Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

September 1, 2010

Beirut was once called the ?Paris of the Mediterranean.? After 35 years of foreign invasions and intermittent civil war, Beirut now conjures images of bloodshed and tragedy.

An Arab-ruled country of about 4 million people living in an area roughly the size of Los Angeles County, Lebanon has a Jewish population of roughly 500 people.

In the summer of 2006, the Israeli military launched an assault on Beirut that was described as retaliation for rocket attacks by the terrorist group Hezbollah. Thousands of Lebanese were killed, and over 1,000,000 displaced.

When Lebanon ? which suffered terribly because of the Israeli invasion -- began to rebuild Beirut two years later, it gave high priority to repairing and renovating the city?s sole synagogue, located right in the middle of its own ?Ground Zero.? The house of worship, ironically, had been bombed by Israeli pilots during the 2006 war.

In times like these, we should take hope wherever we find it.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 31, 2010

The contrived controversy regarding the so-called Ground Zero Mosque illustrates how Islamic radicals benefit when we betray the principles we profess to believe.

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who trained Iraqi soldiers and police, warns that the campaign against the Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan offers a propaganda windfall for terrorist recruiters. Taliban leaders in Afghanistan told Newsweek magazine that they would actually prefer that critics of the Center succeed in preventing it from being built.

?By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,? one Taliban operative explained. ?It?s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.?

Taliban recruitment profited handsomely as a result of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and revelations of officially sanctioned torture. ?[And] now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,? he exults.

Our hypocrisy is a form of self-destructive generosity toward those who hate us.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 30, 2010

Government school officials in New Canaan, Connecticut ? a very affluent community -- have been invited to participate in a federally funded program that would tag schoolchildren with Radio Frequency Identification chips.

California?s Contra Costa County School District received a grant to tag pre-schoolers with RFID chips embedded in school-distributed classroom attire.

These are just two examples of the way public schools are designed to cultivate collectivist docility.

Aaron Kupchik, author of the new book Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear, warns that government-run schools are teaching kids to ?accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment?. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal.?

Within a generation, Kupchik warns, most Americans will be completely accustomed to living in an all-encompassing surveillance society.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 27,2010

During a recent visit to his home country to attend his mother?s funeral, Australian actor Paul Hogan, best known to millions as the cinematic comedy-action hero Crocodile Dundee, was kidnapped for ransom.

The Australian Tax Office seeks to extort roughly $22 million from Hogan. The Australian government issued an order forbidding him to leave the country.

Douglas Urbanski, Hogan?s Los Angeles-based talent agent, describes his client as a victim of ?an act of violence by a very violent police state?. I?m glad I?m not there.?

Mr. Urbankski spoke too soon. Last March, Congress passed the grandly named Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment -- or ?HIRE? ? Act. One provision of that Act requires foreign banks to withhold 30% of all outgoing capital flows and provide account information on U.S. expatriates to the IRS ? or to close bank accounts owned by U.S. citizens.

The same trap that snagged Crocodile Dundee awaits any American who tries to protect his wealth from the rapacious government ruling us.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 26, 2010

A recent public meeting in Libby, Montana offered retired nurse Judy Mattot an opportunity few will enjoy ? and she made the most of it.

The event featured Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, the chief legislative sponsor of the Obamacare monstrosity, and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Kathleen Sibelius . Mrs. Mattot asked ?if either of you read the health care bill before it was passed?; if not, ?that is the most despicable, irresponsible thing.?

Baucus answered that he ?essentially? wrote the socialized medicine bill, but admitted that he had subcontracted the details to unnamed ? and unaccountable -- ?experts,? which is how things are routinely done in Washington:

?I don?t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill. You know why? It?s statutory language. We hire experts.?

If our supposed representatives can?t be bothered even to read what they enact into law, we have no responsibility to obey their enactments.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 25, 2010

Fifteen years ago this month, roughly 250,000 ethnic Serbs were forcibly expelled from their homes in Kajina, a region of Croatia near the coast of the Adriatic Sea.

This human tidal wave was instigated by ?Operation Storm,? a Croatian military offensive conducted with the aid of Military Professional Resources Incorporated, a Blackwater-style mercenary group. Croatian forces advancing under the cover of U.S.-led NATO airstrikes mowed down helpless civilians.

Canadian military observers later testified that the U.S.-organized Croat offensive concentrated on civilian targets. This generated what one historian called the largest European population displacement since World War II.

Many of the Orthodox Christian Serbs driven from their homes ended up in Kosovo, only to be driven from that province by another U.S.-led NATO military assault four years later. That attack tore Kosovo away from Serbia and handed it over to a government ruled by Islamic terrorists.

It often seems as if Washington?s foreign policy is carefully calibrated to create enemies.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 24, 2010

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff warns that the real national debt ?including unfunded liabilities such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and off-budget military spending ? is $202 trillion.

This illustrates a fact Americans find difficult to comprehend: Our supposedly free economy is at least as socialist as that of the former Soviet Union. The chief difference is that American socialism is built around inter-generational redistribution of wealth.

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute predicts that the United States of America may soon suffer a Soviet-style implosion.

Celente points out that America, like Soviet Russia, is burdened with a self-replicating nomenklatura, or economic and political elite that is plundering the country?s wealth and squandering it on an unsustainable imperial foreign policy. Celente takes note of the ominous historical symmetry found in the fact that America ? like the Soviets, the British, and Macedonians before us ? is now trapped in a futile war in Afghanistan, the "graveyard of empires."

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 23, 2010

As we?ve noted previously, Philadelphia is presided over by a mayor ? appropriately named Michael Nutter ? who is engaged in a vulgar shakedown.

Referring to people who supposedly owe various municipal taxes, Nutter has declared: ?We want our damn money. You owe it, we want it, and I plan to collect it.?

Nutter?s administration couples a porcine appetite for revenue with a certain depraved creativity in making so-called tax scofflaws out of innocent people. . It recently devised a way to impose a $300 tax ? disguised as a ?business privilege license? -- on residents who maintain internet blogs

For the past three years, Philadelphian Marilyn Hess has published a low-traffic blog devoted to organic cooking. It has brought in less than $50 in ad revenue. Now the unemployed blogger has received a letter from the city demanding that she pay for a business license, as well as net profits tax.

Nutter?s regime offers another useful look at the authentic face of the loathsome instrument of misery and corruption called government.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 20, 2010

Roger Clemens was one of the most dominant pitchers in Major League Baseball. The last years of his otherwise luminous career were marred with allegations that he had used performance-enhancing drugs in an effort to retain his eroding physical skills.

In 2008, Clemens was questioned by Congress about those allegations. This was a matter dealing with Major League Baseball?s internal personnel policies, which are outside Congress?s constitutional authority. Clemens categorically denied the use of banned substances. His testimony was contradicted by a former trainer and a former teammate.

Absent physical evidence, it?s impossible to prosecute Clemens for violations of drug laws. So the Feds are trying to put him in prison for up to 30 years for the supposed crime of lying to Congress about a matter over which it has no authority.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who knowingly lied our country into an unnecessary war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, enjoys a tax-subsidized retirement cocooned within Secret Service protection.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 19, 2010

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton recently urged Israel to conduct what he described as a pre-emptive strike on Iran?s nuclear facilities in Bushehr.

This would trigger a devastating war involving Iran, Israel, and perhaps the entire world. Bolton is among those willing to pay that price to deprive the Iranian regime of its nuclear program.

Those who support military action against Iran often invoke the Holocaust, insisting that the Iranian government wants to finish the evil work begun by Hitler. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Iran currently hosts the second-largest Jewish population in the Middle East.

There are 11 synagogues and numerous Hebrew schools in Tehran. The BBC reports that Iranian President Ahmadenijad ? who supposedly lusts to kill every Jew on the planet ? recently arranged a donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.

Things aren?t perfect for Iran?s Jews. They would grow dramatically worse if their country were attacked by the West.

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