I was wondering why after eight days of rounding up Cliven Bundy’s “trespass cattle” from his Gold Butte ranch all the captured cows were still in corrals on site. It made no sense to be hauling hay into them, when they could be trucked to feedlots equipped to handle them.
And why would BLM release the cattle because of a few folks standing around exercising their First and Second amendment rights?
Bundy cattle released April 12. (R-J photo by Jason Bean)
But a source with a source tells me a network of western cattle ranchers and those who provide them services collectively got on the phone and their computers with each other and decided to boycott the BLM roundup. No feedlot would take the cattle for auction. No trucker was available to haul the cows.
“Hey, do you want to know the REAL reason why the BLM backed off a week or so ago?” my source’s source asked him. “You’ll never read about this in the news media.”
The source said the ranching community got together on the phone, email, conference calls, small group calls, and though many did not agree with how Bundy was handling things, they were far more upset with the BLM’s roundup tactics and decided to blackball the operation.
The source said that BLM called and called and could not find a single rancher who would sell them a single bale of hay. (I must have seen a dozen trucks loaded with hay earlier this week driving south on state Highway 376.) They called cattle trucking companies to haul off the cattle from the BLM roundup area. All of the trucks were “committed and unavailable.” They called cattle buyer after cattle buyer and no one would buy the cattle — or even take them off their hands for free.
The BLM was stuck with cattle that would start dying without food. Not good optics since all the assembled local media and national media and social media would capture the starvation.
It makes as much sense as the story the BLM told about avoiding violence.
4TH ST8 
Determined ranchers 1, soft handed legislators 0. I have no idea why the old cowboy changed the subject to slavery but it seems to have worked, our esteemed legislators fell for it, changing him and his supporters from domestic terrorists to racists. Now that’s something the legislators can get their teeth into, hard to fault the old cowboy for wanting his cattle to feed but it’s easy to fault him for being a racist. They still can’t shoot him, this is no time to make him a martyr what with the fall election closing in, and it would be another scandal for this administration to deal with, not good, not timely.
I believe this, but because there are those who won’t, I hope somebody documents it beyond all doubt.
No one will even try. Their short attention span has them chasing the latest shiny thing … Look! A racist!
I hope its not documentable…so the same thing can happen again.
As for the “racist” charge…that is easy to accomplish with editing. There are unedited versions available of Bundy saying what they edited to fit the charges of racism and they show Bundy an old man who grew up in times where words meant different things….they also show Bundy to be a very tolerant person who probably took a bunch of trouble over the years for his views on race relations. In fact in the current race climate his views towards illegal immigrants would get him in hot water with many opposed to opening up and allowing them a form of citizenship today.
Bundy is most certainly not well spoken or very good at public speaking, but his heart and mind are in the right place.
What I heard was very different from what was edited for public consumption.
Here is an unedited transcript:
“…” and so what I’ve testified to ya’, I was in the WATTS riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen the last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people is thinking they did not have their freedom; they didn’t have these things, and they didn’t have them.
We’ve progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and sure don’t want to go back; we sure don’t want the colored people to go back to that point; we sure don’t want the Mexican people to go back to that point; and we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.
Let me tell.. talk to you about the Mexicans, and these are just things I know about the negroes. I want to tell you one more thing I know about the negro.
When I go, went, go to Las Vegas, North Las Vegas; and I would see these little government houses, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids…. and there was 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 the kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for the young girls to do.
And because they were basically on government subsidy – so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered are they were better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things? Or are they better off under government subsidy?
You know they didn’t get more freedom, uh they got less freedom – they got less family life, and their happiness -you could see it in their faces- they were not happy sitting on that concrete sidewalk. Down there they was probably growing their turnips – so that’s all government, that’s not freedom.
Now, let me talk about the Spanish people. You know I understand that they come over here against our constitution and cross our borders. But they’re here and they’re people – and I’ve worked side-by-side a lot of them.
Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structure than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, they’re together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together, and I’ll tell you in my way of thinking they’re awful nice people.
And we need to have those people join us and be with us…. not, not come to our party.”
Here is an unedited You Tube vid (as long as it remains available)
This video is the original,,what was aired on TV was most definitely edited to make it appear to say something very different.
Keep defending him.
Not a defense…anon,,,,criticism of media that is willing to edit statements to make those statements say something completely different.
Keep defending the lies you like.
He’s not exactly articulate but he has freedom of speech, he can say what he wants even if his references are rather dated. It’s a long speech by a man not experienced in public speaking but somehow touching, totally unlike Harry Reid’s sarcastic Tourette Syndrome-like outbursts.
Leave it to the NYT to make sure he looks as bad as possible. After all, its motto is, “All the news that fits”.
gosh, a few days ago Cliven Bundy was all over Fox News. But in the past 36 hours he seems to have gone down the memory hole. I wonder why?
Valuable quote Steve. One would have thought that the success of Fox News would have alerted the rest of the media to the need for accuracy. After all, it was media bias that spawned Fox News in the first place.
Conservative media,,sticking its head in the sand…becomes little better than the liberal media from which it spawned.
Telling the Truth is so poisonous that all people run away scared of being labeled a racist.
Talk about not being able to call a spade, a spade! (It just might hurt some libby’s cash cow!)
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