“Radicals Feeling Emboldened”: ‘They’re Nothing More Than Domestic Terrorists’
It’s been nearly a week since the U.S. Bureau of Land Management tried to enforce federal court orders at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch, only to back off in order to deescalate a potentially dangerous situation with heavily armed protesters.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), who of course represents Nevada, said earlier this week, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it’s not over.”
Yesterday, Reid went further.
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on Thursday called supporters of Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy “domestic terrorists” because they defended him against a Bureau of Land Management cattle roundup with guns and put their children in harm’s way.
“Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” Reid said during an appearance at a Las Vegas Review-Journal “Hashtags & Headlines” event at the Paris. “… I repeat: what went on up there was domestic terrorism.”
The senator added that he’s been in communication with Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI leaders, and Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, as well as the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, ‘which has not backed Bundy’s personal battle but has expressed concerns about access to public land.”
There is, Reid said, a task force being set up to deal with the situation. “It is an issue that we cannot let go, just walk away from,” he added.
One assumes Bundy’s militia allies weren’t impressed with the senator’s comments, but Reid probably isn’t foremost on their minds. Rather, many on this far-right fringe are contemplating their next move, embracing what they see as a new precedent established six days ago at the Bundy ranch.
Reuters ran a striking piece yesterday, citing militia experts saying that armed Americans “using the threat of a gunfight to force federal officers to back down is virtually unparalleled in the modern era.” It’s left the radicals feeling emboldened.
Energized by their success, Bundy’s supporters are already talking about where else they can exercise armed defiance. They include groups deeply suspicious of what they see as a bloated, over-reaching government they fear wants to restrict their constitutional right to bear arms.
Alex Jones, a radio host and anti-government conspiracy theorist whose popular right-wing website, Infowars, helped popularize Bundy’s dispute, called it a watershed moment.
“Americans showed up with guns and said, ‘No, you’re not,” before confronting the armed BLM agents, Jones said in a telephone interview. “And they said, ‘Shoot us.’ And they did not. That’s epic. And it’s going to happen more.”
“More” is precisely what the American system cannot expect to tolerate.
As we’ve discussed, there’s an obvious problem with establishing a precedent that says Americans can disregard laws and court orders, whenever they feel justified in doing so, if they surround themselves with friends with guns. It’s a dynamic that invites and encourages lawlessness.
And it’s why this standoff isn’t over.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 18, 2014
“A Fight That Has Already Been Settled”: Nevada Journalists; Conservative Media Darling Rancher Is Clearly “Breaking The Law”
Local journalists covering Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s case stress he is no victim and is breaking the law, regardless of conservative media’s sympathy for his defiance of government orders to remove cattle from federal land.
Those reporters and editors — some who have been covering the case for 20 years — spoke with Media Matters and said many of Bundy’s neighbors object to his failure to pay fees to have his cattle graze on the land near Mesquite, NV., when they pay similar fees themselves.
“We have interviewed neighbors and people in and around Mesquite and they have said that he is breaking the law,” said Chuck Meyer, news director at CBS’ KXNT Radio in Las Vegas. “When it comes to the matter of the law, Mr. Bundy is clearly wrong.”
Bundy’s case dates back to 1993, when he stopped paying the fees required of local ranchers who use the federally owned land for their cattle and other animals. Local editors say more than 85 percent of Nevada land is owned by the federal government.
Bundy stopped paying fees on some 100,000 acres of land in 1993 and has defied numerous court orders, claiming the land should be controlled by Nevada and that the federal government has no authority over it.
Last year a federal court ordered Bundy to remove his cattle or they would be confiscated to pay the more than $1 million in fees and fines he’s accumulated. The confiscation began earlier this month, but was halted because the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had “serious concerns about the safety of employees and members of the public” when armed militia showed up to block the takeover.
Despite his lawlessness, Bundy has become a sympathetic figure for many in the right-wing media.
But for local journalists, many who have been reporting on him for decades, that image is very misguided.
“He clearly has captured national attention, among mostly conservative media who have portrayed him as a kind of a property rights, First Amendment, Second Amendment, range war kind of issue,” Meyer noted. “That’s how it has been framed, but the story goes back a lot longer and is pretty cut and dry as far as legal implications have been concerned.”
He added that, “Cliven Bundy and his supporters are engaged in a fight that has already been settled. There are a number of people around these parts who have strong reservations about Bundy’s actions.”
Las Vegas Sun Editorial Page Editor Matt Hufman said depicting Bundy as a victim is wrong.
“The BLM had court orders against him in the 90s telling him to get off federal land,” Hufman said. “He’s got a bunch of these arguments about state’s rights, it’s not federal land, blah, blah, blah. All of the arguments have been knocked down.”
Hufman cited Bundy’s claim that his family has been on the land since the 1870s, adding, “a federal judge said the land’s been owned by the federal government since 1848.” He later added that Bundy “was paying grazing fees until 1993 then he stopped. At some point it was okay for him to pay grazing fees.”
Ron Comings, news director of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, offered a similar view.
“You have to keep in mind that huge percentages of western states are owned by the feds and that has rubbed people the wrong way for a long time,” Comings said. “But they are the same people who will say that ‘we all pay grazing fees and you have to pay and you should work this through other channels.’ There are a lot of farmers and ranchers who pay the grazing fees whether they like it or not, and they see him as someone who is not. They say to stop paying their fees is like not paying your rent and you don’t have a leg to stand on.”
Comings also pointed out that many of the armed “militia” who came to Bundy’s aid are from out of state, describing them as “just anti-government and … just seen as outsiders who are coming in to jump on this issue.”
Even Las Vegas Review-Journal Editor Michael Hengel, whose paper published an editorial in support of Bundy, admitted he is not legally in the right: “He’s breaking the law, that fact is true, they have ruled that … The courts have ruled that he is on federal land and he is grazing on federal land and he has not paid.”
In St. George, UT., the closest city with its own daily media, the online St. George News weighed in with a critical piece Sunday that also took aim at the national press supporting Bundy, stating: “The Bundy Range War was perpetuated by an irresponsible media vying for nothing more than ratings and an ill-informed and willfully ignorant public who, much like a NASCAR fan, come to the race simply in hopes of seeing a crash.”
By: Joe Strupp, Media Matters For America, April 16, 2014
“A Government Of Laws, Not Of Men”: Uncivil Disobedience And The Opposite Of Patriotism
Back when George W. Bush was president, liberals were regularly accused of being disloyal or anti-American if they disagreed with the policies the administration was undertaking. As Bush himself said, you were either with us or with the terrorists, and as far as many of his supporters were concerned, “us” meant the Bush administration and everything they wanted to do, including invading Iraq. You may have noticed that now that there’s a Democrat in the White House, conservatives no longer find disagreeing with the government’s policies to be anti-American; in fact, the truest patriotism is now supposedly found among those whose hatred of the president, and the government more generally, burns white-hot in the core of their souls.
We’ve gotten used to that over the last five years, but I’ve still been surprised at the conservative embrace of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has been in an argument with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing fees. Briefly: for 20 years Bundy has been taking his cattle to graze on federal land, but he refuses to pay grazing fees as the law demands and as other ranchers do, despite numerous court orders. So the BLM seized some of his cattle, and in the ensuing standoff, hundreds of armed right-wing nuts came to Bundy’s defense, trooping out to aim their weapons at federal employees.
I’m sure there are some conservatives who view this conflict in the clear, simple terms it deserves. This guy wants to use resources that don’t belong to him without paying for them, which is what we generally refer to as “stealing.” The reason he thinks he can do it is, as he put it in a radio interview, “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” In other words, he isn’t standing up for principle, he’s a nut case.
And yet, prominent conservatives are not only rushing to his defense, they’re casting him as a patriotic American. Here’s part of an absolutely incredible column from The National Review‘s Kevin Williamson:
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.
Yes, you read that right: he compares Cliven Bundy to Gandhi. And he ends with this stirring call:
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.
Williamson’s boss, NR editor Rich Lowry, also said that Bundy’s actions are “within the finest American tradition of civil disobedience going back to Henry David Thoreau.” Which just shows how little these people understand about civil disobedience, and about American traditions.
Civil disobedience means breaking a law, publicly and calmly, and then accepting the punishment the law provides, in order to draw attention to a law that is unjust and should be changed. The law Cliven Bundy is breaking says that if you graze your cattle on land owned by the federal government, you have to pay grazing fees. I haven’t heard anyone articulate why that law is unjust. People are saying that the government owns too much land in Nevada, and maybe it does, but until the government sells it to you and you own it, you have to pay to use it. There isn’t any fundamental question of human rights or even the reach of government in question here at all. Mr. Bundy also doesn’t have the right to walk into the local BLM office and stuff all their staplers and pens into his knapsack and walk out.
Secondly, and just as important, there’s nothing “civil” about Bundy’s disobedience. If it was civil disobedience, he’d pay what he owes and then try, through the courts and public opinion, to change what he sees as these unjust grazing fees. But he hasn’t done that. He just refused to pay, and then led a heavily-armed standoff with the government.
I’m sorry, but if you’re defending Bundy, no matter how many times you toss the phrase “We the people” into what you say, you just have no clue about how democracy works. When you become a United States citizen, or when you take public office in America, you don’t pledge to honor whatever particular notion you have of what this country ought to be. You pledge to uphold the Constitution. The whole point of democracy is, as John Adams put it, “a government of laws, not of men.” The system embodies the will of the people and allows for change. When there’s something about that system you don’t like, you can’t just shout “Tyranny!” and refuse to obey the laws. You work to change them through democratic means.
What Cliven Bundy and his supporters are doing is the opposite of patriotism. It isn’t principled opposition to Barack Obama, or to the policies of the federal government; it’s opposition to the American system of democracy itself. And the people who are defending him ought to be ashamed of themselves.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 16, 2014
“5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About”: A Neat Little Rhetorical Trick, Tell Lies So Fast Your Opponents Can’t Keep Up
Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.
Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.
1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”
“Teaching the controversy” is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.
2. Climate change denialism. This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.
Skeptical Science, a website devoted to debunking right-wing lies on this topic, has compiled a dizzying list of 176 common claims by climate denialists and links to why they are false. Some of these lies directly contradict each other. For instance, it can’t both be true that climate change is “natural” and that it’s not happening at all. No matter, since the point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming.
3. The Affordable Care Act. It’s not just science where conservatives have discovered the value in telling lies so fast you simply wear your opposition out. When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare “socialism,” which implies a single-payer system, when in fact, it’s about connecting the uninsured with private companies and giving consumers of healthcare a basic set of rights. In a sense, even the name “Obamacare” is a lie, as the bill was, per the President’s explicit wishes, written by Congress.
But there are also the small lies: The ACA funds abortion. Under the ACA, old people will be forcibly euthanized. Obamacare somehow covers undocumented immigrants. Congress exempted itself from Obamacare (one of the lies that doesn’t even make sense, as it’s not a program you could really get exempted from). Healthcare will add a trillion dollars to the deficit.
The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying. When it was reported that the administration was going to hit its projections for the number of enrollments through healthcare.gov, a subculture of “enrollment truthers” immediately sprang up to spread a variety of often conflicting lies to deny that these numbers are even real. It started soft, with some conservatives suggesting that some enrollments shouldn’t count or arguing, without a shred of evidence, that huge numbers of new enrollees won’t pay their premiums. Now the lying is blowing up to the shameless level, with “cooking the books” being a common false accusation or, as with Jesse Watters on Fox, straight up accusing the White House of making the number up. Perhaps soon there will be demands to see all these new enrollees’ birth certificates.
4. Contraception mandate.The ACA-based requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a copay has generated a Gish Gallop so large it deserves its own category. Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check chronicled 12 of the biggest lies generated by the right-wing noise machine in just the past couple of years since the mandate was even announced. It is not “free” birth control, nor is it “paid for” by employers. The birth control coverage is paid for by the employees, with benefits they earn by working. The mandate doesn’t cover “abortifacients,” only contraception. No, birth control doesn’t work by killing fertilized eggs, but by preventing fertilization. It’s simply false that the prescriptions in question can all be replaced with a $9-a-month prescription from Walmart, as many women’s prescriptions run into the hundreds and even thousands a year. No, it’s not true that the contraception mandate is about funding women’s “lifestyle”, because statistics show that having sex for fun instead of procreation is a universal human behavior and not a marginal or unusual behavior as the term “lifestyle” implies.
5. Gun safety. The gun lobby is dishonest to its core. Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves like they are human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety. Because their very existence is based on a lie, is it any surprise that gun industry advocates are experts at the Gish Gallop, ready to spring into action at the sign of any school shooting or report on gun violence and dump so many lies on the public that gun safety advocates can never even begin to address them all?
A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders. That gun control doesn’t work. That gun control is unpopular. That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns. That a gun in the home makes you safer when it actually puts your family at more risk. That guns protect against domestic violence, when the truth is that owning a gun makes abuse worse, not better. Even the standard line “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a distracting bit of dishonesty, since most gun deaths aren’t murders but suicides.
How do you fight the Gish Gallop, when trying to debunk each and every lie is so overwhelming? There are a few tactics that help, including creating websites and pamphlets where all the lies can be aggregated in one place, for swift debunking. (Bingo cards and drinking games are a humorous version of this strategy.) A critical strategy is to avoid lengthy Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that allow conservatives to lie-dump rapidly during their speaking period, leaving you so busy trying to clean up their mess you have no time for positive points of your own. Better is a looser style of debate where you can interrupt and correct the lies as they come. I’ve also found some luck with setting an explicit “no lies” rule that will be strictly enforced. The first lie receives a warning, and the second lie means that the debate is immediately terminated. This helps prevent you from having to debunk and instead makes the price of participation a strict adherence to facts.
By: Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, April 2, 2014
“Deeply Foolish”: The Wrong Way To Tackle Immigration
At first blush, the fact that House Republicans actually voted on a bill related to immigration policy yesterday may have encouraged reform proponents. The GOP majority has been inclined to largely ignore the issue for quite a while.
But the legislation the House took up yesterday didn’t support reform progress; it did the opposite.
A House Republican bill aimed at forcing President Barack Obama to enforce immigration and other laws as they are written drew sharp rebukes Wednesday from the White House and House Democrats, who ripped the measure as anti-immigrant.
The legal dispute over President Barack Obama’s unilateral decision to suspend deportations for people brought to the country illegally by their parents, known as “dreamers,” has split the GOP and Democrats before.
At least on paper, the legislation, which passed 233 to 181, wasn’t explicitly about immigration. Rather, this was yet another election-year “message bill,” in which House Republicans pretended to be outraged about President Obama’s entirely routine executive orders. GOP leaders put together a bill – subtlely called the ENFORCE Act – intended to make it easier for members of Congress to sue the White House, forcing the administration to prioritize law enforcement in line with lawmakers’ wishes.
It is, by any sensible measure, a deeply foolish proposal. How many House Republicans, some of whom surely knew better, had the sense to vote against this transparent nonsense? Zero.
But immigration stood at the center of the debate because Republicans put it there: to prove Obama’s tyrannical tendencies, GOP lawmakers used the administration’s deferred action on Dream Act kids as Exhibit A.
In practical terms, then, the Republican bill was part of an effort to force Obama to deport immigrant children who came to the United States with their families.
It’s almost as if House Republicans decided, as an election-year gambit, to enrage the Latino community on purpose.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was eager to criticize the GOP scheme.
“[T}his runs contrary to our most deeply held values as Americans, and asks law enforcement officials to treat these DREAMers the same way as they would treat those with criminal records, those with violent criminal records.
“We urge House Republicans to focus on actually fixing our broken immigration system to provide opportunity for all instead of legislation designed to deny opportunity to those who are Americans in every way, in their hearts, in their minds, in their experiences in every way but on paper.
“So you hear a lot of talk about where people are on this issue. It doesn’t require much to look at what House Republicans are doing today to question whether or not they’re serious about moving forward on comprehensive immigration reform.”
Looking ahead, the bill approved by the House yesterday stands no chance of success in the Democratic-led Senate and would be quickly vetoed by the president if it somehow reached his desk. GOP leaders obviously know this, but wasted time on the bill anyway, instead of doing real work (on immigration or anything else).
Why? Party leaders apparently decided it was time for a little stunt to show the party’s far-right base that House Republicans are standing up to Obama for using his executive authority the exact same way every other president has for more than two centuries.
As for the future of immigration reform, the DREAM Coalition, a group representing the children of undocumented immigrants, said the vote “demonstrates Republicans can no longer be relied upon to bring up a sensible and practicable immigration reform bill this year.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 13, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 