Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 16, 2008

After the Senate rejected the proposed bailout of the Big Three automakers, the White House announced that it would proceed without congressional help.

The Treasury Department said it would redirect some of the$700-800 billion set aside in September to bail out banks and other financial institutions stricken by the collapse of the housing bubble. A spokesman for the Department insisted that this extraordinary development was necessary because Congress had ?failed to act.?

Accordingly, the Treasury Department, acting without constitutional authority, prepared to bail out the stricken auto industry.

This is a telling illustration of the new system under which we're living. Congress no longer has control over the public purse; it has effectively surrendered that power to the Treasury Department, at least where financial and industrial bailouts are concerned. In this way, the corrupt mechanism of wealth redistribution can function without being impeded by the people's representatives.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 15, 2008

Were they alive today, the men who drafted the Bill of Rights might be considered clinically paranoid.

Harvard history Bernard Bailyn has documented that the colonial patriots who won our independence and enacted the Constitution acted on the belief that they were battling a conspiracy ? what a ?deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and America."

The Constitution and Bill of Rights cannot be properly understood unless we understand the conspiracy-centered analysis used by the Framers. In the decades prior to independence, that conspiratorial view of government permeated colonial America by way of widely distributed newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets.

Today, conspiratorial perspective on government of widely varying reliability are available online in the blogosphere. This has led some, such as mental health advocate Angus MacDonald of the University of Minnesota, to suggest that propagation of conspiracy theories should be treated as a public health issue.

King George III would have found that approach very useful in putting down the move to American independence.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 12, 2008

In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama asserted that the United States has a moral responsibility to submit to UN-issued international laws and regulations in order to demonstrate that ?these are rules worth following.?

One indication that this viewpoint will help define the Obama administration can be found in the fact that John Podesta, who heads the Obama transition team, recently served on a Brookings Institution task force called Managing Global Insecurity, or MGI. That panel also included the likes of former NATO chairman Javier Solana, and Strobe Talbott, who served as undersecretary of state for global affairs in the Clinton administration.

The MGI calls for binding, enforceable international agreements on global warming and other issues. They also want to create a 50,000-man standing UN army that would help enforce the world body?s will.

What is needed is restoration of constitutional restraints on our government, not the empowerment of the UN as a global lawgiver.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 11, 2008

For two years, a young woman in her twenties known as either Lucy Shoup or Lucy McDonald attended protest rallies of various kinds in Maryland. Even though Lucy never took a hands-on role in preparing protest materials or handing out flyers, she was a diligent note-taker.

Thus it comes as little surprise to learn that Lucy was an undercover officer for the Maryland State Police. What did come as a surprise was the fact that the State Police, using Lucy?s findings, listed 53 people in its federally funded database of potential terrorists.

Most of those listed were environmental activists, or opponents of the Iraq war or the death penalty. Others were pro-life activists. None of them had done anything to attract the hostile attention of the government apart from organizing to express their views.
Apparently, that?s all it takes now to be considered a potential terrorist.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 10, 2008

Barry Cooper of Austin, Texas is a former narcotics officer who has become an outspoken opponent of the war on drugs.

He and his associates rented a house in Odessa, Texas. Inside they placed two small Christmas trees beneath heat lamps of the kind used to grow marijuana.

Less than a day later, police raided the house. But instead of finding marijuana, the narcotics officers found an attorney surrounded by video equipment used to document the illegal raid.

The attorney was arrested and quickly released. The police have refused to release the affidavit used to get a warrant for the unjustified drug raid, most likely because it contained fabricated allegations or evidence obtained through illegal surveillance. Cooper and his associates did nothing wrong, but may face official retaliation of some kind.

This is the first private sting operation targeting corrupt narcotics officers. May it not be the last.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 5, 2008

On Thanksgiving night, a highly trained SWAT team in New Jersey engaged in an hour-long armed standoff with what proved to be a cardboard cutout.

The night before, a woman in Washington, D.C. became the latest victim of a now-familiar scam: Her home was robbed at gunpoint by a gang posing as a SWAT team serving a drug warrant.

The day after Thanksgiving, the police chief of Monroe, Ohio shot himself in the leg while giving his daughter a lesson in gun safety.

In early December, the FBI arrested seventeen Chicago-area police officers who offered to sell their services to what they believed to be a local drug syndicate.

And in St. Louis, city alderman Charles Quincy Troupe , reacting to the corruption and ineptitude of the local police, urged his constituents to stop relying on the police and to buy guns for their own protection.

Here?s hoping that Alderman Troupe?s common sense proves to be contagious.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 4, 2008

The world watched in horror as a handful of armed slaughtered scores of innocent people at ten locations in Mumbai, India.

Many important questions remain unanswered about the origins and connections of the terrorist group that carried out that atrocity. One question, however, is being carefully avoided by the mainstream press: How can a handful of armed men, however well-trained and equipped, hold a city of 13.5 million people hostage ? unless the potential victims had been disarmed first?

One answer is found in the Indian Arms Act of 1878, a British colonial measure that stripped native Indians of their right to bear arms.

Ghandi would later write that ?the Act depriving a whole nation of arms? was the blackest misdeed of British rule. Last week?s massacre is part of that Act?s baneful legacy, and a vivid reminder that the right of armed self-defense is a key element of the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 3, 2008

William Kristol, Fox News commentator and columnist for the New York Times, has urged President Bush to issue pre-emptive pardons for any official who violated laws against torture. The point of those pardons, Kristol insists, would be to show ?how [the] administration's ? interrogation ? policies have helped keep us safe.?

Kristol, a soft-bodied neo-conservative media celebrity, has never worn a uniform or experienced a conflict more intense than a sharp exchange of words.

Matthew Alexander, by way of contrast, is a combat helicopter pilot who became a successful counter-intelligence agent before his combat tour in Iraq.

Alexander describes the administration?s torture techniques, which he rejected, as ?deeply flawed, ineffective, and un-American,? and states flatly that ?Torture and abuse cost American lives? by recruiting additional fighters, both foreign and native-born, to the cause of expelling the American occupation.

Speaking from experience, Alexander concludes that torture is not only morally wrong, but counter-productive.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 2, 2008

Since they had lived under the heel of British army of occupation, the Framers of our Constitution inserted safeguards into the Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent the federal government from creating a similar apparatus of oppression.

The Pentagon?s recent announcement that it expects to have a domestic military force of at least 20,000 troops deployed in our country by 2011 is therefore a genuinely alarming development.

The troops would supposedly be used to assist state and local police in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack. However, military personnel were deployed to deal with routine security matters during the recent political conventions.

Police SWAT teams developed to deal with terrorist situations are increasingly used for mundane law enforcement duties; the same will likely occur with the Pentagon?s new Homeland Security Force.

Our Founders wouldn?t hesitate to condemn this development as a definitive step toward undisguised tyranny.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 1, 2008

Since September 28, the federal bank bailout has cost much more than the $700 billion authorized by Congress. By the end of November, the total bailout bill was an estimated eight trillion dollars.

That amount is equivalent to more than half of last year?s gross domestic product. To put it another way, the Banker Bailout alone has cost as much, in inflation-adjusted dollars, as the combined expenditures on the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the lifetime budget of NASA, the S&L bailout, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars, and the entire New Deal.

An internal memo at CitiBank predicts that the ?world is not going back to normal? following the bailout. The memo foresees the middle class being ravaged by an ?inflationary shock,? and perhaps caught in ?a downward spiral? into global depression, civil disorder, and full-scale international war.

Our rulers know exactly what they are doing, and they don?t care about the consequences for the rest of us.

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