Pun Salad

… you were green in the eyes and still shining like you do all the time:

Well, it's been a busy couple weeks. But if you missed any of this stuff, you shouldn't have:

• We're number one, baby!

  New Hampshire is, by our count, the freest state in the country.

  And there's plenty of room for improvement. But Ann Althouse points out that NH ranks "dead last" in a survey of the educational attainments of state legislators. She wonders if there's a relationship. A commenter points out the obvious: "I consider it likely that the more education a person receives, the more she thinks she's smart enough to run other people's lives. It's for their own good, you know."

• Jim Geraghty noticed another broken Obama promise, the one where "we" were going to get all the money back from bailing out Chrysler and GM.

• David Bernstein resurrects then-Senator Obama's 2005 comments on the historical Supreme Court case Lochner v. New York; in 227 words, Obama made 9 "dubious or inaccurate" claims.

  To be fair, Obama was merely echoing "progressive" common wisdom; it's not as if the former constitutional law prof had actually bothered to check things out himself.

• At CEI's Open Market blog, Adam Michel checks out Governor Lynch's comments on vetoing HB 474, which would make New Hampshire a right-to-work state. The Gov claims he's never been asked by businessfolk about the issue; Adam notes that there's a real good reason for that.

• Dorothy Rabinowitz offers suggestions to GOP candidates, including the helpful "talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate."

  How you do that and stay honest, I don't know.

• Andrew C. McCarthy, for example, is extremely honest, and is pretty sick and tired of politicians of both major parties promising to "save" Medicare from the other side. The right thing to do: figure out a good way to end it.

  In a follow-up column, Andrew notes that he's not in the business of figuring out "a winning electoral strategy for Republicans". Instead, he's just satisfied with being obviously correct.

• Steven Hayward has advice to pols on how to talk about "climate change" when you're out there on the lonely campaign trail. Unlike other matters (like entitlements, see above) it's not hard to be reasonable on the issue.

• Daniel J. Mitchell looked at the unemployment rate, comparing it with what the Obama Administration stimulus advocates claimed it would be back in 2009. No surprise: our would-be emperors have no clothes. They made things worse than if they'd done nothing. Voters would be stupid to trust them again.

  And yet, they might. Go figure.

• A trusty source, Joel Miller, discusses Sarah Palin's take on Paul Revere. A fair and measured piece, with a nod toward those "who revel in the cheap shot and the takedown." I'm not sure, but he may have been reading Pun Salad.

• Back when I was much younger and (even more) pretentious, I found myself kind of liking poetry. For example, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

  And now… there's an app for that. (Make sure you watch the video app tour; it's a jaw-dropping demonstration of how you can, y'know, learn stuff on the iPad instead of playing Angry Birds for another couple hours.)

• These days my poetic preferences lean toward off-color Midwestern parodists:

  I read a hyperlink from a Twitter sage
  Who said: "A vast and trunkless dick of stone
  Stands in an archive. Near it on the page,…

  And I think that's probably the best thing I read about that other thing.

• "I just want to say two words to you, just two words. Are you listening? Bunny dressage."