For those of us who have some understanding of the U.S., the concept of special dynastic privilege is one of the things we threw in the trash from the get go.

But the whole point is mute because Bundy is full of shit about how long his family has been at that location.  If his great-great-grandpappy was not so focused on nailing as many adolescent girls as possible or whatever Mormans did back in the day and more focused on actually buying land that he wanted his progeny to control then Cliven wouldn't have this problem.  Additionally, by the dynastic privilege argument the whole fucking thing belongs to the Piutes or Shoshones or some such.

Looks like the guy bought himself a nice little excavator (Japanese of course) with the proceeds that he got complements of the welfare subsidy that he enjoyed at the expense of taxpayers like me.  I got a similar one recently, but I didn't bilk my fellow countrymen to get the money for it.  I used it all day today; damn things are fun!  I'm sure Bundy's fellow ranchers who actually did pay their fees are happy for him and all  of his toys.  From what I read, the BLM puts considerable resources into making a lot of the land under their control conducive to agricultural utilization in addition to a raft of other uses.  Shit costs money, and the grazing fees help defray those costs.  If Bundy sent me a check last year out of the excess he received by ducking out of paying the fees I must have missed it.  Beef jerky which constitutes a significant portion of my diet seems to cost me $0.99 as always so I didn't see any net benefit there.

For my part, I pay a chunk of money every year for our local forest fire protection department (which is legally barred from fighting structure fires) and am glad to have their services.  It's annoying sometimes to not be able to run my equipment in my own forest because these guys claim it is unsafe, but they have the expertise and if I start a forest fire it's going to a) impact a lot more people than just me, and b) cost a hell of a lot more than I could afford to pay back.  These folks are not some overreaching tyrants.  They are professionals doing their job the best they can and I appreciated that so far they have kept some 'sovereign citizen' or whatever from starting a fire and burning down my place.

BTW, I agree that Reid is a clown and a weak-ass loser.  Nobody should be calling anybody a 'terrorist' at this point even though there might be some legitimacy to that claim on both sides.  I hate to admit it, but the one guy who seems to have his act together a bit is Rand Paul who councils to 'tone it down' at this juncture.