Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 5, 2013

If a cop solicits the services of a prostitute, and then arrests her, shouldn?t both parties to the transaction be prosecuted?

On March 22, Officer Ronald DePellegrin of Homestead, Pennsylvania allowed a prostitute to undress him and begin to perform a sexual act before he informed her that he was an undercover vice officer. DePellegrin had contacted the prostitute through an online advertisement. The two agreed to meet at a house to conduct the transaction. Before they began, DePellegrin assured her that he was not a cop. All of these details were included in DePellegrin?s official report.

The woman?s attorney points out that ?the police in this particular instance are engaging in the exact type of criminal activity that they?re saying that they?re trying to protect the community from.?

The DA?s office insists that Officer DePellegrin?s conduct does not ?create a constitutional issue that would bar us from moving forward with the prosecution? of the prostitute. The prosecutor has not said if charges will be filed against DePellegrin as well ? which is what should happen if we insist on treating the vice called prostitution as a crime, rather than as an offense that lies outside government?s legitimate jurisdiction.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 3, 2013

Assuming that we consider abortion to be in some way related to the practice of medicine, it could be said that abortion is the only medical procedure in which a practitioner can be sued for malpractice when a patient survives. Ariel Knights, a woman from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, is suing the Akron Women?s Medical Group and two abortionists for malpractice because of what she describes as their negligence in failing to abort one of her children in March 2012. A doctor told her the abortion was necessary because of a uterine defect.

Knights described the abortuary as being ?pretty much like a slaughterhouse,? with women being herded through the facility like cattle. After undergoing the procedure, she suffered pains two days later and was told by a doctor that she was still pregnant. In September, she gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby daughter.

According to Knights, she and her fiancé regard their daughter as a miracle and a blessing. She says she doesn?t want to think about how she will someday explain to her daughter that she sued the people who tried and failed to murder her in the womb.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 3, 2013

Assuming that we consider abortion to be in some way related to the practice of medicine, it could be said that abortion is the only medical procedure in which a practitioner can be sued for malpractice when a patient survives. Ariel Knights, a woman from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, is suing the Akron Women?s Medical Group and two abortionists for malpractice because of what she describes as their negligence in failing to abort one of her children in March 2012. A doctor told her the abortion was necessary because of a uterine defect.

Knights described the abortuary as being ?pretty much like a slaughterhouse,? with women being herded through the facility like cattle. After undergoing the procedure, she suffered pains two days later and was told by a doctor that she was still pregnant. In September, she gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby daughter.

According to Knights, she and her fiancé regard their daughter as a miracle and a blessing. She says she doesn?t want to think about how she will someday explain to her daughter that she sued the people who tried and failed to murder her in the womb.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 2 2013

Despite the fact that the practice was known to be illegal, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly ordered officers to continue the notorious ?stop-and-frisk? program in order to instill fear of the police in young black and Hispanic men.

In testimony offered as part of a class-action federal lawsuit, state senator Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer, testified that during a July 2010 meeting, Commissioner Kelly ?Stated that he targeted and focused on that group because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be stopped by police.?

When Adams pointed out that this is against the law, Kelly reportedly replied ?How else are we going to get rid of guns?? Over the past ten years, more than 5 million people have been subjected to warrantless street detention and searches, roughly 90 percent of them young Black or Latino men. Less than one percent of those searches have turned up firearms.

While the ?stop-and-frisk? policy has been widely condemned by civil libertarians, relatively few have considered the fact that this patently racist program was created to facilitate gun confiscation ? and that civilian disarmament inevitably involves routine and widespread police harassment of this kind.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 1, 2013

Fifty-three years ago, the United Nations created a multinational military force to carry out ?peacekeeping? operations in the Republic of theCongoat the request of socialist president Patrice Lumumba. Residents of a small, mineral-rich province calledKatanga, not eager to be ruled by the Soviet-aligned leftist government, declared their independence under the leadership of pro-western president Moise Tshombe. 

UN military forces were deployed to Katanga, where they carried out bloody punitive actions that killed scores of innocent people and prompted a widespread international outcry. Echoes of that decades-old tragedy were heard last week when UN officials reported that armed separatists in Katanga had attacked army and police personnel before forcing their way into a UN compound in the city of Lubumbashi. The UN Security Council responded by passing a Chapter Seven resolution ? the world body?s equivalent of a declaration of war ? authorizing the deployment of a multinational military brigade to disarm and ?neutralize? rebel groups in Congo.

The United Nations has never been a peace organization. Its advertised purpose is to enforce collective security ? and war is implicit in that self-assigned mandate. The world would be immeasurably better off were the UN to disappear.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 29, 2013

Financial affairs analyst Ellen Brown points out that ?Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor?s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank?s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay.?

A 15-page paper published last December by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England anticipates that the next financial collapse will require that private deposits be treated as shares that can be seized and converted into bank equity.

What does this look like in practice? One example was provided by a businessman from Cyprus, who discovered earlier this week that the government, on orders from the European Commission, had stolen more than eighty percent of the money in his account. The Cypriot businessman, who operated a mid-sized IT company, says that the same thing has happened to thousands of other businessmen in his country. He was forced to fire all of his employees, and announced that he would be relocating abroad to a country ?where authorities have more respect to people?s assets.? 

We have no reason to believe that the country he?s referring to is the United States.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 27 2013

Justin Hopson always wanted to be a New Jersey State Trooper. After graduating near the top of his academy class, Hopson was assigned to a training officer. Within a few days of beginning his patrol duties, Hopson was involved in a traffic stop in which his training officer carried out an unlawful arrest and ordered him to submit a false police report.

Hopson did as he was told ? but his conscience quickly asserted itself. He confronted his trainer and informed him that he would not testify on his behalf when the case went to trial. His refusal to perjure himself in court, combined with a dashcam video that contradicted the falsified arrest report, led the prosecutor to dismiss the charges. It also led to severe retaliation against Hopson by a cult-like gang within the New Jersey State Patrol that called itself the ?Lords of Discipline.?

Hopson was targeted for physical abuse, vandalism, petty theft, and harassment ?and eventually driven from the force. He was relatively fortunate: Another outstanding trooper named John Oliva who reported abuses was eventually driven to suicide. In his book, Breaking the Blue Wall, Hopson documents that this kind of institutional corruption is quite commonplace in police departments nation-wide.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 26, 2013

When Congress approved the post-911 ?Authorization for Use of Military Force? on September 14, 2001, Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California was the only member of the House to vote against it. In her address on the House floor explaining her vote, Rep. Lee warned that the measure would be used as an open-ended declaration of war against anybody the president ? any president ? designated an enemy.

More than a decade later, two administrations have vindicated Rep. Lee?s brave and prescient warnings. The Authorization for Use of Military Force has been used to justify torture, warrantless surveillance, and now summary execution of terror suspects ? including at least three US citizens, among them a 16-year-old boy ? by drone strikes.

That measure is the American equivalent of the ?Enabling Act? passed by the German Reichstag in 1933 ? a blank check for both foreign military adventurism and domestic repression. Rep. Lee has now introduced HR 198, a measure to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force, thereby withdrawing Congress?s consent to wage the so-called war on terror, and ending the pretense that it has anything to do with protecting the American public.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 25, 2013

In politics, there is no deadlier word than ?we,? or the associated collective possessive pronoun, ?our.? Every large-scale enterprise in political tyranny begins with the use of those words to nullify individual property rights, the principle of self-ownership, and parental stewardship over home.

Consider how often politicians and bureaucrats refer to ?our? children, as if they were the collective possession of the State, rather than individual human beings entrusted by God to their parents.

When not laying claim to other people?s children, collectivists often infantilize adults by imposing nanny state restrictions on them. Few exemplify this repulsive tendency better than Michael Bloomberg, the Marxist Plutocrat who is Mayor of New York City.

In an appearance on Meet the Press, Bloomberg defended his efforts to regulate the diets of his subjects by limiting soda consumption and banning trans-fats at New York restaurants ? as well as his efforts to impose new restrictions on gun ownership.

Decreed Commissar Bloomberg: ?I do think there are certain times when we should infringe on your freedom.?

Bloomberg is a collectivist of uncommon purity and candor. If only he were an isolated case.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 22, 2013

According to a ruling by the New Mexico State Supreme Court, ?The law ? calls upon the citizen to exercise patience, if illegally arrested, because he knows he will be brought before a magistrate, and will, if improperly arrested, suffer only a temporary deprivation of his liberty.?

New Mexicoresident Stephen Slevin can testify that this assurance is a cynical lie.

In 2005, Slevin was stopped for driving under the influence. The police suspected that he was driving a stolen car, which had actually been lent to him by a friend. At the time, Slevin was battling depression. He was put into a special cell reserved for people suspected of being suicidal. After three days, he was transferred to solitary confinement --- where he remained for two years.

The habeas corpus guarantee requires that anyone arrested by the police be quickly brought before a judge and either formally charged or released. Slevin was never given a judicial hearing. Nor was he given medical attention by his jailers. He was literally left to rot in his cell until relatives inquired into his case.

After being released, Slevin was awarded a $15.5 million tax-funded civil settlement ? and nobody has been held accountable for the two years of torture he endured.

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