Liberty Minute July 8 2013

In Denver, prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the local police union distributed T-shirts depicting a fearsome, nightstick-wielding police figure arising from the skyline surrounded by a caption reading: ?We get up early to BEAT the crowds.? In New York, police unions have distributed shirts showing a young boy behind bars, with a caption reading ?U raise ?em, we cage ?em.?

Another popular t-shirt inscription for New York police is a quote from Ernest Hemmingway: ?There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.? Yet another police union t-shirt declares: ?Police ? My job is to protect your a**, not kiss it.?

Doug Wyllie, Editor in Chief of PoliceOne magazine, criticized officers who wear such shirts - -not because of the attitude they convey, but because they give ?people who dislike police officers additional fodder for their anti-cop rhetoric.? The problem, according to Wyllie, is that the lesser beings who constitute the public at large ?simply won?t understand police humor.?

No, Mr. Wyllie. We understand it perfectly.

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

Liberty Minute for July 5 2013

Alexa Hamme of Salt Lake City was 25 years old when she died in a jail cell. She had been arrested four days earlier on suspicion of drug possession and endangerment of a child or adult. That last charge is a sentence enhancer often tacked on to a drug arrest as a way of escalating the potential penalties and extorting a guilty plea to a lesser charge.

According to Hamme?s father, the young woman had long struggled with drug addiction, which is a familiar affliction but no less tragic for being so commonplace. She needed treatment for her addiction, which she obviously wasn?t going to receive while being cattle-penned with other inmates, some of whom might have committed actual crimes.

Using drugs is unwise and self-destructive. It can and often does lead to addiction, which in turn often leads to disruption or destruction of families and actual criminal behavior. The same is true of other personal vices, as well. But government has no moral or legal mandate to punish people for indulging vices. Doing so is itself a crime ? and as the tragic death of Alexa Hamme illustrates, it is frequently a capital offense.

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

Liberty Minute July 4 2013

Dustin Theoharis of Auburn, Washington was asleep in a basement bedroom when he was shot 16 times by officers who had come to the home looking for someone else. He was not a criminal suspect and had no access to a weapon when the officers opened fire in the darkened bedroom.

The assailants who shot Theoharis were Detective Aaron Thompson of the King County Sheriff?s Office and Corrections Officer Kris Rongen. They had arrested Theoharis?s roommate, Nicholas Harrison, an ex-convict who had failed to report for community supervision. Since Harrison was already in custody at the time of the incident, there was no need to conduct a ?safety sweep? of the residence.

By any reasonable definition, Detective Thompson and Officer Rongen committed the crime of attempted homicide.

 Now King County taxpayers will be forced to underwrite a $3 million payment to Theoharis in order to settle a lawsuit filed on his behalf. The King County Prosecutor?s office ruled that the shooting by Deputy Aaron Thompson and Correctional Officer Kristopher Rongen was legally justified ?because contemporary police, unlike King George?s Redcoats, enjoy something very close to complete impunity.

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

(For context, read Isaiah 14:12-17 )

Liberty Minute July 3 2013

?What kind of a man is he that he makes the whole nation tremble??

Those words were spoken by a waitress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the visit of Barack Obama to the city. Mr. Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, had gone to the Tanzanian capital to commemorate the 15^th anniversary of a terrorist bombing at the U.S. embassy. This event inflicted all of the disruptions and inconveniences that attend every presidential visit, as security personnel ? including grim-faced men with sniper rifles ? locked up huge sections of the city.

Just hours after Obama paid respects at the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, his administration quietly ordered two European countries ? France and Portugal ? to deny access to their airspace to a plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia. Morales had suggested that Bolivia might grant asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, so his plane was forced down in Austria where it was searched by police.

This was a hijacking ? an act of official terrorism committed against an elected head of state of a country with which the US is not at war. The President who authorized it commands a nuclear arsenal and routinely kills innocent people through remote-controlled drones. That?s why he causes nations to tremble.

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

Liberty Minute July 2 2013

The "empire of the Romans filled the world," recalled Edward Gibbon, with some exaggeration. This meant that the known world became "a safe and dreary prison" for anyone who had provoked the Emperor's displeasure.

"On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, seized, and restored to his irritated master," observed Gibbon. "`Wherever you are,' said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, `remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror.'"

Writing in latter part of the mid-18th century, Gibbon said that a tyrannical ruler of that age would be restrained by ?the example of his equals, the dread of present censure, the advice of his allies, and the apprehension of his enemies." No restraints of that kind exist where the world is subject to the will of a global "hyper-power,? like the one headquartered in Washington.

As Edward Snowden can testify, Washington's reach is universal, and those who control its apparatus of repression are utterly pitiless. Snowden's sole sanctuary -- his "safe and dreary prison" -- is a small section of an airport in Moscow.

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

LibertyMinute July 1 2013

Why do we even pretend that the Fourth Amendment exists, when the federal government conducts all-encompassing warrantless surveillance, and local police routinely conduct searches without warrants or probable cause?

In 2000, the US Supreme Court ruled that warrantless narcotics checkpoints in Indianawere unconstitutional. Police in at least two states have responded by setting up fake checkpoints, and then stopping motorists who seek to avoid them. Two years ago, the Genessee County, Michigan Sheriff?s Office began deploying a pickup truck towing a large sign announcing a narcotics checkpoint one mile ahead. Deputies would then stop any driver who took last-minute evasive action.

Police in Mayfield Heights, Ohio are now using the same tactic by placing ?Drug Checkpoint Ahead? signs in the express lanes of Interstate 271. Although such checkpoints are illegal, observes Professor Ric Simmons ofOhioStateUniversity?s Moritz College of Law, lying about one is not, because police ?can lie to anybody.?

As former Texasprosecutor Robert Guest points out, a police officer who asks to search your car ?is telling you that he wants to arrest you. He just has not found or planted a reason to arrest you yet.? What reasonable person would not take action to avoid an encounter with a professional liar who has that objective?

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

Liberty Minute June 27 2013

Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, ?Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has is stolen.? The truth of Nietzsche?s axiom is embodied by the band of thieves and terrorists called the Internal Revenue Service.

Public outrage over recent revelations of IRS corruption and abuse has prompted Nina Olson, who is employed by the agency as its ?National Taxpayer Advocate,? to suggest that the agency should make ?apology payments? of $1,000 to taxpayers who have been mistreated.  If adopted on, Olson?s plan would cap payments at a total of $1 million a year. This would mean that 1,000 of the tens of millions of people abused by the IRS would receive an insultingly trivial sum as compensation for their mistreatment.

To understand the magnitude of the insult offered by Olson?s proposal, consider a recently publicized IRS conference that took place in Atlanta in 2008. The cost of that single event was $2.4 million ? more than twice the amount proposed by the IRS to buy off public outrage over their profligacy, corruption, and state-sponsored terrorism.  The IRS whistleblowers who reported that event to The Hill Newspaper, who remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, describe the event as an example of the agency?s ?culture of excess.?

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

Liberty Minute

June 26 2013

Two days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring federal supervision of local elections in some southern states. Because it was seen as outdated and unnecessary, that provision was considered an unwarranted intrusion by the Feds in an area of state responsibility. That ruling prompted universal lamentation and outrage on the Left.

This morning, the same Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited states from recognizing the novel social arrangement called ?same-sex marriage.? As a result, the same Leftists who assailed the Court as a citadel of oppression are now celebrating it as the vanguard of progress.

Marriage is a covenantal institution, rather than a political artifact. The Feds have no authority to define it, any more than a government can decree that a triangle can have four sides or be round.

Whiplash is an affliction to which statists must be uniquely susceptible. For people of that persuasion, the only moral absolute is the belief that the State is the ultimate arbiter of all truth. This is why their moods will oscillate wildly from one day to the next, depending on whether or not a government institution has validated their political prejudices and granted a temporary victory to their faction.

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

Liberty Minute June 25 2013

In his memoir Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, former  US intelligence asset John Perkins describedhow he and fellow ?Economic Hit Men? were used by Washington in a global loan-sharking scheme. 

His job was to induce leaders of Third World countries to take out huge development loans from the World Bank. This would mean that ?the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years.? But this is the desired outcome. Rather than having the loans paid in full, Washington and its Power Elite allies sought payment in the form of ?control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources.?

What happens to a debt-ravaged country that refuses to play along? The case of Yemen is instructive. In 1991, Yemen refused to vote in the UN in favor of the first Iraq War. Washington retaliated by cutting of all financial aid. Saudi Arabia expelled about a million Yemeni workers whose remittances were vital to the country?s economy. Yemen, which had barely become unified, descended into civil war and dictatorship. Today Yemen is ruled by a compliant puppet dictator who eagerly supports Washington?s drone warfare campaign against his subjects.

Such are the ways of empire.

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

Liberty Minute June 24 2013

Since late 2001, the federal government has behaved as if the U.S. Constitution doesn?t exist with respect to matters of national security.

Rather than acting under the limited and revocable grants of authority provided by the Constitution, the executive branch has routinely invoked two measures enacted by Congress in a panicked haste following the 9/11 attacks ? the so-called PATRIOT act, and the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Those measures supposedly permit the President and his subordinates to wage war anywhere on the face of the earth, carry out all-encompassing electronic surveillance of the entire population, and even carry out summary executions of anyone ? including U.S. citizens ? deemed to be enemies of the state.

Although the Constitution has not been formally suspended, we?ve entered a period in which presidential whim has supplanted the rule of law.

Pakistan endured a similar period of executive rule under the reign of military dictator Pervez Musharraf between 1999 and 2008. The Pakistani government is preparing to put Musharraf on trial for treason for suspending that country?s constitution. Perhaps that dictator?s mistake was to be candid about what he did, rather than swaddling his actions in the kind of civics-class bromides routinely uttered by Barack Obama as he behaves like a dictator.

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