Betty Bowers has some bullet points for you on the gun debate

 And only the "pro" ones are hollow.

New ad spotlights can of worms represented by anti-gay cakemaker case before Supreme Court case now before the Supreme Court

Virtually every time a homophobic judge is nominated for confirmation, @SenatorFischer and @BenSasse haul out their well-worn rubber stamps.
     Should Neil Gorsuch's vote be a deciding green light for gay wedding cake refusniks in the case now before the supreme court, a Pandora's box of similar bias in public accommodations could escape. From Lambda Legal:

Trump’s judicial nominees with anti-LGBT records include: Neil Gorsuch, Gregory Katsas, Kyle Duncan, Don Willett, John K. Bush, Amy Coney Barrett, Allison Eid, Stephanos Bibas, Joan Larsen, Steven Grasz, David Stas, Mark Norris, Jeff Mateer, Matthew Kacsmaryk, Stephen Schwartz, and Damien Schiff.

The first video below is not a pressure group ad concoction. It is based on an actual case in Mississippi.

Throwback Thursday: Why was the Beatle's gay manager smirking at Wayne Fontana on Hullabaloo?

We can't read Brian's 1965 mind, but it probably had something to do with the lyrics of The Game of Love, a smash that reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 the week of April 24, 1965.
     The clever director cut to Epstein just as Wayne Fontana began to sing: "The purpose of a man is to love a woman and the purpose of a woman is to love a man."
     This was probably uncontainably amusing to Epstein. (Epstein once asked John Lennon what he thought his book (Epstein's bio, A Cellar Full of Noise) should be called. Lennon suggested "Queer Jew." Later, Lennon changed his mind and said the book should have been called A Cellarful of Boys." Note to right wing cranks: Epstein was not a pedophile and that isn't what Lennon meant.)
     Fontana (né Glyn Geoffrey Ellis) could be a handful. From Wikipedia:

In 2005, he fought off bankruptcy but was arrested after police were called by bailiffs who went to his home in Glossop, Derbyshire. He poured petrol on the bonnet of a bailiff's car and set it alight with the bailiff still inside. Fontana was remanded in custody on 25 May 2007. He later appeared at Derby Crown Court dressed as Lady Justice, complete with a sword, scales, crown, cape and dark glasses, and claiming "justice is blind". He dismissed his lawyers. On 10 November 2007 he was sentenced to 11 months for setting fire to the car but was released because he had already served the equivalent of the term, having been held under the Mental Health Act 1983. After his release he settled in Spain.

Below: the best audio you will ever hear of this song. Use headphones. The camera cuts to Brian Epstein at 1:45.

A curious gap in the twitter timeline of Parkland teen antigun activist accused of tweeting 'Fuck fags'

David Hogg is a core members of the Parkland high school teens who are now outspoken gun control activists after seeing 17 classmates murdered and their school shot up. Now he and his friends are targets of right wingers. The other day, Erik Erickson smeared Hogg in a piece in which Erickson prepostrously accussed Hogg of bullying Dana Loesch, the NRA's pitbull flack.
     On Twitter, lesser-known ammosexual apologists than Erickson are now piling on, including one who calls himself "Chief-10beers" who tweeted this to Hogg:

We don't know if the homophobic Hogg tweet Chief-10beers claims to have unearthed is real or forged, but there is a rather startling gap in @DavidHogg111's twitter timeline from November 20, 2015 to October 25, 2016, a black hole including the alleged tweet of 6/27/2016.
     Before and after that gap, Hogg tweeted often. Looks to us like somebody just made a lot of his tweets vanish, although it's possible Hogg took a twitter sabbatical.
     In any case, Chief-10beers posted an interesting tweet himself:

Teacher, teach thyself.

Four pieces you should read about the gun debate

Did you know that although the NRA controls Florida's legislature more tightly than it does in any other state, the organization's PAC has not made a single direct contribution to any current member of the Florida House or Senate in 10 years, according to the New York Times? 
     Did you know that what most defines an assault weapon isn't how fast the semiautomatic or automatics fire, but the velocity of the bullets they fire? A Parkland radiologist explained the grisly details from an Emergency Department perspective in The Atlantic.
     Did you know that Florida's NRA enforcer/lobbyist is a old, pint-sized woman who so terrifies legislators that they won't even cross her in naming a state bird? Tracer and the New Yorker investigated Marion Hammer. HuffPost had the bird anecdote.

Creighton TPUSA chapter hosts Ben Shapiro, who falsely claimed that Jews are hate crime victims as often as LGBTs

1900 people were in attendance. There were two protesters. In 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center called Shapiro out for minimizing antiLGBT discrimination and excoriated his arithmetic competency for claiming that the number of hate crimes committed against Jews and LGBTs were equivalent.

Source

     Breitbart’s [then] editor-at-large, said that, “[t]his is not a country that discriminates against homosexuals” and that “there is a vastly minute amount of discrimination against gays in this country.” To back up his argument, Shapiro cited the fact that the FBI’s hate crime statistics “show there are about the same number of attacks on Jews in this country as there are homosexuals.”

     Oh, Ben. Ye of little math skills.
     If Shapiro had taken the time to account for the share of the population that the LGBT community makes up, he would have discovered that the community suffers violent hate crimes at rates far higher than other targeted populations. In fact, an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center of 15 years of FBI hate crimes data showed that the LGBT community is far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime.
      Unlike Shapiro, we did the math. You can see it here.