Liberty Minute June 18 2013

In May 2012, William Barboza, a Connecticut resident, was stopped for speeding while driving through the village of Liberty, New York. As an out-of-state resident, Barboza wasn’t aware that the portion of State Route 17 that runs through the tiny village is one of the most notorious speed traps in the state.

Not surprisingly, Barboza wasn’t happy about the ticket. When he mailed his payment to the Sullivan County Court, the 22-year-old included a vulgar message expressing contempt for the town, to which he referred as “Tyranny” rather than “Liberty,” New York. The court rejected his payment and ordered Barboza to make a two-hour trip to attend court. At the October 2012 hearing, a judge upbraided Barboza for his language, and police handcuffed and arrested him for violating the state’s “aggravated harassment” statute. Barboza was booked, fingerprinted, handcuffed to a bench, and forced to pay $200 bail. He has filed a lawsuit against the police officers who arrested him.

The charge was eventually dismissed as facially unconstitutional – but not before Barboza had been humiliated, verbally abused, and forced to make several expensive trips for gratuitous court proceedings.

Tyrannical bullying by arrogant government officials is immeasurably more offensive than vulgar language.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 17, 2013

Utah businessman Jeremy Johnson faces an 86-count federal indictment accusing him of defrauding customers through his once-lucrative internet marketing firm, iWorks. Johnson’s company allegedly lured unwitting customers into signing up for recurring membership fees, and then threatened to place disgruntled customers on a credit blacklist.

As in any other high-profile federal case, prosecutors seized Johnson’s assets and unleashed a torrent of press releases and leaks damaging to Johnson’s reputation. His wife, Sharla Johnson, has fought back by setting up several websites exposing what she regards as official corruption and misbehavior by federal officials.

Although Johnson, who is presently free on bail, is bound by a gag order, his wife is not – but that hasn’t stopped U.S. District Magistrate Judge Paul M. Warner from threatening to send him back to jail unless his wife ceases to publish critical commentary about the federal government on her websites.

If the allegations are true, Johnson swindled people out of an estimated $275 million by offering to help them obtain taxpayer-funded government grants – and then using tactics that mimic the institutional corruption of the government offering those grants. The difference is that the government demands a monopoly on fraud – and is utterly ruthless in pursuing and enforcing that monopoly.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute June 14 2013

When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong, many observers were puzzled that he would seek sanctuary in a city that is a special administrative region of Communist China.

According to Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, this wasn’t all that surprising, given that the U.S. and China are, in his view, beginning to resemble each other. Weiwei, who lived in the United States for 12 years, describes the NSA’s massive surveillance program as an “abuse of state power” that “goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilized society, and it will be shocking of American citizens allow this to continue.”

Speaking from a different totalitarian tradition and a vastly different perspective, Russian President Vladimir Putin – a veteran of the KGB – has given his enthusiastic support to the NSA’s surveillance program. Comprehensive phone surveillance and internet data-mining, according to Putin, is “the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.” He also applauded the brutal paramilitary tactics increasingly used by U.S. police in dealing with demonstrations. According to Putin, “That’s the way it’s done in the U.S. … and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.”

Under Obama, the United States has become the land of Mao and Lenin, rather than Madison and Jefferson.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute June 13 2013

Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens are threatened with prosecution for lying to federal agents. Constitutional attorney Harvey Silverglate points out that this often happens because of minor and materially insignificant discrepancies between the citizen’s testimony and a handwritten report of an earlier interview with an FBI agent.

Former Major League baseball star Roger Clemens was threatened with a prison term over supposedly lying to Congress over his alleged steroid use. Lying to federal investigators or during Congressional testimony is thus treated as a grave criminal offense – unless, apparently, it is done by the Director of National Intelligence.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing in March, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon asked James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence: “Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper’s reply was: “No, sir” – a statement that is now known to be a direct, conscious lie, as he subsequently admitted.

Republican Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan has called for Clapper’s resignation for lying under oath. That would require Clapper to display integrity he obviously doesn’t possess. If this were a society of laws, Clapper would be prosecuted for perjury. Then again, in such a society the NSA wouldn’t exist.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 12, 2013

The Supreme Court has quietly dismissed a lawsuit filed by a U.S. Navy veteran named Donald Vance who was illegally imprisoned and tortured by the government he served.

In 2004, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Donald Vance went to that country to work as a security contractor. He soon discovered that the company employing him was deeply corrupt and selling weapons to radical Islamist militias. Vance contacted the FBI and began feeding it information about what he found. This prompted military officials to arrest Vance and confine him in an Iraqi dungeon, where he was tortured.

Like foreign nationals who had been detained in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vance was told by his captors not to disclose what had been done to him. To his credit, once he was home Vance – along with a fellow detained named Nathan Ertel -- contacted an attorney and filed a lawsuit against Rumsfeld. The7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals insisted that Rumsfeld could not be held responsible for the crimes committed by his subordinates – who, in turn, insisted that they weren’t liable for carrying out crimes that were authorized by their superiors. Those perverse, mutually reinforcing claims of immunity have been tacitly ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

June 11, 2013

When Boulder, Colorado resident Chrissy Smiley returned to her condo after walking her dog, she was stunned to find a card from a police officer on her dining room table. When she called the department she was informed that the fact she had left a sliding door unlocked and partially open constituted “probable cause” to conduct a welfare check, Smiley recalled to the Boulder Camera newspaper. The Boulder Police Department insists that entering what they call “unsecured residences” is “standard operating procedure” and that it will continue.

In Stillwater, Minnesota Sonya Sylos was startled to find a sheriff’s deputy and two police officers who had entered her home at 2:00 a.m. without a warrant or permission. The officers said they wanted to talk with Sylos about her son, who was not a criminal suspect but was allegedly a friend of another individual who had fled from police during a traffic stop. Their questioning persisted even after Sylos told them they did not have permission to be in her home.

In the garrison state America has become, the police – like their Soviet and Nazi forebears -- assume that they no longer need permission to invade our homes or otherwise inflict their uninvited attention upon us.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute June 10 2013

While waiting for a flight at Washington’s Dulles Airport, Foreign Policy Analyst Steve Clemons of The Atlantic magazine overheard four men he identified as intelligence officers talking about killing the NSA whistleblower who revealed that agency’s pervasive surveillance of American phone calls and electronic communications.

 The men, who had attended a conference for intelligence professionals, made references to having the whistleblower “disappeared,” which refers to an extra-judicial assassination. Clemons characterized their remarks as “bravado,” but during an era in which U.S. citizens have been targeted for drone strikes such remarks can’t be dismissed as mere whimsy.

The apparent source of the leaks is 29-year-old NSA contract employee Edward Snowden. He told the Guardian of London that he leaked the information in the hope that public exposure would lead to political and legal action to rein in the surveillance state. Currently living in Hong Kong, Snowden said that he seeks asylum from any country that supports privacy and freedom of speech – and that he doesn’t expect he will ever see home again. Comments of the kind made by the intelligence officers at Dulles Airport underscore his concerns – and suggest one dreadful way his prediction could come true.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

LibertyMinute

June 7, 2013

Last March, following a national outcry, two high school football stars fromSteubenville,Ohiowere convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl. A few weeks later, an FBI SWAT team raided theSteubenvillehome of 26-year-old corporate cybersecurity consultant Deric Lostutter, who obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which members of the football team had joked about the rape and mocked the victim.

That information was made public by way of the hacker collective that calls itself Anonymous. Mother Jones magazine notes that if Lostutter is convicted of federal hacking-related charges, he faces up to ten years in prison – as compared to the one and two-year sentences handed out to theSteubenville rapists.

Bear in mind that the Regime threatening to send this hacker to prison is currently conducting wholesale warrantless surveillance of telephone and internet communications. Through a program called PRISM the National Security Agency can monitor e-mails, file transfers, and conduct real-time surveillance of online searches. The CIA is also developing the ability to conduct surveillance through internet-connected “smart appliances.”

It is impossible to exaggerate when describing the dishonesty, hypocrisy, vulgarity, and corruption of the government that presumes to rule us.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute June 6 2013

According to the Obama administration and civilian disarmament advocates, Americans need to have a “conversation” about gun violence – but one 11-year-old student in Maryland was suspended for ten days for following that advice.

 Bruce Henkelman of Huntington, Maryland told WMAL radio that his son, a sixth grade student, received the suspension after a bus driver overheard the child talking about the Sandy Hook massacre. The student was interrogated by the school’s principal and a sheriff’s deputy – without the father being present.

The principal later reportedly told Mr. Henkelman that “if you say the word `gun’ in my school you are going to get suspended for ten days.”

This outrage occurred in the same county where a five-year-old child and his first-grade sister were interrogated for two hours – without a parent being present – because the boy had brought a toy cap gun pistol to school. The boy, who was so traumatized he wet his pants, was suspended for ten days.

It’s should be noted that the police officers who assisted in these interrogations were carrying firearms. If guns are too dangerous for children to talk about, why should we permit strangers in government costumes to carry them?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute June 5 2013

Most of the U.S. economy remains mired in a recession, but Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties continue to thrive. Mass bloodshed provided the fertilizer in which Washington has bloomed, as the expanding war economy has led the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and military contractors to bring hundreds of thousands of new residents into the region.

The result, as the Wall Street Journal observes, is a new “Gilded Age” for Washington, which has been “a time of lush business profits fueled by government outsourcing and war.” Well-connected recent college graduates secure entry-level bureaucratic jobs that pay enough to support rentals that charge $3,000 a month. Military contractors like Northrup Gumman, corporate lobbying groups, and Wall Street firms bring in hordes of first-time home buyers, driving real estate values upward. Owing to their connections, Democratic Party insiders like Frank Islam and Debbie Driesman can afford to build a 40,000-square foot French chateau-style mansion in Potomac, Maryland, buying up and demolishing adjacent houses in the process.

After the housing bubble burst in 2007, the national economy collapsed. However, as the New York Times points out, “as the country withered, Washington blossomed.” This does much to explain the invincible indifference of the ruling class to our nation’s unfolding economic catastrophe.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.