The recent Bundy Ranch story covers both of these points. I'm pretty sure that's what he's referring to.

Somethings wrong when a county commissioner is threatening someone with death because they refuse to give up the land they've owned for decades, because of a recently passed law. In this country, no less...

 Not at all. Think about mutually assured destruction. The thing that kept the world in one piece during the Cold War era. We don't have the 2nd ammendment so people can run around all willy nilly shooting up governemnt officials for no reason. We have it so that the people will always have the ability to defend themselves against a government that wants to overpower. We, the people, are are supposed to have more power than the government could ever even dream of having. If the goverment wants to try and overrule the people, they're gonna have a nasty fight on their hands. That's the point of the 2nd amendment.

The ranchers don't own the land and the law was passed in 1940.

The ranchers recognizes that they should pay the fees, but they just don't want to give them to the feds.

BLM acted irresponsibly by showing force instead of using the most efficient force of all. The court.

Well, I'm not so sure that he just doesn't want to pay. Hell, I'm not even sure he could afford to pay given the strictures they were placing on him. Look at this way: the heavy-handedness of the BLM is the reason he's the only rancher left out there. So it's quite possible that he sincerely felt backed into a corner here, and it seems overly uncharitable to automatically assume that he's simply a mooch who is saw an opportunity to do some grandstanding.

I can think of several reasons why the federal government can and should own land in a state; leaving aside how the feds need some land to operate things like military bases, courts, and administration buildings, there's the fact that the states collectively and knowingly ceded ownership rights over certain land to the federal government when they, the states, created the Constitution (see the Property Clause).

Every bit of land outside the first thirteen legally began with federal ownership: The original thirteen states surrendered all their claims to the land west of the Appalachians when the Constitution was ratified, the Louisiana Territory was purchased by the federal government with federal funds, the Southwest was given to the federal government as part of the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, and the Oregon Territory was ceded to the federal government by the Treaty of 1818, Alaska was bought by the feds from the Russians, and Florida was given to the feds by treaty with the Spanish. I won't profess to know how federal land in the original thirteen states was acquired (I assume largely by purchase), but the legal right and history of federal ownership of state lands is pretty cut and dry (Hawaii admittedly being something of an odd duck), and has existed since the days of the Founding Fathers. If anything, thirty-seven of the states were wholly owned by the federal government before the feds ceded some of that land to the locals.*

You're free to argue the policy wisdom of retaining federal ownership of land vs. ceding all of it to the states, of course, but legally the issue has been settled for quite some time now. Don't forget that the federal government is entirely a contractually-created creature of the states; if they felt that the feds should give up all of its land, they could have made it that way. For that matter, they still can. Instead, they consciously surrendered some of their own land (not a small concession, if you know how rancorous those fights were in the colonial days), and have not made any real concerted effort to change the situation since then.

In the meantime, regarding Nevada specifically, the reason it's federal ownership rate is so high is simply because no one wanted to buy land there when it was first offered: I don't know if you've ever been, but there's a reason 95% or so of the population lives in only two counties, and if hadn't been for a silver boom (and later legalized gambling) I'd wager Nevada would never have reached the population rate it takes to become a state: the place is largely uninhabitable.

*We are ignoring the whole issue of people who lived on said lands before the territories were ceded to the feds, most notably the Native Americans but also French, Mexican, British, Russian, and even American settlers, only some of whom were covered by the treaties encompassing their territory and only some of whom previously answered to the sovereign who handed the land to the federal government.

Source? The closest I've heard of this is Pollard's Lessee, which only a minority of scholars have read it that broadly, with the general consensus, including the Supreme Court's, being that the ruling was far more narrow than that.

Eh not really.  

They were willing to pay the fee's.  It's just the BLM limited the amount of cattle they could pay fees for at such a small level it made being a rancher impossible.

It's like back when it was illegal to ban drugs, so they made the drug stamp act, then refused to issue the stamps to anybody.

It was TECHNICALLY legal to pay for the stamp and be a drug user/seller but the restrictions were as such so that you'd have to spend way too much time and money to even be able to be considered for a stamp.

Effectivly making it illegal.

ehhh... not really.  It's more, the BLM refused to let him pay.  He refused to pay because they said he could only have 150 cattle graze on those lands.  Which, you can't be a rancher with so few cattle.  

So he would of been breaking the law either way, whether he paid the fee for the 1/10th of the cattle they'd take or not.   So why pay.

It's really more a story of the BLM trying to drive out cattle owners so they could sell the land to home developers under the claim of enviromental protection.

It's sort of like one of those times in the comics where It's Magneto vs The Redskull.

Sure Magneto sucks... but he's no Nazi.

However, today the BLM said it would not enforce a court order to remove the cattle and was pulling out of the area.
According to the article they were acting on a court order...

If you keep refusing to pay your taxes, the government will come seize your property too at some point.

Btw isn't it common in the US to have signs: Trespassers will be shot. His cattle is basically tresspassing.

The general consesus... today.

That consesnus being that it only applies to the original 13 states.

Although the Equal Footing law you would think would disagree except for the odd Supreme court belief that it applies only to Soverinty laws and land that exists under water.  Even though extending it to land underwater aknowledges that it originally appled to land on the ground.

It's really quite a silly roundabout arguement that's kept more out of political convience then anything.  (So the federal government can make direct cash off of the resources.)

I mean, how you can makle the arguement that not holding soverinty over your land doesn't effect your states soverinty... I don't know.

Subterranean rights and surface rights have a long history of being legally distinguishable, stretching back to long before the Constitution was created, usually centered around water and mineral rights. It is by no means a difference without a distinction, or a modern creation. In fact, we are still the only country where ownership of the surface land presumptively gives you ownership of the subsurface; prior to the formation of our country, the king/sovereign owned everything under the surface, unless he expressly ceded it to you, a situation which persists everywhere else on Earth.

For the last included statement, the answer is simple: because the state contractually agreed to that exact arrangement, including giving the federal government exclusive power over federal land. This argument is akin to saying that no country is truly sovereign because they've ceded land to other nations in the form of embassies or military bases. If the states want to change this arrangment, they merely have to have their congressmen pass a law ceding/selling/otherwise transferring federal land to the state governments, as Congress has the exclusive right to deal away federal land. Or they can amend the Constitution to do away with the Property Clause for good. I infer from the fact that neither has happened that a majority of the states do not see this as a major impediment (and in fact many states covet some federal land ownership for the economic benefit it can provide).