Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 28, 2013

Former Philadelphia Police Lieutenant Jonathan Josey lost his job after slugging an innocent woman named Aida Guzman during last September’s Puerto Rican Day Parade. The assault was captured on video.

On February 27, Municipal Judge Patrick Dugan dismissed the video evidence after Josey testified that he had intended to knock a beer bottle from the woman’s hands, despite the fact that she clearly wasn’t carrying one. As he acquitted Josey, Judge Dugan claimed that the assault took place amid “a violent, fast-paced, real-life situation.”

Police officers who packed the courtroom celebrated and embraced Josey after the case was dismissed.  Among the cops on hand to congratulate Josey was Officer Nancy Farrell Dugan, who has been on the force since 1997. More importantly, she is married to Judge Dugan, whose verdict she was celebrating. When asked by a reporter about a potential conflict of interest, Dugan insisted that he was forbidden by the Code of Judicial Conduct to answer that question.

Guzman, who was falsely arrested by Josey and charged with assault, is suing the former cop. Josey’s union is demanding that he get his job back – and given the history of officially sanctioned police misconduct in Philadelphia, he most likely will.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 27 2013

40-year-old Orlando, Florida resident Anthony Brasfield was with his girlfriend in the parking lot of a motel when he released a handful of helium-filled, heart-shaped balloons into the air. A Florida Highway Patrol Trooper saw this and arrested Brasfield for violating the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act –a third-degree felony  punishable by a prison term of up to five years.

On February 23, Lendsey and Delilha Harbin, a married couple from Portage, Indiana, paid for a ticket to see the new action film “Snitch” and then, after it ended, decided to switch theaters and catch the zombie movie “Warm Bodies.” Two off-duty cops working as security guards spotted the sneak and arrested the couple.

It would have cost the couple $13.50 to pay for tickets. Throwing them out of the theater, and perhaps banning them from it, would have been an appropriate response to their attempted petty larceny. Instead, they were charged with felony theft.

It’s worth remembering that in Anglo-Saxon law, the term “felony” originally described a crime of such severity that a death sentence was considered appropriate punishment. Today, practically anything can be treated as a felony – a fact that suggests that we lack the sense of proportionality possessed by our medieval ancestors.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

Even when it is not directly abetting genocide – as it did in Cambodia and Rwanda – the United Nations manages to abet the needless, tragic death of thousands of people.  Over the past decade, thousands of Haitians have died from exposure to a rare and aggressive strain of cholera that had been imported by Nepalese troops participating in a UN “peacekeeping” mission. UN authorities had neglected to screen the foreign troops, who were assigned to a rural base in an area where the outbreak began.

Writing in Slate magazine, Jonathan Katz, author of a new book on Haiti’s humanitarian disaster, reports that since the beginning out the outbreak UN officials “chose to lie, dissemble, destroy evidence, persuade allies to change the topic, and cajole critics.” Last week, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, responding to a civil action filed on behalf of 8,000 victims of the UN-abetted plague asserted total immunity from liability.

The United Nations is quite possibly the least accountable and most corrupt organization in human history. Perhaps the only marginally redeeming aspect of the UN is the fact that its incompetence eclipses its malice, which is why, despite its best efforts, the body has never achieved its ambition of becoming a fully realized world government

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 25, 2013

In a recent commentary we reviewed state Senator Chuck Winder’s role in promoting two legislative resolutions seeking greater federal government in prosecuting the unconstitutional and counter-productive war on drugs. I had neglected to point out Winder’s equally repellent role in encouraging the federal government to select Idaho as a test site for its unmanned aerial drone program.

On February 5, theIdahostate senate passed a resolution asking the state government to apply for the supposed privilege of being one of six states used to conduct tests of drones. The resolution instructs the state Commerce Department to spend $25,000 for writing a proposal to the Federal Aviation Administration. According to Winder,Idaho’s selection would stimulate the state’s economy – particularly the academic sector, which would create new technical programs and offer advanced college degrees.

Significantly, Winder not only seeks to encourage drone testing, but also the increased use of drones in law enforcement.  In an interview with the New York Times, he emphasized that he does not want to restrict law enforcement by requiring search warrants for the use of surveillance drones. We have yet to find the limit to Senator Winder’s appetite for police state measures.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 23, 2013

In recent decades, professional sports franchises have increasingly relied on the sale of corporate “naming rights” – in addition to various kinds of government subsidies -- to pay for sports stadiums. This trend has caught on in college football, as well. As a result, a growing number of stadiums are named after companies that produce goods or offer services. Florida State University has sold naming rights to a company that warehouses convicts – and lobbies government to produce more of them.

The GEO Group, the nation’s largest private prison company, has bought the naming rights to the new 30,000-seat football stadium at Florida State University. On February 19 the company announced that its charitable foundation will pay $6 million to the university over a 12-year-period in exchange for the coliseum bearing the name “GEO Group Stadium.”

In a 2011 corporate report  to the Securities and Exchange Commission, GEO described how its profits depend on the constant expansion of the prison population, and that it opposes “the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, [and] … the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances….”

Public incarceration is the only consistently growing sector of our increasingly socialized economy.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 21, 2013

Idaho’s Republican leadership is often at odds with the federal government. So it would seem out of character for Republicans in the state legislature to be petitioning the Feds for more intervention in state affairs.

Yet that is precisely what the State Affairs Committee did on February 20 by enacting two resolutions urging the federal government to expand its efforts to enforce anti-marijuana laws along borders with states have relaxed their own marijuana statutes.

State Senator Chuck Winder of Boise, who sponsored the resolutions, describes them as a “statement that we, as a legislature, at this time, do not support the legalization of marijuana because of the impact we’ve seen in other states around us.”

Like his fellow Pharisees of previous eras, Winder believes the course of righteousness is defined by making rules that will supposedly perfect other people through the application of force. He is more scandalized by the foolishness of people who use forbidden substances than by the innate violence and corruption involved in unconstitutional efforts to enforce prohibition. By encouraging further federal intervention in Idaho, Winder is abetting officially sanctioned criminal violence – but should we expect anything else from a Pharisee?

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 20, 2013

The public is taught to assume that police are trained protect the helpless. The truth is that they are trained to put “officer safety” above every other consideration. This is illustrated by a line of firearms training targets for law enforcement personnel produced by Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security.

The training targets include images of “non-traditional threats” – such as pregnant women, children, and the elderly.  The company claims that the targets are “designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.”

Putting police in environments of this kind, the company insists, can, “help the transition for officers who are faced with these highly unusual targets for the first time.” That is, it can condition them to overcome the natural human reluctance to kill the innocent and helpless.

The Minnesota-based company’s promotional material boasts that it its customers include the Department of Homeland Security, the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and “Thousands of law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county, and state levels.”  This means that the company has implicated itself in the escalating campaign of criminal violence by law enforcement agencies against innocent citizens.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 19 2013

Laura Benson of Union County, Illinoiswas alarmed when a party of heavily armed police officers swarmed the family’s rural farm property early on February 13. Her alarm turned to puzzlement when the officers told her that they had received a report of a meth lab on the premises – and then pointed to several buckets used for making maple syrup. Once the confusion was cleared up, Mrs. Benson invited the officers to have pancakes.

Police in Tennesseestopped 65-year-old Ohio State Football fan Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni because she displayed a Buckeye Football Sticker on her car – a decal that was mistaken for a marijuana leaf. Two officers, wearing body armor and carrying guns, approached the car and demanded to know why she had a marijuana sticker on her bumper. Boggioni patiently explained that the symbol was a Buckeye leaf identical to those worn on helmets byOhioState football players as commendations for exceptional plays. The traffic stop took place in a region nearMemphis heavily patrolled by a Narcotics Task Force that is notorious for confiscating cash and automobiles in the name of “civil asset forfeiture.” 

These are just two snapshots of the enduring exercise in unalloyed insanity called the “War on Drugs.”

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 18 2013

Speaking in support of a ban on private ownership of so-called assault weapons, Emeryville, California Police Chief Ken James condemned what he called the “myth” that a gun can be used as a defensive weapon.

 According to Chief James: "A gun is not a defensive weapon. That is a myth. A gun is an offensive weapon used to intimidate and used to show power. Police officers do not carry a gun as a defensive weapon to defend themselves or their other officers. They carry a gun in order to do their job in a safe and effective manner, and face any [opposition] that we may come upon. If it was a defensive measure, why did we lose 55 officers nation-wide last year to gun violence…? We deal with gun violence on a daily basis."

If the police acted as peace officers, they would use force only in defense of persons and property, just as private citizens everywhere do on a daily basis. Chief James’s admission that police see their weapons as implements of aggression amounts to a powerful case for disarming the police, rather than peaceable, law-abiding citizens.

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

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 15, 2013

Classrooms in Meridian, Idaho went into full “prison mode” after a student brought a folding shovel to Heritage Middle School, prompting the school’s “resource officer” to call for a full lockdown.

Deputy Chief Tracy Basterrechea told KTVB news that the youngster had been seen “jogging out of the school, then back into the school with what [staff members thought] was an axe.” After the “resource officer” called for a lockdown, police arrived “seconds” later, set up a perimeter, and deployed “search teams” to confront the “suspect” – an innocent teen who had brought the shovel to serve as a prop in a classroom presentation. Meanwhile, students at four nearby schools were put into “shelter in place” mode – that is, they were confined to their classrooms until police at Heritage Middle School gave the all-clear.

All of this occurred, once again, because a junior high school student brought a shovel to school, and none of the purported adults on campus was blessed with the presence of mind to approach the kid and find out what he was doing.

This incident did teach students a useful lesson – namely, that for operatives of the Homeland Security State, the default setting is overkill.  

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