Martyrs without a cause
by digby
These goodbye cruel world videos are too much:
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Prayers!Posted by Adrian Sewell on Thursday, January 21, 2016
He was the first rancher to tear up his federal grazing contract in this ceremony yesterday apparently:
The leader of an armed group occupying a national wildlife refuge in Oregon plans to have a ceremony Saturday for ranchers to renounce federal ownership of public land and tear up their federal grazing contracts.
Midday on Saturday, a small counter-protest gathered on an overlook about five miles from the refuge, chanting for the group to go home.
Kieran Seckling with the Center for Biological Diversity said the leaders of the armed group want to “stage another occupancy like this and to terrorize those towns the same way they have terrorized burns. There’s no town in the west that wants to be the next Burns.”
About 40 people gathered for the counter-protest around 1 p.m. in bitter wind and sleet.
Katie Fite from Boise, Idaho, called the occupiers bullies and said their action could give rise to other hate-filled efforts to take over public lands.
On Friday, Ammon Bundy met briefly with a federal agent as authorities attempt to resolve the three-week old standoff over federal land policies, but Bundy left because the agent wouldn’t talk with him in front of the media.
The short meeting occurred as Oregon officials are putting increased pressure on federal authorities to take action against Bundy’s group.
On Thursday, Bundy went to the airport in Burns, where the FBI has set up a staging area, and spoke to an FBI negotiator over the phone. They agreed to speak again Friday, but Bundy left the airport shortly after he arrived because the FBI agent he spoke with said federal authorities wanted any conversation to be private.
Bundy wants face-to-face conversations in front of reporters. “I really don’t think, at this point, even having another phone conversation here without him would be beneficial,” Bundy said before leaving Friday.