Meanwhile, on Facebook: "Little Jebbie"

Very funny. Attribution, unknown
(but I'm happy to add it, should anyone know).

 

Meanwhile, on Facebook: Anti-Marriage Equality Group Changes Mission

A lot of people wonder what drives groups that put out ballot amendments to outlaw same-sex marriage as strenuously as possible, and spend millions of dollars to do so. These same groups will then fight tooth-and-nail to keep those laws intact, fight when they are overturned, and keep plugging away after the battle is lost. And you've got to wonder, why? I mean, for actual gay people and their allies, there is a vested interest: equal civil marriage equality.  It's a tangible, real-world thing they're fighting for. The anti- side? They win or lose exactly nothing either way. Everything in their fear-mongering arsenal is hypothetical, vague, even though marriage equality has been with us in parts of the country for 10 years.

There's been a lot of speculation that the reason is money. Gobs and gobs of money.  Scaring people about the eeeevil gays attaining a marriage of equality is lucrative, if you scare the right people. Brian Brown, the head honcho at the (badly named) National Organization for Marriage makes six figures annually. NOM was a couple million in the red last year, but Brown got paid. Still, with the massive success of the marriage equality movement over the last couple of years, another mystery is what they'll all do once the anti-gay money train runs off the tracks?

Shift gears! Exploit another aspect of your tangled web of religion and politics! Well, I don't know if that's what NOM will do, or its affiliates and "family"-named compatriots. But here's just one example, one of the smaller groups populating Facebook is changing its name from "I Support Traditional Marriage," to the much more dramatic (and nonetheless vague) "Warriors for Christ." Their new motto is, "We will not keep silent." Because free speech, of course, and I've gotta wonder who they imagine has been silencing them. Maybe that's the new angle: paranoia over "persecution" of Christians? I'd bet on it.

By the way, if you think this is trivial because of the small number of followers this page had, I agree. But keep in mind, though NOM does fairly well on Facebook with 39K followers, their Twitter followers are logging about 7,000. How many of them are people like me, keeping tabs on them would be speculation, but I speculate: half. And even if every one was legit, that's a fairly paltry number of followers for a movement. For contrast, The Rachel Maddow Show has 1.1 million Facebook likes, and 2.8 million Twitter followers.

Meanwhile, on Facebook: Enough with the Umbrella-gate

The moment I smelled the first whiff of "Umbrella-gate," I knew it was ridiculous. The more I saw about it, the more evident it was that this was nothing more than naked racism and/or full-blown Obama Derangement Syndrome. It's nothing short of ridiculous. Let this photo, currently floating around on Facebook, be the last word on it, all right? Okay then.

Meanwhile, on Facebook Gun Control, Right vs. Left

 Submitted without comment. . .

Click to embiggen

Meanwhile, on Facebook: The Media Hokey-Pokey

Brilliant.

And I love that it looks like Sean Hannity. . .

Meanwhile, on Facebook: Tick-Tock, Ted Nugent. . .

Meanwhile on Facebook: Guns vs. Knives, A Bad Analogy

You hear it all the time regarding politics and hot button issues: both sides do it. Meaning, both sides are equal in their horribleness in whatever way they're being horrible right now. As a liberal, but also a somewhat dispassionate observer--at least over topics that aren't my hot-button issues--I think on the gun control/gun rights issue, the right is nuttier than the left. There are exceptions, but liberals don't tend to get as instantly frothy over guns.

One area where both sides can get out of hand though, is memes. These images with words are passed around on social media, and sometimes can be very clever. Sometimes they can be informative, and sometimes they can really grab you. Other times, they only think they're clever, and are in reality deeply stupid. Also frequently in bad taste. Throw in abuses in punctuation, spelling and grammar, and they can really be a mess. Take this image, now floating around on Facebook

The target (pardon the pun) is ripe for parody, were the subject matter not in almost-impossible-to-pull-off comedy danger territory. Hint: too soon. And even though the best humor exaggerates the truth, this one misses the mark (pardon) for a very large, glaring reason:

The crazy guy who stabbed all of those people? He didn't manage to kill any of them.

That's a fairly stark difference between a mass stabbing and a mass shooting. Nobody has ever argued that there aren't crazy people. That crazy people aren't dangerous. That other weapons aren't dangerous in the wrong hands. The aim is to try to do something to prevent mass murder. Most weapons outside of guns and bombs are very inefficient for killing lots of people in a short period of time. Bombs and bomb making materials are subject to pretty tight restrictions and laws. Why aren't guns?*

The other day I posted a very bad analogy between guns and cars. Now this one. I'm sure there are many more, and I'll try to explore those as I find them.




*Come to think of it, there are fast ways to kill lots of people, like toxins, poisons, hijackings, and other terrorism. But last I looked we have a war on most of that stuff, and people don't seem to mind (or at least put up with) controls, restrictions and laws around all of that stuff.

Meanwhile on Facebook: "John Boehner's Greatest Hits!"

The Weeping Orange Boner Boehner Sings! From bewareofimages.com

Meanwhile on Facebook: Obama Leads Romney 60/40

An unofficial poll--okay, it's just Facebook "likes" amongst my list of friends--has Mitt Romney losing the election 30 to 45 out of 75 people willing to "like" one or the other! Do I have a liberal-leaning sample group? No, not really. My family is made up of both, as are my other friends, many of whom are from my high school days. I even have four hard-right pastors in there (yeah, I'm not sure why either).

Meanwhile, on Facebook: SNL's Steffan on The Republican National Convention

Meanwhile, on Facebook: Mitt Romney's Bogus Charges

Yeah, I'm still not getting the "division, hatred and anger" charges coming out of camp Romney/Ryan. I think they're still desperate to change the direction of the storyline, and they'll grab anything they can use as an oar. The President at his most strident rarely emotes anything harsher than a stern lecture. This cartoon--currently floating around on Facebook--captures the argument perfectly.