These made me laugh —

Brits try to label the 50 states.

Americans try to label the countries of Europe.

I’m short on time so I’m ignoring the ongoing Obamacare hysteria, except to recommend this article by Jonathan Bernstein.

Instead, I want to write about this 74-year-old retired teacher who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting several female students under the age of 14. A whole lot of powerful people rushed to his defense, including (get this) Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr.

Granted, all of the incidents we know about took place before 1986. And he’s 74 now. But having read what he admitted to have done, I wouldn’t trust him with so much as a potted cactus. The investigation was kicked off when one of his former victims found out he was substitute teaching at her daughter’s grade school.

And because he used to teach at some exclusive elite school he knows a lot of influential people, and they just can’t believe he deserves to be punished. They not only want his sentence commuted, but they want him to continue his community work, which includes working with children. As the article says, he is “liked by the parents of the children he didn’t sexually abuse.”

You’d think that the parents of this upscale children would be alarmed. However, it may be that they assume a real sexual predator would be some shifty-eyed lowlife in shiny polyester suits, not this perfectly respectable man they all know. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

There’s a long conversation amongst leftie bloggers today over the failure of the progressive blog movement. My initial reaction was

1. There’s a progressive blog movement? (Well, yes, there was; see commentary below)
2. If we failed, precisely what did we fail at?

Much of this conversation was initiated by Ian Welsh, and let me say that Ian is a smart guy who, over the years, has been right about a few things that I misjudged. So I don’t want to be unnecessarily snarky here. If this topic interests you, here is the conversation thus far, by author, in sorta kinda chronological order:

Ian Welsh
Jerome Armstrong
John Cole (responding to Jerome Armstrong)
Booman (also responding to Jerome Armstrong)
Scott Lemieux (Responding to Ian Welsh and Jerome Armstrong)
Pachacutec
Athenae

With the caveat that I’m under big-time deadline pressure right now and don’t have time for the long and thoughtful post I’d like to write — A lot of good points are made by all authors, with the exception of Jerome Armstrong, who seems to think progressives should be joining forces with libertarians and Ron/Randbots. Um, no.

There was a time during the Bush Administration that progressive bloggers did seem to be a kind of movement, that we called Netroots, but this era of relative solidarity did not survive the 2008 primaries. Unlike others, I do not blame Barack Obama for that. It’s true that he did not cultivate the A-list bloggers as much as other candidates, such as Hillary Clinton, did, but he did speak at the Daily Kos convention in Chicago in 2007, so he didn’t ignore us entirely. I remember at the time there was a lot of buzz that the DK convention goers didn’t support him, but his break-out session was the first one to fill up. Lots of bullshit already was in the air, in other words.

What really killed the movement for me was the dismissive attitude of the kewl kids who were determined to make Hillary Clinton the nominee. Anyone who questioned their elite judgment was attacked as an “Obamabot.” I realize a lot of the Clinton supporters caught grief from the more rabid Obama supporters, but my impression was that the worst of the anti-Clinton snark was not coming from other bloggers. I found it impossible to have anything like a rational conversation with anyone, and even some actual fleshworld friendships did not survive the rancor. By the time the dust settled I considered myself out of the Netroots. I dropped out of the listservs and stopped cross-posting on other blogs. I also didn’t have the money after that to travel to conventions, anyway.

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what ended the “movement.” But anyone who thinks Hillary Clinton represented True Progressivism and would have listened to us after she became President was deluded, IMO.

Now, is it true that we accomplished nothing? We did not become kingmakers, that’s for sure. But some of the candidates supported by large chunks of the blogosophere — Howard Dean and John Warner come to mind — were in most ways even less progressive than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So if the point was to elect more progressive candidates, even if we had succeeded, we would have failed.

I do think we helped make it possible to get a few progressive voices on national media. The biggest reason I started blogging in 2002 was that progressives were entirely absent from television and radio and mostly absent in print media as well. I was either going to yell at the television or blog, and I decided to blog. Now we have some presence in media, such as Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Perry, and I think in an indirect way the strength of the progressive blogs helped made that possible. If nothing else it demonstrated that there were lots of people out there who were hungry more a more progressive perspective. Of course, news media still mostly suck.

There were many conversations back in the day of how the Netroots should relate to the Democratic Party. There was a general consensus that we must not be captured by the Democrats, but instead support more progressive candidates and work to push the Dems in a more progressive direction. In many ways the party has moved left at least a tad. There is much more robust support among Dems for reproductive rights, marriage rights, and economic populism than there was a decade ago. And I think progressive bloggers played a part in bringing those issues into our national political discourse.

However, I don’t blame Dems for wanting to keep us at arm’s length. More than anything else I think stunts like Jane Hamsher’s very visible and very hysterical anti-ACA campaign in 2009 and 2010 demonstrated that we couldn’t be counted on to support realistic and incremental progressive reform. Instead, too many of the A-listers harbored a completely fantastical notion that if we attacked the Democrats enough they would be scared into becoming more progressive.

In short, that was insane. And I still find it unfathomable how anyone bright enough to tie his own shoes could think that if the ACA had failed to pass, Congress would have opened its arms to single payer. Not on this planet.

So here we are, talking to ourselves, not influencing much of anything. I keep this blog going because I find it therapeutic, and I think some of you do, too, but I’m not kidding myself that I’m part of a movement any more.

Well, I’ve already gone on longer than I intended. Of the comments linked above, I second Athenae most of all. So for all the stuff I’m thinking and leaving out, read her.

I’ll be traveling until Monday night, so posting will be light. If at all. Do talk among yourselves.

The graphic is priceless.

By now you may have heard about possibly the Most Ignorant Interview in the History of Television, in which Fox News’s Laureen Green grilled religious scholar Reza Aslan about why a Muslim would want to write a book about Jesus. Yesterday Fox doubled down and hosted Brent Bozell, who declared that if Aslan really is “just a scholar” and not a propagandist/polemicist he can’t be a good Muslim. Seriously.

Aslan is no fool. After the interview his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth shot up to the top of the Amazon best seller list, and it’s still there as of this morning. I downloaded the book to my Kindle a couple of days ago, and wow, this guy is a good writer. I haven’t gotten to any parts talking about Jesus yet, but Aslan’s account of all the political/social nonsense going on in the Roman Empire at the time is genuinely engrossing, and some of it is new to me.

Another book I downloaded a few days ago is Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities by Chris Kluwe. I couldn’t resist a book written by a football jock titled Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies. This may be a girl thing. But it’s really a fun little read, along the lines of good blog writing.

Another recommendation, briefly reviewed at the other site, is a novel, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being I hardly ever find a novel I actually like, and I actually liked this one.

This last book might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I got a kick out of it — There Is No God and He Is Always With You, by Brad Warner, also reviewed and blogged about at the other site.

Oh, and if you buy any books from the evil Amazon — and yeah, it’s Amazon — if you get to Amazon by clicking on the Amazon ad in the right-hand column here, I get a small cut of the profits.

A couple of related bits — I got a kick out of Facing Facts: 15 pieces of advice to give your kids about race, fear and everything else by Alexandra Petri, which is a nice mocking of Victor Davis Hanson’s recent racist screed. Follow up with a recent Colbert “word” segment.

Although I usually avoid it, every time I’ve read Victor Davis Hanson’s florid and supercilious prose I’ve imagined him looking like a gaseous cloud, possibly a fart, wearing a bow tie and a monocle. But his National Review photo reveals that he looks like a normal human being, which goes to show you can’t judge people by what they look like.

His most recent column reveals him to be a garden variety racist, albeit one who knows big words. Ta-Nehisi Coates takes him down so I don’t have to. And may I say, this is a bit like watching Leonardo da Vinci critique Thomas Kinkade.

White men who believe the key to personal safety is avoiding black men crack me up. All kind of data say that I am more likely to be sexually assaulted by a white man than by a black one. And, frankly, I don’t remember ever being physically threatened by a black person, although there have been some white men who scared the stuffing out of me.

So, by Victor David Hanson’s logic, I should have sat my children down and told them to avoid white people. But my blue-eyed Celtic-American offspring might have found that difficult.

In other stupid news, Hunter informs us that Jennifer Rubin has declared racism in America to be solved.

She’s got an assigned seat in St. Peter’s press room.