Beastly Behavior (smirk's horse bloody hands)

[donsu]

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/12/17/120.html


It was a largely secret operation, its true intentions masked by pious rhetoric and bogus warnings of imminent danger to the American way of life. Having gained the dazed complicity of a somnolent Congress, U.S. President George W. Bush calmly signed a death warrant for thousands upon thousands of innocent victims: a native population whose land and resources were coveted by a small group of powerful elites seeking to augment their already vast dominance by any means necessary, including mass slaughter.

A flashback to March 2003, when Bush finally brought his long-simmering brew of aggressive war to the boil? Not at all -- it happened just last week. This time, however, the victims were not the Iraqi people, but one of the last remaining symbols of pure freedom left in America itself: the nation's herd of wild horses, galloping unbridled on the people's common lands.

With an obscure provision smuggled without any hearings or public notice into the gargantuan budget bill -- 3,000 pages of pork and chicanery approved, unread, by Bush's rubber-stamp Republicans and that wiggly bit of protoplasm known laughingly as the "Democratic opposition" -- Bush stripped the nation's wild horses of long-standing legal protections against being sold off, slaughtered and shipped overseas for meat. The Bush plan, spearheaded by Montana Senator Conrad Burns -- longtime bagman for Big Cattle interests -- sets a production goal of up to 20,000 wild horse corpses in the coming year, The Associated Press reports.

-snip-

Here's how it works. The 50,000 remaining wild horses roam on federal land -- land held in common by the American people. Big-time ranchers also use this land to graze millions of their privately owned cattle. Able to buy and sell politicians like so much prime stock, the wealthy ranchers have rigged a long-running sweetheart deal that gives them access to this common pasturage at bargain prices: less than one-tenth of the going market rate for private grazing land. The result is an effective annual subsidy of more than $500 million to some of the richest men in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. As always, your rootin', tootin' cowboy capitalists must be protected from the risks of the "free market" at every turn -- even as they impose it, at gunpoint, on others.

But like all good Bushists, they want more. Why do they want more? Simply because it's there, and they want it. Yes, our leaders and elites are that witless. That's not to say they're stupid, of course. Given the manifold imperfections of our still-evolving brainpans, it's possible to be remarkably cunning in pursuing your basest desires while remaining oblivious to their pointlessness and brutality -- and to their origin in the blind electrical firings of those primitive layers of the mind we all share with the rat, the pig and the chicken.

So the ranchers want the horses off public land so they can cram more cows in there and make more money through their sweetheart deals. The resource at issue here is grass, not oil, but the principle is the same as in Bush's witless, pig-layer adventure in Iraq: Me want, they got; kill them, give me.
-snip-
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watching america change

[Demeter]

1. Does Bush Really Hate Horses That Much?

It would explain a lot.

[antigone382]

2. Hitler hated horses, too

He almost wiped out the Lippizaners of Vienna.

True cowboys love horses.

[Demeter]

4. Hitler Probably Felt Upstaged!

[Tsiyu]

3. Yes, Hitler was afraid of horses, too

Link:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/polise/holocaust.html

by Anthony Polise

-Did Hitler suffer from any known mental disorder?

In actuality, scholars believe Adolf Hitler suffered from a number of known mental disorders. The first and most significant was manic-depressive disorder, which rendered Hitler unstable and with clouded thought. It also is speculated that Hitler was a split personality because of this, and would swing in and out of isolated, indecisive moods to arrogant, aggressive moods. Records of from his personal physician reveal that Hitler was afraid of water, horses, and the moon. Perhaps the most concrete evidence that Hitler was manic-depressive fall in Hitler's obsession with constantly washing his hands to avoid germs and infection.

snip

[idiosyncratic]

5. Horrifying . . . the ranchers also make money removing elk

I was in Ely, Nevada a few weeks ago and talked for a long time with a man at the NAPA Auto Parts store. He said local ranchers get "depredation permits" to remove elk that compete with their cattle.

These ranchers sell these permits to trophy hunters for $6,000 to $10,000 each, filling their pockets with as much as $40,000 each year.

HEY!! Those are the government's elk, managed by the Fish and Game Department.

Why does a private landowner who grazes his cattle on Public Lands get this windfall?