Category Archives: Federalism

UPDATE III: Heroic Homesteader Ammon Bundy Stands With Rancher Hammond, Against Feds

Criminal Injustice, Federalism, Government, Media, Natural Law, Private Property

The Fox News Channel, dishing out statism for Republicans, has finally caught up with last year’s news, forever a defining issue for freedom lovers: The standoff between Feds and farmers brewing in Burns, Oregon, and reported in this space on 12.30.15.

In a seminal column, “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy,” you met Ammon Bundy, fighting for his homesteader rights, against the Federales of Nevada, in 2014. Now Rancher Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, has come to stand in support of Dwight Hammond, rancher under siege in Oregon.

Via State Broadcaster FNC:

Armed protesters occupying a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon—including three sons of a Nevada rancher who battled with the government in 2014—warned Sunday that any use of force by law enforcement agencies would be “putting lives at risk.”

Hours into the occupation by activists and militiamen a spokesman for the group told reporters that there has been no contact with the FBI or other government law enforcement since the occupation began Saturday night.

“They should be constitutional,” said spokesman Ammon Bundy, referring to the government. He is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who clashed with the feds two years ago.

Ammon Bundy said if the government did use force to retake the Malheur National Wildlife refuge “they would be putting lives at risk.”

Earlier, the protesters vowed to occupy the refuge for “as long as it takes,” as state and federal officials on Sunday sought to defuse the situation.

The protestors have said they stormed the federal land in a remote area near Burns, some 280 miles east of Portland, to protest the prosecution of a father and son facing jail time on an arson charge for burning 130 acres of land. Prosecutors said the fire was set to hide poaching, but the ranchers, who face five years in prison, and the protesters supporting them say it was set to stop invasive plants. …
… The 73-year-old rancher and his 46-year-old son claim they lit the fires in 2001 and 2006 to reduce the growth of invasive plants and protect their property from wildfires. The two were convicted of the arsons three years ago and served time — the father three months, the son one year. But a judge ruled their terms were too short under federal law and ordered them back to prison for about four years each.

The decision has generated controversy in a remote part of the state.

MUST READ: “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy.”

UPDATED I (1/3/016): In a massive land grab under the Antiquities Act, Barack Obama will be putting hundreds of Oregonian ranchers out of business. Hear it in their own words.

UPDATE II (1/4): Once these farmers, whose homesteader rights are as authentic and naturally valid as those of the Native Americans whose rights (robbed) the Left champions (as do I)—how will the bloody liberals eat their organic grass-fed local meat? I buy it. I support local farmers’ grass-fed grazing. It’s an American frontier, founding profession, noble.

“Left Demands Media Start Calling Bundy Group ‘Terrorists.”

“Statement by Oregon Farm Bureau President Barry Bushue on sentencing of Steve and Dwight Hammond to five years in federal prison.”

UPDATE III: Everything you wanted to know about Ted Cruz and were too bored to ask:

About Pope Francis, The Lady Di of The Papacy

Celebrity, Christianity, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Government, Islam, Reason, Religion

“About Pope Francis” is the current column, now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch. …

… Read the rest.“About Pope Francis” is now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED: It takes A Special Kind Of Stupid To Lose Moral High-Ground To Planned Parenthood

Conservatism, Federalism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Morality, Republicans, Uncategorized

Progressives are evil, immoral; as clueless as the pope in their arrogant ignorance of the American political system and the role of government in the American federal scheme.

But one has to be a special kind of stupid to lose the moral high ground to the 500,000 dollars-a-year babe (Cecile Richards) and her congressional harpies, who plump for public funding for Planned Parenthood.

THAT Republicans certainly are. (I say this as a libertarian who doesn’t see how, in a free world, one can agitate for the arrest of a woman for what she does with her property: her body and all that’s in it. I do, however, see a clear and logical way to argue the outlaw of late-term abortion. The reasoning I’ll share in a new book.)

Progressives are gloating: “The GOP still has nothing to show for its anti-Planned Parenthood campaign.”

UPDATE: What I mean by outlawing” late-term abortion is arguing convincingly—well, almost convincingly, since it’s pretty hard—against the practice of late-term abortion based on libertarian reasoning. Libertarian law turns on private property rights and the non-aggression axiom. You cannot initiate aggression against a non-aggressor. To aggress against a woman for what she does to her body, however much you abhor the practice, flies in the face of libertarianism.

So the challenge is arguing for that aggression in the case of a late-term child. It’s almost impossible logically, but I think it can be done. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from religious libertarians how they’d argue for outlawing abortion. Ron Paul is anti-abortion. Not sure it works in libertarian law. But please share. Don’t bother specifying that abortion should not be funded by the state. We all agree. In fact, this is the central silliness of the Repubs; they can’t explain to silly bimbos that to defund abortion is not to ban abortion.

You Say McKinley; I Say Denali

America, Constitution, Federalism, Race, States' Rights

To me it seems natural and organic for the people of Alaska to name the hilly protrusions along their stomping ground.

Aaron Goldstein, at The American Spectator, doesn’t wish “to make mountains” of the fact that his Highness, Barack Obama, changed the name of Mount McKinley to Denali. Instead, Goldstein laments the president’s flouting of the Constitution or the federal scheme (not quite sure which).

Can we agree that federalism, like freedom, is long dead, and is the stuff of nostalgia?

The other thing I wonder about is the ease with which my fellow Americans offend native Americans (Indians), as opposed to the crippling fear they have of saying anything that might make blacks mad.

It’s to the credit of native Americans that they are less menacing.