Pun Salad

• Well, despite all those mean things conservatives said about Senator McCain in the past, we can certainly rely on his pledge not to increase Social Security taxes. Oh, wait…

  Noah Millman explains why that's a particularly bad idea.

• Investor's Business Daily starts a series titled "The Audacity of Socialism," an analysis of the lefty policies and influences of the "even worse than McCain" candidate. Part One here.

• Please note you shouldn't make stuff up about candidates' tax proposals. Instead, check out non-made-up stuff from Michael Boskin at the WSJ"

  What if I told you that a prominent global political figure in recent months has proposed: abrogating key features of his government's contracts with energy companies; unilaterally renegotiating his country's international economic treaties; dramatically raising marginal tax rates on the "rich" to levels not seen in his country in three decades (which would make them among the highest in the world); and changing his country's social insurance system into explicit welfare by severing the link between taxes and benefits?

  Further hint: his name rhymes with "Yo' mama."

• UNH's front web page today celebrates our appearance on the Princeton Review's Green Rating Honor Roll this year, sharing the highest possible rating with 10 other schools.

  Not mentioned at all anywhere on UNH official websites: our appearance on the Princeton Review's other lists. We rank:

  • #3 on PR's "Lots of Beer" list;

  • #4 on the "Little Race/Class Interaction" list;

  • #5 on the "Homogeneous Student Population" list;

  • #6 on the "Town-Gown Relations are Strained" list;

  • #18 on the "Professors Get Low Marks" list;

  • #14 on the "Least Accessible Professors" list;

  • #20 on the "Reefer Madness" list;

  and, finally, we are
  • the #11 "Party School" in the US.

  That "least accessible" thing is a bad rap on the faculty, though; would you want to be accessible to a bunch of homogeneous drunken potheads who fail to interact either racially or classily? Me neither.

• The New York Times comes in for a lot of abuse here, but they do employ John Tierney, and today he lists 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List.

  It made me worry that I was not aware that I was supposed to worry about any of the things Tierney said I shouldn't worry about.

In yet another unwarranted reminder of my advanced age, it turns out to have been 20 years since the previous appearance of John Rambo, as he rescued Colonel Trautman in Afghanistan, and coincidentally destroyed a whole bunch of Commies in helping out the Mujahedeen eject the Soviets.

Now he's somehow retired to Thailand, where he ekes out an honest living catching snakes, blacksmithing, and mumbling. But, as probably even major-party presidential candidates know, Thailand is next to Burma and very bad things go on there. Rambo is persuaded to insert some peace-loving Christian missionaries into the country. When things, inevitably, go very bad for them, he's on the hook to go back and get them out.

This is not family fare. Lots of death and destruction, and perhaps more than you want to know about what happens to people hit by .50 caliber machine gun fire or who find themselves too close to a Claymore mine.

If you've seen Rambos II and III, you can pretty much predict how things play out here. To repeat: it's very, very, graphically violent, and some of the victims are children. I'm hardly a prude about movie violence; and I suppose there's an argument that if you want to be honest about depicting the nature of evil, you have to be unflinchingly honest. Still, I found it disturbing.