement today said that France must get accustomed to living with terrorism. And before anyone castigate the French, one cannot judge France by Hollande any more than one can judge America by Obama, but I can easily picture Obama, or Hillary saying the very same thing in a few months.
I think America is already quite accustomed to the fact of terrorism on American soil. And all the rhetoric of taking the war to ISIS ignores the fact that the terrorists in France were French citizens and that the terrorists in the USA were American citizens.
We live in a time of war and we must take the necessary steps as individuals to win that war.
THE GABE SUAREZ BLOG
ON FACEBOOK
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https://adaptivecurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/thoughs-on-z-blogs-on-being-revolting-in-the-modern-age/
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/oregon-armed-occupation-trial-set-to-start-1473499800
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Have not had a chance to read this yet, but it comes recommended.
http://www.molonlabemedia.com/2016/10/18/guns-ban-hillary-confiscation/#
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http://weaponsman.com/?p=36045
OT: Whistling Past the Graveyard
bye-gravestone
We first encountered Gerard VanDerLeun a seeming age ago, soon after 9/11, when he posted a thoughtful musing on a relative’s service in a war that slips out of memory. And the two thoughts that came to us, struck in the moment, were: (1), “This gentleman can write,” and, (2), “His heart is in the right place.” Clichés, both, but apposite.
So it is disturbing to us when sensible Gerard writes this. It is rather more disturbing because it’s true.
Whenever a class of people, self-anointed, seek to impose Utopia on the world, evil ensues. Whenever a group of people seek to arrogate the power of the people to themselves, evil ensues. It is not merely that power corrupts but that some people are compelled to corrupt democratically distributed power through statist centralization. If the age of kings was the age of rule by one monarch, the current age drifts towards the rule of many smaller kings acting in unison. This is the age of the Multi-Monarchists; of rule by the faction of “Little Hitlers.” Their accoutrements are not uniforms and stark symbols, but cap & gown, press passes, and union cards. Their collective policy is plague.
It is a bleak view of a time that should be a Golden Age. The world is, apart from the tribal throwback lands, at peace; the world’s prosperity is unprecedented; technology and the humane arts save human lives today that were forfeit a few years ago; the flames of freedom burn bright.
And yet. There are those whose only reaction to those flames is to extinguish them, and those whose black hearts year to possess and control (and misuse) them. There is always the urge to power, now with new flowery overgarments of words, but not concealing well the base urge that gives them shape and form.
All faction, no matter its origin or ideals, is in the end Fascist. The Founders knew Faction and feared it. Much of the Federalist Papers is taken up with the problem of suppressing Faction and the Constitution is the carefully wrought attempt at a solution to it. Of course, the Founders also knew that Faction as Facism is never finished except by fire and fire alone.
via Usurpations and the Plague of Locusts @ AMERICAN DIGEST.
There is no magic inevitability to the Golden Age of the 21st Century. We could as easily ruck back into a subsistence dystopia, as plenty of examples illustrate to us.
Zimbabwe? Far away, and her people so different from us. “A land far away and a people of whom we know nothing,” in the words of the great statesman who had his hour, and lost it.
Afghanistan? When we arrived there was scarcely a stone upon a stone; yet in 1973, when forward-looking progressives overthrew a King who was not liberalizing fast enough, there were cosmopolitan cities and decent universities. That is the wages of 25 years of civil war. But it is far away, and her people are so different from us.
Venezuela? Far away, and her people… but, she walked away from the 21st Century, to adopt the most spectacularly failed ideology of the 20th. And as a result, the citizens of that unhappy land are now living in an experience with poverty, sickness, child mortality and overall privation that hearkens back to the conditions of the 19th that produced the great literature of Charles Dickens — and the mistaken political theories of Karl Marx, which, in every single example to date, have recursively caused the conditions they were implemented to cure.
So, tell yourself “It can’t happen here.” If you whistle past the graveyard, there will not be one in your future, right?
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http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2403-6-reasons-why-new-civil-war-possible-terrifying.html
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https://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2016/11/05/is-america-on-the-brink-of-civil-war/?singlepage=true
Is America on the Brink of Civil War?
By Roger L Simon November 5, 2016
chat 120 comments
Valerie Jarrett—Barack Obama's closest consigliere who has lived in the lap of luxury in and out of the White House—is calling for James Comey's head because the FBI director reopened the matter of Hillary Clinton's emails only days before the election.
As we all know, Comey did this after some 650,000 digital missives, many from Clinton's server, were discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop by the NYPD.
Obama, however, is a bit uneasy about Jarrett's hawkishness toward Comey.
“Valerie argued that Comey was interfering deliberately in the election process and had to be stopped,” a source told The New York Post. The same source said Obama, though, is “worried about the consequences of taking such an action – the tsunami of outrage that would come his way, and possibly become a major footnote, or worse, in the history of the presidency.”
Ah, those legacy problems, not that the president has much of one outside the comically-named Affordable Care Act, which is about as popular as stomach cancer.
Nevertheless, he's right about the tsunami of outrage. In fact it's an understatement. The bad news is this: As miserable as this endless election season has been, the aftermath is likely to be far worse. You don't have to be Nostradamus to see that putting the American Humpty Dumpty together again is going to be a herculean task. Our country could be permanently fractured in ways few of us would have anticipated even a year ago. Anything is possible now.
Sponsored
If Hillary Clinton is elected, the very next day millions of Americans will be watching to see what will happen with the FBI and the Justice Department. Since we can now assume this will be a close election, that would be nearly half the voters in this country, sixty to seventy million people, almost all of whom believe Clinton, the woman a few weeks from inauguration as president, should have been charged with serious crimes and belonged behind bars, not in the White House.
Moreover, many have seen the WikiLeaks that reek of collusion between the Clintonistas and officials at the FBI and Justice, not to mention with virtually all the mainstream media outlets that were distrusted to begin with and are now reviled.
If that's not an explosive situation, what is? And we don't know what Assange et al have in store for us after the election. Just now we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted—while Her Ladyship was secretary of State and in honor of Bill's birthday—an unreported one million dollar donation from that paragon of women's and gay rights, Qatar. This is chump change in the grand Clinton scheme of things, but another reminder of their unending greed and corruption. More importantly, as Tyler Durden points out, this time there should be legal consequences for the Foundation—or would be normally in a country governed by the rule of law.
Only we're not anymore.
This and a thousand other things put Obama, quite possibly liable himself from the email disclosures, and his attorney general Lynch behind a treacherous eight ball going forward, because they are not dealing with a few thousand disgruntled people, but those many millions. If they were to go ahead with Jarrett's suggestion, take Comey's head (i. e. fire him) and replace him with a yet more complaisant successor, who knows what would happen?
But if they don't, and even if they do, the investigation may reveal things so shocking the nation will never be the same. Rumors have been flying that are so extreme that even a ten percent accuracy rate could ignite a firestorm.
The problem for all of us is that there is literally nothing Clinton can do to get out of this box, even if, as many predict, Obama pardons her. The corruption is so pervasive there is no way short of an actual military putsch to stop the continuing revelations. And such an action would itself unleash ... well, you know the title of this article.
Would a Trump victory save us from all this? No one knows. Dennis Prager perhaps put it best. When you have two doors and behind one is a man-eating lion and the other one may or may not have such a lion, which door do you choose? Unless you want to commit suicide, the answer is self-evident.
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“Valerie argued that Comey was interfering deliberately in the election process and had to be stopped,” a source told The New York Post. The same source said Obama, though, is “worried about the consequences of taking such an action – the tsunami of outrage that would come his way, and possibly become a major footnote, or worse, in the history of the presidency.”
Obama is already guilty of using government agencies as political weapons and multiple law breaking behavior by them with him never lifting a finger. We just don't have a media willing to report it and go after it for reasons we are all aware about.
So he can play act the phony role that he is above it all by not publicly denouncing Comey, but the truth is already obvious to all of us who care and simply not willing just to ignore it.
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http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8884
The Great Fear
Posted on November 3, 2016
Imagine if tomorrow, a space ship descends to earth, hovering over some part of the United States. At some point, when the eyes of the world are fixed on the event, the ship lands and out pops a bunch of aliens. These aliens are able to speak to the people of earth in a way that everyone can understand them. They explain where they are from and that earth is just one of many planets with sentient life. Further, most of the people in charge of earth are aliens sent to run things while the talking monkeys get up to speed.
For a fuller presentation of this concept, you can watch the John Carpenter movie, They Live. One thing I liked about that movie, is that when people realized the truth, they were stunned and confused. Paranoia immediately set in as they tried to reorient themselves to the new reality. That’s what would happen in the above scenario. Suddenly confronted by the truth, everyone would know most of what they have been told was a lie. That would lead to questioning of everything else, then mass paranoia and fear.
Something like this happened in revolutionary France. Instead of space aliens, they got a collapse of the old order. Feudalism had been under great strain due to the new economics of the age. Trade and the beginning of the industrial age challenged the old economic system. There was also the rampant corruption in the French economic system that was slowing bankrupting the government. The King was not just broke. Massive borrowing to keep the system running had made the system insolvent.
The French Revolution was not just a money issue. Within one year, the King went from being god-like to merely a citizen. That was not a small thing. Symbolism is an important part of the normal rhythms of human society. The social order of France was built upon the King having a divine right to rule. Once the king became just another guy, the whole system stopped making sense. It was a short trip from there to conspiracies about the aristocrats plotting against the people. The result was the Great Fear.
That has been coming to mind often of late. My twitter feed is full of posts that can be charitably described as batshit crazy. Scan through the news and you see “reports” that range from the ridiculous to the deranged. I don’t have a Faceberg account, but I’m told that all sorts of crackpot stories are popping up there too. I’ve had to reconfigure my news reading in order to filter out the crazy rumors and made up nonsense. It feels like the wheels have come off the cart and we live in a world of nonsense.
The reason, I suspect, is the growing awareness that much of what we have taken for granted is, at the minimum, not what it appears to be. The open hostility of so-called conservatives toward the people they claim to represent, for example, has been quite an eye-opener for a lot of people. You don’t have to be a red-pilled conspiracy monger to think the whole conservative movement was just a money scam all along.
That also means the Republican Party was something other than a good faith attempt to counter the other party. When prominent leaders in the party appear to be backing the other party’s candidate, the system does look rigged. It’s not hard to imagine what these people are saying when the cameras and microphones are off. Throw in some leaked e-mails that seem to conform people’s worst fears and it is not surprising that the peasants are getting a bit paranoid about the ruling class.
The shenanigans in the news media has breached that wall in our minds that separates bias from conspiracy. When allegedly solid opinion polls swing by a dozen points in a few days, it is not unreasonable to wonder if they were fraudulent all along. The revelations in WikiLeaks has made clear that it is not just bias. It is an organized effort by our “news media” to fool people on behalf of the government party. Rigging the debates by feeding Clinton the questions is a pretty big deal.
Just this week we have learned that the FBI and the DOJ may very well be colluding in order to conceal very serious crimes by the Clinton Family from the public. Seeing that the current FBI director let the Clintons off the hook 15 years ago, when he was tasked with investigating them, naturally makes people think the whole system is rotten and corrupt. When people see e-mails from the Clinton campaign chair revealing that he is best buddies with the Feds, it tends to confirm and amplify their suspicions.
Probably the biggest blow to public trust has been the revelation regarding the Clinton Foundation and the shenanigans involved in covering up what looks like very serious crimes. Everyday we get new stories that make a Hollywood thriller sound pedestrian. All of a sudden, the conspiracy guys don’t sound so nutty as their theories are playing out in the news. If the Feds can accidentally find a laptop that brings down the Clinton Crime Family, name a cloak and dagger scenario that is still implausible?
We are in a period where no one takes anything in the news at face value, but lots of people are willing to accept all sorts of outlandish rumors. After all, the crackpots and conspiracy nuts have been right a lot lately. When every scandal starts with WikiLeaks or some anonymous tweet, it is not unreasonable to pay more attention to that stuff than the main stream media, which is often working to conceal these stories. You cannot blame people for being a bit paranoid, given what we see happening.
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A powerful point! May I ask you post in in the Way Forward for the American Creed thread and that we discuss it there? TIA
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All of a sudden, the conspiracy guys don’t sound so nutty as their theories are playing out in the news.
After all, the crackpots and conspiracy nuts have been right a lot lately.
We were never wrong, got posts going back years ago... saying the same thing... many people do.
It isn't "crazy and crackpotted" when you're right.
We were wrong about two things though...
1.) We though people cared. Clinton supporters clearly don't, and if that's true, given the Republican support for Clinton in some cases. and human nature, then conservatives don't care either.
2.) The apparent willingness of people to be ruled rather than governing themselves, so long as the whip rests lightly, or not.}
The founding fathers were never more correct.
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Probably best for the American Creed thread , , ,
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/366788.php
November 10, 2016
As Anti-Trump Violence Perpetrated By Hillary/Obama/Soros Minions Spreads Across America, Media Blesses It and Encourages It With Their Silence and Even Support
Question:
Is it true that "dark rhetoric" encourages violence?
I think it might be true. I'm not convinced it's true, but I'm sensitive enough to the possibility that it may be true that I'm cautious about writing things that might stir dark hearts to perform dark deeds.
But I know who definitely thinks it's true: the media, which is always on vigilant patrol about "dark rhetoric emanating from rightwing quarters" and said dark rhetoric's ability to spark genuine political violence.
Well, the political left is right now calling for a lot of violence.
Last night, CNN interviewed a protester who explicitly called for violence -- people will have to die for there to be real change, she avowed. And CNN didn't seem particularly fussed by it.
"If we don't fight, who is going to fight for us? People had to die for your freedom where we’re at today. We can’t just do rallies, we have to fight back," said Lily, a Latina woman from Los Angeles.
"There will be casualties on both sides. There will be, because people have to die to make a change in this world," she continued.
This call for violence -- political murder and assassination -- went out over CNN's bandwidth. Seems to me that as they were the conveyor of the call to assassination, they have a moral duty to repudiate it -- but I do not see this story on their front page, nor in politics, nor any mention in Opinion, where I'd expect CNN to sternly warn people from this kind of "dark rhetoric."
If it's there, I don't see it. I did see a headline on "Trump's tax trick, explained," so you can tell, they're really up-to-the-minute on breaking news.
So which is it, media -- is hateful, violent rhetoric something to be sternly vigilant about, or is a little exhortation to murder just fine and dandy if you want to kill the right people for the right reasons?
Think this has no effect? Think again. In another story the media is embargoing, an older man was dragged from his car and beaten by a mob which shouted "He voted for Trump!" as he was subject to a beat down from multiple people attacking him in wolfpack style, one attacks while the other waits for his turn.
Is this just some Dark Rhetoric by Conservatives Making up Racist Stories?
Nope! It's all on dramatic videotape. The perps videotaped themselves doing it.
They seem to steal his car at the end too, but we don't see them drive it away, because the video ends there.
So: which is it, media?
I know #WhiteLivesMatter is a politically incorrect thing to say, but are you really now standing behind the actual declaration that white lives don't matter?
If so, then say so: If it be war, then let it be a declared war, so that both sides know the agreed-upon Rules of Engagement.
Please: Watch language in comments. I know this story is infuriating but never forget their violence is speech but your speech is violence.
And remember, there are bad people and criminals of all races. Race is not the issue here -- except indirectly, in that the Orwellian culture promoted by the media is single-mindedly set to detect and shame conservative misbehavior, while pretending away any bad actions committed by a member of the Obama/Clinton Coalition.
Either the rules bind all or the rules bind none.
The media, more than any institution in America, is undermining and actually now destroying the very fabric of American political stability.
No one is willing to be the last person to take up violence. The last person to take up violence usually winds up dead or at least bleeding on the street.
By not condemning violence on all sides, the media is doing its level best to promote violence by all sides.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/366788.php
November 10, 2016
As Anti-Trump Violence Perpetrated By Hillary/Obama/Soros Minions Spreads Across America, Media Blesses It and Encourages It With Their Silence and Even Support
Question:
Is it true that "dark rhetoric" encourages violence?
I prefer her full quote from the page that the hyperlink above links to:
CNNDuring the massive anti-Donald Trump protests held in California the day after Election Day, one woman CNN spoke to called for violence and death as a means to enact political change.
“If we don’t fight, who is going to fight for us? People had to die for your freedom where we’re at today. We can’t just do rallies, we have to fight back,... There will be casualties on both sides. There will be, because people have to die to make a change in this world,” she continued. “Trump, enough with your racism. Stop splitting families. Don’t split my family.”
So basically, she's calling for the deaths of Americans, if her undocumented relatives are removed from the country.
Again, I'm saying that anchor babies, as sad as it is, NEED to be deported along with their parents. This woman was not by herself, and that is a Mexican flag in the video.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/people-have-to-die-anti-trump-protester-calls-for-violence-on-cnn/
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"They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind"
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http://abc7news.com/news/fires-erupts-vandalism-reported-at-anti-trump-protest-in-oakland-/1599421/
Enjoy lefties!
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(https://twitter.com/TexasTsunami/status/797091083821924354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
https://twitter.com/TexasTsunami/status/797091083821924354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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(https://twitter.com/TexasTsunami/status/797091083821924354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
https://twitter.com/TexasTsunami/status/797091083821924354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Oh man.....
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https://twitter.com/TexasTsunami/status/797091083821924354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I doubt she did it to herself unless she is dyslexic. Not smart enough.
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http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markmeckler/2016/06/oregon-rancher-receives-government-request-to-survey-his-property-read-his-brilliant-response/
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(http://olegvolk.net/gallery/d/52226-2/henry45-70_sunflowers_D6A5236web.jpg)
http://olegvolk.net/gallery/d/52226-2/henry45-70_sunflowers_D6A5236web.jpg
All other concerns — hunting, sport, even self-defense — are secondary considerations to people who do not wish to be ruled…and to the fiends whose self-worth depends on ruling others.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/2/rosa-brooks-obama-pentagon-official-says-anti-trum/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRsa09HRmtNREJrTnpsbCIsInQiOiI3YnhRK28rU0FcL2pwMmZOaHVLckdiMWl1ZkRQc05zZm5Gd2Q3NFJ5ekE1WDJSVWVvazViMWJFWVlWSW5CN29aZXFYTGFxRGkzeEhjR1lDUDVLUHhHQVJnODBuUXdUODQ2T0xLTHYzdFdiWDlEMUJiY2k2aUxseHNnWXpMMzZJRlUifQ%3D%3D
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http://usuncut.com/news/man-pulls-gun-standing-rock-protesters-runs-truck/
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Unprecedented, but then so was Obama's Presidency - with it's explicit goal of dismantling this nation as founded. He has hardly given up on that goal, and will work very hard to undermine Trump, along with many D.C. career appointees who despise Trump and his plan to root out corruption. This promises to be a long, nasty fight. I think Trump is up for it, however. Even Republicans in Congress are in many cases working to dismantle his Presidency - just as it has begun.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265808/obamas-shadow-presidency-matthew-vadum
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Obj post :
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265808/obamas-shadow-presidency-matthew-vadum
yup
unprecedented.
This guy O gets away with it all.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/24/republican-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-curb-protesting-in-at-least-17-states/?utm_term=.4d805c3c5ac1
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs4P1kKK-5k
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http://cw33.com/2017/03/18/mosque-protest-and-counter-protest-in-richardson-upstaged-by-third-group/
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William Powell, ‘Anarchist Cookbook’ Writer, Dies at 66
By RICHARD SANDOMIRMARCH 29, 2017
William Powell discussed his book “The Anarchist Cookbook” at a press conference in New York in 1971. Credit JP Laffont/Polaris
William Powell was a teenager, angry at the government and the Vietnam War, when he walked into the main branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan in 1969 to begin research for a handbook on causing violent mayhem.
Over the next months, he studied military manuals and other publications that taught him the essentials of do-it-yourself warfare, including how to make dynamite, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher and how to blow up a bridge.
What emerged was “The Anarchist Cookbook,” a diagram- and recipe-filled manifesto that is believed to have been used as a source in heinous acts of violence since its publication in 1971, most notably the killings of 12 students and one teacher in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
Throughout his manual, Mr. Powell fashioned a knowing voice that suggested broad experience in warfare, sabotage or black ops, mixed with an extremist’s anti-establishment worldview.
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“As almost everyone knows, silencers are illegal in virtually all the countries of the world,” he wrote before describing how to build a silencer for a handgun, “but then a true revolutionary believes that the government in power is illegal, so, following that logic, I see no reason that he should feel restricted by laws made by an illegal body.”
He declared that his book was an educational service for the silent majority — not the one identified by President Richard M. Nixon as his middle-American constituency, but the disciplined anarchists who were seeking dignity in a world gone wrong. To them, he offered how-to plans for weaponry and explosives as well as drugs, electronic surveillance, guerrilla training and hand-to-hand combat — a potent mix that attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The book found a big audience. More than two million copies have reportedly been sold, and still more have been downloaded on the internet.
“It was inevitable that he did it,” James J. F. Forest, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said in a phone interview. “If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It’s human behavior to tap into a dangerous stream of knowledge, and in his case he was inspired to make that dangerous information available to anyone else who was interested.”
Mr. Powell never revised the book or wrote a sequel, but his original stayed in print, through Lyle Stuart and its successor company, Barricade Books, and most recently by Delta Press. Eventually, he renounced the book. In 2000, he posted a statement to that effect on Amazon.com. And later, in 2013, he expressed his regret in an article he wrote for The Guardian.
He chose a career as a teacher, not a revolutionary, specializing in working on behalf of children with special needs.
Photo
A sketch from “The Anarchist Cookbook.” Credit Barricade Books Inc.
And then, on July 11 of last year, he died of a heart attack while vacationing with his family near Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was 66 and had lived part-time in Massat, France, when he was not working with his wife, Ochan Powell, on educational projects in other countries.
His family reported the death on Facebook, but few if any obituaries followed. His son Sean said that the people who needed to know had been told, and that the family had not thought of reaching out to newspapers.
It was not until last week that his death became more widely known, with the theatrical release of “American Anarchist,” a documentary about Mr. Powell. His death was noted in the closing credits.
The director, Charlie Siskel, said he had interviewed Mr. Powell over a week in 2015.
“What interested me was: How do you go through 40 years of your life with his dark chapter in the background?” Mr. Siskel said on Monday. “How does one sleep at night or get through the day?”
On camera, Mr. Powell seemed to struggle to absorb the idea that his book had apparently had an influence on a number of notorious criminals. One was Zvonko Busic, a Croatian nationalist who hijacked a TWA flight in 1976 while carrying phony bombs after leaving a real one at Grand Central Terminal that killed a police officer who tried to deactivate it.
Others included Thomas Spinks, who was part of a group that bombed abortion clinics in the 1980s; Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995; Eric Harris, one of the Columbine attackers; and Jared Loughner, who killed six people during his attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
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“When ‘The Cookbook’ has been associated with Columbine and the later characters and killing, I did feel responsible, but I didn’t do it,” Mr. Powell told Mr. Siskel, adding: “Somebody else with a perverted, distorted sense of reality did something awful. I didn’t.”
William Ralph Powell was born on Long Island, in Roslyn, on Dec. 6, 1949. His father, William Charles Powell, was a press officer at the United Nations; his mother, the former Doreen Newman, ran a phobia clinic at a hospital in White Plains.
Mr. Powell told Mr. Siskel that after his father was transferred to Britain, he attended a school where bullying was commonplace and where the headmaster had caned him. When the family returned to the United States, he said, he felt alienated as an outsider. His fifth-grade teacher mocked his British accent. At a prep school in Westchester County, N.Y., he said, he was molested by the dorm master.
He was working at a bookstore in Greenwich Village in late 1969 when he decided to quit his job to research and write “The Anarchist Cookbook.”
Photo
Mr. Powell, as seen in the documentary “American Anarchist.” Credit Gravitas Venture
“My motivation at the time was simple,” he wrote in The Guardian. “I was being actively pursued by the military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam. I wanted to publish something that would express my anger.”
The book, a precursor to more recent publications like “The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook” and “Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla,” was at times angry, but it also came with cautionary notes (“This book is not for children or morons”) and common-sense tips, like one he appended to the 14 steps for manufacturing TNT.
“The temperatures used in the preparation of TNT are exact,” he wrote, “and must be used as such. Do not estimate or use approximations. Buy a good centigrade thermometer.”
In an interview at the time of the book’s publication, Mr. Powell told The Bennington Banner in Vermont, “I don’t see myself as crazed or bomb-throwing, though I could be if driven into a corner.”
By 1971, when Lyle Stuart — considered a renegade for his belief that the American people had a right to read anything — published “The Anarchist Cookbook,” Mr. Powell was attending Windham College in Putney, Vt. After graduation, he received a master’s degree in English from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y.
His early teaching focused on children with emotional and learning needs. He moved overseas in 1979 and worked in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Indonesia and Malaysia, teaching marginalized children and training teachers in how to better include them in the classroom.
Sean Powell said in an interview that his father did not exile himself from the United States because of “The Anarchist Cookbook.”
“The book came out in 1971,” he said, “and he went to Saudi Arabia in 1979. Why would he take eight years to go into exile?”
In addition to his wife, the former Ochan Kusuma, and his son Sean, Mr. Powell is survived by another son, Colin; four grandchildren; a brother, Christopher; and his mother. His first marriage ended in divorce.
When “The Anarchist Cookbook” drew the attention of the F.B.I., agents were assigned to track which stores sold the book and to find out if William Powell was a pseudonym, according to the bureau’s file on Mr. Powell. It noted a request by John W. Dean III, counsel to President Nixon, for a copy of the book.
But agents could find no reason to take action against Mr. Powell. Though he did, as the F.B.I. wrote, “submit for consideration recipes for nearly every type of explosive” whose manufacture and distribution violated federal law, there was no evidence that he had been guilty of either.
Correction: March 31, 2017
An obituary on Thursday about William Powell, the author of “The Anarchist Cookbook,” misstated his age in some copies. He was 66, not 67. (As the obituary correctly noted, he was born in December 1949 and died in July 2016.) The error was repeated in the headline.