Source: Salon

For years they struck fear in the hearts of progressive Catholic candidates. They could, and did, help destroy presidential campaigns. The media took them seriously, reporting on their pronouncements as representative of a significant bloc of conservative Catholics. They were not legion; but they were powerful. They were the Christian right’s smaller, more shadowy counterpart: the Catholic right wing.

But now, many of their leading spokesmen—and they are almost all men—have been discredited within a stunningly short period. Former lights of the Catholic right like Bill Donohue and Cardinal Raymond Burke have seen their clout dissipate almost overnight. How did this happen and what does it mean for progressive Catholic candidates eyeing 2016?

Many on the right were the victims of their own rhetoric run amok. Catholic League President Bill Donohue is being widely pilloried for asserting in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack that “Muslims are right to be angry,” and that Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonnier played a role in his own death. “Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive,” Donohue said in a statement that horrified even fellow conservatives.

Donohue, the leading proponent of the “war on Christmas” and other ginned-up made-for-Fox-News controversies over supposedly anti-Catholic persecution, was the ringleader behind efforts to discredit John Kerry with people of faith during the 2004 presidential election. He attacked Mara Vanderslice, Kerry’s first director of religious outreach, as an “ultra-leftist who consorts with anti-Catholic bigots” because of her work with organizations like ACT UP, an AIDS advocacy group that criticized the Catholic Church’s ban on condoms. The accusations spooked the Kerry campaign enough that they removed Vanderslice as head of outreach, even as Kerry, who is a committed Catholic, faltered in the polls with people of faith.

Read more:
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/18/the_pope_francis_revolution_inside_the_catastrophic_collapse_of_the_catholic_right/

source: Daily KOS

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is the liberal that all liberals should mimic. He is sticking to the liberal values that got him elected by an overwhelming 73 percent of the vote. He refuses to attenuate his stance on social justice even as sects within the New York City Police Department are attempting to coerce him into doing so. He remains the stiff-spine liberal that takes no crap.
De Blasio clearly was never going to be a hero to NYPD’s rank-and-file leadership. He campaigned in support of a more inclusive department and to rein in stop-and-frisk policing. The NYPD leadership could not quite frame him as an anti-law-and-order liberal because he broke away and supported certain policing methods many liberals were apprehensive about. He did not want to end stop-and-frisk or "broken windows" policing outright—he wanted to use those policies as tools when necessary. This meant, of course, less racial profiling and much less harassment for the sake of showing police authority.

The NYPD rank-and-file leadership thought they got their moment with de Blasio’s comment after police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death, which can be read below the fold.

Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/18/1358172/-Will-Bill-de-Blasio-teach-liberals-that-liberals-with-a-spine-win

A friend of mine is in the process of losing her mother. She has been in the hospital for two weeks and is getting weaker daily. She is on high volume O2 to breathe, and today her so called doctor told my friend if she would "allow him to turn the O2 down from 12 liters to 5 liters, her mother would die faster".
I know when my mother was dying I would have done anything to stave off her dying as long as possible and if I had not I would drown in guilt for the rest of my life. My friend is already in a bad way, I hesitate to think what she would do if she followed his advice. I told her to tell him to go fuck himself.

I don't know what kind of heartless scumbag he is but I hope sometime he gets a dose of his own medicine with as much humanity as he shows.

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Miss Georgia Rae

She was given to me as a birthday present last week. She is an eight week old YorkiePoo