Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 13, 2011

As head of the southeast regional office for the department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), Anthony Mangione became a highly visible crusader against child predators .

Mangione was preparing to retire this summer at the age of fifty. But now his sumptuous federal pension has been imperiled by the discovery of child pornography stored on his office computer.
Even if Mangione is guilty of the charges, there’s a good chance he will avoid jail and keep his pension.

A few years ago, Frank Figueroa, head of the ICE agency’s Tampa office, was arrested for exposing himself to an underage girl at a shopping mall. Figueroa had headed a large-scale federal campaign targeting child predators – that is, other than himself. Figueroawas given a year’s probation and a withheld judgment – meaning that there is no record of his crime, and his pension remains intact.

Should we be surprised that a Regime that pays people to molest children in airports would take care of a few rogue predators on its payroll?

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 12, 2011

Nassau County, New York is burdened with one of the most degenerate criminal justice systems in the country. The County Police Department’s crime lab has been shut down because of incurable corruption. Thousands of criminal convictions may be taintedbecause of perjury and evidence tampering on the part of crime lab officials.

Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice has announced that thousands of forensic samples from the lab will have to be re-tested at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars. The expenses will be paid out of the police department’s forfeiture funds.

When asked how much money was in the forfeiture slush funds, Rice refused to answer. The police department – in a fashion typical of the risk-aversive plunderers who gravitate to that disreputable occupation – insists that a public accounting of the forfeiture funds would put officers “at risk.”

Asset forfeiture isn’t a substitute for taxation; it’s just another form of officially sanctioned theft – and the thieves figure there’s no point in riling up the victims by describing the size of their haul.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 11, 2011

If you have it, they will find a way to steal it from you. This is the modus operandi of every thief, from the petty cut-purse and small-time con man to the inconceivably wretched people running the foul, degenerate enterprise called government.

Anybody who thinks that description is too harsh should have a chat with San Francisco resident Carla Ruff, who lost tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of heirloom jewelry and irreplaceable personal documents after officials from the California Department of Unclaimed Property seized her safe-deposit box.

Mrs. Ruff – who lived a few blocks from the bank – maintains a checking account, and had paid her rental fee. She wasn’t dead or missing, nor was her property unclaimed. This hardly matters to the criminals running the California state government, who have stealthily plundered over five billion dollars in supposedly unclaimed property in this fashion.

States are collecting additional billions each year in unclaimed gift card credit, and through the undisguised larceny called “civil asset forfeiture.”

No private criminal syndicate is this despicable.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 8, 2011

In an April 1 memo, the Obama administration claimed that the president needed no congressional authorization of any kind to commit aggressive war against Libya, since the possibility of “regional instability” and injury to the “credibility and effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council” threatened our national security.

The memo asserts that a “pattern of executive conduct, made under claim of right, extended over many decades and engaged in by Presidents of both parties, evidences the existence of broad constitutional power.” It does no such thing, of course, any more than the persistence of armed robbery in defiance of laws against theft makes those laws irrelevant.

Of particular interest is the Obama administration’s claim that “the United States government has recognized that `[t]he continued existence of the United Nations as an effective international organization is a paramount United States interest.’”

The term “paramount,” of course, is a synonym for “supreme”; this means that preservation of the UN – not our country’s independence -- is the supreme foreign policy interest of the United States government.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 7, 2011

Four years ago, constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, who worked in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan, created an ad hoc group called The American Freedom Agenda. Fein and his associates were horrified by the Bush administration’s assault on what remained of the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus guarantee, and residual limits on presidential war-making powers.

Fein has continued his commendable campaign against the imperial presidency. After the Obama administration began a war in Libya without so much as consulting with Congress, Fein drew up a fifteen-page article of impeachment.

“President Barack Obama, in flagrant violation of his constitutional oath to execute his office as President of the United States and preserve and protect the United States Constitution, has usurped the exclusive authority of Congress to authorize the initiation of war,” Fein’s indictment concludes. Mr. Obama’s crimes against the Constitution require that he be impeached and removed from office.

Yes, previous presidents – including Obama’s immediate predecessor – have committed similar offenses. This means that the restoration of the rule of law is badly overdue.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 6, 2011

Over the past five years, 35,000 people have been killed in the U.S.-funded war between the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon and the country’s narcotics cartels. Several months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that Washington should eliminate the middle-man by invading Mexico and battling the drug cartels directly.

A proposal by Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul would sharpen the prospect of direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico. McCaul insists that six Mexican narcotics syndicates should be designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

According to McCaul, Mexican President Calderon has “boldly declared war against the cartels… [but] the Mexicans are losing the war – and so are we.” By designating the syndicates as terrorist organizations, Washington would “show serious commitment to war in our backyard.”

McCaul, a former federal prosecutor, points out that this designation would permit the deportation or prosecution of anyone found to be offering material aid to the cartels –anyone, that is, apart from federal officials whose “war on drugs” acts as a huge narcotics price-support program.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 5, 2011

Terry Jones calls himself a Christian pastor. He calls his Florida-based group the Dove World Outreach Center. Yet he seems more preoccupied with Islam than with the gospel of Jesus Christ. He likewise appears more interested in provoking Muslims to sin than in teaching them about salvation.

Following Jones’s most recent publicity stunt, which involved the burning of a Koran, protests erupted in Afghanistan. With the help of professional agitators, those protests were transformed into murderous riots. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. occupation forces in Afghanistan ( and likely future head of the CIA) , complained that Jones’s actions put U.S. troops at risk.

This led some politicians – including Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to suggest that Jones should be subject to official punishment of some kind. Graham in particular believes that the rights of U.S. citizens should be curtailed in order to protect soldiers during wartime. Those are the priorities of a military junta, not a constitutional republic.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 4, 2011

Of the many lies told by George W. Bush in the build-up to the Iraq War, some of the most extravagant dealt with the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein’s death drones – remote-controlled, unpiloted vehicles that could supposedly dispense biological or chemical agents in the skies above American cities.

Like Iraq’s supposed arsenal of WMDs, the death drones didn’t exist. This isn’t to say, however, that the skies above North America are devoid of potentially lethal drones.

The same Predator drone technology used by the CIA to kill suspected militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere is being used for police surveillance in , Houston Miami, and probably other cities as well.

The U.S. Border Patrol operates Predator drones armed with sophisticated tracking gear in the skies above the U.S.-Canadian border. Beginning last February, the Department of Homeland Security began to use Predator drones in counter-narcotics operations in Mexico.

Remember: When our rulers try to frighten us by describing the depravity of the foreign enemy du jour, they’re up to the same nasty business themselves.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 1, 2011

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman of California that the administration would ignore any congressional effort intended to end, restrain, or limit the war in Libya.

The administration committed the government to war without congressional approval of any kind. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has publicly acknowledged that the war – which was supposedly authorized by a UN Security Council resolution -- has nothing to do with defending the United States, or any American strategic interest of any kind.

Before being elected to their present positions, both President Obama and Vice President Biden candidly stated that it is an impeachable offense for a president to launch a foreign war without congressional approval. Perhaps this is why Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has suggested that Congress should enact a resolution retroactively “authorizing” the war weeks after it had begun.

By any rational measure, the war in Libya is an Orwellian exercise in unfettered, dictatorial power.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 30, 2011

New Orleans resident John Thompson was unjustly convicted of armed robbery and murder. The prosecutors responsible for this crime stole 18 years of Thompson’s life, 14 of which were spent in isolation on death row.

At one point Thompson was just a few weeks away from being murdered by way of unjust execution when an attorney who took an interest in his case found critical exculpatory evidence in the form of a blood test that had been deliberately withheld by the prosecutors. This discovery was later buttressed by the deathbed confession of an assistant prosecutor who had taken part in that crime.

Thompson filed a lawsuit for wrongful prosecution and won a $14 million judgment against the DA’s office. That judgment has been overturned by the Supreme Court, whose five conservative members consider it more important to uphold the spurious and malignant doctrine of prosecutorial immunity than to validate the rights of an innocent man – and punish the criminals who attempted to murder him under the color of law.

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