Liberty Minute April 10 2014

Sheriff's deputies in Kootenai County, Idaho detained a teenager from Arizona at a rest stop on suspicion of being a runaway. The girl managed to slip free of her handcuffs and commandeer the vehicle, leading police on a brief chase before being stopped in a dead-end road and being taken into custody once again.

The most interesting ? and ominous ? aspect of this story is the way the girl was identified by the officers: According to Lt. Mike McFarland of the Kootenai County Sheriff's Office, a license plate reader along Interstate 90 identified a plate that was ?associated? with two juveniles from Chandler, Arizona who had gone missing.

Automatic License Plate Recognition systems are widely in use by police nation-wide. These passive devices, which are tied in to comprehensive databases, routinely scan the license plates of every car they encounter, and produce detailed information about people connected to the vehicles. Motorola, which manufactures one such system, boasts that they are a ?force multiplier that helps generate revenue, enhance officer safety, and improve intelligence capabilities.?

They also accelerate our country's already-rapid descent into a surveillance society.

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

Liberty Minute April 9 2014

After former Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated his claim that waterboarding isn?t torture, Independent Senator Angus Young of Vermont offered a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

Speaking in an interview with MSNBC, Senator King exclaimed: ?If [Cheney] doesn?t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through?. That was torture by anybody?s definition. John McCain said it?s torture, and I think he?s in a better position to know that than Vice President Cheney.?

Senator McCain, who was shot down over North Vietnam, was tortured by his captors. The North Vietnamese contended that the US war was one of aggression, and claimed that this meant all American POWs were unlawful enemy combatants deprived of protection under the Geneva Conventions.

Decades later, the Bush administration ? headed by two men who avoided combat in Vietnam ? appropriated essentially the same argument made by the North Vietnamese Communists and applied it to terrorism suspects who were subjected to waterboarding, a torture method later used by the Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Edmund Burke warned that ?Criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.? Unless the criminals who tortured in our name are punished, the evil they did will continue to metastasize.

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

Liberty Minute April 8 2014

Sherri Watson is a 48-year-old mother of two who lives with her husband and children in the tiny town of Genola, Utah. With great reluctance, Sherri and her family are selling the house her father built and leaving the state. It?s the only way she can protect her family, which faces a constant threat of violence from the local police.

A few years ago, Sherri was targeted for harassment by a police officer named Chad Black, who is employed in the nearby city of Orem. The harassment apparently was punishment for a reckless driving complaint she filed against a friend of Black who is now a member of the Orem PD. Although Sherri has never committed a criminal act or threatened anybody, Black persuaded a judge to issue a protective order treating her as a stalker.

Every time Black or a family member sees Sherri, a police complaint is filed that could lead to imprisonment. Her home has been raided by police several times. Although Black is forbidden to have any contact with Sherri, he goes out of his way to drive by her house every day, as if to taunt and torment the innocent woman he has made a prisoner in her own home.

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

Liberty Minute April 7 2014

Forty years ago, Marxist academic Herbert Marcuse devised a doctrine called ?Repressive Tolerance? in which the concept of tolerance was weaponized in the service of cultural revolution. While revolutionaries were out of power, Marcuse taught, they should demand tolerance from those who defend traditional values and institutions. Once in power, however, the revolutionaries were to abolish tolerance for those with whom they disagree.

As Marcuse wrote: ?Liberating tolerance ? would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the left.? Officially sanctioned intolerance would include suppression of ?discussion and propaganda, of deed as well of word.? That is to say that there would be no freedom of speech for those who peacefully express opinions now deemed to be reactionary.

Marcuse?s doctrine of ?repressive tolerance? was put on display recently when Brendan Eich, the former CEO of the Mozilla computer technology company was forced to resign because of a small donation he made several years ago on behalf of California?s ballot Proposition 8. That measure defined marriage as a union of a man and a woman. Eich was targeted as a thought criminal by a revolutionary clique that left-wing entertainer Bill Maher calls the ?gay mafia.? He won?t be the last.

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

Liberty Minute April 5 2014

About five years ago, I suffered a very serious gastrointestinal disorder that came respectably close to killing me. This condition, which made me pass nearly my entire blood volume over the course of about five days, was produced by an imbalance in my intestinal flora that often results from the use of antibiotics.

During a recent trip to Utah, I started experiencing symptoms suggesting a relapse of that condition. To treat them, I asked a friend to obtain a quantity of raw ? that is, unpasteurized ? milk, which contains natural bacteria that can help restore the balance of intestinal flora. Within a few hours the symptoms disappeared.

My friend told me that to purchase raw milk it was necessary to provide detailed personal information and sign a lengthy disclaimer. This is because the FDA treats this this natural, wholesome food as if it were a harmful substance. The Feds have been actively persecuting farmers who sell raw milk to willing, informed customers.

The same totalitarian presumption that brought us the War on Drugs has led to the Regime?s war on unapproved natural food. Both of those tyrannical campaigns assume that government can prohibit something that informed people freely choose to consume.

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

Liberty Minute for April 4 2014

Rape is a violent crime, and child rape is among the most abhorrent acts found within the compass of fallen man?s depravity. Assuming that prisons should exist, men who sexually molest children deserve to fill them, and judges generally aren?t reluctant to send them there.

Delaware resident Robert H. Richards IV pleaded guilty several years ago to raping his three-year-old daughter. The presiding judge in that case, Jan Jurden, decided not to send Richards ? a 47-year-old man who stands six-feet, four inches tall and weighs roughly 275 pounds ? to prison, insisting that he ?will not fare well? in that environment. Instead, he was placed on probation and assigned to undergo sex offender treatment. Now Richards? ex-wife accuses him of molesting his son.

The sentence, which was recently made public by attorneys for Richards? ex-wife, stunned the legal community in Delaware, given that Judge Jurden is regarded as hawkish and inclined to impose maximum penalties. One likely explanation for this uncharacteristic leniency is the fact that Richards is an heir to the DuPont fortune, and is supported by an immense trust fund.

Innocent poor men suffer in prison after being wrongfully convicted of the crimes to which this wealthy man pleaded guilty.

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

Liberty Minute April 3 2014

Two years ago, Chicago-area voters reelected a criminal court judge named Cynthia Brim despite the fact that she was declared legally insane. Her state-certified mental illness was the only thing that kept Brim from being sent to jail for assaulting a sheriff?s deputy.

Judge Brim, who shoved the deputy during what was described as a manic episode, was found not guilty of battery by reason of insanity. The day before that incident, she indulged in a lengthy, incoherent rant during a session of traffic court.

Suspended after the battery charge was filed against her, Brim was reelected two weeks later. And given the character of Chicago politics, it?s not surprising that she continued to receive her $182,000 salary during the two years she has been suspended from the bench.

Brim spent several hours on March 28 arguing to a Judicial Inquiry Board that she is fit to serve as a judge, despite her diagnosed condition and the fact that she is on several strong prescription medications.

While wishing Cynthia Brim well, she should not be allowed to reclaim a job that requires sober judgment. And her campaign for reinstatement illustrates that she, like too many others in her profession, sees her position as an entitlement, rather than a duty.

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

Liberty Minute April 3 2014

Two years ago, Chicago-area voters reelected a criminal court judge named Cynthia Brim despite the fact that she was declared legally insane. Her state-certified mental illness was the only thing that kept Brim from being sent to jail for assaulting a sheriff?s deputy.

Judge Brim, who shoved the deputy during what was described as a manic episode, was found not guilty of battery by reason of insanity. The day before that incident, she indulged in a lengthy, incoherent rant during a session of traffic court.

Suspended after the battery charge was filed against her, Brim was reelected two weeks later. And given the character of Chicago politics, it?s not surprising that she continued to receive her $182,000 salary during the two years she has been suspended from the bench.

Brim spent several hours on March 28 arguing to a Judicial Inquiry Board that she is fit to serve as a judge, despite her diagnosed condition and the fact that she is on several strong prescription medications.

While wishing Cynthia Brim well, she should not be allowed to reclaim a job that requires sober judgment. And her campaign for reinstatement illustrates that she, like too many others in her profession, sees her position as an entitlement, rather than a duty.

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

Liberty Minute April 2 2014

 Climate change ideology is a dogma masquerading as science. Proponents of the theory of human-generated global warming insist that their views are rooted in objective data ? yet they also insist that subjecting their conclusions to scrutiny constitutes ?denial,? rather than the application of skeptical intelligence that the scientific method requires.

 Rather than defending their views, the guardians of global warming orthodoxy assail the motives of those who don't share their perspective. This is why people who are unpersuaded by the climate change movement's claims ? a group that includes thousands of well-qualified scientists in the appropriate fields ? are routinely denigrated as ?Climate Deniers,? an epithet calculated to associate them with Holocaust Deniers and other unsavory figures.

 Predictably, the high priests of the global warming cult have decreed that disagreement with them should be treated as a crime. One of their spokesmen, Adam Weinstein, insists that so-called ?climate change deniers? should be arrested and prosecuted as purported accomplices in what he insists are 150,000 climate-related deaths each year.

 ?First Amendment rights were never intended to be absolute,? proclaims Weinstein, invoking the familiar defense offered by totalitarian-minded people seeking to criminalize disagreement with them.

 Environmentalism has always been a religion, and its adherents are preparing their own Inquisition. 

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

Liberty Minute April 1 2014

 David Johnson and his family were asleep in their two-bedroom apartment in Caldwell, Idaho when they heard a noise later described as sounding like the walls were caving in. David went to open the front door, but it was shattered before he could unlock it. Two armored men burst through the entrance, pointing guns at David's head and ordering him out of his home. Along with his wife and adult son, Aaron, David was handcuffed and watched helplessly as the invaders searched their domicile. At no point did the intruders identify themselves as police officers. 

The raid targeted the Johnson family's next-door neighbor, Bill Gerst, who was the subject of a domestic violence allegation. Gerst was ordered to crawl on his stomach to be handcuffed and his apartment was also subjected to a warrantless search. Gerst's quiet, plaintive requests for an explanation were rewarded with threats and the terse command, ?Shut your mouth!? Despite the fact that Gerst was in custody, the raiding party kicked in a third door at the same address for no discernible reason. 

This February 21, 2013 midnight raid was carried out without a warrant or credible evidence that a violent crime was underway. It's simply how things are done now in the American Reich. 

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