Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 4, 2012

Denver Police Officer Eric Sellers once choked an innocent pedestrian into unconsciousness while two other officers refused to intervene. A few weeks later, Sellers attacked a young man named John Crespin because the officer thought the kid acted ?nosy.?

Sellers put Crespin in a chokehold while spitting obscenities in his face. After handcuffing the victim, Sellers used his police baton to lift the young man a couple of feet from the ground, then dropped him face-first into the driveway. He then brutally beat him into a bloody, lumpy mess before charging him with ?felony menacing.?

Sellers was not fired, let alone prosecuted, for his crimes. John Copeland wasn?t as fortunate.

Two weeks ago, the elderly man ? who is hard of hearing ? used his cane to defend himself from what he thought was an attack in a parking lot. The assailant was a volunteer police officer. Several police later materialized and dragged Copeland out of bed in the middle of the night. He has been jailed on a charge of felony assault ? not because of the severity of his supposed offense, but because of the identity of the supposed victim.

By any rational measure, the Denver Police Department is that city?s most notorious street gang.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 3, 2012

Over several decades of employment, French actor Gerard Depardieu has paid more than one hundred million dollars in taxes. Several weeks ago, facing tax rates that would have cost him 75 percent of all earnings in excess of one million euros, Depardieu fled the country that considers him a national treasure. He relocated 800 yards across the border into a tiny Belgian village. Roughly one-third of the town?s 2,000 people are French refugees from confiscatory taxation.

Like many other economic refugees from France?s socialist government, Depardieu has been driven to renounce his citizenship. French law doesn?t allow those born as citizens to be stateless. So Depardieu has been granted Russian citizenship.

Why did Depardieu choose to become a citizen of Russia, rather than Great Britain, the United States, or another western nation? For one thing, the actor is already a star in Russia?s film industry. Just as importantly, he most likely did some comparison shopping and found that Russia has a flat tax rate of 13 percent. Russia?s tax police, who aren?t as ruthless as the IRS, don?t hound expatriates.

Things have taken an interesting turn when post-Soviet Russia displaces the U.S. as the land of opportunity.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

January 1, 2013

It costs about $60,000 a year to attend Georgetown University. Students who have enrolled in Professor Louis Michael Seidman?s class on constitutional law should demand a full rebate.

In a recent New York Times op-ed column, Professor Seidman urges Americans to ?give up on the Constitution.? This isn?t because he believes that the more decentralized system under the Articles of Confederation was superior, or because the document has been effectively destroyed through decades of determined, contemptuous disregard by the federal government. His complaint is that the Constitution still presents impediments ? however modest ? to government action.

Siedman claims that what he calls ?constitutional disobedience? by presidents, judges, and legislators has helped our country to ?grow and prosper.? He contends that emancipating them from what he refers to as ?constitutional bondage? would ?give real freedom a chance.?

From this perspective, freedom is a product of government power, rather than a result of restraining what government can do. Seidman?s expansive confidence in that formula appears to be entirely uninformed by the experiences of the previous century, in which hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered by governments that exercised unlimited power. But why should we expect a Georgetown professor to be familiar with basic history?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 31, 2012

The Framers of the United States Constitution did not create a nation-state. They created a confederated republic in which the federal government was given certain delegated powers to act on behalf of the states that created it.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution served two indispensable purposes. One was to prevent the federal government from disarming the state militias. The second, and more important, purpose of that amendment was to recognize, unambiguously, the individual right to armed self-defense. That right exists independent of government, and cannot be infringed by it

To put the matter simply: The Founders did not accept the modern definition of government as a social artifact that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That?s the view of Vladimir Lenin, who said that government should exercise ?power without limit, resting directly on force.?

New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler is typical of contemporary figures who embrace the Leninist view of government. Addressing the question of firearms ownership, Nadler recently declared: ?One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.?

The reason we have guns is to prevent the likes of Nadler from working their will upon us unopposed.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 27, 2012

To the lengthy and ever-growing list of public hypocrisies committed by Barack Obama should be added the following limp witticism he uttered during a recent softball interview with Barbara Walters.

Referring to what he called the ?real reason? why he wanted a second term in office, Obama declared: ?One of the main incentives of running was continued Secret Service protection so we can have men with guns around at all times? when his teenage daughters begin dating.

That line was a sample of the same tone-deaf sense of humor that inspired his speech-writers to load a supposed thigh-slapper about drone attacks into Obama?s teleprompter for the May 1, 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner. Noting the presence of the Jonas Brothers at the event, Obama said that his daughters ?are huge fans, but ? don?t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.?

Just weeks ago, Obama engaged in a pantomime of sympathy for the parents of twenty children who weren?t enveloped in Secret Service protection. He continues to dispatch Predator drones that kill innocent people ? many of them children ? without warning.  And he?s continuing to pursue the disarmament of the American public.

Obama has a killer sense of humor in the worst sense of that expression. 

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 24, 2012

Seattle residents Matt Duran and Katherine Olejnik have been imprisoned in the SeaTac Federal Detention Center for weeks.

Neither of them has been indicted, arraigned, or even arrested for a crime. They have been imprisoned for civil contempt by a federal prosecutor for refusing to answer personal questions during a secretive grand jury investigation of other people in the Occupy movement.

During her examination by the prosecutor, Olejnik was asked about incidents of vandalism that took place in Seattle last May Day. She wasn?t even in the city on that date. When the prosecutor began showing her photographs of people and inquiring about her political beliefs, Olejnik exercised her constitutionally protected right to remain silent. That is why she was sent to prison on the orders of U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones. Duran?s case is nearly identical. They may remain in prison until the grand jury?s term expires in January 2014.

Duran and Olejnik are political prisoners in every sense of the expression. However, they are not the only Americans who are current being indefinitely detained without criminal charges.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 21, 2012

CNN commentator LZ Granderson insists that it is insane to allow school teachers to be armed.

?In a country with fewer than 350 million people but more than 310 million guns, we don't need more of them,? pontificates Granderson. ?We need fewer. And when it comes to our schools, we don't need guns at all.? Granderson insists that it is much more sensible to have ?police patrol the area during school hours? because ?allowing guns in school is simply counterintuitive to the kind of civilized society we want to live in and represent to the rest of the world.?

Apparently, Granderson assumes that the guns carried by police in their school patrols somehow don?t count.

 In a column published last July, Granderson rebuked people for being ?nosy? about the administration?s Fast and Furious program, which provided high-performance weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Those guns have been implicated in mass shootings and the death of US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

The same CNN pundit who doesn?t trust teachers or other civilians with guns also doesn?t trust the public with the facts about guns provided to criminal gangs by the Obama administration

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 20, 2012

Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who is a bottomless fountain of foolishness, has proposed a measure that would permit governors to deploy National Guard troops to provide security at government-run schools.

?Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?? Boxer asked during a Capitol Hill press conference announcing her initiative.

Mass shootings like the incident in Newtown, Connecticut are horrific, but vanishingly rare. Criminologist Grant Duwe, who has compiled a history of mass murders in the U.S., points out that episodes of this kind peaked nearly a century ago and have been declining in number since the 1990s. The chance of someone ? man, woman, or child ? being killed in a mass shooting is roughly the same as that of being struck by lightning.

British commentator Tom Chivers perceptively notes that mass shootings ?fill a similar psychological space for the Left as Islamic terror does for the Right? ? by providing a rationale for restricting liberties in the name of public safety. Boxer?s proposal to militarize public schools is just as cynical and opportunistic as anything done by the Bush administration in the wake of 9-11.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 13, 2012

Late last year, the Montgomery County Sheriff?s Office inTexasannounced that it had used a homeland security grant to purchase a sophisticated drone from Vanguard Defense Industries. For PR purposes, the department offered the familiar excuses for this purchase ? namely, that it could help locate missing persons, or provide reconnaissance help in SWAT team deployments.

However, Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel hinted at things to come when he admitted that the department was looking into equipping the drone with rubber bullets and tear gas. After all, Deputy Daniels explained, rubber bullets and tear gas ??are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out.? That?s a perspective one wouldn?t expect from a constitutional peace officer, but one that?s entirely appropriate for a warden in a prison society.

Last week, the department held what was supposed to be a grand photo op to show off its drone -- but the event didn?t come off quite as it was planned. The $300,000 piece of federally subsidized hardware crashed into the SWAT team?s Bearcat armored vehicle ? which was also purchased with federal funds ? as combat-suited SWAT team members looked on helplessly.

There must be less expensive, and less dangerous, ways for the police to make fools of themselves.

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

Liberty Minute December 18, 2012

Todd Stovall, Police Chief of Paragould, Arkansas, used a town meeting at a local church to announce the imposition of martial law.

Because of what he described as a crime crisis, Stovall will deploy SWAT teams armed with AR-15 assault rifles to patrol the streets. ?If you?re out walking, we?re going to stop you, ask why you?re out walking, check for your ID,? he explained.

To those who might complain about being harassed, the chief offered an unqualified promise: ?We have a zero-tolerance [policy]. We are prepared to throw your hind-end in jail, OK? We are not going to take a lot of flak.?

Where does Stovall get the supposed authority to put the city under martial law? According to the chief, "The fear is what's given us the reason to do this?. I?ve got statistical reasons that say I?ve got a lot of crime right now, which gives me probable cause to ask what you?re doing out.?

In fact, Paragould has a high burglary rate, but the violent crime rate is substantially below the national average. But Stovall, like so many other government functionaries, assumes that government derives its "just" powers from whatever fears it can instill and exploit in its subjects.

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