Governor Rick Perry gives his views on hot topics of the day

Texas Governor Rick Perry is interviewed here by Stuart Varney. The interview covers immigration, BLM, competing with other states for jobs, and a presidential bid in 2016 by Perry.

Appreciating the rural way and its polite contempt for the softer world of the city

Victor Davis Hanson gives us his thoughts on the stand off in Nevada.

Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert.

Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada.

Two, this administration has a long record of not following the law — picking and choosing when and how to enforce immigration statutes, depending on the particular dynamics of the next election; picking and choosing which elements of Obamacare to enforce, again depending on perceived political advantage; and picking and choosing when to go after coal companies, or when not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or when to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, or when to allow Lois Lerner to destroy the credibility of the IRS for partisan advantage.

In other words, the Obama administration regularly breaks the law as it sees fit. So we wonder why a federal agency sends out swarms of armed security agents to the empty desert on behalf of a tortoise, when it could just as easily storm Jay Carney’s press conference and demand that the president promise to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Or start apprehending those who are not just violating immigration law, but also serially signing false federal affidavits or providing employers with fraudulent identities.

Finally, Bundy, for all his contradictions, is a throwback to a different age.

My other grandfather was a refined Welsh version of the rural way, but no less independent as a small farmer who worked all his land himself until he quit one day at 86 and died that night in the hospital. He was as wiry as my other Swedish grandfather was a hulk. The one was a master horse rider, the other an expert at plowing with horses. Growing up with them, I never much learned about the secrets of “business” or “how to make it” (sometimes I wish I had). Making it, as I at sixty look back at them now, was probably defined as talking bluntly, gaining a reputation for “straight shooting,” paying all your bills on time, never making excuses for failure, and in general being loyal to friends and of some worry to enemies. To understand Bundy’s fatalism is to appreciate the rural way and its polite contempt for the softer world of the city and the mush that now passes for making it. Losing nobly was preferable to winning badly — Old Ajax to the core.

Under Obama the government is becoming tainted and an ideological tool of social transformation. After just six years, we shrug that, of course, the IRS is biased. The Justice Department is politicized; ask Dinesh D’Souza or the AP reporters. No need to mention the NSA. The EPA makes laws up as ideologically required. No one believes the State Department that in the weeks before the election a video-caused “riot” led to expert jihadists zeroing in with their GPS-guided mortars on a CIA annex in Benghazi. And so on.

The point is Mr. Bundy is no Rahm Emanuel, Al Gore, or Jay Carney. He is no Jay-Z or Sean Penn. He is a world away from the Kardashians and the BMW meets Mercedes crowd of the California coastal corridor or the psychodramas of brats at Dartmouth. Bundy does not have the white privilege that those who have it — mostly liberal, wealthy, and seeking an apartheid existence — damn in others.

Money is not Bundy’s point. Pleasing Harry Reid or the federal bureaucracy is not either. Making a living from the scrub of a desert by providing people good food probably is.

Grant him that. He’s our past, Harry Reid and the bunch in Washington our future. To paraphrase the ancients, sometimes we’d rather be wrong with Cliven Bundy than right with Harry Reid — and the SWAT teams that will revisit Mr. Bundy and his clan very, very soon to enforce a dispute over grazing fees and insensitivity to a tortoise.

Read more here.

Hero or scofflaw? Why can't he be both?

Is the federal government at war with the people? Will the federal government strike faster next time? With the establishment of the Bill of Rights, we established a free speech zone in the entire country! The establishment of a free speech zone just goes to show how much those rights have been trampled. Private landowners rarely show up with helicopters and AR-15s, threatening to rustle your cattle!

Some industries are favored, some are not

Some activities are favored by Obama's BLM (solar and wind farms), and some are not favored (ranching, logging, mining). The developers of wind and solar projects are invariably big Democrat donors; their projects depend on federal subsidies. John Hinderaker writes that for these Democrat donors, influencing people like Barack Obama and Harry Reid

is fundamental to the developers’ business plans. Ranchers, on the other hand, ask nothing from the federal government other than the continuation of their historic rights. It is a safe bet that Cliven Bundy is not an Obama or Reid contributor.

Why is it that the BLM is deeply concerned about desert tortoises when it comes to ranchers, but couldn’t care less when the solar power developers from China come calling? Environmentalists have asked this question. Does the difference lie in the fact that Cliven Bundy has never contributed to an Obama or Reid campaign, or paid a bribe to Reid or a member of his family?

So let’s have some sympathy for Cliven Bundy and his family. They don’t have a chance on the law, because under the Endangered Species Act and many other federal statutes, the agencies are always in the right. And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps. It probably has never occurred to them to bribe a politician. They don’t subsist by virtue of government subsidies or regulations that hamstring competitors. They aren’t illegal immigrants. They have never even gone to law school. So what possible place is there for the Bundys in the Age of Obama?

Read more here.

Pictures from the fight for freedom

Here is the BLM officer tasering Bundy's son Ammon, and ordering the german shepherd to attack him. Thank goodness for the ubiquitous cell phones!

Here is rancher Cliven Bundy walking along the fenced in "First Amendment area" set up by the Bureau of Land Management.

Here is the real area covered by the First Amendment. Don't ever forget it!


Thanks to Power Line for posting these images.
Breitbart has more here.

BLM leaves, gives Bundy back his cows

Here is the Reuters photo of the final stand off in Nevada between the BLM (on the other side of the blocked interstate highway) and the supporters of freedom.

The government gave Bundy back 300 of his cattle that had been stolen from Bundy by the BLM. The BLM's director had formerly been the Chief of Staff to Senator Harry Reid. Bundy's family has been ranching there for many years. Senator Harry Reid and his son Rory want the land for a Chinese company Rory represents to build a utility scale solar energy project. The Chinese guy found out we do things a little differently here in America, including having an armed citizenry. Thank goodness we have the British press to cover the story. Here is today's story by Reuters.

BLM issues press release announcing an end to their cattle rustling

Rick Moran has the press release by BLM to announcing that it will stop rounding up Bundy's cows. Moran concludes,

The BLM may wait for things to die down and then return to enforce the court order. If they try the same tactics, it’s likely they’ll meet the same resistance. “It’s about the freedom of America,” said another of Bundy’s sisters, Margaret Houston. “We have to stand up and fight.” If the only thing they accomplish in the end is put the government on notice that citizens won’t sit still for this kind of bullying, something positive will have come out of this mess.

Read more here.