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Most of you heard about the rancher in Nevada, Cliven Bundy, that is in a battle with the BLM (Federal Bureau of Land Management) over land that his family has used for grazing since the 1880 and the BLM’s pushing out ranchers in Clark County to “protect the desert tortoises” that are on the protected list.

Sidenote: the BLM has admitted to euthanizing hundreds of those same “protected species” due to “budget cuts”

He believes he has the right to use that land, the BLM says no (the Federal Government actually owns most of the land in Nevada and claims to own that land as well).  Things have escalated over the last week with between 3 – 5 thousand people reportedly streaming into the area to defend the Bundy ranch as the BLM brought in over 200 heavily armed agents, helicopters and snipers.  Yesterday it was announced that an agreement was made and that the BLM left.

Er, not so much.  Folks from NH have headed west to join the other protectors at the Bundy ranch, including Jerry Delemus.  His wife Sue emailed me an update earlier today and it doesn’t seem that the Feds have pulled back:  

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For years, Ed Naile of CNHT has toiled in the vineyards of Voter Fraud here in NH.  Sure, the soil here is rocky (lots of NH Democrats), the weather is erratic (first the Repubs govern, and then the Dems try to rule), but the season seems to be never ending (i.e., “the never ending campaigning”) – but he is finally getting traction and a lot of the Professional Vote Stealers (“PVSs”, Democrat political operators) and their enablers (the owners of the “voter fraud nests” that put up the PVSs for a month or two until they skedadle out of State to their next gig).  A good shot of “fertilizer” helped his crops when James O’Keefe and his merry band of pranksters showed how easy it would be here in the First in the Nation Primary State to pull off voter fraud.  As a result, we got a valid Voter ID law – wanna vote, show us your mug!

And STILL, NH Democrats keep saying that there is no such thing as Voter Fraud – a made up problem that has no basis in reality.  Why wouldn’t say that – look what it did for them this past November!  So, as Allahpundit said “I did not see this coming”; the most popular Democrat President living, Bill Clinton, now thinks that picture ID to vote is not a bad idea!

With 34 states now requiring some form of identification at the polls, former president Bill Clinton and civil rights leader Andrew Young on Wednesday endorsed the idea of adding photos to Social Security cards as a way to prevent voter suppression…Clinton and Young, a former mayor of Atlanta, expressed concern that the voter ID laws could discourage poor and minority voters from showing up at the polls, which would circumvent the intent of the Voting Rights Act. 

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“Elijah Cummings and Lois Lehrner sitting in a tree…” – OK, maybe only in a political sense.  It is clear that we know that the IRS became politically weaponized against Conservative groups but who knew that the main Democrat who was supposed to provide non-partisan oversight was actually in cahoots with Lois Lerner!  Steve wrote about Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings actually working with the IRS to target Conservatives here and now, more has come out (emphasis mine):

New IRS emails released by the House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote. True the Vote was targeted by the IRS after applying for tax exempt status more than two years ago. Further, information shows the IRS and Cummings’ staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht about her organization, indicating coordination and improper sharing of confidential taxpayer information.  

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Tolerance and Judgement are not opposing idea.

From an interview by The Blaze with Charles Murray on his new book “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life,” (emphasis mine):    

Question: One of the contrarian aspects of your book is that you actually argue for judgmentalism, with which you draw a clear distinction from intolerance. Explain.

Murray: Making judgments is part of being human. The only way you can go through daily life without making judgments is if you deliberately refuse to think about what’s before your eyes. Being judgmental is not only OK; we have a moral obligation to make the best judgments we can. Having done that, however, the next step is not to try to make laws enforcing our judgments about right and wrong. It is appropriate to be tolerant of behaviors of which we may disapprove, but which should be left as individual choices that people may make in a free society.  

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At that level of any organization, one never knows in looking from the outside in and bottom up whether is was pre-ordained, self-determined, or “quit or be fired”.  In any case, HHS Secretary Sebelius has handed in that resignation.  $700 million and four years for a website that still doesn’t work (front end mostly, but the back end is still rather buck naked).  $700 million spent on marketing to get signups.  Bogus numbers on that end too.

People will remember her – those that got “affordable” healthcare only because the Law was rigged to be a financial Hoover of the middle and upper classes to pay for it (once again, Progressives only tout who they help and NEVER who they’ve hurt).  Earn too much for a subsidy and you are forced into a plan that averages 41% higher premiums and two to four times the deductible.  You know what that means?  

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Fearless, these pissants ain’t.  Even as they declare themselves to support “diviersity” and they are the “Tolerant Brigade”, they turned on someone who actually showed “diversity” that contradicted their own heterodoxy with no tolerance at all.  Yes, as a company they can do what they want to and the First Amendment does not apply here.  However, I do not have to use the products of a company that gives into the Leftist mob mentality.  They wish to project and place politics into everything?  Screw them.

I can too.  I have just removed FireFox from my system and this is being written using the Avant browser and left the following on Mozilla feedback page on Sunday:

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Update: see the bottom of the post.

Well, we may not like everyone politically but we DO want to give everyone a chance to talk to our readers and listeners directly and unvarnished by our bias if we are reduced to merely writing about them and their stances.  On GrokTALK! or on video, either works better than the written word.  I had reached out to the Innis campaign (US Congress, CD-1) quite some time ago when he had first got into the race (at the official NH GOP birthday in Exeter) but never heard back. Well, long term NH political operative Paul Collins is now Dan Innis’s campaign manager and sent out an eblast on 3/31 (reformatted, emphasis mine):

On 3/31/2014 3:47 PM, Paul Collins wrote:

Dear Skip,

Please allow me to give you a quick update on Dan’s campaign.  Since he announced that he was running for Congress Dan has outlined specific solutions to replace Obamacare with common sense health care reforms, fix our broken budget process and remove barriers to job creation that will unleash American entrepreneurs and help get our economy back on track.  The response to Dan’s issues oriented campaign has been terrific, with conservative Foster’s Daily Democrat newspaper proclaiming, “Here’s a Republican with a plan!” We are grateful for the positive feedback and Dan will be rolling out additional solutions on energy, education and infrastructure in the near future. Stay tuned!

Along with focusing on the issues Granite Staters care about, Dan is committed to running a grassroots campaign that will allow him to personally meet and hear from voters in every corner of our district….

So, seeing that [mine] bolded part, I figured that I’d try again, so I emailed Paul back: 

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Sure, what happened to Brendan Eich was a high tech lynching for a religious belief  in traditional marriage – and simply believing what President Obama held at the time.  But what we saw was the anti-Christian / Jewish / Muslim veneer overlaid on what many are seeing as the Left, having believed it has captured all of the ramparts of the Culture Castle, move from one phase to a more dark one: we no longer need to show and act as being tolerant, we own the place.  “Sore winners”, as some are saying, doesn’t come close – “vengeful winners” seems to be apt.  This post from RedState puts it well (emphasis mine):

…The people morally invested in overturning California’s Proposition 8 are no longer willing to work through peaceable means. So if you’re one of the Neo-Fascist jerks who just knee-capped the career of Javascript Inventor, Brandon Eich, you just form up the lynch mob and assassinate your foes using the duplicitous means called Soft Totalitarianism by some.

So what does this Soft Totalitarianism really mean? Funny you asked, the tactics employed by the compassionate champions of alternative lifestyles employed by the Mozilla and the vivacious dating site OKCupidHimmler are explained quite nicely below.

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In the Land of the Free, how free are we?  Once again, the sorry story of Brendan Eich is a great object lesson.  Over at Patheos, the Anchoress has a good piece on this growing intolerance of groupthink (emphasis mine, reformatted):

If the headline strikes some as offensive, it will nevertheless remain, because that’s the case I’m making, and I’m sticking with it: a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms — the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” — and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions.

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