It was the Global News Editor for Reuters, the international news agency, who once said, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

He’s got a point. You’ve got to be cautious how you define people, places and things, and bus bombings.

Every time a politician calls for more “investment” in education or windmills or studying flatulence in ducks, somewhere there’s a taxpayer thinking “investment” sure sounds like “more taxes.”

In New York City, using the power of city government to limit the size of your coffee or your soft drink isn’t curbing freedom. Not at all, you dolt.

“We’re not banning anything. It’s called portion control,” explained Mayor Michael Bloomberg, except that government is controlling the portion.

Here are a few examples closer to home.

“Loan Max Yellow” means one thing if you own Loan Max. It means something else to the Batesville Planning Commission. And to Batesville.

In the Eureka community one man’s gravel mining operation is a $3.2 million investment (the private version, not the government version). To the neighbors, it’s another reason the house won’t sell.

Any discussion about freedom must include the controversy at South Panola High, where a teenage boy won the right via a stable of ACLU attorneys to dress like a girl named “Leah” and be called a “she.”

Let freedom ring — and wear pumps and a mini-skirt!

A handful of students, unaccompanied by attorneys, pointed out South Panola’s stringent dress code hypocrisy and got in trouble for it. Apparently what’s good for the goose who wants to be a gander is not good for the goose who’s still a goose.

I talked to the ACLU attorney only for a brief time. But it was made quite clear that “Leah” is afforded this exception for medical and psychological reasons. I’m still waiting on a return phone call for the reason a math teacher can’t ask for prayer, after her breast cancer came back, from the rest of the math department.

Just below the First Amendment portion in the U.S. Constitution is the Second Amendment, which is interesting since it follows so closely behind the First.

“The Second Amendment is there to protect the First Amendment,” Rush Limbaugh, who knows a thing or two about pushing First Amendment rights, said recently.

Of course that’s just one bloviating right-winger with a radio talk show. How many of us have a talk show anyway? Well, you can apply that same logic to the Second Amendment, since only AR-15 and AK-47 gun owners would be affected by the assault weapons bill being proposed this week.

“I don’t think anybody should have an assault weapon,” people have said, a sentiment that could also apply to eight-cylinder vehicles, cigarettes, more than two children, a home over 2,500 square feet, and Big Gulps, none of which are protected by the U.S. Constitution.
 
As is stands now the assault weapons ban would ban the manufacture and sale of 157 specific firearms. But it also exempts 2,271 firearms, you see.

 “Isn’t that enough for the people of the United States?” huffily asked Diane Feinstein, the bill’s author, when Sen. Ted Cruz asked her if she would support a bill that exempted 2,271 books.
A government ban of 157 firearms is approximately seven percent of the 2,271 shotguns and rifles. So 93 percent of firearms would still be legal — another form of portion control. That sort of sounds like the President in “Mars Attacks” when he proclaimed, “I want the people to know they still have two out of three branches of government working for them, and that ain’t bad.”

What would you wager that Sen. Feinstein is hoping people let the gun nuts fight for their Second Amendment right to own an “assault weapon” while the rest of us sit out this fight. Hunters, just cross your fingers that the next tragic shooting doesn’t involve a scoped hunting rifle. MSNBC will be showing photos of “sniper rifles commonly used by hunters” before the first body is buried. 

Somewhere in “Mars Attacks” the husband and wife are loading their shotguns (part of the 93 percent) to repel the Martian invaders and she tells him, “I’ll tell you one thing. They ain’t gettin’ the TV.”
Because you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, friends.