I return to my original post in this thread. I'm not in the "Cliven Bundy fan club". However, I'm much less in the government's camp in how this was handled.
They have spent well over a million dollars of our money to collect a claim of million dollars in fines. While after the media attention they may now say they are going after Bundy to recover that money, I don't see any evidence of them looking to recover costs pre-media blitz, only to remove the cattle at taxpayer expense. Even if they were going to recover the costs, the cattle removal process itself was ridiculously overpriced. If herding cattle actually cost that much, either there would be no cattle ranchers, or we'd be paying $400/lb for beef.
They claimed that they needed a freakin' battalion's worth of armed LE at the scene "for the safety of our personnel". Yet in everything I've read or watched so far, the only physical attacks and injuries I've seen are to Bundy's son, Bundy's sister, and several protestors. The only battery or physical threat I've seen to LE is a dog that was kicked. While post "militia presence" it is harder to argue against an armed government presence, it is much harder to argue for the oversized armed government presence that was there before this blew up, and frankly, to me, is a primary reason that this did blow up the way it did. They wanted to have an intimidating presence at the scene, and it simply didn't work out the way they'd planned.
