Tortoises 0, Hubris 1, Public exposure 1.

The Bureau of Land Management withdrew 200 armed men and dogs and wrote off milions of enforcement dollars at the Bundy ranch because they weren't popular?   Who called them off? The Bundy land is in a swath designated for future solar plants, a use that is incompatible with the tortoises this foofaraw is supposedly about.  Senator Reid and his sons are involved with Chinese investors to invest in desert solar power.  The story came out during the week and the optics are awful for Reid.   Somehow, the information about the solar reserves and their incompatibility with tortoise habitat disappeared from the BLM website.    (Sources:  Powerline: Standoff at the Bundy Ranch ends with photo of the year, and DC Clothesline:  Nevada Standoff: Harry Reid, Russian Soldiers, Chinese Businessmen and Euthanized Turtles.  The second link includes BLM documentation but wanders into the farfetched with the "Russian soldiers" footnote.)

There actually are tortoises in this story but they don't explain a thing.  There's a facility funded to the tune of $1,000,000 per year to raise and release the rare tortoises.  While more money than that is being spent making a fool of the federal government at the ranch, the facility has run out of support and plans to kill about half their animals and let the rest go wild.

Why is the federal government even present in this story?  The mandate comes from those endangered tortoises.  Is Mr Bundy in the right?  Perhaps in part.  But the over-reaching federal government is clearly wrong.

From Gateway Pundit:Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of “utility-scale solar power generation facilities” on “public lands.”