Now there's an event in Boise:
Boise • The BLM allotments Western ranchers use are not really public land, but rather grazing reserves to which ranchers hold a "property right" that the federal government has no authority to infringe.
That's the lesson being taught Saturday at a property rights forum in Idaho organized by Utah activists sympathetic to the militants who have occupied an Oregon wildlife refuge for most of January.
And it's dead wrong, according to Thad Box, retired dean of Utah State University's College of Natural Resources.
"The federal agencies are essentially our hired hands, paid to manage and protect public lands that belong to all of us. Livestock grazing is a traditional, permitted use of western our lands. A rancher who grazes animals on public lands is a permittee, not an owner of the privilege," he wrote in an e-mail. "If they renounce their privilege, their grazing allotment could, and should, be canceled and assigned to someone else."
Called "Storm Over Rangelands" by organizers, there's a counter-protest going on there as well.
Meanwhile, back in Burns, there's a protest going on in front of the Harney County Courthouse over the shooting death of that "LaVoy" dude, which they're claiming was an out-and-out assassination. They seem to be from out-of-state as well.
BURNS, Ore. — BJ Soper has never supported the nearly month-long occupation of a national wildlife refuge by armed anti-government activists. He sympathized with their frustrations about the federal government, but he thought calm negotiation was a better strategy.
Then on Tuesday, an Oregon state trooper shot and killed LaVoy Finicum, a cowboy-hat-wearing grandfather who acted as the occupiers’ spokesman.
Now Soper is furious, and he’s calling for people from all over the country to come to Burns to show their outrage at Finicum’s “ambush.”
Great: now "LaVoy's" a freaking martyr. The FBI released video of the events leading up to the shooting in an effort to defuse things, but that's actually had the opposite effect; it's re-energized anti-government sentiments and increased support for the Battling Bundys and their ilk.
“They were ambushed in that canyon,” Soper said. “There’s no doubt about it. It was planned, it was premeditated. The FBI has lied to us from the get go, and we’re tired of it. They said they wanted a peaceful resolution, there was never an attempt to negotiate, and now a man’s dead.”
He said protests would continue daily “until some sense of reason is reestablished here.”
Meanwhile, the people in Burns, most of whom never supported the takeover of the refuge in the first place, have to continue putting up with the circus. Most sane people recognized the point that the Bundy Boys were trying to make, and even agree with it - they just thought it was a stupid approach, and they wanted them to go home. Instead, what they get is even more loons around the area of the wildlife refuge.
