The season’s first episode follows the lead character, Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope, to Washington DC, where she met real political figures such as Joe Biden (her hero), Olympia Snowe, Barbara Boxer, and John McCain. Recent episodes have been titled "Soda Tax" and "How a Bill Becomes a Law" and highlight the nitty-gritty — if comically histrionic — details about local politics. In addition, the show's constant use of innuendo surrounding current political events, reenactment of debates concerning economics and governance, and tongue-in-cheek references to the increasing conservatism of American politics have made Parks and Rec more a comedic primer in American politics than a primetime comedy.

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At least the dead generations took Marx seriously. At least they had a powerful labor movement and center-left parties that believed in the welfare state. And at least Ralph Miliband, the dead leftist whose son is the living leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would never have answered a question about capitalism with a grudging obeisance to the creative power of BlackBerry.

It’s easy to get nostalgic.

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The vote in the upper house of parliament — led by President Francois Hollande's Socialists — comes despite boisterous protests. Opponents — mostly conservatives and fervent Roman Catholics — have sought to defend traditional marriage.

Both houses of parliament will now take up a second reading to consider minor Senate changes to the bill passed in February by the National Assembly, also controlled by a Socialist-led majority.

The bill would allow gay marriage and let same-sex couples adopt children. On the campaign trail last year, Hollande pledged to push through such legislation if elected.

About a dozen mostly European nations already allow gay marriage.

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But North Dakota is also red in another sense: it fully supports its state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND), a socialist relic that exists nowhere else in America. Why is financial socialism still alive in North Dakota? Why haven't the North Dakotan free-market crusaders slain it dead?

Because it works.

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"We all want to make America strong economically and militarily and every other way but you can't do that if you're not in office," he told The Hill. "We've got a socialist in office right now — how's that working for us?"

When pressed on his choice of words, Barbour said: "I don't care. I mean, look, I think he's a socialist. I'm not saying he doesn't love our country," he said. "No, I don't care."

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Just to get it out of the way, I'll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms (though as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy notes, "Venezuela is recognized by many scholars to be more democratic than it was in the pre-Chávez era"). His rein also coincided with a boom in violent crime.

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Last Sunday, the unthinkable happened: Ross Douthat wrote something halfway sensible.

To be sure, his column “A World Without Work” is no "Communist Manifesto." But I read Douthat, in this deeply conflicted piece, as a metaphorical three-year-old attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle: He finally has all the pieces, but he just can’t get them to fit together. He admits that work in today’s world is “grinding,” meaningless, alienated, coercive. He argues that government should play an active role in promoting human flourishing. And he seriously considers the position that “the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms.”

These are the building blocks of a left politics for the 21st century — but Douthat tries instead to jam them into his conservative lens.

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The wonderful Jane Mayer recounts an Americans for Prosperity rally she covered in Texas two and half years ago, at which now-Texas Senator Ted Cruz “accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there” in the early 1990s. The revelation of these baseless, McCarthy-esque accusations sheds light on the origins of Cruz’s baseless, McCarthy-esque questioning of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel. (The best part of Mayer’s piece is the bewilderment of Charles Fried, a Republican who served in the Reagan administration and later taught Cruz at Harvard, who diplomatically told Mayer that Cruz’s statement “lacks nuance.”)

Mayer adds:

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As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, Broun has been publicly playing the cool contender since announcing his run last week. But on the side to potential donors, he's brandishing his Tea Party background. "I was the first Member of Congress to call him a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth," Broun wrote in an email.

He continued:

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The recently elected socialist president announced his education reform proposal last week. "An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home," Hollande said. Under the plan, the school week would be slightly extended to compensate for axing homework.

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Chavez won the mandate of another six years in power (adding to his 14-year tenure) with more than 54 percent of the vote, beating challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski. A number of conservative U.S. news outlets were quick to challenge the validity of the large margin (which was nonetheless the weakest margin the socialist leader has ever enjoyed in an election).

Fox News reported that "exit polls told a different story." In an example of what Glenn Greenwald described via Twitter as "revealing and amusing … cognitive dissonance" in Western media over this election, the Fox News host decried the Venezuelan result, suggesting that even if there was no technical foul play, Chavez had overly influenced the elections with money and media monopolies.

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With most votes counted, Chavez had more than 54 percent of the vote, and Capriles had 45 percent, National Electoral Council president Tibisay Lucena said. She said 81 percent of the nearly 19 million registered voters cast ballots.

It was Chavez's third re-election victory in nearly 14 years in office. The victory gives Chavez another six-year term to cement his legacy and press more forcefully for a transition to socialism in the country with the world's largest proven oil reserves.

Fireworks exploded in downtown Caracas, and Chavez's supporters celebrated waving flags and jumping for joy outside the presidential palace.

Chavez won more than 7.4 million votes, beating Capriles by more than 1.2 million votes, Lucena said.

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So let’s talk about the process of job creation, both in normal times and in times like these.

Demand for labor is so-called “derived demand” -- derived from the demand for goods and services that firms sell to consumers and investors. That can be anything from a Snickers bar (consumer good) to a steel bar (intermediate good) to barroom (investment good). As I explained in greater detail here, in normal times, job creation is a function of a virtuous cycle where growth generates income which drives consumption, signaling investors renew opportunities, generating more growth, etc.

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There's a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says: choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which they've taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of the Soviet system -- too often leaving their employees, customers, and other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back in the day.

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