Freezing Them Out - Part 2

Wednesday 1/6 at the Malheur Constitutional Freedom compound:

Six lumbering men sat around a TV in an adjacent lounge room, jeering at a Fox News TV report on their standoff. They insisted that a federal government plan to cut power only steeled their resolve. They have enough propane and generators, they said, to last the winter.

[...]

[A] plan to turn off power at the site [has] run into snags. Local power officials [...] said the move would also cut power to several surrounding ranches and that the only way to isolate the wildlife refuge would be to send men to the site to cut the local lines.

  Guardian

So, the militia is not even going to have to use its generators.  (Which idiot leaked that plan to the press in the first place?  Now the feds just look silly.  Sillier.)

On Tuesday, the bunkhouse breakfast room felt like a hunting lodge, with wives and girlfriends serving meals while working-class men with beards, flannel shirts and dour expressions milled about.

[...]

Late Monday, [Neil Wampler, a 68-year-old retired woodworker from central California,] said ranchers arrived with enough meat to fill four industrial refrigerators, replenishing the group’s diminishing supplies.

So, now they don't even have to hunt game on the land.

Wampler, who joined Bundy’s 2014 armed standoff with BLM officials at the ranch outside Las Vegas, said the wildlife refuge offers hot showers, comfortable beds and, on Monday night, a spaghetti and sausage dinner with a vegetable salad and homemade biscuits.

“Man, that dinner was good,” he said. “When I was at the Bundy ranch, we lit a fire on a propane stove in an outdoor shed and washed our dishes in a ditch. But I could get used to this.”

[...]

Moments later, a militia member drove past in a federal government truck with a US Fish and Wildlife Service insignia on the side.

Wampler smiled: “We found some keys lying around.”

Yep, they're really struggling against far superior federal officials out there.

“Listen, the potential of violence is on everyone’s mind here,” said Burns’s mayor, Craig LaFollette. “We want this to end peacefully. But even without violence, these outsiders have disrupted our lives here, closed our schools. It’s time for these people to leave."

Well, to be accurate, Mr. Mayor, you closed the schools.

“An ongoing siege could break a county like this one,” said Randy Fulton, one of the attendees of the closed-door gathering. “Nobody wants this to continue.”

Fulton, 60, a lifelong Burns resident and a leading businessman who owns the town’s weekly newspaper, the Burns Times-Herald, said the standoff is hurting his town.

I don't think siege is the proper word for what those guys are doing out there.  They don't seem to have anyone surrounded. And, the local hotel owner is probably not complaining.  Nor the diners.

As legions of federal law enforcement officials arrive here – one hotel manager said 40 of 114 rooms are rented by federal officials – local businessmen worry the emerging battle lines will discourage visitors and keep workers at home.

Yeah. No.

Workers will go to work, because they can't afford not to, and they are not under any threat. And winter in way-the-hell-out-there-ville probably doesn't attract many visitors. Those 40 rooms are probably at least 30 more than that hotel would otherwise have rented out at this time. And maybe even 40 more.  And how many rooms do the press masses rent?

Michael Stettler, a 49-year-old electrician who arrived on Monday from a nearby county, said he wasn’t “ready to take a bullet”. “If the federals move in and offer a chance to leave, I’m leaving,” he said.

Seriously, dude. Why are you there? For the meals?

Locals at [a recent] meeting demanded to know why federal officials are allowing the militia to come into town to restock supplies.

Now that is a good question.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.