"If prosecuting politically unpopular speech becomes the 'new normal,' you can bet this tactic will be embraced by both parties."

"Left-wing individuals and groups are at least as guilty of coordinating their expenditures and efforts with Democrats as conservatives are with Republicans," writes Larry Kaufmann at Isthmus.

If the Supreme Court does not unambiguously repudiate the basis for the current John Doe probe, the GOP is empowered to launch similar investigations into left-leaning organizations in 2016 and beyond. The next group at the business end of a John Doe battering ram could be One Wisconsin Now rather than the Club for Growth.

You would think every commentary on John Doe would recognize this danger, but you would be wrong...

"The cause of the Labour downfall is simple enough. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, proves to be a hard-line Leftist..."

"... believing that the state should control the individual and the individual should have no control over the state. Resenting capitalism, he wants to control markets and punish through taxation everyone who has benefitted from markets. He reminds me of Mikhael Gorbachev whose policy of perestroika was supposed to have the edge over reality. One look at him has been enough for the people of England. The Scottish National Party has captured an almost clean sweep of the Scottish seats, thus smashing beyond repair the previous Labour monopoly of those seats. A twenty-year-old student, in one startling instance, has trounced a former experienced cabinet minister. Culturally distinct from the English, the people of Scotland are wandering away into another imaginary landscape of socialism and nationalism. Now where have we had examples of this combination, and has any good ever come of it?"

Writes David Pryce-Jones in "Westminster Election Diary" at The New Criterion.

"How can we cultivate a practice of stealing from the university? Do marooned and resistant communities exist on campus?"

"What do Moten and Harney mean when they recommend theft as our proper relationship to the university? What would this look like in our institutions and disciplines? Where do the undercommons exist or where can it be created? What skills do we need to develop to become thieves? Where would we use stolen and reappropriated resources?"

Things happening around here.

"I don�t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people�s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally."

Said a professor at the University of Warwick, The National Review reports in (fake?) horror. I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about this the other day too. I guess it was red meat for righties, but the professor's quote was perfectly true (to the point of banality) and his proposal was modest and apt.

This is mostly the traditional, old-fashioned moral practice of counting your blessings. Maybe before you eat dinner, you should say grace and reflect for one second about how there are people in this world who are hungry.

Hey, here's a bedtime story, kids, "The Great Gatsby." It begins:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I�ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

�Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,� he told me, �just remember that all the people in this world haven�t had the advantages that you�ve had.�

It's very stodgy, very old-fashioned advice, this thinking about the less privileged. I know Rush and The National Review are acting like the professor is a big, old lefty, but I'm trying to remember that maybe they didn't have all the advantages I have had. I�m inclined to reserve all judgments, and as a consequence, I've been unjustly accused of being a politician....

"I would like to talk about �Sleeping Beauty� and �Swan Lake,� about my battements and my handsome partners..."

"But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin�s terror," wrote the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89.

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin�s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan....

Ms. Plisetskaya was... restricted by the Bolshoi�s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning....

�I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,� she said. �In my time, it was impossible.�

I'd like to hear more specifically how ballet movements could be thought to contain political ideology. I once met a woman in Madison who had learned a difficult craft that produced a type of ordinary object � a lovely version of something quite utilitarian. She expressed anguish in not yet having found a way to make these objects political. I said I thought that loading politics into art tended to make bad art. I dreamed of interesting conversations in Madison. Many years later, I started this blog.

ADDED: I don't like tag proliferation, so I'm using my "merging politics and showbiz" for this. It seems wrong to call ballet "showbiz," but think about it. Why is it wrong? It isn't!

Ah, but I remember I also have an "art and politics" tag. I remember that tag as I think of the conversation with the Madison artisan. Why did those crafted objects prompt me to think "art" when ballet did not? Because I thought of art school.

"An Honest Socialist/Could Bernie Sanders show Elizabeth Warren how to beat Hillary?"

A Wall Street Journal editorial. (There's a subscription wall that you can bypass if you Google some of the text and get your own link.)

Milton Friedman once observed that the 1928 platform of the Socialist Party of America may have seemed radical at the time, but nearly all of it was eventually absorbed by mainstream parties and became law. That�s also Mr. Sanders�s hope. He wants to drive the Democratic Party debate to the left so it drags Hillary Clinton along with it.

And it may be working. Mrs. Clinton has already disavowed her husband�s trade agenda. She�s proposed a rewrite of the First Amendment to limit political speech, and don�t be surprised if she also embraces expanded entitlements. The difference is that Bernie believes what he says, while Hillary believes whatever seems necessary to win.

The practical political question is whether Mr. Sanders, or some other liberal gadfly, can do well enough to serve as a stalking horse for a stronger candidate against Mrs. Clinton. Recall how Eugene McCarthy drove LBJ out of the 1968 race with a strong performance in the New Hampshire primary. Robert Kennedy soon jumped in as a more electable antiwar candidate.

LBJ really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win. As for that 1968 business... we ended up with Nixon... who by today's standards was a big old liberal.

[NOTE: The last paragraph of this post is rewritten. Originally, it said: "And we ended up with LBJ, who really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win." That's not a proper account of 1968!]

"While the [FBI]�s voguish interest in Harlem�s 'New Negroes' faded during the Great Depression..."

"... its inspection of African-American writing persisted from World War II through the militant Black Arts movement unveiled in 1965."

In the early 1940s, worried over black attitudes to the war effort, the FBI began compiling files on such traveling targets as [Richard] Wright, Chester Himes and Barack Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis....

In the depths of the Cold War, a busy season of FBI literary criticism, no fewer than 22 African-American authors were first tracked by Bureau paperwork, among them Ralph Ellison and Lorraine Hansberry. (Hansberry�s now family-friendly drama A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was reviewed by an incognito FBI agent even before reaching Broadway. The four-page paper that resulted would receive a non-inflated �A� in my introductory African-American literature class.) Three Cold War files created in the 1950s�for [James ] Baldwin, Hoyt Fuller and Black Arts founder Amiri Baraka � looked forward to the last great wave of FBI book-clubbing: an elaborate counterintelligence program, well documented in the Senate�s Church Committee report of 1976, to imitate and subvert the literature of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s....

"I think she�s a Democrat just like they all are. She seems like every other Democrat."

"I would not like to see her win. She�s the same old shit. I�d like to see me win," said Roseanne Barr, who ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2012. Roseanne isn't impressed with the idea of Hillary Clinton as a woman President:

"No, not at all. I think that a party that was woman-friendly would be revolutionary, and that party could be headed by a male or female. It�s what the party itself stands for that matters. She is standing as a Democrat so she�s a Democrat, and I don�t see much difference between them and the Republicans. They both get paid by the same guys. They do the same thing, they want the same stuff, more business.... I would rather see the first intelligent, honest American president. I don�t care what�s in their shorts. I don�t care what it looks like down there at all."

I'm blogging this because Roseanne is saying something that isn't heard too much anymore: Democrats and Republicans aren't different enough to get excited about. I remember back in 2000, when Ralph Nader was a strong third-party candidate and lefties scoffed at the option of voting for the Democrat, as if Al Gore were significantly different from George W. Bush. It was a popular joke to say "Gush and Bore."

Something changed in our political culture. Those who, in the past, would have been straightforward lefties with an aversion to mainstream Democrats have bonded with Democrats and get passionate in support of them, as if the difference between Democrats and Republicans is profoundly important. To me, it's quite weird. I mean, I don't look to Roseanne Barr for lucid analysis, but her serio-comic riff reminded me of how much the Democratic Party jams the left-wing brain waves of America.

Teachers' Unions find an issue that can appeal to those who are not big fans of public employee unions.

"Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor and possible presidential candidate, stoked national attention when he stripped collective-bargaining rights from most public-sector unions, including teachers. But testing, [said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara], offers unions a way to join forces both with parents who object to testing and with Republicans who oppose the Common Core standards as a federalization of education. 'It is a powerful issue, by virtue of the fact that the right is also against it,' he said."

From a NYT article titled "Teachers� Unions Fight Standardized Testing, and Find Diverse Allies."

The teachers� push on testing comes as Congress is debating how to revise the 2001 No Child Left Behind law...

Critics of the campaigns against testing, including many state and local education officials, say the unions are not acting out of concern for children but are trying to undercut efforts to institute tougher evaluations. They argue that annual testing is critical for tracking how effectively schools are educating poor and minority students and that evaluations based only on subjective criteria like observations typically fail to identify weak teachers....

Secky Fascione, director of organizing for the National Education Association, the largest nationwide teachers� union, said reining in testing was the union�s top organizing priority. In the past month, Ms. Fascione said, chapters in 27 states have organized against testing, including holding rallies; petition drives; showings of �Standardized,� a documentary critical of testing; and sessions telling parents they have a right to keep their children from taking tests, as tens of thousands of parents around the country have done.

�Does it give us a platform?� said Karen E. Magee, the president of New York State United Teachers. �Absolutely.� 

The union of left- and right-wing ideology. Who's leveraging whom? Or is this the serendipitous coalescing of natural interests?