Pun Salad

Today's Proverb is 29:20:

Do you see someone who speaks in haste? There is more hope for a fool than for them.

… so I'm being careful to type verrry slooowly today.

• Ben Shapiro writes at NR: "When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is — Your Enemy". He pleads for to paying more attention to "ideas and values" than with automatically picking sides based on "tribal identity." RTWT, but I found these paragraphs to be especially perceptive:

  Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly, that’s a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him.
  
  […]
  
  The logic of “if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us” actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’ friends. It gets to choose whom we support. This isn’t speculative. It happened during the 2016 primaries, when the media attacked Trump incessantly, driving Republicans into his outstretched arms. The media’s obvious hatred for Trump was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates: If, as his detractors claimed, he wasn’t conservative, then why would the leftist media hate him so much?

• My Google News Trigger for LFOD found "Testimony by Peter Sprigg in Opposition to New Hampshire House Bill 478". This bill will insert "gender identity" into the list of qualities by which various entities are not allowed to discriminate. (Current list: "age, sex, race, color, marital status, physical or mental disability, creed, or national origin".) And sure enough:

  Of course, transgendered people have a right to the "pursuit of Happiness" as well. What they do not have, however, is the "right" to enlist the coercive power of the state in an effort to guarantee the attainment of the Happiness that they pursue, at the expense of the liberty of others.
  
  In a state that proclaims, "Live Free or Die," we should certainly leave people free from government coercion on this issue.

  The existing combination of "sex" and "mental disability" would seem to cover issues of "gender identity" as well, but that's me.

• In good news: "New Hampshire Enacts Constitutional Carry".

  New Hampshire became the latest state to adopt a permitless concealed gun carry policy on Wednesday [February 22].

  There were plenty of shriekers and fear-mongerers along the way, but the simple fact is that this just allows Granite Staters to operate under the same carry law as their neighbors in Maine and Vermont. Pravda-on-the-Merrimack (aka the Concord Monitor) reports Governor Sununu's remarks:

  “It is common-sense legislation,” he said during a ceremony in Executive Council chambers. “This is about making sure that our laws on our books are keeping people safe while remaining true to the live-free-or-die spirit.”

  As previously noted, I hate that "common-sense" thing. Otherwise, thumbs up.

• But sometimes things just get silly. Jacob Sullum at Reason finds an "NRA-Backed Law Violates the First Amendment in the Name of Protecting the Second".

  Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a censorious Florida law that tried to stop doctors from pestering their patients about guns, sacrificing the First Amendment in the name of protecting the Second. Such laws, which the National Rifle Association supports, show how fake rights—in this case, an overbroad understanding of the right to armed self-defense—endanger real ones.

  Smart patients should probably shop around for doctors who don't ask nosy medically-irrelevant questions. Lying is also an option.

• I know that "what-aboutism" can be tiring, but this seems worth remembering: "When President Obama’s National Security Advisor Lied, The Media Laughed".

  Buried deep beneath the Michael Flynn hysteria this week was Judicial Watch’s release of newly obtained State Department documents related to the Benghazi terrorist attack on September 11, 2012. One email confirms—again—that the Obama administration knew the day after the attack it was not a random act of violence stemming from an anti-Muslim video. That was the excuse shamefully propagated by top Obama administration officials (including the president himself) and swallowed whole by a media establishment desperate to help Obama win re-election six weeks later.

  It's increasingly clear that the media establishment is biased and unfair, rife with double standards and hypocrisy. All made worse by self-righteous preening.

  But see above: the enemy of your enemy is sometimes …