Armed protesters, who police say are coming from outside the area, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns on Saturday after participating in a peaceful rally over the prison sentences of local ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond.What these lunatics want is to provoke another Federal overreaction, like at Waco back in 1993. They hope that'll lead to other people striking at the Federal government.
Like those assholes who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
As for their unstated goals, they are no different from the various and sundry assholes who have gone around killing minorities (mostly African-Americans) in the hopes of sparking a race war. People have occupied buildings before as a form of protest, but one doesn't do with with lots of guns unless one is itching for a fight.
These guys do have some similarities with al Qaeda: Both groups want to have martyrs for their causes. And both seek to provoke an overreaction from the U.S. government in order to recruit more followers.
By the way, it's a safe bet that the people who are cheering on those guys would be calling for airstrikes if a bunch of hippies had done the same thing.
14 comments:
Dissappointing to see people so scared the schools are closed and some kids are being shipped out because their parents fear they'll be trageted because their parents are "Feds". Occupy Wall Street was crushed, Bundy still hasn't had anything done to him, I guess being crazy with guns helps? The return the land to the people narrative is amusing, given the area was part of a larger Reservation before we broke yet another Treaty. On that thought, perhaps an authentically run raid by the previous owners and some scalps on the wall might be fun...but something like that is what they want.
I see Oregon has announced they aren't plowing the two roads that access the area, I just wonder how long the residents of Burns will be put out till these guys get tired of playing soldier and go home? Did the schools stop teaching about the Whiskey Rebellion in the last 30 years?
I believe the term is Al-Qracker.
All the feds need to do is set up a perimeter to keep supporters and supplies out. Then they cut the power. It's not warm there. Eventually they will get hungry, thirty or cold enough to come out..right into waiting jail vans. Charge with felonies and imprison for a while. Two years later, no one will even remember that it happened save for Ammon Bundy, who will still probably be someone's block bitch.
Nobody in Burns wants those assholes there, including the two ranchers who the Bundies are supposedly there to support. The Sheriff, a supporter of the Hammonds, calls the Bundies self-aggrandizing assholes who are there to get PR while he and the other real supporters of the Hammonds, their friends and neighbors, are busy running their cattle ranch for them while the Hammonds are in Club Fed. The Sheriff also points out that 50% of the population of Burns are Federal employees and the rest depend on the Federal employees' money to survive, and the Bundies' bizarre theory of public land ownership would leave them unemployed, so the Bundies are idiots if they think people in Burns want them there.
Note that the wildlife refuge building occupied by the jerks was empty because the refuge was closed due to expected blizzard conditions, so yeah, just not plowing the roads to the place is going to render it unreachable by anybody not on snow machines quite rapidly -- and you know that the Bundy clan doesn't have snow machines (snow isn't exactly common in their part of Nevada!). So Old Man Winter is going to set up a perimeter soon enough. They'll welcome the local Sheriff's snow machines and mugs of hot cocoa when the Sheriff shows up with the FBI to arrest their starving shivering asses in a few weeks. Because that's all it'll take. Eastern Oregon is *not* Nevada!
Funnily, only the Oregonian story mentions that the real reason for the 2006 fire being set, according to witnesses, was to cover up an illegal deer slaughtering operation. Everyone else makes it a case of a back fire getting out of control, poor ranchers...forgetting to mention the previous fires too. Interesting, I wonder what else, either way, we're not aware of.
Why isn't the media referring to the Bundys as fundamentalist christian terrorists? Must be one of those coverups Fox "News" is always warning us about.
My bad, the 2001 fire was to cover-up...typing too fast.
Popular hashtags....
YallQaeda, Al-Shabubba, VanillaISIS and YokalHaram
seriously, the best way to deal w these jackasses is not to get into an armed confrontation but to find ways to make their absurdity hilarious and humiliating ... use armored vehicles to get close enough to punch holes in the roof and fill the damn building with dish soap and make these wannabe martyrs swim in it... if there's a factory scale hog or dairy operation nearby, get tanker trucks to move liquid manure and pump that in on top of the dish soap... enough of the slimy stuff and they won't even be able to hold onto their guns much less shoot 'em... get creative, think outta the box a little
CP88, the jury rejected the notion that the 2001 fire was a cover-up of illegal deer slaughter, as well as the other charges other than arson. The illegal deer slaughter story was supported by one (1) witness who was alleged to have a beef with the Hammonds. The jury found the Hammonds guilty only of arson -- of deliberately setting fires that they knew were going to go onto Federal land in order to get rid of invasive juniper on their grazing allotments.
In short, there was a fundamental land management dispute between the Hammonds and Federal land managers over how to deal with the invasive juniper. The Hammonds wanted to burn it and thus let the land go back to meadow, which is what it had historically been, even the Native Americans used fire to burn the juniper off to improve the land for wildlife. The land managers preferred to let the juniper take over. The Hammonds took the law into their own hands, and the jury and judge properly said "no" to that. Then a Federal prosecutor decided to *literally* make a Federal case of it after the Hammonds had already served their sentence, going back to the appeals court and whining about how he didn't like the sentence handed down by the judge... after the Hammonds had already served their sentence and been released. That's wrong. But two wrongs don't make a right, and y'all qaeda coming in and stirring up trouble has the locals even more pissed than the overreaching Federal prosecutor made them.
Ok, useful data, however, the law they were convicted under does specify 5 year minimum...and the sentencing guidelines are mandated (that's another problem, but...)...so I'm not that put off by the way this rolled.
The 2006 fire endangering firefighters is more bothersome, but the Congressional mandated sentence is the problem here.
We don't NEED people like this on our side!
Actually, the sentencing guidelines used here were those set by the United States Sentencing Commission, part of the judicial branch of government (this is used to get around the whole separation of powers thing where Congress can't tell a Federal judge directly what sentence to give for a crime). The "reasonableness" test in United States v. Booker ( 543 U.S. 220 (2005) ) does give judges the ability to violate those sentencing guidelines if in the judge's opinion the mandated sentence under the guidelines is not reasonable, but unfortunately the Booker decision did not define "reasonableness", and also gives appeals courts the right to review sentences that violate the guidelines for "reasonableness".
In this case the Federal prosecutor got butt-hurt because he'd put out a press release about how the Hammonds were going to jail for 5 years, but the trial judge had ruled that 5 years failed the "reasonableness" test for the crime at hand and handed down a lesser sentence. So he appealed. The appeals court overruled the trial judge and ruled that 5 years was "reasonable" for the crime of which the Hammonds had been convicted and ordering re-sentencing. At that point the Hammonds had a choice of appealing to the full appeals court, or working a deal with the prosecution and the judge at re-sentencing. The Hammonds chose option (b), which is why they're pissed at the Bundy morons from Nevada coming in and raising a fuss.
Oh yeah, the wildlife refuge they're occupying was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Who was, uhm, a Republican. Heh.
So far it is a peaceful protest; terrorists usually blow shit up first.
But these idiots are definitely hoping for a Waco or Ruby Ridge style outcome. Which is insane. And stupid. And they deserve more than they'll probably have happen to them.
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