WHAT IS THE HARRY REID CONNECTION?
U.S. Sen Harry Reid, who actually lives in a fancy hotel in Washington City and wears tailored gray suits most of the time, returns to Nevada every six years to don a pair of blue jeans and get his picture taken sitting on a hay bale and fondling the .22 rifle with which he recalls once shooting rabbits as a kid. He consistently wins re-election in close races by carrying only two of Nevada’s 17 counties -– Mineral County in the north, which is depressed but still heavily dependent on federal funding for its military ammo dump, and massive and increasingly Democratic Clark County, home of Las Vegas.
Harry Reid is a fragile and elderly politician who has had several supposedly “mini” strokes and who often mis-speaks, or says things so odd that — if they emerged from the mouth of a public figure on the political right — would be mercilessly ridiculed by the leftist commentariat, as well as prompting suggestions that retirement might be in order.
Following the collapse of the BLM’s armed assault -– complete with men in full combat regalia with leveled combat rifles who observers with military expertise called “the Homeland Security Army” -– surely any savvy politicians would have publicly regretted things going so far, calling for new efforts to resolve things peacefully . . . however they may have felt in private.
Not Harry Reid. When the latest BLM effort to round up Bundy’s cattle or prompt a shoot-out backfired and had to be called off, Sen. Reid made it personal, branding Bundy’s non-violent supporters as “domestic terrorists” and vowing “It’s not over.”
He went further. A few days later Sen. Reid, sounding like a cheap gangster, predicted “something would happen” to Cliven Bundy.
Why? Why would the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate want so badly to get rid of Cliven Bundy’s little herd of cows? If nothing else, the Bundys have lots of Nevada relatives who are, after all, Sen. Reid’s constituents.
Well, the federal judge who in 2001 stunningly ruled that the federal government “owns” 86 percent of Nevada, Johnnie Rawlinson, was nominated for that post by Harry Reid. Rawlinson is black; it’s hard to deny her appointment was made in part to firm up Sen. Reid’s support among black voters. And the boss of the BLM, who doubtless OKd the big Bundy raid, was a chief Reid staffer from 2003 to 2011. So it would indeed have been difficult for the senator to shrug and say “All I know is what I read in the papers.”
But there’s more going on, here.
Former Review-Journal editor Tom Mitchell wrote on his 4thST8 blog on April 11, 2014::
“For some reason a web page the BLM had once posted listing its reasons for the confiscation of Cliven Bundy’s cattle in the Gold Butte area has been taken down, but a cache of the page is still extant.
“One of the more unusual aspects of the page comes under the heading of ‘Examples of Restoration Funding and Viability Impacted’:
“‘Non-Governmental Organizations have expressed concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for offsite mitigation for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not durable with the presence of trespass cattle.’
“I have no idea what any of that means in English,” Mitchell wrote, though of course he does. It means the federals have already accepted the planned “Gold Butte Conservation Area” -– the fenced-off Bundy ranch without its cattle -– as an acceptable replacement for the acres of supposed “tortoise habitat” that would be destroyed by the big Red Chinese solar plant planned for the Dry Lake bed down near Laughlin -– a plant which could not be built without the Red Chinese somehow making Harry Reid their friend, since it would also require both federal subsidies and a Nevada state legislative requirement that local monopoly utility companies buy a certain percentage of their power from high-priced solar sources, even though this drives up local power bills.
“So, cattle bad. Solar panels good,” Mitchell notes. “Harry Reid likes solar panels.”
Another long-term Reid donor and supporter, Harvey Whittemore, didn’t have much trouble getting an exemption from tortoise protection rules when he wanted to put a big residential development at Coyote Springs, in the empty desert northwest of the Bundy grazing allotment.
Whittemore was later convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Harry Reid, though of course no culpability for accepting the donations in any kind of “quid pro quo” arrangement was ever assigned to “Mr. Cleanface.” The Coyote Springs development appears to have died on the vine with the big housing market collapse of 2008.
Who’s the lawyer who appears to be doing pretty well promoting that Dry Lake Solar Zone, which has had a fantastic run of luck in seeking exemptions or “mitigation” approval for the tortoise habitat its solar panels will supposedly destroy? Um . . . that would be Harry Reid’s son, Rory Reid.
Unfortunately for the Reid Machine, it appears the senator’s good friend, Red Chinese energy billionaire and solar tycoon Yusuo Wang, pulled the plug on the big Laughlin solar farm about a year ago, in the summer of 2013. Even Sen. Reid’s arm twisting had not proved sufficient to win commitments from monopoly California and Nevada energy providers to buy hundreds of megawatts of high-priced Chinese solar power.
There’s no room here to do more than scratch the surface of the Reid machine. For more, see:
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/25014
