Is there anything Rahm has been involved in over the last year that turned out well for the left-leaning sector of the party?  I can't think of anything.

Don't imagine this will be the exception.

I'm expecting a center-right nominee out of the box, who gets jettisoned for someone even farther to the right.

At some point, the barometer needs to stop being "who the GOP will accept" and start being "who the Democrats actually want," and the strategy needs to stop being "see how hard we are trying to please the GOP and be bipartisan," and start being "elections have consequences and this is how we're going to put the country on a better path."

They cost money. They waste energy. Every night. Every day of the year.

Next door to where I live there are street lights that glare on properties all night long. Maybe they don't notice, but still they do nothing for others passing by their houses.

A block from where I live there are street lights that glare on those properties all night long.

While I'm paying for those street lights, two or three positions in our local school system are being cut this year. One or two were cut last year.

So, though we're losing teachers at our local schools, we've got lots of street lights about which the best can be said is no one notices. The energy companies make out nicely, but teachers get fired.

I say remove the street lights and keep the teachers.

So far all the theories that "they can't get married" or "celibacy" giving reasons to why it seems so prevalent- the data says bunk!

The Catholic sex-abuse stories emerging every day suggest that Catholics have a much bigger problem with child molestation than other denominations and the general population. Many point to peculiarities of the Catholic Church (its celibacy rules for priests, its insular hierarchy, its exclusion of women) to infer that there's something particularly pernicious about Catholic clerics that predisposes them to these horrific acts. It's no wonder that, back in 2002--when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines--a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests "frequently'' abused children.

Yet experts say there's simply no data to support the claim at all. No formal comparative study has ever broken down child sexual abuse by denomination, and only the Catholic Church has released detailed data about its own. But based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."