Report:
Bundy Owes US Gov't More Money Than All Other Ranchers Combined
AP Photo / John Locher
Catherine Thompson – June 5, 2014, 3:32 PM EDT
Out of 16,000 ranchers who graze cattle on property managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management, only one reportedly owes more money in late grazing fees than all the others combined -- Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.
Data from the Bureau of Land Management shows that Bundy owes over $1 million to the federal government for grazing fees he's refused to pay since 1993 combined with separate trespassing fees he began accruing in 1998, Environment & Energy Publishing reported Wednesday.
That's significantly more than what 458 other ranchers owe in late grazing bills, which totals up to to $237,000 combined, according to the agency's data. The BLM didn't indicate how many ranchers owed trespassing fees, however.
Bundy won a tense standoff with the BLM in April when he refused to remove his cattle from federal property, citing his family's claim to the land dating back to 1877, and rallied militiamen to his ranch to protect his claim. Court records obtained by local TV station KLAS later shed doubt on Bundy's land rights.
The bulk of Bundy's unpaid fees likely come from trespassing, E&E reported. The standard grazing fees on BLM lands are just $1.35 per cow per month, while a 1998 court order required Bundy to pay a whopping trespass fee of $200 per month per cow. That was later modified to $46 per day that Bundy's livestock continued to graze on federal lands.
@coldjoint,
You moron, Bundy was grabbing that land for profit. You REALLY are that dumb.
Texas GOP platform embraces discredited therapy to cure ‘unacceptable’ LGBT people
By David Ferguson
Thursday, June 5, 2014 12:15 EDT
In a draft copy of its official party platform, the Texas Republican Party has classified LGBT people as aberrant and endorsed the discredited practice of so-called “reparative therapy,” which seeks to rid people of same-sex attractions and turn them heterosexual.
The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that the current draft of the party’s 2014 platform reads, in part, “(W)e oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. We recognize the legitimacy and value of counseling which offers reparative therapy and treatment to patients who are seeking escape from the homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.”
Conversion therapy has been outlawed for minors in California and New Jersey as a form of child abuse.
Exodus International — the North American nerve center for the “ex-gay” therapy movement — shut its doors in June of 2013, admitting that its mission is impossible, that sexual orientation is immutable and that the notion that people can be religiously converted from one orientation to another is a sham.
Exodus’ former director Alan Chambers penned a letter of apology to the LGBT Christians who were harmed by his ministry, writing, “I understand why I am distrusted and why Exodus is hated.”
Nonetheless, Texas Republicans are doggedly clinging to the notion that prayer and religious study can alter a person’s sexual orientation and that LGBT people are just straight victims of a treatable pathology.
“Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples,” reads the platform statement.
Delegates were able to convince party extremists to drop language that declared that the practice of “homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God.”
However, Texas Republicans were sure to include language forbidding the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states, writing, “We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin.”
The draft platform called for even further restrictions on abortions performed in the state, gave tax incentives to energy companies engaging in the practice of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) and called for further hearings to investigate the September, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
The platform is expected to be ratified at this weekend’s 2014 Texas Republican State Convention, which is being held in Ft. Worth.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/05/texas-gop-platform-embraces-discredited-therapy-to-cure-unacceptable-lgbt-people/
@bobsal u1553115,
Since Texas doesn't seem to want to play nice with the rest of us, maybe it's time to stop asking whether or not they have a right to secede, as they've threatened to do. Maybe we should just vote to expel them. Take back the Texas Air National Guard, George W. Bush's cushy avoid-the-war-in-Vietnam scam. Give 'em back to Mexico.
since Texasw doesn't
@MontereyJack,
With their love of guns, the federal government can tell them they're on their own in protecting themselves from Mexico - after informing Mexico that Texas is no longer part of the US. We can get first hand news from Faux Snooze during the war.
Bergdahl's Dad is Republican!!!
Bergdahl’s Dad: Drone Killed Captor’s Kid
In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
In June 2010, Robert Bergdahl, the father of released American POW Bowe Bergdahl, gave a speech at an Idaho Republican Party fundraiser. In one of his first public appearances during his son's five-year captivity, he asked the conservative audience to show compassion for his son's captors—and, in a twist that foretold the plot of Homeland—he alleged that the United States had killed one of those captor's children with a drone strike.
In the past week, Bowe Bergdahl’s case has grown into a full-blown political firestorm. The 2010 speech was not televised, but it was one of the first sparks. It was Robert Bergdahl's first turn as either a tool or technician of national politics in his family's struggle.
The Idaho fundraiser was an election year event, and the day's other speakers—Idaho Senator Jim Risch, then-national-party-chairman Michael Steele, radio host Dennis Prager, and a belligerent stand-up comic named Eric Golub—took the usual shots at President Obama and rallied partisans to donate money to November's cause. [I covered the event as a reporter for AOL News.]
"There are many things that can hurt America," Senator Risch said. "Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban—they can all hurt us. But they can't destroy us. This [Obama] Administration can destroy us."
It was four years before Bob and Jani Bergdahl would know that their son's imagined execution would not be videotaped for Taliban propaganda. The traditional symbols of MIA-POW remembrance were laid out before the speakers' podium—an empty table set for one with a white cloth, a red rose in a vase tied with a yellow ribbon—and Bergdahl began by explaining why he was at a political event at all.
"I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles," he said with a smile. "My father was for Goldwater. He wore a Nixon button in our liberal Jewish neighborhood. I was the lone U.C. Santa Barbara surfer who voted for Ronald Reagan." Many in the audience nodded in approval, and then Bergdahl talked about the work of retrieving his son.
His contacts in the Pentagon had assured them that Bowe's safety was an absolute priority. "Everything that can be done has been done. I have [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Admiral [Mike] Mullen's cell phone number on me right now."
Several people in the room began to cry. Then Bergdahl turned his attention to his son's captors, and his speech veered into the complexities and humanism that, four years later to the week, have confounded the American media and made his private thoughts a national speculation.
"The man who we believe holds Bowe grew up on the lap of his mother learning the Koran. He is a powerful man," Bergdahl said. "We pray for him. He recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike. The fact that he didn't kill Bowe right then is incredible. So we pray for him."
This was not idle speculation; Bowe Bergdahl was believed to be held by the militants of the Haqqani Network. In the winter of 2010, several members of the Haqqani family were alleged killed in drone strikes.
Robert Bergdahl made his statement a year before the Showtime series Homeland built a plot line around a nearly identical scenario—an American soldier is captured in a Muslim country and brainwashed to avenge the death, by drone strike, of the captor's young son. It was also before Bergdahl had taught himself Pashto, grown out his beard to its full solidarity length, and posted a YouTube video where he appealed directly, by name, to the men he believed held Bowe.
"No family in the United States understands the detainee issue like ours," Bergdahl says in the May 2011 video, referencing some of the Taliban prisoners who were ultimately released from Guantanamo in exchange for Bowe last Saturday. "Our son's safe return will only heighten public awareness of this. That said, our son is being exploited. It's past time for Bowe, and the others, to come home."
For the first two years of his ordeal, I knew Bob Bergdahl as the local UPS man in Hailey, Idaho, where he was a polite but intense presence outfitted in the iconic brown uniform of American shipping expediency. Throughout the small mountain town, storefront and house windows bore decals of his son's face and the plea, "Bring Bowe Home." When he stopped by with the mail, he smiled, and we all pretended things were normal. During one late-evening delivery, when he saw the office was mostly empty, he asked if he could use the landline. Of course, we told him. Bergdahl dialed out, leaned into the desk, and spoke to his contacts in code names and a clipped military shorthand.
"The man who we believe holds Bowe grew up on the lap of his mother learning the Koran. We pray for him. He recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike. The fact that he didn't kill Bowe right then is incredible.”
In his video plea, about fifteen months later, he appealed to the captors directly. "Strangely to some, we must also thank those who have cared for our son for almost two years. We know our son is a prisoner and also a guest in your home."
He continued:
"To the nation of Pakistan our family would wish to convey our compassionate respect. We have watched the violence of war, earthquake, epic floods and crop failures devastate lives all while our son has been in captivity. We have watched your suffering through the presence of our son in your midst. We have wept that God may show his beneficence his mercy and that his peace may come upon the people of Pakistan. A salaam alaikum."
At the GOP fundraiser, the crowd was with Bergdahl when he led a traditional prayer for MIA-POWs. They nodded emphatically when he asked them to pray for his son. But the moment he lost them, when he turned his family's spiritual lens outward, was obvious. They applauded, and a few minutes later, when the comedian made some cracks about Janet Napolitano's weight. Then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele brought the event full circle.
"We are with Bowe," Steele said. "We appreciate the sacrifice of the mother and the father watching their son go off to war. We appreciate it," he said. "But I don't believe this administration, or those of its ilk, appreciate the sacrifice."
After five years, by whatever tactics and strategies and prayers, Robert and Jani Bergdahl will be reunited with their only son. But after a week when their hometown canceled the homecoming event out of safety concerns, when the motivations of the father—along with his politics, religious beliefs, grooming habits and parenting skills—are being dissected on national television, their personal struggle has entered a new phase. With another election year upon them, the Bergdahls may have their son back, but they are captives again, subject to an entirely different and more disturbing sort of exploitation.
@coldjoint,
For a guy who never served or did anything positive for your country you sure use "traitor" and "deserter" pretty freely. You are a mooch and a drag on society you slacker.
How about reading it you lazy piece of shot or ask an eight year old for the source after having him read. You worthless piece of ****.
@coldjoint,
ColdDope wrote:You on the other hand, make me glad I am not a veteran, I might of had to serve with a suck ass like you.
ColdDope, this Doperino quote kinda makes me feel sorry for ColdDope. Why? Because it is indicative of what a miserable individual ColdDope must be. I certainly hope ColdDope has no children because someone who makes hateful vile statements like this and has children would have been the type of parent that is hated by their children. I wouldn't want to wish that on anyone--even someone as vile and miserable as ColdDope.
BTW with an attitude like the ColdDope quote --Doperino would have never made it in the military---the military is inclusive and would have cashiered your hating, bigoted closed minded Doper ass.
I'm gonna leave ColdDope with a Jewish curse
May you make a fortune, and lose it all in one of Sheldon Adelson's casinos.
Rap
@raprap,
I actually got it from another source, it just pisses me off when coldjerk confuses questioning validity of facts presented with impeaching a source.
Bergoff Sr speaking at a GOP fund raiser is a fact whether reported by HuffPo, Political or Fox. I am sure I can find a Fox report on this.
@bobsal u1553115,
And the significance of this is?
