In an 1892 case about a police officer's First Amendment challenge to a law proscribing political activity by officers, a justice on Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court wrote: The officer "may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman."

First Amendment protections of government employees and everyone else have expanded since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that pithy formulation 10 years before beginning 29 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Progressives today are mourning the fleeting (six-day) martyrdom of Jimmy Kimmel, archetype of today's late night sometime-comedians, all-the-time-propagandists. And some progressives, noticing how big government can throw its weight around by working levers of coercion, are perhaps having an e

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