Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 30, 2010

Erich Strausbaugh of Kenosha, Wisconsin, killed himself in late October. The married 34-year-old father of two was a police officer who was reportedly still dealing with the aftermath of a 2004 traffic stop in which 21-year-old Michael Bell was shot and killed. Bell?s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and received a $1.75 million settlement from the city.

Strausbaugh was one of two officers who restrained Bell while a third shot him in the head at point-blank range. Strausbaugh claimed that Bell attempted to grab his gun, but this claim was decisively refuted through DNA evidence and forensic investigation.

In spite of this, the department ruled that the shooting was justified, and the incident was actually used as a model for training other police.

Bell?s family has mounted a campaign to reform official review of fatal police shootings, which too often are ratified in cynical, corrupt official whitewashes.

A real accountability process might have saved Erich Strausbaugh?s life.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 29, 2010

Several years ago, publication of unflattering cartoons of Mohammed triggered riots among Muslims in Denmark. This development, and the Danish government?s reaction to it, had ?positive and negative? policy impacts, according to a classified U.S. State Department cable recently published by the WikiLeaks whistleblower organization.

On the positive side, observed the diplomatic communiqué, the Danish government ?extended troop mandates in Iraq and Afghanistan? in reaction to a perceived upswing in Islamic militancy. The dispatch continued: ?On the negative side, though, this popular center-right government has hardened its views on the absolute primacy of free speech.?

Once again: The ?good? news for Washington was that Denmark remained committed to open-ended war in the Middle East, and the ?bad? news was that its government was unwilling to practice political censorship.

Given that WikiLeaks has revealed multiple layers of murderous official corruption, this isolated instance of hypocrisy might seem trivial. But it is still a telling detail in the portrait of the incurably corrupt Regime that rules us.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 28, 2010

At the close of this or any other year we confront the unfortunate but vital task of assessing our society?s slide into undisguised totalitarianism. One suitable definition of that term is this: It is a condition in which any person can be deprived of physical liberty or be subjected to state-sanctioned violence at any time, entirely at the discretion of the state?s authorized agents of coercion.

By that definition, as economic analyst and attorney Michael Snyder grimly notes, we are already living under what could be called ?soft totalitarianism.?

It seems as if ?almost everything has become a crime in America now,? Snyder observes. ?Americans are being arrested and charged with crimes for doing things like leaving dog poop on the ground, opening up Christmas presents early, not recycling properly ? and having brown lawns.? This explains why America ? the supposed land of the free ? has the largest prison population in human history. Indeed, as Snyder laments, ?our entire nation is being turned into one gigantic prison.?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 27, 2010

Summarizing a report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance, the AP reports:

"Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve."

Police are supposed to be peace officers, not combat soldiers. Yet in ways too numerous to list here, contemporary police are indoctrinated in paramilitary tactics and assumptions, equipped for a combat environment, and put on a war footing.

The military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose "civilian" job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. Tragically, at this point we really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 23, 2010

An unlikely name was added to the roster of Drug War skeptics when religious broadcaster Pat Robertson recently endorsed the decriminalization of marijuana.

?I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot ? [is] costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people,? Robertson observed in a recent segment of his television program The 700 Club. ?Young people go into prisons ? as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."

As a result of draconian laws passed during the 1980s, Robertson continued, "We're locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they've got 10 years with mandatory sentences.?

Hopefully Robertson and other Christian conservatives will eventually come to understand that using state power to punish vice is not only ineffective, but immoral

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 22, 2010

The civic authorities who misgovern Providence, Rhode Island recently conducted a Christmastime Toy Gun Bash.

Prodded, hectored, and brow-beaten by local politicians and the parents foolish enough to do their bidding, children were forced to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the ?Bash-O-Matic,? a device described by the Boston Globe as ?a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.?

A ritual of this kind could be considered a child?s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction. Its purpose is to indoctrinate children in the idea that only agents of officially sanctioned lethal violence ? such as police and the military ? should be permitted to possess firearms and other weapons.

Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers ? but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 21, 2010

Denver resident James Moore, a disabled Army veteran, was standing in the street when he was approached by Denver Police Officer Shawn Miller and his partner. Moore wasn?t aware that a neighbor had called 911 to complain about noise coming from his apartment.

Before Moore knew what was happening, he was tackled by the officers, hog-tied with handcuffs, and beaten so severely ? with both fists and a blackjack -- that he flat-lined on the street while being treated by paramedics. Moore now walks with the help of a cane. Yet he was charged with felonious assault on an officer, and spent two years preparing for trial before the charge was dropped.

Officer Miller has been involved in at least two other documented instances of criminal assault; for example, he and another partner severely beat Jason Graber after the Denver resident gestured for the officer to slow down while driving through a crowded intersection.

Why should we fear gangbangers when officers of this kind are permitted to patrol the streets?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 20, 2010

Missoula County District Court Judge Dusty Deschamps called it a ?mutiny? ? a revolt triggered by ?hardliners? and ?militants? who are subverting the criminal justice system.

This outpouring of judicial outrage followed the refusal of roughly one-third of a pool of potential jurors to convict a man of a felony based on possession of one-sixteenth of an ounce of marijuana.

Only a tyrant in black robes would use the term ?mutiny? to describe an instance in which jurors reclaimed their plenary authority to judge both the facts and the validity of a law

The defendant was already serving a sentence for theft, which ? unlike anything having to do with marijuana consumption ? is an actual crime against persons and property. Deschamps and the prosecutor were piling on by seeking to manufacture a drug conviction.

Owing to the perverse incentives created through federal intervention, this kind of prosecutorial behavior is quite typical. The peaceful, principled revolt by potential jurors, however, is a new, welcome, and badly overdue development.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 17, 2010

As St. Augustine pointed out, every government begins as a criminal gang. Some governments, however, distinguish themselves by the purity of their criminal malice. Such was the case in Bell, California, a poor suburb of Los Angeles.

Last September, Bell?s city manager, assistant city manager, and six others were arrested on corruption charges. Before his arrest, the city manager was pulling in nearly $800,000 a year in a town where the average annual per-capita income was about $25,000.

To feed this municipal beast, reports the Los Angeles Times, police ?extracted tens of thousands of dollars from plumbers, carpet cleaners, even people scavenging for bottles and cans, by seizing vehicles for alleged code violations and then pressuring the owners to pay arbitrary fines.? Victims were forced to sign bogus but official-looking documents as part of a ?civil compromise? ; those agreements were never reviewed by a judge.

The fundamental business of government is to provide institutionalized extortion with a façade of propriety.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 16, 2010

Detroit?s municipal government is planning to withdraw basic services ? including road repair, trash collection, and even street lights ? from an area amounting to twenty percent of the city. The city is writing off everything but seven neighborhoods within its 139 square miles.

The Mayor?s advisors bristle when asked if the city is downsizing, insisting that they aren?t abandoning sections of the city, but rather ?repurposing? them. This kind of thing won?t stop in Detroit.
The New York Times observes observes that ?the finances of some state and local governments are so distressed that some analysts ? are reminded of the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown or of the debt crisis hitting nations in Europe.?

Civic ?repurposing? of the kind undertaken in Detroit is likely to become quite commonplace as tax bases shrink, revenue pools dry up, and investors flee from the municipal bond market. Detroit, once the gem of our industrial economy, is now foreshadowing our national economic future.

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