His lips are moving.  John Rosenthal, among the more famous of Massachusetts gun control ideologues, is engaged in fabulism about the Fort Hood shooter being on a terror watch list.

Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 plots, in federal district court rather than before a military tribunal.

I am surprisingly sympathetic to a lot of the arguments in favor of this, most notably that we ought to have enough civilizational confidence to trust our civilian justice system with the like of KSM.  That said, though, I cannot help but regard Holder’s decision as an example of either profound cynicism or profound stupidity, either of which ought to result in his boss, the president, firing him.

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Sometime this year, the United States Supreme Court may accomplish two remarkable things in the same case: one, strike down the odious Slaughter-House Cases decision and its progeny, and thereby breathe new life into the long-neglected Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and two, hold that the Second Amendment is not merely a limitation on the powers of the federal government, but on those of the states as well.

I am pointed by a wonderful friend of mine to this column at the Huffington Post, penned by a colleague of his who is a chaplain for Planned Parenthood.  It is a thoughtful, interesting read.

As I told him, though, I find myself nonplussed that “reproductive justice for women” has come to encompass not merely the right to end a pregnancy, but taxpayer subsidies for elective abortion (or, for that matter, taxpayer subsidies for the care and feeding of not-aborted anklebiters).

I am largely indifferent to what a woman does with her own uterus on her own dime.  While I am frequently discomfitted by the antiseptic denialism in the pro-choice ranks (you are destroying nascent human life, folks, not simply “terminating a fetus”), there are two hard realities, here:

1. The ultimate question — when, if ever, does a woman’s right to sexual and reproductive self-determination give way to her unborn child’s right to exist? — is freighted with moral ambiguity, such that reasonable people of goodwill can and will reach wildly different conclusions.
2. Even assuming a moral consensus that prohibiting or sharply limiting the practice is appropriate, every legal prohibition comes at an intolerable cost to our other civil liberties (see also, the War On Some Drugs).

Accordingly, my view is that the government ought to butt the hell out.  Individuals, not the state, are the best arbiters of whether, if ever, abortion is right or wrong, proper or improper.

But when you begin demanding that public dollars be used to subsidize your healthcare needs, my indifference fades, and I recite the subject line of this post: he who pays the piper calls the tune.  American taxpayers are not required to supinely accept indentured servitude to the functioning of your uterus, and the fact that some of them are motivated by a religious conviction that abortion is a moral horror is entirely irrelevant.  Either pay your own way, or accept the strings that your benefactor attaches to his largesse.

UPDATE: Reason #1 I hate discussing abortion — it’s perfectly obvious and uncontroversial that in much of the country women have ample access to accurate and fairly comprehensive reproductive health and family planning information.  For goodness sake, one can find safe-sex PSAs on the Big Three networks in prime time.  And yet, dare to point this out, and someone is sure to start in about the tragically-ignorant girls in the rural wastelands of Insert Bible Belt State Here, who still think storks bring babies and live 30 miles from the nearest drugstore, never mind a Planned Parenthood clinic.

It is not to deny the existence of these women to observe that many, many others don’t have tragic ignorance as an excuse, and yet make poor family planning decisions resulting in unwanted pregnancies anyway.  Many, many others, in other words, end up pregnant as the result of their own sexual irresponsibility.

That sounds a good deal more judgmental than I mean it to be, and so I want to make clear: I am not unsympathetic to any woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy, under any circumstances, and considering her options.  It’s an awful situation, and there but for the grace of God, and my gender, go I.  But even if a woman ends up hostage to her own body as the result of some sort of systemic injustice, one does not right that wrong by doubling down, as by forcibly confiscating private wealth to pay for her ob/gyn care.

Doug Pennington, Assistant Director of Communications for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is a freedom-hating asswipe:

An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn?  The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport.  Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with.  After all, they have the guns, right?

Yeah, Doug.  I have no problem “forcing” you to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere you turn in precisely the same way I have no problem “forcing” you to live with, say, people saying and printing things you don’t like or worshipping in ways you disapprove of; or with two dudes kissing in public; or with some people purchasing gigantic gas-guzzling SUVs and extravagantly-large wide-screen televisions; or with some people smoking cigarettes or eating fatty foods or drinking to excess.  In short I have no problem “forcing” you to put up with your fellow citizens enjoying their personal and economic freedoms in spite of the enormous psychic discomfort this apparently causes you.  It’s a small price to pay, given that the alternative is that we’re left the “freedom” to behave the way you want us to, whether we like it or not.

Cue Doug chanting, mantra-like, “Guns are not speech,” and backlinking to his past flailing at what he called the “damaged analogy between unregulated speech and unregulated [ed. -- if only] gun carrying”:

The assumption is that since prior restraint against speech is bad by definition, prior restraint against unrestricted gun carrying must be equally bad, or at least deeply suspect.  Except that it’s not, because they are radically different things when put into practice in the world real human beings live in.

If the cure for speech you don’t like is more speech, it can’t be the case that the cure for gun carrying you don’t like is… carrying more guns.  By extension, it can’t be that the only point at which society can do something about the high cost of illicit gun use in America – thousands of deaths and injuries – is after someone gets shot dead or wounded.

Got that?  “It can’t be,” because… well, Doug never bothers to tell us, other than to complain that “they are radically different things when put into practice in the real world human beings live in.”  Parents of two-year-olds are no doubt familiar with this style of argumentation:  “They’re different!”  “Okay. How?”  “They just are!”  “OK.  How?”  ”They just are!” 

Anyway, back to Doug on Fort Hood:

Because, thanks to the National Rifle Association,  law enforcement is prohibited from blocking gun purchases by someone on the Terrorist Watch List if  the buyer doesn’t have another disqualifying reason (such as a felony conviction or domestic violence restraining order).

Here, I yield the floor to Reason commenter “oaktownadam”:

Yes, it’s terrible that we don’t allow peoples’ constitutional liberties to be taken away without first being convicted by a jury of their peers. It’s a shame that secret lists aren’t allowed to be used to disenfranchise people who may or may not commit some crime in the indeterminate future.

Send better idiots, Bradys.

Trolling the intertubes you run across all manner of rhetorical nuggets, but I found this one at Reason Online and thought it nicely encapsulated the gun control ideologues’ (as distinguished from Joe Q. Public, who hasn’t given the matter much in the way of real thought) habit of mind:

When anti-second amendment types say “guns” they don’t mean the literal devices. Instead, “gun” is a code word for “people with bad judgment and the technological capacity for lethal violence.” Inserting the decoded phrase, his statement makes perfect sense:

“…was his insistence that more people with bad judgement and the technological capacity for lethal violence can only make things worse in a situation like the Fort Hood massacre…”

Which is probably true. People with bad judgement and weapons could have easily made the Fort Hood attack much worse. However, if you assume that the vast majority of people who carry weapons do in fact have good judgment about when to use those weapons, then the argument collapses.

These people see no contradiction is saying “guns” are bad but that police with guns are okay because they aren’t talking about the weapons but rather the people with the weapons. They trust police with the weapons but they don’t trust their neighbors.

That is what all “gun” control is about, an elitist disdain for the judgment of the average citizen. “Gun” control isn’t about controlling weapons, it’s about controlling people.

The first step to fighting this is to not let them control the language and to stop letting them use euphemisms and code words. Make them come out and say they think most people are idiots who can’t be trusted with sharp objects.

I would add that there exists a significant cohort of gun controllers who aren’t merely motivated by elitist disdain for the judgment of the average citizen, but who regard gun ownership itself as somehow retrograde and unenlightened — a rebuke to (and I am paraphrasing Jeffrey Snyder, here) coercive utopian collectivism insofar as it communicates a reservation of judgment about whether the state is encroaching on liberty and a willingness to defend that liberty with more than words.

The joint U.S.-Mexico task force on border issues has, entirely predictably, returned a recommendation to reinstate the federal “assault weapons” ban:

A binational task force on U.S.-Mexico border issues will call Friday on the Obama administration and Congress to reinstate an expired ban on assault weapons and for Mexico to overhaul its frontier police and customs agencies to mirror the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Why?  Because:

Mexican officials want a ban, saying that 90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives originate in the United States, including most assault rifles.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that’s true, and the notoriously corrupt Mexican government isn’t simply making things up to deflect from the incompetence and graft endemic in its own ranks.  Note the language used in the article: “90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing” (emphasis mine).  I’ve talked about tracing before, in my post about the Tiarht Amendment.  The universe of traced guns is not a statistically-valid sample from which to draw any conclusions about the larger universe of untraced guns, for the simple reasons that (a) not every criminal investigation results in a trace, and (b) not every trace is for a criminal investigation.  Is the Mexican government requesting traces for 100% of the guns seized in drug crimes?  We don’t know, and that fact alone makes the article’s “90%” statistic a load of codswallop.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of the constitutional issues involved, nor to point out that there’s no evidence so-called “assault weapons” are disproportionately dangerous or used in a disproportionate number of crimes.

On the heels of her risible claim that the House healthcare reform bill is a Christmas gift for the country, Madame Speaker says that her legislation is “very fair” insofar as it contemplates criminal penalties for people who refuse to comply with its individual mandate:

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Socialism always comes with handcuffs.  Always.

UPDATE: Ace has a fantastic post on this same subject, that it’s probably unfair to quote so extensively:

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn’t, after all) to enforce its notions of the “economic good.”

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I’m paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of “slippery slopes” or in terms of “what comes next?”

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you’re proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here — Pelosi, Reid, Obama — are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state’s balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term “economics” is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state’s master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they’ve realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we’re paranoid. We’re lunatics. We’re “extreme.”

Read the whole thing.

Absolutely odious.  No principle in heaven or on earth justifies this.

UPDATE: The problem doesn’t appear confined to GLBT domestic partners.  Evidently, under Rhode Island law, a general will and power of attorney are insufficient for anybody to make funeral arrangements for a decedent who is neither a spouse nor a blood relative without completing some statutorily-required form.

Governor Carcieri, of course, remains a vile jackass.

My visceral reaction to this loathsome woman’s untrammelled hubris was pure rage — nearly enough to make me put my fist through a convenient wall.  Upon reflection I realized that, like Hillary Clinton’s execrable ad during the primaries last year, it’s a wonderful illustration of the leftist habit of mind: forcibly confiscate money out of the pockets of the unwilling, buy them something they don’t really want, and then give yourself a repetitive motion injury patting yourself on the pack for your good intentions and magnaminity despite the certainty that the program will turn out to be (yet another) horrendous boondoggle.

My wife (peace be upon her) added this: “You can’t return it and you have to wear it — like the bunny pajamas in A Christmas Story.”