Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 16, 2011

Miriam Leverington, a cardiac nurse, wasn?t happy to be stopped in a speed trap outside Colorado Springs in December 2008. The condescending attitude of the officer who had ambushed her, Duaine Peters, did nothing to improve her mood.

After being handed the little extortion note called a ?traffic ticket,? Leverington told Peters: ?I hope you are not ever my patient.? Peters smugly replied that this probably wouldn?t happen, because he was going to contact Leverington?s supervisor to have her fired for threatening a police officer.

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom displayed in Leverington?s exasperated remark, no honest person would describe it as a ?threat.? As the nurse pointed out at the time, her point was not that she intended to do Peters harm, but that she never wanted to see him again. Yet the petty little uniformed functionary succeeded in getting the nurse fired from her job.

That act of craven retaliation has now been upheld by the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Leverington?s supposed threat was not protected free speech, and that Officer Peters enjoys ?qualified immunity? from the lawsuit filed by his victim.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 13, 2011

The Indiana State Supreme Court has just nullified the Fourth Amendment and the equivalent provision of that state?s constitution. In a 3-2 decision, the court has ruled that Indiana residents have no right to obstruct unlawful police incursions into their homes.

?We believe ? a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,? wrote Justice Steven David. ?We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.?

The first claim is dishonest, the second disputable. What David calls ?modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence? is a prolonged exercise in writing that indispensable guarantee out of the Constitution.

When police commit criminal aggression by invading a home without a warrant, they are the party responsible for the needless escalation of violence. This is why the Constitution places unconditional, non-negotiable limits on police power ? limits that have now been effectively destroyed.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 12, 2011

?Please don?t shoot, I have a baby!? pleaded Tucson resident Vanessa Guerena as a party of armed men swarmed her home. Vanessa woke up her husband, 26-year-old Jose, who had just returned from the graveyard shift at a local mine.

Jose, a former Marine, told Vanessa to take their son and hide in a closet. He grabbed his AR-15 and turned to confront the intruders, who burst into the home and opened fire. Before Jose could pull the trigger, he was cut down in fusillade of at least 71 shots.

This home invasion was carried out by a SWAT supposedly sent to execute a search warrant in a narcotics investigation. Neither Jose nor Vanessa had a criminal record of any kind, and no drugs or related evidence was found in the Guerena home. As is usually the case, the assailants initially misrepresented the incident, falsely claiming that they had announced that they were police and that Jose had fired on the officers.

The horrifying irony here is that a veteran of the Iraq war was murdered in his own home by the government he had served.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 11, 2011

The term ?felony,? as used for centuries in Anglo-Saxon law, referred to a criminal offense for which death may be considered an appropriate punishment. Until recently it was widely understood that felonies were grave crimes against persons and property that involved death or grievous injury.

Today, many legislatures are guilty of shameless felony inflation ? pumping up trivial or technical offenses until they qualify for prison time. The Texas state legislature leads that parade of foolishness.

HB 1806, recently enacted by the Texas legislature, would criminalize the common vice of telling fish stories.

Misrepresenting the size of a fish caught during a competitive tournament would be categorized as a third-degree felony punishable by as much as ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

As Texas legal commentator Scott Henson observes: ?You know what the punishment should be for cheating or lying about the length of a fish in a tournament if you get caught? Disqualification.? Why can't the private sector take care of this on its own??

One plausible answer is this: Between nanny state leftists and hyper-punitive conservatives, the political class has suffocated the private sector.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 10, 2011

In 1940, James Thurber published ?The Very Proper Gander,? an allegory describing how patriotic fervor can mutate into irrational hysteria.

In Thurber?s fable, which was set among oddly human farm animals, a description of a fine-looking and very proper gander is misunderstood as a reference to ?propaganda.? This misunderstanding is fed into the rumor mill, and a thousand wagging tongues soon collaborate to depict the hapless gander as a seditious terrorist and mad bomber. Soon a mob materializes at the gander?s home:

"`There he is!" everybody cried. `Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!? So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.?

As if in conscious mimicry of Thurber?s parable, many residents of Springfield, Ohio were prompted to barrage a local Hampton Inn with threats after a flagpole malfunction left the Stars and Stripes drooping at half-mast. For reasons that make sense only to the unreasoning, the callers assumed that the flag had been lowered as a gesture intended to mourn the death of Osama bin Laden.

Someone once sagely observed that people lose their minds in packs, and come to their senses one at a time.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 9, 2011

The ?American Dream,? as envisioned by generations of Americans, is defined by attending a ?good? government school, earning at least a four-year college degree, then buying a home as early as possible.

Until very recently, people were encouraged to borrow on the inflated value of their house in order to spend money on expensive cars and other high-priced amenities. Local governments benefited from this system by inflicting property taxes assessed on the basis of inflated home values.

This permitted government officials and government employee unions to devise extravagant pension and benefit programs for the ?extractor? class ? that is, those who subsist on wealth siphoned away from the private sector.

This economy wasn?t so much a dream as a multi-layered delusion ? an intricate construct based on self-perpetuating debt financed through cheap credit and loose money provided by the Federal Reserve. Every layer of that precarious construct is now in full collapse ? from the housing and mortgage bubble, which burst four years ago, to the federal student loan bubble, which will explode shortly.

As we confront a deepening depression, Americans who long slumbered in government-promoted delusion have awakened to a nightmare.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 6, 2011

The real estate bubble collapsed years ago, but one segment of the housing market continues to thrive ? incarceration.

Like the Federal Reserve-driven housing bubble, the prison economic boom reflects government intervention, not market demand. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the national crime rate began a precipitous decline in 1993. The national crime rate was 18 percent lower in 2004 than it was in 1970. The homicide rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Yet prison construction, and the concomitant expansion of its support industry, continues unabated.

The Wall Street Journal recently noted that in California, prison guards with GEDs can expect to earn more ? and receive better benefits ? than Harvard graduates. Furthermore, prison guards aren?t saddled with huge debts from student loans; they?re actually paid to attend the state academy.

The only thing government makes are criminals out of innocent people, and corpses out of living human beings. America imprisons more people than any other nation, and spends more money on the military than the rest of the world.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 5, 2011

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, co-founder of the Senate Tea Party Caucus, told reporters that the Obama administration was right to go into Pakistan without the country?s approval to find Osama bin Laden: ?I?m glad that it was unauthorized and unilateral because if we had gone through the step of trying to get permission [from Pakistan], I strongly suspect that we would have lost the opportunity to take him out.?

Lee has served as general counsel to former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. He has also been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. His father was the U.S. Solicitor General under Reagan. Lee himself professes to venerate the Constitution. Yet he has no problem condoning an act of aggression against a nominally friendly country that ended with the premeditated murder an unarmed criminal suspect after he was in custody.

Such is the logic of Empire ? and Lee apparently considers it his role to tutor Tea Party activists in such matters, lest their growing discontent with the Obama administration mature into principled opposition to the Regime itself.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 4, 2011

We are told that Osama bin Laden was the head of a world-wide terrorist syndicate threatening our very existence. Yet instead of being captured and interrogated for priceless intelligence, he was gunned down.

Originally we were told that he had been armed and fought back ? using a woman as a ?human shield?. Now the administration admits that he wasn?t armed, but that he ?resisted? in a way that justified lethal force. In any case, according to CIA Director Leon Panetta, ?The authority here was to kill bin Laden.? That means that the operation was always intended to be an execution, not an arrest.

Most curious of all was the insistence that bin Laden?s body be buried at sea -- despite the fact that this meant transporting it more than five hundred miles when time was supposedly of the essence.

In a totalitarian system, what passes for the truth is almost infinitely mutable, and the population is expected to display limitless credulity in accepting every permutation of the party line. This applies to the Obama administration?s still-evolving account of the death of Osama bin Laden.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

May 3, 2011

The State of Texas stole eighteen years from , Anthony Graves who was sentenced to death for a murder he didn?t commit. A federal appeals court overturned his conviction in 2006, but Graves had to wait four more years while the state tried to convict him again.

When he was finally released in 2010, the judge who issued the
order neglected to use the phrase ?actual innocence?; on the basis of this self-serving technicality, the State of Texas refused to pay Graves the $1.4 million settlement to which he was entitled.

For all it has done to him, the State is not content to leave Graves alone: The Attorney General?s Office is pilfering $175 from the $3,000 monthly salary he earns at a part-time job. While he was unjustly imprisoned, Graves was hit with a child support order he had no means of paying.

?The state of Texas tried to kill me for something I didn?t do and now they are trying to get child support out of me,? complained Graves, whose suffering illustrates that there are few criminals more vile or vicious than many of the people who find jobs as prosecutors.

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