Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 31, 2008

British commentator Peter Hitchens, an unabashed patriot and unflinching enemy of the European Union, has had it with self-described ?Euro-skeptics.?

Such people, Hitchens notes, ?fritter away their energies on micro-complaints about the detailed operation of the EU ... while veering away from the issue of membership itself....?

That issue was effectively decided by the 1975 referendum on membership in the Common Market, the precursor to the EU. Only a tiny handful of people recognized ?we were being asked to give away our national independence and this was the most important issue.?

Opponents of the Common Market were widely derided as paranoid. However, Hitchens writes, ?the supposed crackpots of 1975 ... were actually quite right.?

Today, subtle but unmistakable moves are underway to amalgamate the US with Canada and Mexico as an EU-style North American Union. And those who warn of this prospect are derided as crackpots. We can't wait for that view to become respectable in order to act on it.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 30, 2008

The biggest threat to our national independence may be our overgrown military establishment. The huge sums required to pay for it have to be borrowed from foreign powers ? including potential enemies ? who thereby obtain the means to disrupt our economy or even foreclose on our national assets.

Maintaining a military suitable to the defense of a country our size would be an expensive challenge. But our military is not presently configured for defense; rather, it is designed to project power and conduct long-term nation-building occupations.

This is why the 2008 US military budget is more than six times larger than the military expenditures of Russia and China combined. Dr. Chalmers Johnson, author of three scholarly books examining American foreign policy, notes that the US military budget exceeds ? by roughly $100 billion ? the combined military spending of the rest of the world.

The costs of maintaining the welfare-warfare state are unsustainable. If unchecked, they will soon lead to our demise.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 29, 2008

The defining trait of a prison is the fact that those within it cannot leave without the permission of their keepers. Bear that in mind as we examine new federal policies regarding international travel by US citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security requires US citizens to obtain passports before flying to Canada or Mexico. It is also extending that requirement to those who travel by land to those countries. A supplemental rule going into effect on January 31 will require Customs and Border Enforcement agents to deny entry to US citizens who do not present the appropriate government-issued papers.

The Identity Project, an activist group seeking to protect privacy and the freedom to travel, notes that under the new rule, ?The burden will be on you to `prove' your right to travel....If the government won?t give you papers, you can neither leave nor return to your own country.?

By any reasonable definition, this is a description of a prison society.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 28, 2008

Geneva France, a 22-year-old single mother, met Jerrell Bray in October 2005. When Bray asked Geneva out, she firmly declined the invitation. A few weeks later she was in jail.

Bray, a drug dealer working as a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, accused Geneva of dealing crack cocaine. A police raid of the home Geneva shared with her three young daughters turned up not a molecule of evidence. Yet she was convicted by a federal jury solely on the strength of a drug dealer's testimony.

Last May, Bray was arrested after shooting a man when a drug deal went bad. He is now in prison on perjury charges. Geneva has been freed, along with fifteen others convicted by Bray's testimony.

Although she was reunited with her daughters, Geneva lost her home and has a hard time finding a job. All of this was inflicted on her for refusing the romantic overtures of a federally protected criminal.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute
January 25, 2008

The border town of Eagle, Texas has long absorbed the costs of illegal immigration. Now it is learning that the federal solution to that problem might be even worse.

A US District Judge, acting on a request from the Department of Homeland Security, ordered the town to surrender 233 acres of city-owned land to the federal government. The land will be used for a section of the 700-mile fence the federal government supposedly intends to build along the border with Mexico.

The fence project will be hugely profitable to federal contractors and useless as a deterrent to illegal immigration. It will also displace many residents and businesses along the route. The Bush administration is expected to file more than 100 eminent domain lawsuits against landowners who object to the seizure of their property.

Not minimizing the problems associated with illegal immigration, it's clear that the real invaders here come from Washington, not Mexico.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 24, 2008

Economist Bill Bonner notes that ?The long-term value of all paper currencies is zero.? This is because paper money not backed by gold or silver has no innate value. As such currencies inflate, they move rapidly toward their actual value, which is -- nothing

The Communist-ruled nation of Zimbabwe offers both an object lesson and a possible glimpse of our own future. That long-suffering country currently endures an inflation rate plausibly estimated to be 250,000 percent. A hamburger costs about 15 million Zimbabwean dollars, reflecting the ever-increasing prices of such staples as bread and meat.

Last month, the government issued a 750,000 dollar bill, which this month is worth about a quarter. So the government has now created a $10 million bill, which is about two-thirds the price of the local equivalent of a Big Mac.

Our own government is the world's biggest debtor and most profligate spender. So Zimbabwe might offer a foretaste of what's in store for us.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 23, 2008

The Anti-Defamation League has filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller. That case deals with a Washington, DC police officer who is permitted to carry a gun at work, but forbidden to own one for self-defense as a private citizen.

The ADL contends that the true purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the power of states to disarm their citizenry, on the assumption that the government must have a monopoly on the use of force. This is an Orwellian inversion of the language and clear meaning of the Second Amendment.

Further, the ADL brief claims that ?the rebellion of a people against a government established by themselves is not justifiable, even in an extreme case.? This would mean, apparently, that the ADL would have agreed with the Nazi Regime's gun control policies, which were designed to disarm the people in order to prevent just such a rebellion.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute
January 22, 2008

History professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University is a Vietnam veteran and West Point Graduate whose only son was killed serving in Iraq. He describes how the much-vaunted ?surge? in Iraq has had only one ?undeniable success: It has ensured that US troops won't be coming home anytime soon.? And he points out that ?this was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place.?

The war costs us $3 billion a week -- a total of $1 trillion so far. Americans are paying the costs of the war at the gas pump and grocery store as inflation ? fueled by war spending ? ravages the value of our earnings.

Dr. Bacevich notes that ?far from draining the Jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.? And the war is critically undermining our sovereignty, since Washington must borrow from China and Saudi Arabia in order to pay for it.

How much more of this fatal foolishness are we going to endure?

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute
January 21, 2008

Until recently, New Jersey resident Hal Turner was host of an Internet radio program notorious for its unstinting promotion of white supremacy and incitements to murder and other criminal violence.

In late 2006, for example, Turner urged listeners to assassinate members of Congress who voted in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants. He takes credit for inciting the double murder of the husband and mother of federal Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow. And last December he claimed to be assembling a vigilante mob from members of ?the Klan, Aryan Nations, and Skinheads? to intimidate blacks in Baltimore.

Some suspected that Turner was a government provocateur or, at least, an informant. Those suspicions were validated a few weeks ago when hackers discovered a set of e-mails between Turner and his FBI handler, who was working with the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Turner closed down his program and disappeared. But he's hardly the only provocateur of his sort on the federal payroll.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

January 18, 2008

Mel Kay of California's Golden State Fence Company was threatened with a prison term for employing illegal immigrants. That term may have been spent inside a prison fence his company erected. That's just one of several ironies in this case.

During his decades in the fence construction business, Kay has build barricades for many government installations such as military bases and a Border Patrol station. His company's largest employer was the U.S. Navy. And Kay's company even built a mile-long stretch of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Kay has relied extensively on illegal labor since 1984; this fact was known to the government agencies that contracted his services. Yet while Kay and several of his managers face criminal prosecution, none of the federal officials responsible for giving Kay those contracts has been indicted or sanctioned in any way.

So Kay served six months in home confinement, and the bureaucrats he worked with got pay raises.

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