Sunday morning Bundy ranch roundup.

Cliven Bundy and his GI Joe wannabes.

Okay, so for a few days now I have been trying to sit down and write about the goings on at the Bundy Ranch.

However, and this is no exaggeration, the moment I thought I had an interesting take on the situation, more crap would suddenly appear that was just as explosive and worthy of mention.

So I decided to just do a roundup of all of the most recent events and hopefully it will not prove to overwhelming or confusing.

First there is a response from the Metro police officers who were there on the day of the standoff: 

Metro police officers who were on the front lines when Cliven Bundy’s army of militiamen drew weapons and faced them down are speaking out. Officers say that they “feared for their lives.” 

Assistant Sheriff Joe Lombardo explained that “There was a possibility of somebody just having an accidental discharge causing a blood bath, because the individuals that were showing up, the militia quote unquote, were armed to the teeth.” 

According to 8 News NOW I-Team, “At least some of the militia members who pointed weapons at police officers during the confrontation may have wanted a violent outcome and tried to incite one.” 

Sgt. Tom Jenkins laid out the general feeling among the thirty police officers that stood between federal agents and Bundy’s domestic terrorists. “We didn’t show any fear that day, but I can tell you, we all thought in the back of our minds, we all thought it was going to be our last day on earth, if it went bad,”he explained.

Now remember these are not the federal agents that the Teabaggers are always vilifying, and claiming do not have rights in Nevada. These are local law enforcement who were simply doing their jobs.

Of course to the sane it is equally indefensible to threaten federal agents doing their jobs as well.

However threatening is apparently what these lunatics are all about.

This from the Daily Kos: 

Within the past few days, local 8 News NOW received Police Reports and other information that show Bundy's Anti-American, Anti-Government thugs: 

- "poured lighter fluid around" news trucks, 
- Issued "bomb threats" against Hotels where Federal employees were lodging, 
- told hotel staff they would be "dragged out in the parking lot and shot" 
- Bundy thugs asked Metro Police Sgt Jenkins if "he was ready to die"

And when these gun toting dipshits are not threatening others, they are fighting amongst themselves:  

Vicious infighting among those remaining at the camp – estimated at less than a hundred – broke out a little more than two weeks after heavily armed militiamen forced federal agents to back down from a planned roundup of Bundy’s illegally grazing cattle from public lands. After vowing to stay on and protect Bundy – who then stumbled on the national stage with an outpouring of racist commentary – the remaining “Patriots,” who have been raising fear levels among local residents, have begun feuding. And it has been revealing. 

Apparently, someone within one of the major factions at the camp, the Oath Keepers, relayed word of the imminent drone attack to his leaders. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes responded by pulling his people out of what they called “the kill zone” (the area the supposed drone would be striking). When the other militiamen learned that the Oath Keepers had pulled out, they were outraged.

Of course there was no drone attack, and only a moron would think there might be one, which caused the militia men to call the Oath Keepers "traitors" and cowards for leaving the "battlefield."

(And yes they do refer to the ranch as the "kill zone" so you can imagine the level of paranoia floating around that place.)

The Oath Keepers responded to these charges by making a few of their own:

RHODES (One of the Oath Keepers) : … and this is the tip of the iceberg of the cluster out there. One of our guys from Montana, Rick Delap, who was there from the beginning he’s been out there for 2 weeks in the dirt. The day of this confrontation [with Steve & John Bidler] I come to find out he [Rick Delap] had to draw on somebody. Two of the Mountain men guys came up to him — were aggressing on him. Then one of them ran back to his vehicle and grabbed an AR and came back with an AR in his hand and Rick had to draw on him. And those two ran off. That was this close [hand signals an inch] from Rick having to shoot that ding-a-ling. If that guy had raised his barrel, Rick would have had no choice but to shoot him.

How nobody has yet been shot at this ranch yet is beyond my comprehension.

But don't think that police, federal agents, hotel staff. and each other, are the only ones being threatened by this group.

Just take a look at how they harass a reporter who had the temerity to ask Cliven Bundy about his racist remarks:

I have seen numerous things in my life labeled a "powder keg" but I don;t think that there has been a time in recent memory where that was more apropos

Made up of radicalized ex-military members, the Oath Keepers have decided to train their own "Special Forces" in response to the upcoming "Apocalypse." Do I even need to mention that they hate Obama?

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

Up until now, Oath Keepers has mainly been a bunch of pissed-off white dudes talking tough and holding meetings and rallies and so forth, but now the group is setting out to train Special Forces-esque "civilian preservation teams" to contend with the apocalyptic future they see coming to America. "We are flat running out of time and we need to get as prepared as possible as fast as possible," the group's founder, a lawyer named Stuart Rhodes, wrote to the group's members. The Daily Beast's Caitlin Dickson has the update: 

"We think this is what Americans should do anyway, but now we see that we're seriously in a vulnerable position because most Americans don't," Rhodes told The Daily Beast. "After Hurricane Katrina and Sandy, we saw Americans dependent on FEMA, on a government that can't do anything. People have been desperate, vulnerable to crime and vulnerable to dying" in such emergency situations, he said. 

But it's not a natural disaster that Rhodes thinks will catapult the country into chaos. In his email announcing the launch of the plan, Rhodes lays out the course of action he predicts "the enemy"—the government—is preparing to follow, including "intentionally triggering a catastrophic economic collapse" as a means of creating disorder that they will then use as an excuse to impose martial law, destroy the constitution and use the billions of dollars in ammunition, armored vehicles and weapons he claims the Department of Homeland Security and local police have been stockpiling "to control and contain us." 

Rhodes, who has been somewhat measured in the past, is now straying into serious wack-job territory. The group's rhetoric is also pretty disingenuous, given Oath Keepers' tight relationship with the tea party movement, whose faction in Congress is the one holding a gun to America's head and threatening to put the economy at serious risk. (It's perhaps also worth noting that American civilians already pack far more heat than the government does.) 

A glimpse at the Oath Keepers' website will tell you what this is really all about: A large graphic bearing the president's face reads: "Snowden Honored His Oath...Honor Yours! Stop Big Brother!" And the site's "featured" posts include: "Mr. Obama, Tear Down Those Walls! Veterans, Oath Keepers, and Friends Tear Down 'Barrycades' In D.C.," which faults the White House for the closure of the WWII Veterans Memorial in DC while featuring a photo of tea party leader Ted Cruz—one of the federal shutdown's primary architects—speaking to the protesters as though he were some kind of hero.

They vilify the President, whole deifying Ted Cruz, and they are heavily armed and military trained.  And the sign for action that they are looking for as an excuse to take up arms against the government, "intentionally triggering a catastrophic economic collapse," is an action actively being pursued by the Tea Party faction of the Republican party.

Does anybody want to disagree with me about my Bill Maher post from yesterday now?

Believe me that just because we finally got a deal to reopen the government, and avoid default, these assholes are not going to suddenly be placated.

Their hatred for this President is deeply ingrained, and it will only take one or two more instances, that the Right Wing can unfairly or not lay at the President's door, for one of these wackos to break off from the pack and make a serious attempt on his life.

In my opinion this group, which openly attempts to convince military and law enforcement personnel to disregard their orders if they come from the President, are a domestic terrorist organization and they need to be treated as such. Because they ARE dangerous, and they ARE advocating a violent response to the government.

In Alaska we had our own "Oath Keeper" and we did what was needed to render him impotent. I think it behooves the Federal government to take a similar approach in dealing with this group of terrorists.

Heavy reading Tuesday. Time to learn the truth about the Teabagger movement.

First let's look into the money behind the "grass roots" Teabagger organization.

Meet the Koch brothers, from Wichita, Kansas.

The focus of most political groups is to influence candidates, lawmakers, agency heads, and reporters at the top of the system. But these two brothers have been executing a concerted plan for more than 30 years not only to influence those at the top, but also to go much deeper. They spend freely on dozens of ideologically grounded, right-wing groups to influence schoolteachers and high-school curricula, state and federal judges, lawyers and legal scholars, conservative policy thinkers and media producers, city-council candidates and local party activists--and their aim is to shove the country's national debate to the hard right, discombobulate the public's progressive wishes, and alter government policies to advance corporate interests generally and the Kochs' own interests specifically.

Here is a profile of just one of the Koch tentacles: Americans For Prosperity. AFP, the third-largest recipient of Koch foundation largesse, is the brothers' overtly political unit. Essentially, it is a front group for mass-producing front groups. Much like McDonald's churns out Big Mac franchises, AFP can pop out a grassrootsy-looking, cookie-cutter political operation on demand.

That was the money, now meet the muscle.

Chris Matthews confronts "Oathkeepers" founder about the scare tactics he uses to convince cops and soldiers to disobey orders from the government.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This guy tries to make the case that he is just a normal non-partisan freedom loving American who wants to make sure that our government does not stomp on state's rights or the rights of individual citizens.

In light of what happened during the Bush administration this almost seems reasonable. After all under George W. Bush we had our own government tap our phones, they outed an undercover CIA agent, and we had a President who once referred to the Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper".

So for a real patriot I could understand them getting worried about what a President like that might do next and preparing for the worst.

Except Oathkeepers was not formed back in the Bush administration. It was formed in March of 2009.

So with George W. Bush, a man who seemed not to care one little bit about the Constitution, safely out of office why would these men suddenly feel the need to prepare to resist orders that came from their own government?

Why would they fear Barack Obama, a Constitutional scholar, over George W. Bush?

Oh I think you know why.

BTW Matthews did a great job here. This is just one more example of the hate mongering, and racism that we are seeing spread across a certain segment of our country.