"We would prefer our clients not look like disheveled slackers in front of the jury''

"Ammon Bundy's lawyer argues for his client's right to wear cowboy boots at trial"

The judge advised Philpot (Ammon Bundy's lawyer) to file a motion by the end of the day Tuesday, and cite any prior court rulings on the matter.

Philpot, in his motion, said he and co-counsel Marcus Mumford were not able to find a U.S. Supreme Court or U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case on point that declared a defendant's right to be tried in the clothes of his choosing.

Instead, they cited a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that found because of a defendant's presumption of innocence, "(n)o insinuations, indications or implications suggesting guilt should be displayed before the jury, other than admissible evidence and permissible argument."

Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan Bundy both wore suit jackets to court Tuesday because the court took photos of them to place in a juror's book that will be handed out at trial. Ammon Bundy wore a gray suit jacket over a white dress shirt. His brother wore a dark suit jacket over a light blue dress shirt.

"He looks very presentable,'' the judge said of Ammon Bundy.

She described his clothing as "perfectly appropriate for court.''

But Philpot argued in his written motion that the judge's opinion was based on a view of Ammon Bundy seated. Yet at trial, he will stand and likely take the witness stand to testify in his own defense, his lawyer said.

"We must consider, when he does so, how will he look? And what are the spot assumptions and impressions will the jury have about him when they see him in the kind of white socks and loafers he was wearing today, with his beltless trousers, and dressed in a formal suit without a tie,'' Philpot wrote. "Just as significantly, how will the lack of belt, tie, or other apparel compare to others in the courtroom, as he and the other detained defendants are the only ones who will appear that way.'' (read the whole thing)

"I’m an Oregon rancher"

"Here’s what you don’t understand about the Bundy standoff. The Obama administration has pushed our livelihood to the brink." (excerpts)

Most days, I’m up before the sun rises. I spend my mornings tending to my horses, dogs and livestock. In the winter, when it’s bitter cold, I’m outside with my cattle, making sure their water isn’t frozen and that they’re properly fed. In the summer, I often work 15-hour days, cultivating my crops and tending to the animals. In the afternoons, I’m in my office, reaching out to customers and handling the ranch’s business side. Over the course of a given day, I act as a vet, a mechanic, an agronomist and accountant.

I love the work, but it’s grueling. As a rancher, I’m always one bad year away from financial disaster. Every purchase I make — from new cows ($2,000 each) to a new piece of equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — is a major investment. And my ranch operates on very slim margins, so I have to be savvy to make ends meet.

Money isn’t the only challenge. Raising cattle requires a lot of land, much more than most ranchers can afford to own outright. I lease about a third of the space I use from private owners. But most ranchers aren’t so lucky. The federal government controls a huge amount of land in the west (more than 50 percent in some states, like Oregon), and many ranchers must lease that space to create a sustainable operation.

Utilizing federal land requires ranchers to follow an unfair, complicated and constantly evolving set of rules. For example, a federal government agency might decide that it wants to limit the number of days a rancher can graze their cattle to protect a certain endangered plant or animal species, or they might unilaterally decide that ranchers can’t use as much water as they need because of a fight over water rights. Or they might take over land that once belonged to the state or private individuals, imposing an entirely new set of restrictions.

I saw this play out firsthand when the federal government considered listing the sage grouse, a chicken-like bird, as endangered. That regulation would have shrunk the amount of land where ranchers could graze cattle, putting many out of business and decimating the industry. To avoid this, ranchers like myself and local officials spent months meeting with federal officials looking for compromise. We ultimately found middle ground. But we already have an enormous workload in our daily lives. The pressure of having to drop everything to lobby against a rule (which happens more often than you’d think) is a tremendous burden.

Most of the time, those regulations are written by people with no agriculture experience, and little understanding of what it takes to produce our nation’s food.

Ranching is a billion-dollar industry in Oregon. Overall, agriculture accounts for 15 percent of the state’s economic activity and 12 percent of the state’s employment. The income of a local farm generates double the money for the local economy as a supermarket’s income in the same area, according to the London-based New Economics Foundation.

The siege on our industry has only increased under the Obama administration. Officials are effectively regulating us out of business by enforcing a string of unprecedented environmental restrictions. In Malhuer county (next to Harney county, where the current standoff is taking place), the Obama administration is considering a measure that will turn 2.5 million acres of federal land into a “national monument,” a move that would severely restrict grazing. These restrictions would cause a huge economic downturn for those communities.

These decisions are being made by people who are four to five generations removed from food production. The rule-makers don’t quite understand our industry, and are being spurred on by extreme environmentalist groups asking for unreasonable policy changes.

"In Oregon, frustration over federal land rights has been building for years"

Washington Post: The federal government owns more than half the land in the state, as it does across much of the West. It used to be routine for ranchers to get permits to graze cattle or cut timber or work mines — a way to make a living from the land.

Then came increasing environmental regulations, and the federal land became more for owls and sage grouse than for local people trying to feed their families, said Soper, 39, who lives 100 miles up the road in Bend.

“What people in Western states are dealing with is the destruction of their way of life,” said Soper, a father of four who was once a professional rodeo rider. “When frustration builds up, people lash out.”

Anger at the federal government boiled over this past weekend, when a small group of people took over a remote federal wildlife refuge east of here. Their specific aim was to support two local ranchers sentenced to prison over arson charges. But the larger issue is a decades-long struggle over federal land rights in the West that often flies under the radar in much of the country.

Cliven Bundy on blacks: ‘Are they better off as slaves?’

"Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher whom some Republicans and tea party activists have rallied around as he fights federal government efforts to restrict the land his cattle can graze on, suggests in a New York Times story that African Americans might be better off as slaves, given their current situation."

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.” (read more)

The call is going out for conservatives to distance themselves from Bundy. I find it interesting that after President Obama has repeatedly called for a national conversation or race, as soon as a citizen is engaged in the race conversation, the conversation is used against him.
I'm not going to defend Bundy, but, (I guess I 'am) we all have been asked to talk about race. And unless there is a school we have to go to learn how to talk about it. I'm not going to condemn a man for being in-artfull, un-nuanced as to the euphemism riddled, ever evolving language of race. Bundy spoke his mind the best he could, which is saying a lot, in the day when exercising free speech by making a donation to the unapproved cause can get you virtually tarred and feather not to mention fired.

2 Paragraphs: Cliven Bundy Is Angry—Just Like the Rest of Us

"Rand Paul wants us to focus calmly on the issue of whether governmental authority has exceeded its legitimate scope. In an all-or-nothing world where the federal government dwarfs everything, that’s a tall order. Democrats dig in their heels, certain that ceding ground to “the crazies” will set a dangerous precedent of retreat. Republicans cling to real-life examples of “out-of-control government,” whatever the risk to their reputation, because they know that abstract ideals just aren’t enough to inspire Americans to restore limited government."

"Paul is right that we must deal with the Bundy crisis in the spirit of neighborly forbearance. To do so, however, we need to turn our gaze away from politics for a moment. For devout Christians—and not just the devout—Easter weekend is an especially propitious time to do exactly that. Before religion was conscripted into the nationalization of all political issues, more of us could see clearly that the realms of church and of faith ameliorated the burdensome work of forgiving enemies, reconciling with foes, and recognizing one another as beings plunged up to our necks in the same hard predicaments."

Daily Beast

Bundy Redux

From the Washington Post on March 21, 1993: The Post article was written more than 21 years ago, before Cliven Bundy had been assessed even one dime in fees, and validates his claim that his grievance is about the intrusiveness of federal rules aimed at protecting the desert tortoise, and how the government has used the rules as yet another tool to pick economic winners and losers.

Three years ago, with tortoise populations crashing largely because of habitat destruction across its range in Nevada, California, Arizona and Utah, the federal government added the tortoise to its list of threatened species. The designation immediately imperiled tens of millions of dollars worth of construction projects in this development-crazed city.    

But it also triggered a novel experiment in the peaceful resolution of endangered species conflicts that is similar, in many respects, to the process Babbitt would like to try nationwide to defuse explosive development-versus-environment fights.    

Employing a rarely used mechanism approved by Congress a decade ago, environmentalists, developers, government officials, cattlemen, miners and off-road vehicle enthusiasts began negotiating a “habitat conservation plan.” The hope was it would satisfy both the needs of the tortoise and the Las Vegas area’s rapacious appetite for development.    

The result was a plan to protect the tortoise by providing vast tracts of federal land as a refuge while sacrificing other tortoise areas to development....    

By mid-1991, the Fish and Wildlife Service had approved a short-term conservation plan that allows for development of about 22,000 acres of tortoise habitat in and around Las Vegas in exchange for strict conservation measures on 400,000 acres of federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land south of the city. The plan is funded by development fees of between $ 250 and $ 550 an acre paid by builders. Almost $ 10 million has been raised so far.

Among the conservation measures required are the elimination of livestock grazing and strict limits on off-road vehicle use in the protected tortoise habitat. Two weeks ago, the managers of the plan completed the task of purchasing grazing privileges from cattle ranchers who formerly used BLM land....

Open Secrets reports that Harry Reid has raised more than $44 million of campaign donations during his time as Senator.  Many of the donors are attorneys, casino owners, developers, etc.

1989 - 2014 Total Receipts:

$44,499,256

Say what you will about Cliven Bundy being a cantankerous old guy, the facts suggest that he and other ranchers are being screwed out of a living by the federal govenrment, all so other interests can use the land Bundy and other ranchers have been grazing their cattle for more thatn a century.  The land on which he holds grazing rights is being set aside as tortoise habitat so other lands can be deleloped, likely by people who have enriched Harry Reid's campaign chest.

And who, exactly, gave the order to kill Bundy's cattle?  Shouldn't we know that?  Damn right we should.

Read more here.

A Different Take On The Bundy Ranch Conflict

The best part of the video is in the middle.   The beginning has some fluff, the end is a commercial of sorts.  There is clear information that Harry Reid and his son are involved in the BLM attempting to end Cliven Bundy's cattle operation.

Is Sen. Harry Reid Behind BLM Land Grab of Bundy Ranch?

“[Reid] and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm and panel manufacturing plant in the southern Nevada desert,” he wrote. “Reid has been one of the project’s most prominent advocates, helping recruit the company during a 2011 trip to China and applying his political muscle on behalf of the project in Nevada.

His son, a lawyer with a prominent Las Vegas firm that is representing ENN, helped it locate a 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) desert site that it is buying well below appraised value from Clark County, where Rory Reid formerly chaired the county commission.

The land in question is the land on which Cliven Bundy and his family have grazed cattle for more than 100 years.  Land on which they have for years taken steps to provide habitat for tortoises the Bureau of Land Management says are (suddenly) threatened.

“A tortoise isn’t the reason why BLM is harassing a 67 year-old rancher; they want his land,” journalist Dana Loesch wrote. “The tortoise wasn’t of concern when [U.S. Senator] Harry Reid worked with BLM to literally change the boundaries of the tortoise’s habitat to accommodate the development of his top donor, Harvey Whittemore.”

Harry Reid is involved in something filthy.  Are you surprised?  I'm not. 

Read more.