http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSbBIj9Yft0

Y’all, this is either the Seventh Sign or something good is happening.

Using strikingly open language, a new Vatican report says the church should welcome and appreciate gays, and offers a solution for divorced and remarried Catholics who want to receive Communion.

Amazing, right?

Next up:  women are human beings.

Dinesh D’Souzais one of the more slimy Republican mouthpieces.  He recently plead guilty to violating campaign law when he bypassed the whole campaign donation limits by having straw men donate to a friend during her campaign and then reimbursing the straw men.

That’s illegal and he knew it was illegal but he did it anyway.

When it got to be sentencing time, D’Souzais’ lawyers argued that he was a contrite man and felt real bad about breaking the law so maybe that was punishment enough.

However, the judge had read an article that D’Souzais wrote lamenting that he was the victim of “selective prosecution” so that dog didn’t hunt with the judge.

“I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” Berman said before announcing the sentence. “And it is still hard for me to discern any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

And the sentence?

D’Souza, 53, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan to live in a center, which would allow him to leave during non-residential hours for employment, for the first eight months of a five-year probationary period.

Berman also ordered D’Souza to perform one day of community service a week during probation, undergo weekly therapy and pay a $30,000 fine.

So who jumps up and offers to help D’Souza pay the fine?

Louie Gohmert.

So the next time Louie want to talk about being tough on crime, maybe not so much when Republicans cause the crime.

However, there is an upside.  This is a felony conviction and D’Souza is still on paper so he cannot vote in the midterms.  And, unless he is released from probation early, he can’t vote in the 2016 Presidential election.  I wonder why the judge didn’t consider barring him from politics like Pete Rose was barred from baseball?

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.

First off, we have David Vitter, congressimbecile from Louisiana.  Vitter is asking members of congress to “block any additional funding to combat Ebola until the Obama administration more clearly details its plans to stop the deadly outbreak.”

The reason that Vitter wants a a detailed plan?

“Instead of using powers given to him, the President is requesting $1 billion for a plan that has not been presented to members of Congress, focuses on Africa, and largely ignores our own borders,” he wrote.

Okay, but when the President tries to use his powers, y’all call for his impeachment so, you know, this kinda looks like a trap to me.

And Vitter opposes fighting Ebola at the source.  It would be much smarter to wait until we’re fighting it in Baton Rouge.  Or freekin Dallas!

And then we have Erick Erickson, the conservative commentator who says that the fault for the spread of Ebola lies not with Republicans in congress who cut funds for research but at the true source — fat lesbians.

Yep – not a typo – fat lesbians.

Erickson pooh-poohs the budget cuts to agencies like the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control. All the evidence you need that the agencies have plenty of cash, he argues, is in some of the research items they’ve funded.

Erickson’s post, titled “Fat Lesbians Got All the Ebola Dollars, But Blame the GOP,” cites an NIH-funded study examining why lesbians confront higher rates of obesity; the research is in line with other demographic studies examining public health challenges, but Erickson seized on the study to wage a demagogic attack on the agency for frivolously “studying the propensity of lesbians to be fat.” He also attacked CDC research on gun violence and smoking cessation.

Congratulations, Erick!  You keep the “crazy homophobe with severely limited IQ points” title.  And that, my friend, is quite an accomplishment considering the conservative competition.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up!

Last August I told you about Greg Abbott filing briefs saying that the purpose of marriage is procreation and that why we can’t be having marriage equality.

Now I took this to be a slam against me personally because Ole Bubba and me ain’t in the procreation business any longer so I suspect our marriage would insult Greg Abbott’s world view.

Since August, the boy has doubled down on dumb.

He’s now arguing that the gay marriage ban reduces the number of out-of-wedlock births.

Okay, I’ll wait here while you get your brain put back together.

Attorney General Greg Abbott says Texas’ same-sex marriage ban should remain in place because legalizing it would do little or nothing to encourage heterosexual couples to get married and have children.

Abbott writes —

Texas’s marriage laws are rationally related to the State’s interest in reducing unplanned out-of-wedlock births. By channeling procreative heterosexual intercourse into marriage, Texas’s marriage laws reduce unplanned out-of-wedlock births and the costs that those births impose on society. Recognizing same-sex marriage does not advance this interest because same-sex unions do not result in pregnancy.”

So by not having gay marriage means that gay people will marry a member of the opposite gender and have babies because we are “channeling” them to do that.

Honey, if he lets go of that stretch, he’ll boomerang for about a week.

You know, for the past two decades, Republicans have called Democrats weak and soft.  They portray us as tree huggers and bleeding hearts.  They say we are not tough enough to stand up and govern.

Oh yes we are.

Following Greg Abbott’s use of his wheelchair as a campaign centerpiece, Wendy Davis took to the airways to remind people that Greg Abbott is so damn mean and heartless that he has kept other people in wheelchairs from suing and pocketing $10plus million like Abbott did.

He uses his wheelchair to gain sympathy and votes, yet he oddly has no sympathy for others.

Greg Abbott was hit by a falling tree in a freak accident while he was out jogging.  He sued the homeowners.

If your wheelchair is a campaign star, once saying “a guy in a wheelchair can move faster than traffic” and another time saying he got strong by using his wheelchair to go up ramps in parking garages, then you threw the ball in the air and you can’t whine when she hits it.

But whine he does.

I represent disabled Texans on the State Democratic Executive Committee, the group of people who are elected to lead and guide the Texas Democratic Party.  The Texas Republican Party has no such position.  In the 40 page Texas GOP platform, the word disabled or disability is only mentioned once, on page 17.  That entry only refers to people with mental disabilities; physical disabilities are never mentioned.  Not even once.  On the other hand, the Texas Democratic platform has an entire section on Texans with disabilities on page 53.

You tell me which party cares about disabilities.

Thanks to the efforts of Greg Abbott, if a ten year old child has the wrong leg amputated by a drug addicted doctor, the most that child can recover for a lifetime is $250,000.  That’s what Greg Aboott says a leg is worth to a child.  Unless, of course, it’s Greg Abbott’s leg.

That, my friends, is a very legitimate campaign issue.

I will leave it to others to determine if the ad is effective but I can say with total certainty that is not mean.

Wendy Davis is not saying that Greg Abbott is not qualified to be Governor because he can’t walk.  She’s saying he’s not qualified to be Governor because he can’t think.

Why are Greg Abbott’s legs worth 40 times more than your child’s legs?   That is mean.