Oregon militia standoff: What should government do?

[baseline bum]

thought he was going to be a martyr

[TSA]

what ever happened to the two FBI agents that lied about shooting Fini and tampered with the crime scene and took the bullet casing?

FBI SPECIAL AGENT INDICTED FOR MAKING FALSE STATEMENTS AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

PORTLAND, Ore. – A federal grand jury in Portland has charged W. Joseph Astarita, a member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) based in Quantico, Va., with three counts of making false statements and two counts of obstruction of justice.

Astarita was one of a number of FBI agents assigned to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and was present during the shooting of Robert LaVoy Fini on January 26, 2016, in Harney County, Oregon.

The indictment alleges that Astarita knowingly and willfully made false statements to FBI Supervisory Special Agents, knowing that the statements were false and material to the FBI’s decision not to investigate the propriety of an agent-involved shooting.

Specifically, Astarita falsely stated he had not fired his weapon during the attempted arrest of Mr. Fini when he knew he had in fact fired his weapon. Astarita also knowingly engaged in misleading conduct toward Oregon State Police officers by failing to disclose that he had fired two rounds during the attempted arrest.

http://www.ktvz.com/news/fbi-agent-i...ting/566626538

[Pavlov]

White militia guy shot -- TSA follow story forever.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Merill Beyeler bears the classic look of a Western rancher. He’s got the leathery face of someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors. He wears flannel shirts, jeans, and a bone-colored cowboy hat.

Mr. Beyeler, whose family roots in Idaho’s Lemhi County extend back to the 1850s, is also a rock-ribbed Republican. True, in Idaho, one of the reddest states in the nation, most people are Republican. But in Lemhi County, a hauntingly beautiful expanse of bald, taupe mountains and verdant river valleys wedged up against the Montana border, virtually no one puts a Democratic bumper sticker on his or her pickup. So you’d think that people like Beyeler would be happy at the prospect of the new Trump administration, buttressed by one of the most conservative cabinets in decades, ushering in a dramatic change in the management of public lands in the West. You’d think that they would relish the prospect of federal agencies either opening up more expanses to ranchers and commercial interests or giving more control to states.

You’d be wrong.

While Beyeler occasionally chafes at the way federal lands are managed, he doesn’t want US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land opened up unconditionally to loggers or developers, or – worse – handed over to bureaucrats in Boise and sold off. “The reason you come home is that this is the soul of our people,” he says. “When you look at our public lands in that respect – as an economic driver and as the soul of our state – the idea of losing that, or risking that, is just too great.”

As the Trump administration works to fashion an iden y in Washington, one of the big questions is how much the federal government will change its stewardship of public lands in the West. With Republicans in control of Congress, many envision a significant shift in access to and development of public expanses similar to what happened under the Reagan administration 35 years ago. They believe it could be one of the signature achievements of the Trump era. A few on the right are even pushing for an outright transfer of some of those lands to state control.

Yet others – including many Republicans – occupy a more pragmatic middle. Like Beyeler, they are looking for a recalibration rather than a land-management revolution. They believe that the natural landscape is as much a part of the region’s iden y as coal seams and oil shale and requires at least some federal stewardship. And they believe firmly that public lands need to stay public – not sold off to private interests.

When Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) of Utah recently introduced a bill in Congress to sell 3.3 million acres of federal lands in the West, he was forced to withdraw the legislation days later because of the backlash from his own cons uents, many of whom regularly fish for trout or hunt elk on federal lands.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Societ...-new-range-war