Archives for: January 2010
Conspiracies Are Fine -- Just Don't Discuss Them in Public! January 29, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 29, 2010
Professor Cass Sunstein, the Obama regime’s unofficial minister of information and a likely future nominee for the Supreme Court, recently stated that the federal government could criminalize discussion of conspiracy theories.
“Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law,” insisted Sunstein.
Shortly after Sunstein’s views were made public, a congressional committee pried loose details of the criminal conspiracy by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pay off the bad debts of politically favored banks using taxpayer money.
Bloomberg News columnist David Reilly describes this as a plot by “a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks … while trying to end-run Congress.” This cabal spent at least $8 trillion in money extorted from taxpayers, Reilly observes. If Sustein and his ilk prevail, discussing such outrages would be a criminal offense.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
The Presidential Assassination List January 28 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 28 2010
Without a declaration of war or even overt congressional approval, U.S. troops are now involved in yet another military conflict, this one in Yemen.
According to the January 27 Washington Post , this latest military venture began in mid-December, when President Obama unilaterally approved a plan for the clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (or JSOC) to join government forces in tracking down and killing suspected terrorists.
The campaign included a missile strike by an unmanned drone against an installation containing a U.S. citizen suspected of ties to al-Qaeda. That individual, Anwar al-Aulaqi, wasn’t killed; however, notes the Post, “he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture….”
We’ve heard a great deal about the federal government’s “no-fly” list. Now we learn that the government maintains what could be called a roster of U.S. citizens subject to summary execution on presidential order.
When the president can kill citizens at whim, in what sense could it be said that we’re free citizens governed by law?
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Why Expect the Truth from Torturers? January 27 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 27 2010
In a 2007 intrerview with ABC news, CIA interrogator John Kiriakou claimed that terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah was broken by a brief application of water torture – commonly called waterboarding. He then supposedly provided information that prevented “maybe dozens of attacks.”
Advocates of torture, including Rush Limbaugh and other prominent conservative media figures – seized on Kiriakou’s statement with a sense of triumphant validation.
This attitude persisted after it was revealed that Zubaydah had been subjected to water torture not once, but 83 times , as well as being beaten, stripped naked and suspended from ceiling hooks, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation.
In his new memoir The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, Kiriakou now confesses that there is no truth to what he said.
“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time,” writes the former CIA operative.
Why should we expect the truth from torturers?
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
The Pentagon: Corporate Welfare Pimp January 26, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 26, 2010
Many people who are commendably hostile toward Washington’s increasing role in our lives surrender to uncritical admiration of the immensely wasteful and ever-metastasizing federal bureaucracy called the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon is the largest and most costly federal bureaucracy, devouring unfathomable quantities of money and feeding a growing roster of corporate welfare clients.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently met with leaders of several major Pentagon contractors – including Boeing and Lockheed Martin – to propose a “closer partnership” in order “to secure steady growth in the Pentagon’s budget over time.”
If defense were the real objective, the Pentagon – which spends roughly as much as the combined military budgets of the rest of the world – would be seeking opportunities to reduce its expenditures, rather than rationales to justify continued budgetary growth.
The Founding Fathers were hostile to standing armies and foreign entanglements, since the first often lead unnecessarily to the second and both are natural enemies of liberty. Gates and his corporate cronies embody the kind of military establishment the Founders opposed.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
The Corrupt Politics of "Campaign Finance Reform" January 25, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 25, 2010
Last week the Supreme Court struck down most of the so-called McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The ruling, which treated corporate contributions to political campaigns as a form of protected “free speech,” triggered widespread outrage from people who insist that money is corrupting politics.
In a refrain echoed by many critics of the ruling, President Obama and the New York Times insisted that lifting restraints on corporate campaign donations represents the death of what they call our “democracy.”
The Times hysterically pronounced that the ruling “has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.” This suggests that spending limits favor insurgent candidates over corrupt incumbents. But the McCain-Feingold law was designed to protect congressional incumbents, whose turnover rate is lower than that of the old Soviet Politburo.
Genuine political reform would severely limit what government can do, rather than what private citizens can spend in promoting their interests.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
What Is Terrorism? January 22 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 22 2010
St. Augustine defined a government as the dominant band of robbers in any society, a criminal clique with the power to re-define its plunder as “public policy.”
He illustrated that principle in the famous parable of the pirate and the emperor. The first is described as a public menace because he preys on people with a single ship and small crew of cut-throats; the second is deemed a ruler because he does the same thing with the help of huge fleets and vast armies.
Bill Clinton updated Augustine in a brief comment offered in the middle of an extensive interview published in the December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Addressing contemporary international affairs, Clinton defined terrorism as “killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders.”
By that definition, killing, robbery and coercion carried out with state authority aren’t terrorism – at least, from the perspective of whatever robber band is currently dominant in global affairs.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Driven to Tyrannicide January 21, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 21, 2010
If Chinese official Li Shiming had respected the lives and property of others, his wife wouldn’t be a widow, his children wouldn’t be fatherless, and 18-year-old Zhang Xuping wouldn’t have become a murderer.
Zhang was hired to kill Li by a farmer in a north China mining town. Li had used his high position in the Communist Party to terrorize and plunder many local residents through extortion and blatant acts of terror. Those who opposed him in any way were subject to beatings inflicted by police or other hired thugs and often summarily imprisoned.
When Zhang was sentenced to death for killing Li. more than 20,000 people signed a petition demanding clemency. The young man’s real crime, wrote one local commentator, was that he “refused to be obedient and to be a slave.”
This tragic episode displays, to good effect, the elemental conflict between those who live to control others and those who wish to be free. It may also be a foretaste of our own future.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
The Thieves Who Rule Us January 20, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 20, 2010
The term kleptocracy refers to a government run by thieves. In a sense, the term is redundant, since every government is created through aggression and sustained by theft.
Hundreds of billions of dollars pilfered from taxpayers were filtered through AIG to pay its counterparties – banks such as Goldman-Sachs who had invested in AIG’s junk securities and should have been forced to absorb their own losses. Instead, the taxpayers were forced to make good on those bad investments.
This is the equivalent of a loan shark shaking down small business owners to pay bad debts contracted by other people. Admittedly, that analogy is unfair to loan sharks, who are generally more honorable than Geithner and his ilk.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Mass Murder at Camp Delta January 19, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 19, 2010
In June 2006, the public was informed that three suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay had simultaneously committed suicide. This was described as a form of “asymmetrical warfare” intended to demoralize the American public and embolden our enemies.
Through diligent research into thousands of pages of heavily redacted documents, faculty and students at Seton Hall Law School discovered that the three supposed Jihadists – none of whom had been charged with a crime – had been tortured to death.
Rather than hanging themselves, they had been suffocated by having rags stuffed down their throats. The remains turned over to relatives had been savagely mutilated; the throats had been removed in order to conceal evidence.
This horrifying account is confirmed in the current issue of Harper’s magazine, which provides first-person testimony from Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, an eyewitness to these atrocities whose patriotic decency will not permit him to remain silent.
How can Christians countenance crimes of this kind, supposedly committed in our name?
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Prosecutor as Persecutor January 18 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 18 2010
As District Attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Martha Coakley – now the state’s attorney general and Democratic senate candidate – prolonged the patently unjust imprisonment of Gerald Amirault, an innocent man wrongfully convicted of child abuse and sentenced to decades in prison.
The unjust conviction of Gerald Amirault, his mother Violet, and sister Cheryl, is among the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. The trio was convicted of grotesque child abuse charges in the absence of a particle of material evidence.
Judicial hearings in the mid-1990s overturned the convictions of Violet and Cheryl due to extensive subornation of false testimony from children by Coakley’s former boss.
Violet Amirault died of cancer in 1997 while threatened with another prosecution. Coakley dropped the charges against Cheryl but campaigned with then-Governor Jane Swift to deny parole to Gerald. Five years later Gerald won parole but today he remains under a form of house arrest.
Coakley is typical of those willing to build political careers atop the broken lives of innocent people.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Government: The Real Haitian Curse January 15, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 15, 2010
After achieving its independence in 1804, Haiti was required to pay huge reparations to France. The nation struggled to discharge that debt for roughly a century and a half. This was made more all the more difficult by repeated foreign intervention, including a lengthy U.S. military occupation in the early 20th century.
Suffering under a government devoted entirely to plunder, Haiti was left utterly destitute, unable to develop a modern economy that could create infrastructure and social institutions adequate to deal with large-scale emergencies.
Advocates of eugenicist population control insist that Haiti’s problems are created by too many people, rather than too much government. UN officials have exploited the country’s misery to promote abortion and sterilization. One abortionist who collaborated in the UN’s anti-natalist assault sneered that Haitians should be left to “stew in [their] own juices.”
The unfolding tragedy in Haiti is a heart-rending illustration of the way that avoidable government corruption exacerbates unavoidable natural catastrophes.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Haiti's Tragedy January 14, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 14, 2010
In chapter 13 of the book of Luke Jesus confronts some common assumptions about suffering.
Referring to innocent Galileans slaughtered by Pontius Pilate and Jerusalem residents who died when a tower collapsed, Jesus said: “[D]o you think that they were worse sinners than all [others]? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
In reacting to the horrifying earthquake in Haiti, the Rev. Pat Robertson apparently forgot that passage. He insisted that Haiti’s misfortunes reflect a supposed pact with the Devil made by Haitian rebels during the war for independence from France.
Leaving aside the fact that no such pact occurred, it’s illogical – and un-Biblical -- to assume that all Haitians – including faithful, committed Christians – would be bound by it. Furthermore, the intractable poverty and lack of economic development afflicting that country reflect decades of official corruption and profligacy. Our own country has countenanced exactly the same kind of political misrule, and unless we repent we will likewise perish.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Officer Safety Uber Alles January 13 , 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 13 , 2010
Charlie Mitchener, a contractor from Las Vegas, has endured several burglaries, the most recent occuring on January 3 of this year.
Complying with a request from the responding police officer, Mitchener provided personal identification and a copy of his firearms permit. Before determining if the area was secure, the police officer ordered Mitchener to surrender his personal firearm and submit to being handcuffed. This was supposedly done, the officer said, to make sure “that we [are] all safe.”
As Mitchener pointed out to Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review-Journalpointed out to Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this may have made the officer feel safer, but it put his own life in jeopardy. If the burglar had still be on-site, the handcuffed and disarmed civilian wouldn’t have been able to protect himself.
For the police, “officer safety” is always the first consideration. Mitchener’s experience is particularly significant in that it demonstrates how police are taught to regard armed citizens as potential enemies.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Framework for an American Reich January 12, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 12, 2010
Hitler’s National Socialists devised a new term to describe the centralization of all political functions in the hands of the Fuhrer and his party: Gleichschaltung, a word often translated as “synchronization,” an innocuous word to describe the process that created a murderous unitary government that controlled all aspects of German life.
By limiting the powers of the central government and protecting the powers of the states, the U.S. Constitution was designed to prevent the emergence of a monolithic central government of the sort Hitler and his comrades created.
On January 11, the Obama administration unveiled an executive order representing a dreadful milestone in the process of American Gleichschaltung – the establishment of a “Council of Governors” to aid in the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities” both domestically and abroad. This doesn’t mean that troops will soon flood our streets and death camps will sprout across the countryside. But that executive order makes it even likelier that such afflictions will descend on our country.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Welcome to the People's Republic of Amerika January 11, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 11, 2010
On January 3, graduate student Haison Jiang dropped his girlfriend off at the Newark Airport. In the absence of a Transportation Security Administration guard, Jiang escorted his girlfriend to the boarding area.
The supposed security breach triggered a lockdown that left passengers stranded for up to six hours. Several days later Jiang was arrested at his home in Piscataway, interrogated for a few hours, then released. He has been charged with “defiant trespass” and faces a $500 fine.
New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, displaying a disposition suitable to one of Mao’s Red Guards, is infuriated over the supposed leniency displayed toward Jiang, describing his act of escorting his girlfriend without government permission as “a terrible deed.” Significantly, the TSA guard whose absence permitted Jiang’s supposed offense is likely to escape any kind of professional censure.
Jiang came to the U.S. from Communist China in 2004. It’s doubtful his new home is significantly freer than the country he left.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Suffocating Statism January 8, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 8, 2010
One by one, the Midwestern states that once hosted America’s major manufacturers are being overwhelmed by the tax-consuming class.
Four years ago, the population of government employees in Michigan exceeded the number of people employed in manufacturing, and government employees made, on average, 18 percent more than private sector workers.
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce reports that in 2009, for the first time since relevant statistics began to be kept in 1959, government employees outnumbered Wisconsin manufacturing workers. Fifty years ago, manufacturing workers outnumbered government employees three-to-one; since that time the number of people working in manufacturing has slightly decreased, while government payrolls have exploded.
As is the case elsewhere, government is claiming an ever-bigger share of the Wisconsin economy. In the last legislative session, the state government approved $2 billion in tax increases and increased state spending by 6.5%.
These trends aren’t confined to the Midwest; they’re visible everywhere in the U.S. If not arrested, government growth will permanently destroy our prosperity.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Come Fly the Servile Skies January 7, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 7, 2010
John Locke observed that slavery consists of being subject to the “arbitrary will of another man” – something Americans can experience every time they check in at an airport.
Joan Rivers, an easily recognizable 76-year-old Jewish woman, makes a singularly unlikely terrorist. Yet she was recently kept off a flight because her Passport lists her by both her showbusiness and married names.
Three-year-old Josh Pitney received an early lesson in government power and individual servitude when his Play-Doh was confiscated by a TSA official at the New Orleans Airport. No regulation authorized the confiscation, yet a bureaucrat who can’t tell plastique from Play-Doh swiped the child’s favorite Christmas gift.
Veteran war correspondent Michael Yon was arrested, handcuffed, and interrogated in Seattle for refusing to tell a TSA screener how much money he makes. In his travels throughout Asia and the Arab world, Yon observes, “No country has ever treated me so badly.”
Our economy and prestige are in steep decline, but the USA leads the world in airport harassment.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
Government Isn't Civilized January 6, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 6, 2010
Although relatively few people are familiar with the phrase “high time preference,” that concept explains why we are experiencing an economic crisis that literally threatens to demolish our civilization.
Simply put, high time preference is a tendency to demand immediate satisfaction of desire while deferring payment. As economic analyst Doug French points out, our civilization was built by people governed by exactly the opposite priorities: They delayed consumption, saved their earnings, and built capital.
Time preference can be changed by a crisis, such as illness or disaster. Criminals use violence and fraud to impose their skewed time preference on others. But only government is capable of perverting the time preference of an entire society through large-scale force and fraud – that is, through redistribution of wealth via taxation and inflation.
Civilization can survive disasters, plagues, and the depredations of private criminals. But, as we are learning, it cannot long survive the routine violation of property rights by a government ruled by a high time preference.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
What "Public Service" Really Looks Like January 5, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 5, 2010
Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker is a politician, which means that everything he does is probably tainted with opportunism. Not long ago he promoted a civilian disarmament initiative in which residents would be paid $1000 apiece to snitch out gun owners.
Nevertheless, it’s appropriate to commend Booker for a completely unexpected gesture of genuine civic decency.
The Mayor, who is very active on Twitter, recently received a message from a prominent local constituent, whose elderly father was snowed in.
“Don’t worry about your dad,” the Mayor replied. “Just talked to him and I’ll get to his driveway by noon. I’ve got salt, shovels, and great volunteers.”
The constituent contacted Booker again after the job was done: “My daddy is a happy man! He took pictures of his mayor shoveling his driveway!”
In this instance, Mayor Booker actually earned the title “public servant” by addressing a need without confiscating and redistributing wealth. If only this were the rule rather than the refreshing exception.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
When Judges are Racketeers January 4, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 4, 2010
The story plays like something out of the darkest chapters of Dickens. For years, a criminal syndicate entrenched in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Court needlessly imprisoned thousands of youth for profit. Judge Mark A. Ciaverella and his cohort, Judge Michael T. Conahan, allegedly received at least $2.8 million in kick-backs for sending youngsters to a privately run detention center.
Young defendants were coerced into signing forms waiving their right to counsel and then brow-beaten into guilty pleas by Judge Ciaverella.
He also established a special court to imprison children until their parents could pay fines. In one instance, an 11-year-old boy who was barely four feet tall and weighed 63 pounds was dragged away in handcuffs and shackles when his parents couldn’t pay a $488 fine.
Although the judges face criminal charges, they are protected from civil lawsuits by the principle of judicial immunity. Institutional privileges of that sort do not protect the public or the rule of law, but rather provide shelter for corruption.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
A Bipartisan Dictatorship January 1, 2010
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
January 1, 2010
Although Republican politicians criticize what they call Barack Obama’s weakness in the exercise of presidential counter-terrorism powers, in substantive terms Obama’s conduct has differed little, if any, from that of his predecessor.
While it is true that their shared posture does little to protect us from the threat of foreign terrorism, it constitutes an acute threat to the liberties protected by the Constitution.
Legal analyst John C. Yoo, who wrote several key Justice Department memos during the George W. Bush administration, points out that President Obama has picked up seamlessly where Bush left off.
In his new book Crisis and Command , Yoo – a proponent of dictatorial wartime presidential powers and defender of torture – points out that Obama has continued or even escalated such measures as warrantless wiretapping and summary execution of terrorist suspects overseas.
Many of the same Republicans who condemn Obama’s weakness also warn that he is an aspiring dictator. If the latter is true, they have themselves to blame.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
The State Prefers Defenseless Subjects December 31, 2009
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
December 31, 2009
The constitutional republic created by America’s Founding Fathers did not claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This is the core principle embodied in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
As James Madison explained in Federalist Paper 46, the purpose of preserving what he called the people’s “advantage of being armed” was to deter tyrants and, when necessary, remove them from power.
A glimpse of the radically different views of contemporary leaders was offered Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, who recently criticized a state appeals court for overturning a law forbidding felons to own body armor.
According to Chief Beck, “there is an absolute need [to ban ownership of body armor] by anyone other than law enforcement personnel….” This would include common civilians.
Body armor, of course, is purely defensive. Beck – a second-generation, 32-year veteran police officer who must have some acquaintance with the U.S. Constitution – believes that agents of the state are entitled to deprive the public of any means of self-defense.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
A License to Harass December 30, 2009
Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute
December 30, 2009
A license is a government-issued permit to do something you have a God-given right to do with your person or property. Business licenses create a cartel and provide revenue for government-employed parasites.
As the economic collapse deepens, an ever-greater number of honest, productive people desperate to make a living are offering unlicensed goods and services. At the same time, the government is arresting and otherwise harassing the productive by expanding enforcement of licensing regulations governing manual labor and local commerce.
Despite large-scale job losses in the productive sector, the State of Oregon has hired additional inspectors to fine unlicensed contractors the State of Oregon has hired additional inspectors to fine unlicensed contractors seeking to find work in the aftermath of the housing market’s collapse. Police in Florida have conducted stings to entrap unlicensed contractors. In Savannah, Georgia, police sprang a trap to arrest a delivery man working for an unlicensed biscuit restaurant.
Ridiculous as such measures appear, in desperate economic times this kind of harassment will eventually lead to bloodshed.
Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.