Pun Salad

■ Proverbs 27:19 is pretty wise, even by 21st century standards:

As water reflects the face, so one's life reflects the heart.

■ A mere two days ago, NPR assured us that March For Science Organizers Work To Maintain Non-Partisan Position.

A March for Science will be held Saturday in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of other cities in the U.S. Organizers say the march is a non-partisan celebration of science. It's meant to both encourage political leaders to fund science and rely on scientific evidence when making policy decisions. Critics worry the march will turn into an anti-Trump rally and paint scientists as just another interest group.

As it turns out, our local march organizers did not get that memo, as related by our local news source: Hundreds join Occupy NH Seacoast’s March for Science. Our guest speaker was Democrat, my CongressCritter, and general toothache, Carol Shea-Porter, and …

“This is a wonderful showing but we have so many more days before the next election and the election after that where we step forward and take this country back from people who don’t believe in science,” Shea-Porter said as people drove by honking their horns and waving in support of the crowd.

Doesn't exactly say "non-partisan" to me, how about you? I would love to see Carol take a basic scientific literacy test, or as Instapundit suggests, solve a quadratic equation.

An interviewed marcher was less partisan, but…

Chris Schera of Nashua turned out on Earth Day in Portsmouth “because science is important, because science is under fire and people just need to be aware that things are real.”

A bold stand indeed: "things are real". Hey, Chris? What can you tell me about the roots of the equation x²+1=0?

Hint: they're not real!

■ Oh well, let's get away from destroying Science and work on the Arts and Humanities. At NR, Deroy Murdock encourages us to draw the Curtains for NEA and NEH. His advice to the nay-sayers:

The Left should stop whining about the NEA and NEH and, instead, do something productive: They should fight for President Trump’s tax-cut plan. If Congress snaps out of its permanent vacation and puts Trump’s tax proposal on his desk for signature, Hollywood and Broadway artists and executives would see their top rate sliced from 39.5 percent to 35 percent. Major media companies such as Time Warner and NBCUniversal would see their corporate taxes MOABed from 35 percent to 20 or, even better, 15 percent. When wealthy show people pass away, their death taxes would have plunged from as much as 40 percent to 0 percent. Trump’s tax system would liberate billions or even trillions of dollars that could be donated to and invested in a new generation of American artistic masterpieces, honorable mentions, and beloved near-misses.

Among many other examples, Murdock notes that Orson Welles didn't need an NEA grant to make Citizen Kane.

■ My LFOD Google alert was triggered by a letter in Pravda on the Merrimack, aka the Concord Monitor, from Bill Walker: My Turn: Marijuana reform sabotaged in state Senate.

There is no way to have a world without drugs; there are still drugs in our prisons. There are only two real choices in drug policy. One is the path of personal freedom, which results in harm reduction, easy access to treatment, safe drugs and no drug cartels. The other is Prohibition, with all the cost, corruption and death. We can have a Live Free or Die New Hampshire, or we can keep paying taxes for our New Deal drug bureaucracy and admit that we aren’t as free as Massachusetts or Vermont.

Bill blames, convincingly, Republican Jeb Bradley.

■ Rod Dreher notes (however) that Vermont's Middlebury College is hardly a bastion of liberty. Instead, he describes Middlebury’s Obscene Cowardice. He quotes (in full) the craven statement of Bertram Johnson, chair of Middlebury's Political Science department, and comments:

This capitulation to the ideological thugs who attacked Murray and others on Middlebury’s campus deserves wide denunciation. A professor from the man’s own department was physically assaulted by these goons, and sent to the hospital — and nobody has been held accountable for any of this by Middlebury. As a scholar and as an American, Bert Johnson, the poli sci department head, should be ashamed of himself. He has shown himself to be a lickspittle to the campus left, and will be treated exactly that way by the radicals he is helping to empower.

If only those earnest marchers-for-science were one-tenth as concerned about the often-violent suppression of free expression on college campuses…

■ OK, one more NR piece, this one from KDW. He writes on Little Creep. In case you don't get the reference, and KDW doesn't explain it: there's the Big Creep, from whence we got Mrs. Creep, and…

Chelsea Clinton, most recently lionized on the cover of Vanity Fair, is a 37-year-old multi-millionaire who has never uttered an interesting word about any subject at any time during the course of her life. Judging from the evidence of her public statements, she has never had an original thought — it isn’t clear that she has had a thought at all. In tribute to her parents, she was given a series of lucrative sinecures, producing a smattering of sophomoric videos for NBC at a salary of $600,000 a year. She later went more formally into the family business, leaving her fake job at NBC for a fake job in her parents’ fake charity. She gave interviews about how she just couldn’t get interested in money and bought a $10 million Manhattan apartment that stretches for the better part of a city block.

KDW is wickedly and hilariously on-target.