Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 18, 2007

Not long ago, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case challenging the constitutionality of Washington, DC's ultra-strict gun control laws.

The case, Columbia vs. Heller, may require the Court to deliver a definitive decision as to whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense, or a so-called collective right on the part of states to maintain militias.

This point has been made before, but it bears repeating: The Constitution does not empower the federal government to disarm the sovereign people. This would be true even in the absence of the Second Amendment. The chief value of that amendment may be that it prohibits the use of other federal powers ? such as regulating interstate commerce ? in ways that would ?infringe? the right to keep and bear arms.

The fact that the Founders included explicit protection of that right testifies that they considered it indispensable to a free society.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 17, 2007

A young woman on a Christmas shopping spree in New York City complained to the New York Times: ?We had trouble spending all our money.?

Dear listener, when was the last time you had that problem?

This young lady was not an aristocrat, but rather a 27-year-old nurse from Great Britain, whose pound sterling is worth more than twice the value of the ever-depreciating dollar. She and her friends gorged their suitcases with designer clothes and flew back across the Atlantic with money left unspent.

American fashion designer Erica Nevins has had exactly the opposite experience. While visiting Marrakech, Morocco a few weeks ago, Miss Nevins was moved by the plight a street beggar and handed the little girl a dollar. The young mendicant looked with disdain on the greenback, telling Nevins: ?I don't want this. This is nothing.?

When the dollar is worth ?nothing? in the slums of Marrakech, it's clear our economy is headed for disaster.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 14, 2007

The Bush administration has embraced a medieval concept of law by abolishing the habeas corpus guarantee, which forbids imprisonment without trial. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has proposed a measure that would refine that crude medieval concept into pure totalitarian tyranny.

Justice Breyer has suggested that Congress should pass ?some special statute involving preventive detention and danger.? This would permit the open-ended imprisonment, without trial, of anyone deemed to be dangerous to the State.

The kind of law Breyer is describing was first passed in September 1793 by the government of Revolutionary France. Called the ?Law of Suspects,? it permitted the wholesale imprisonment of six classes of people deemed enemies of the State. In 1923 a similar law was enacted by the government of Soviet Russia as Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution; that measure permitted the imprisonment, or utter liquidation, of ?socially dangerous persons.?

That's the direction we're headed, unless we reverse course immediately.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 13, 2007

As the parent of a son who suffered the singular horror of sexual molestation, Ivan Oliver was understandably suspicious of strangers who moved into his neighborhood.

When he learned that his new neighbor, 67-year-old Michael Dodele was a registered sex offender, Oliver took what he considered to be logical defensive action: He allegedly killed Dodele before he became a threat to his son and other local children.

Yet Dodele, as it happens, had served a twenty-year prison term for rape, and wasn't a child sex offender. Oliver had misinterpreted the information on the public sex offender registry. Bad assumptions combined with unchecked rage resulted in a criminal act for which Oliver may face the death penalty.

Ironically, the logic behind Oliver's alleged crime is identical to that used to justify the war in Iraq and other proposed pre-emptive wars against countries such as Iran. If pre-emptive war is morally defensible, why is what Ivan Oliver allegedly did a crime?

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 12, 2007

After igniting fires that threaten to consume the world, the international league of arsonists met and announced a plan to fight those fires with gasoline.

Of course, this didn't actually happen. But that program makes about as much sense as the proposal that a cartel of five central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, collaborate to pump tens of billions of dollars into the international economy in order to prevent a credit crunch.

With the economy being ravaged by monetary inflation, a credit crunch is precisely what is needed. Yes, it would be as painful as it is inevitable. But the longer it is postponed, the worse it will be for everyone.

Through decades of loose money policies, the Federal Reserve has all but destroyed the dollar's value, consuming the wealth and savings of Americans in a vast inflationary bonfire. And now the Fed and its allies threaten to put what's left of our economy to the torch.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 11, 2007

On December 6, CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that the agency had destroyed video recordings of the 2005 interrogations of terrorist suspects. This was done, Hayden insists, to protect the safety of undercover operatives.

Critics of the agency point out that the videotapes may have contained evidence of torture, which was clearly illegal at the time. This being the case, the destruction of those tapes would be nothing less than a criminal act itself.

Hayden insists that the tapes revealed no illegal activity, since the interrogations had been subject to a ?rigorous review? by the Agency's General Counsel. However, that official, John Rizzo, has openly defended torture as a proper interrogation method, even when forbidden by criminal statutes.

So it appears the CIA employed torture, had its in-house torture advocate certify it legal, and then destroyed the evidence. This is the kind of behavior we'd expect from a dictatorship, not a constitutional republic.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 10, 2007

During a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, the U.S. Military unveiled a remarkable new unmanned aircraft called the Predator. Its mission was to locate Serb artillery units and target them for laser-guided bombs.

Beginning in 2002, a version of the same drone was outfitted with lethal Hellfire missiles and used by the CIA to conduct airstrikes against various suspected al-Qaeda leaders. By 2005, the Predator had become part of the arsenal of the Department of Homeland Security, particularly for surveillance missions along the southern border.

According to the Sacramento Bee, ?a wave of law enforcement agencies across the country [are] hoping to use ... aerial drones similar to those used by the military.? Thus the same unmanned aerial vehicles developed for battlefield use and remote CIA assassinations will soon be deployed in the skies of American cities. This cannot possibly be a good idea.

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

Link: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/12/captain-blackadders-lament-imperialism.html

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 7, 2007

Forty-four years before the Imperial Japanese attack on the United States, an Hawaiian leader referred to the loss of Pearl Harbor as ?a day of infamy in Hawaiian history.?

Lilioukalani, who would become Hawaii's Queen in 1891, used that phrase to describe the surrender of Pearl Harbor by her brother, who was the last of the puppet monarchs installed by the US government. The independence-minded Queen Lilioukalani reigned only two years before being deposed in a coup. Her overthrow was arranged by a tiny, Washington-backed clique who were supported by a small but formidable contingent of U.S. Marines.

We properly remember FDR's more familiar words that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a ?day that will live in infamy.? But it was Washington's imperial designs that put Americans in a position to be attacked on that day. And today, the same interventionist foreign policy is sowing the seeds of future tragedies.

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

Please click on the above title of this Liberty Minute for more about this subject.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 6, 2007

As Article I of the Constitution acknowledges, the Founding Fathers recognized the existence of ?the law of nations.? This is definitely not the same concept known today as ?international law,? in which the United Nations is treated as the global lawgiver.

What the Founders believed was that each nation was sovereign within its territory and should be dealt with as an equal in international affairs. This includes the observance of time-honored diplomatic protocols, among them the creation of bilateral extradition treaties to govern the delivery of criminal suspects from abroad for trial here.

According to the Sunday Times of London, the Bush administration has declared that the US ?can `kidnap' British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.? A valid extradition treaty exists, but Washington apparently believes that the British system of due process is an unacceptable impediment.

Apparently, the Bush administration expects all nations to set aside their laws and bow to its will.

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

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 5, 2007

Sovereign Wealth Funds, or SWFs, are huge, State-controlled financial entities that are used by governments to buy key financial or infrastructure assets from other countries.

The world's largest SWFs are controlled by energy-rich countries -- such as the petroleum-exporting kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, and Russia, which has huge reserves of natural gas. Such countries have also acquired immense reserves of currency, particularly dollars.

On November 27, an SWF controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich member of the United Arab Emirates, spent $7.5 billion to buy a roughly five percent share in Citigroup, America's largest and most prestigious bank.

Citigroup, like most of the banking system, is in potentially mortal peril from the collapse of the mortgage industry. The government of Abu Dhabi, like other Arab petro-monarchies, is aware of this situation. This is why, as economist Gary North points out, Arab oil states may soon control the flow of funds into our capital markets.

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