LISTEN AND believe.

MAKE: Looking Back at the Launch of the Maker Movement: The First Maker Faire.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Town Where U.S. Marshal Smashed Citizen’s Camera Rakes in Millions from Federal Forfeiture Rules; South Gate seizes more under federal program than San Francisco.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): LC Charter Academy teacher arrested on multiple sex charges. “Sommer Nicole Odom, 35, of Iowa, La., was arrested Tuesday and charged with three counts of oral sexual battery, four counts of indecent behavior with juveniles and one count of sexual battery.”

EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other.

HEATHER WILHELM: Attack of the Leftist Snowflakes. “Sadly, huge swaths of today’s college campuses, supposedly pinnacles of higher learning, have morphed into a giant preteen slumber party with an alarming population of sulking corner girls.”

Related: The real victim of ‘rape culture’? Free speech. As the Christina Hoff Sommers furore shows, too many students can’t handle debate.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Hillary’s Free Trade Meltdown May Pull Warren into Race.

TODAY IS THE anniversary of Israel’s independence.

Here we have John Wayne and Kirk Douglas on the subject, from Cast A Giant Shadow.

UPDATE: Second link was wrong. Fixed now. Sorry!

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: SEE IT: Ohio 5-year-old with prosthetic ‘Iron Man’ hand throws out first pitch for Columbus Clippers.

STENCH OF CORRUPTION: Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company.

Related: Clinton charities will refile tax returns, audit for other errors: “For three years in a row beginning in 2010, the Clinton Foundation reported to the IRS that it received zero in funds from foreign and U.S. governments, a dramatic fall-off from the tens of millions of dollars in foreign government contributions reported in preceding years. Those entries were errors, according to the foundation: several foreign governments continued to give tens of millions of dollars.”

IT HAS COME TO THIS:  Amherst, Wisconsin fire chief encourages violence against Governor Scott Walker.   On a Facebook post, he encourages locals to “hit him [Walker] with a shovel.”

Ah, sweet liberal “tolerance.” 

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 714.

ED MORRISSEY: The Closing of the Millennial Mind on Campus.

RAND PAUL’S Internet Army.

SADLY, THIS IS NEWS: Iowa Man Found Not Guilty Of Rape For Having Sex With Wife.

But I wonder if this isn’t the key bit: “Rayhons served 18 years as a Republican member of the Iowa House. He withdrew from the race for another term shortly before he was charged last year.” Related: “Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is a Democrat.” Note that Miller’s office tried to move the trial somewhere else, where there were fewer Republicans in the jury pool. Given the prosecutorial misbehavior we’ve seen in Wisconsin, this makes me suspicious. Has anyone asked Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller why this very unusual prosecution was brought, and if politics had anything to do with it?

NO WORRIES, WE’VE GOT SMART DIPLOMACY^TM AT WORK! Poland Arms, Russia Fumes.

Poland announced yesterday that it would be buying Patriot missiles from U.S. manufacturer Raytheon in order to upgrade its missile defense shield, adding six batteries by 2022. And predictably enough—like clockwork, really—Russia bared its teeth at the announcement. Both Russia’s top general and its defense minister described the move as NATO aggression towards Russia and made threats towards Poland in response to the missile defense announcement. The Russian invective was also aimed at Romania, where NATO troops are currently holding military exercises and where a missile defense shield installation (of a different variety than the Patriot called Aegis Ashore) is in the works. . . .

The purchase of the Patriots is part of Poland’s pledge to spend more than $1 billion annually for its military modernization budget, which, as Andrew Michta noted in our pages yesterday, makes its projected expenditures “roughly equal that of all the remaining 11 ‘new allies’ who joined NATO from 1999 onward.” This makes Warsaw the top defense spender in the Baltic-Central European theater, a development which could, and hopefully will, push fellow European NATO member countries towards fulfilling their commitment to spend two percent of GDP on defense.

They should.

WILL SCOTUS AGREE TO HEAR WISCONSIN “JOHN DOE” CASE?:  The Supreme Court will decide Friday whether to grant review on a case relating to the infamous Wisconsin “John Doe” investigation of conservative groups that supported Governor Scott Walker and his reform of public sector union collective bargaining.

The case, O’Keefe v. Chisholm, was filed by Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth after they each received John Doe subpoenas in October 2013, demanding that they turn over all Club records and communications–including all emails, financial materials and donor lists–to prosecutors.  Consistent with Wisconsin’s John Doe law, the subpoenas gagged O’Keefe and the Club, prohibiting them from speaking to anyone (including lawyers or the press) about the existence or nature of the subpoenas, under pain of contempt.  Numerous other conservative activists’ homes were searched in middle-of-the-night SWAT raids, their computers, phones and other papers seized, and their victims also gagged.  Documents divulged in the litigation revealed that the prosecutors hoped to expand the John Doe investigation by issuing subpoenas to high profile conservatives such as radio show host Sean Hannity.

O’Keefe’s lawsuit centers primarily around a claim that the John Doe investigation was being conducted in bad faith, in an attempt to silence the First Amendment speech and association rights of O’Keefe and the Club.  In May 2014, a federal trial judge, Rudolph Randa, granted O’Keefe and the Club a preliminary injunction, halting the investigation and finding that their First Amendment claims were likely to succeed on the merits.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed, reasoning that federal courts should not entertain O’Keefe’s First Amendment claims because of the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA)– an argument that none of the parties to the O’Keefe litigation (nor Judge Randa) had argued or briefed.

Specifically, the 7th Circuit ruled that O’Keefe’s federal constitutional lawsuit should not be considered because considerations of “equity, comity and federalism” that underlie the AIA required Wisconsin state courts be given an opportunity to halt the John Doe investigation before federal courts should get involved.  Unfortunately, as O’Keefe’s Supreme Court petition rightly points out, this interpretation of the AIA directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s decision in Mitchum v. Foster (1972), which held that federal civil rights lawsuits were an exception to the AIA.

To make matters worse, the 7th Circuit’s ruling also directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Sprint Communications, Inc. v. Jacobs, that federal courts should not abstain from deciding federal law claims because federal courts “are obliged to decide cases within the scope of federal jurisdiction” and “[a]bstention is not in order simply because a pending state-court proceeding involves the same subject matter.”  Federal constitutional rights are sufficiently important that victims of abusive state government power shouldn’t be forced to wait years to see if state courts will halt abusive state officers’ behavior, before they are able to seek relief from neutral federal courts.

The Supreme Court is also being asked to consider the propriety of the Seventh Circuit’s alternative ruling that a viable First Amendment claim cannot be grounded in an assertion of retaliatory, bad faith investigation– a question the Supreme Court has unfortunately punted since its obscure footnote 9 in Hartman v. Moore (2006).   Since Hartman, five federal appellate courts have disagreed with the Seventh Circuit, and concluded that any retaliatory investigation that would deter a reasonable person from exercising his First Amendment rights is, in fact, actionable.  And this is as it should be:  just consider the IRS scandal, in which the agency has targeted tea party groups for investigation and scrutiny, all in an attempt to chill those groups’ First Amendment activities.  Retaliatory investigation is the quintessential abuse of government power, and it must be actionable lest John Doe-type investigations become a model for intimidating those who dare to participate in the political process.

If the Supreme Court cares about vigorously defending the First Amendment–and recent cases have suggested it does— the O’Keefe case warrants review, to set the record straight about abstention in federal civil rights cases, and to close the gaping First Amendment loophole (disallowing retaliatory claims) endorsed by the 7th Circuit.

WE NEED ACCOUNTABILITY AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS: The Wall Street Journal urges the U.S. Supreme Court to take the free-speech case arising out of Wisconsin’s John Doe investigation. Ann Althouse notes the inability or unwillingness — she doesn’t use the word “complicity,” but I might — of the Wisconsin state courts to deal with this and comments: “It’s one thing for federal courts to refrain from jumping into state court proceedings that might do a decent-enough job of enforcing federal rights. But here, these proceedings have worked to suppress political speech for 2 election cycles and beyond. It’s quite shocking.”

FLASHBACK: Watch Hillary Defend “Heterosexual Marriage” As A Fundamental, Bedrock Principle. “It wasn’t long ago that Clinton sounded much more like a staunch social conservative than a gay rights champion on the issue, describing marriage as a ‘fundamental bedrock principle’ going back ‘into the mists of history’ that was primarily about raising children. During 2004 Senate floor debate, Clinton argued that though she opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment that would have amended the Constitution to make marriage between a man and a woman because she thought the issue should be a state matter, she wanted to make it crystal clear that this in no way suggested she wanted to change the definition of marriage.”

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WASHINGTON FREE BEACON SUPERCUT: MSNBC’s Tax Delinquents Lecture Audience on Taxes. Maybe Republicans object to taxes because they actually pay them, and Democrats don’t mind taxes because, well, they don’t.

UPDATE: From the comments: “They told me that if I voted for Romney, the rich would thumb their noses at the idea of paying their fair share…….and they were right!”

AUSTIN BAY: Apocalyptic Battles, 1945 and 2015.

NO GOOD REASON AT ALL: Why don’t we just abolish the VA? “Yes, there has been misconduct, dishonesty and incompetence, and the guilty must be held accountable. Fundamentally, though, VA staff and officials were responding to perverse incentives and impossible demands presented by a health-care organization that — unlike almost any other in American society — is not only single-payer but single-provider. Without market signals to help allocate resources, long waits and other patient frustrations are inevitable, no matter how sincerely, or how threateningly, Washington orders their elimination.”

WHEN GOVERNMENT IS IN A STATE OF WAR AGAINST THE CITIZENRY: House Report: IRS ‘Deliberately’ Cut Customer Service to Make Tax Season Painful for Taxpayers.