In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States; old as well as new, North as well as South.

Abe is referring to the various attempts to compartmentalize, minimize, or otherwise make the issue of slavery conveniently recede into the background so politicians would not have to deal with it. Of course they all failed and ultimately the nation had to confront the question directly and decide it definitively.

For years now the Supreme Court has been doing its damnedest to pass the hot potato on gay marriage. Different states have passed different laws regarding it and different federal courts have issued conflicting decisions. Because the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution requires things like marriage licenses issued in one state to be recognized as valid by others, it simply is untenable for this patchwork, confusing approach to continue. Now that one federal district court has ruled California's Prop 8 unconstitutional we have reached the decision point. Gay marriage bans cannot be unconstitutional in one state or one federal court district but constitutional in others.

We have kicked the can down the road for too long already. It is time to decide whether we will become all one thing or all the other. Is this legal or is it not? Will all states recognize legal gay marriages or will none? The Supreme Court appears to be painted into a corner. An appeal of this decision is a certainty and it is unimaginable that the Court would be so derelict in its responsibilities that it would not accept the case. My confidence in the current Court to make the correct decision here is shaky, but regardless we need this issue to come to a head. The status quo is untenable and it is time for the Supreme Court to do its job.

As an aside, if the dissenting opinion in the Perry case is any indication we are in for some disastrously poor legal reasoning from the gay marriage opponents on the Supreme Court.

To be fair, backmasking is a technique that appears on a number of popular recordings since it was popularized in the Sixties by the Beatles. The problem is that the human brain is good at pattern recognition (it can find things that sound like words from a bunch of random noises) and it's even better at hearing what it wants to hear. If you're convinced that a backward Def Leppard song contains satanic messages, then lo and behold you're going to find some. So we destroy the line between actual backmasking done intentionally by artists and the figments of Jerry Falwell's imagination.

Many of you might not remember this wave of hysteria (complete with high-profile trials against bands accused of inspiring listeners to do horrible things with hidden satanic messages) but you see something very similar today in politics: the insistence that everything is secretly brainwashing people with the hidden liberal/gay/feminist/etc agenda. Remember when Tinky-Winky the Teletubby was secretly pushing the gay agenda? Or when the Muppets were secretly pushing a radical anti-oil agenda? Just two of many examples of creeping liberal brainwashing in action.

As soon as I heard about the Chrysler Super Bowl ad ("Halftime" starring Clint Eastwood) in the weeks leading up to the game, I was pretty sure that it would ignite a shitstorm of ridiculous accusations from conservatves about…something. It wasn't clear what or how, but somehow this commercial was going to be secret liberal propaganda. Sure, it stars lifelong Republican Clint Eastwood pitching cars for a quintessential Old Money megacorporation. That doesn't matter though. It's, you know, a secret Obama ad or something.

And of course that is exactly what has happened. The right's leading intellectual lights are lining up to accuse the ad – which was a parade of Chrysler vehicles under generic "America is awesome and will rise again!" sentimentality and stirring pictures/music/narration – of everything from being an Obama campaign ad to some sort of corrupt bargain with Chrysler executives who need to get Obama re-elected in exchange for the bailout money they received (from George W. Bush). I know that doesn't make sense to you or me, but that is because we are not paranoid wingnuts.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a song just a song, and a commercial for cars just a commercial for cars. Conservatives' wild imaginations ensure that nothing is really what it seems anymore. You can't see the subtle messages, but their trained eyes can detect the liberal agenda everywhere and they're eager to explain to the rest of us that essentially everything except Fox News, John Wayne movies, and old video clips of Ronald Reagan is thinly disguised left wing propaganda.

Although imperfect, the comparison works on levels beyond the superficial. The main characteristics they share in common are, in no particular order: great personal wealth that they're willing to blow against an incumbent, the generic "Looks like a president" physical characteristics (tall, white, full head of graying hair), the perception of aloofness stemming from their fortunes, and complete malleability on issues and ideological positions. They are the kind of classic, people-pleaser politicians who follow the general direction of the wind. They both fit stereotypes that their parties try to avoid – the Massachusetts Liberal and the Plutocrat.

They are both also the kind of person you nominate when the party doesn't have any good candidates. They both pass the "You'll Do, I Guess" test with flying colors. As long as the field is full of scrubs – the 2004/2012 analogy works well here – everyone gravitates to the tall rich guy who doesn't sound completely insane or have lots of baggage. Nobody wants to nominate someone like Kerry or Romney, but you have to nominate someone and Boring > Crazy in the hierarchy of default nominees.

That said, there are some key differences. Nobody in the Democratic Party had the kind of hostility toward Kerry that vast segments of the GOP appear to have toward Mittens. Most people found Kerry drab and, if anything, more liberal than the median Democrat. Romney, on the other hand, is treated as an impostor – "not a real conservative." Romney's religion also introduces an element into the campaign that was absent in 2004. Issue-wise, Kerry may have been "flexible" but he looks as dogmatic as the Pope compared to Romney. And despite the fact that they share great wealth, their means of acquiring it was different and, for Kerry, less controversial.

I think the overarching premise is valid, though more because of similarities between the elections than the candidates. We have an incumbent hovering at or slightly below 50% approval and subject to fanatical hatred from opposing partisans. The incumbent is vulnerable, if only the challengers could rustle up a decent candidate. Unfortunately they can't, so they go with the best of a poor field and hope that being Not Bush or Not Obama is good enough to motivate people to support their weak nominee. It isn't, and the relatively unpopular incumbent squeaks out a win in a low turnout election in which no one gets excited about anyone or anything.

Romney = Kerry isn't a bad analogy, but the key difference is Romney's lack of acceptance among key elements of the GOP base. I just didn't see that with Kerry. Democrats were severely ambivalent toward him as a candidate, yes. There was not the sense that he was a Fake Democrat, though, nor wings of the party talking about 3rd Party or independent candidacies to wage ideological war. It was a rare example of the disorganized Democratic Party uniting, and now with Romney, and to a lesser extent McCain, we see the usually lock-step GOP splintering into factions that can't agree about anything except Obama Bad.

The famous Soul Train host died on Wednesday, leading to many topical Facebook posts and shared video clips. I remember the show well from childhood – it followed Saturday morning cartoons and was also popular on Sunday evenings – but it is hardly an integral part of my life or memories. It has been a good 25 years since I watched or thought about it. But this clip, of the much-loved "line dance" portion of the show, caught my eye:

A lot of things have changed in 30-plus years, obviously, but it is striking how much different these people look than the ones we see on TV today (or would see if Soul Train was still on the air). They look like real people. No fake hair, fake boobs, fake nails, fake collagen-pumped lips, fake eyelashes, or fake smiles. The women don't look like porn stars and the men don't look like steroid addled He-Men with abs like cheese graters and zeppelin arms. They're all dressed loudly but quite differently. And they look like they're having actual fun rather than wearing fake, practiced personalities for the camera.

Nothing's easier than idealizing the past – usually unjustifiably – so I'm trying to tread lightly here. It's just surprising to me in a way that has probably already occurred to older readers to see how the idealized image of cool people listening to cool music has become so overwhelmingly fake and detached from reality in a relatively short period of time. Would any of these women make it on an MTV-type program today without a boob job and/or lipo? Would any of those guys be trying to make it in Hollywood today without hitting the gym until they looked like UFC fighters? And we wonder why kids transition to adulthood with such horribly distorted self images these days. I'm sure the pressure to be thin and pretty has been around forever, but it would be nice if Hollywood suggested that you could look like an actual human being and still be cool.

That's what I thought. No one ever picks A.

As a preface, please consult Lea Goldman's outstanding, well-researched article "The Big Business of Breast Cancer", which represents what may be the one and only outgoing link to Marie Claire magazine I will ever offer. It details the proliferation of scams in the charity industry (a fitting, if oxymoronic, term) that has sprouted up around breast cancer. There are many organizations that use the funds they raise primarily to raise more funds and pay handsome salaries to the administrators and their talentless family members. It is a long read but well worth it. Note well the point that breast cancer research is hardly suffering for lack of funds. The author conservatively estimates six billion dollars funneled toward research annually with almost no progress made since the 1970s.

Second, just in case you missed what all of the fuss is about, the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm For the Cure^tm announced on Wednesday that it will no longer be making grants/contributions to Planned Parenthood for early breast cancer screenings for the poor and/or uninsured. Nothing says "We're committed to stamping out breast cancer by encouraging regular, early mammograms" like eliminating funding for mammograms.

OK.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm has been on my personal shitlist for many years (this post is from 2008). If this is what it takes to get you on the heretofore lonely Screw Komen bandwagon, so be it. But you should not have a low opinion of Komen^tm because of their announcement on Wednesday. You should have a low opinion of them because they're a fake charity run like any other company with a product to sell. In this case the product is a combination of guilt, pity, and hope dissolved in a weak acid and dyed a nauseating pink.

Wednesday's decision has been described as motivated by pressure from pro-life groups, but in reality Komen^tm is (and always has been) run by right wingers and closely aligned with conservative politics. The organization's current president, Karen Handel, ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 and lost in the Republican primary. Sarah Palin endorsed her. During her campaign she promised repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood. She took over Komen^tm a few months ago. You do the math. On a personal note, Karen, I hope you get cancer. I hope the doctors find it too late to do anything but treat your pain, and I hope they do a poor job of that. Cut and paste that at your leisure to prove how mean-spirited and Uncivil liberals are.

Komen's founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, is a big money Republican with ties to the past three Republican administration who received a political appointment from George W. Bush as a reward for her fundraising largesse. She draws a salary of $459,000 annually, money well spent compared to the 39% of its budget the foundation spends on "public health education" (i.e., marketing itself). Not to mention that they also spend a million bucks per year in legal fees to threaten other non-profit groups who use the phrase For the Cure^tm, to which Komen^tm claims to have intellectual property rights.

That last part is important to the organization, of course, because every successful marketing campaign needs a good logo and a slogan. And that's all Komen is – a consulting firm that helps large corporate clients sell more of their products through pinkwashing campaigns. By slathering everything from pasta to baseball bats to perfume to fast food with the Pink Imprimatur, consumers are led to believe that their purchases are making meaningful contributions to breast cancer research. Somewhere down the line a few cents per purchase may trickle into those bloated coffers, but the immediate and motivating effect of that pink packaging is to get you to buy things. In short, Komen^tm is a group of salespeople selling image. Whatever money benefits the sick, researchers, or recovering patients is ancillary. Getting those big, fat tax-exempt checks from their Partners for the Cure^tm is what drives their business model.

Am I too cynical? Consider their lack of discretion in choosing Partners^tm. Nothing says "We're serious about stomping out cancer!" like a pink bucket of fried chicken or pink bags of deep fried snacks. It's ridiculous on that "Earth Day brought to you by Ford" level.

There is a special circle of hell devoted to people who conceal their own selfish behavior with the appearance of charity and good deeds. I suppose that people who make so much money on the suffering of others need some way to look their spa-treated faces in the mirror every morning, but the rest of us need not be deceived. I have never purchased a Komen^tm-labeled product and I hope you will make a similar arrangement with your conscience today. Playing politics with people's lives is low, even by the withered standards of morality in the corporate world. The 60% of women whose breast cancer is detected before it metastasizes survive almost without exception. The 40% of women whose cancer is detected after metastasis almost inevitably die within five years.

Regardless of whether they cave to public pressure and reverse this decision, I would love to see the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm and its self-aggrandizing, silly publicity stunts reduced to ground zero. I want corporate sponsors to feel like they'd rather put a swastika on their packaging than another Komen^tm logo for fear of a public backlash. And I want to prove that charitable giving is not wedded to the act of shopping. And since I'm so much better at pointing out what's wrong with everything than at offering solutions, here's what you should do if you want to help the fight against breast cancer:

1. Donate directly. Call or visit the Sloan-Kettering or Johns Hopkins/Avon cancer research institutes and ask how to make a donation that will go 100% toward research. Or donate to the American Cancer Society, which contributes less to research but does a lot of quality-of-life things like buying wigs or prosthesis for cancer victims. Donate locally to a hospital or hospice in your area that will use your money directly on patient services rather than commercials and administrative salaries.

2. Donate your time. One afternoon helping Chemo patients by cleaning their home or running their errands is worth more than all the yogurt lids in existence.

3. Say no to fake activism and Cause Marketing.

4. Remember that people die from things other than breast cancer. Cervical and ovarian cancer are overlooked. Men needlessly die from the reluctance to get regular prostate exams. AIDS is still a thing. Heart disease is the #1 killer of men and women. Depression is a leading cause of death among young people.

5. Share this with as many uninformed people as possible. On Facebook, via email, or whatever. Show them Lea Goldman's article. Explain patiently why Planned Parenthood is used as a pinata by every floundering right wing political figure to score cheap points and get the rubes whipped into a frenzy. If you encounter said rubes directly, insult them. Suggest that his or her parents were related prior to marriage.

Not being a practitioner of any organized religion, I understand the factionalism and various interdenominational rivalries adequately but not completely. I get it that evangelical Christians (let's safely assume they made up the vast majority of religiously inclined South Carolina GOP primary voters) have extremely negative views of Mormonism. It was clear that this would be an issue with his candidacy from the outset, but I never really processed it or attempted to understand it.

All religion is based on faith, and specifically the belief in miraculous events. Don't flip out here. What I mean is, Christians believe that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead. As people cannot rise from the dead (or, in the case of lucky Lazarus, be risen) one can only base a belief that such things occurred on considerable faith in a higher power. I'm not making fun of anyone. This is simply the reality of believing in something that can't be empirically validated. As such every religion, logically speaking, is equally plausible. The only reason Mormonism gets more crap is because the miraculous events upon which it is based occurred more recently and thus are treated with a greater degree of skepticism. Mohammed and the Buddha and Jesus and the gang were lucky to exist before photography, the telegram, and newspapers. Not so for ol' Joseph Smith.

My point here is that while the core beliefs of Mormonism may appear silly to the non-religious or merely the non-Mormon, they're no sillier (or less plausible) than the stories of the Old Testament or the Bhagavad Gita. It all requires the willing suspension of the laws of physical reality and a belief in a supernatural power. Fine. So why do born-again Christians have such fanatical hostility toward Mormonism? While Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants, and other major religious groups in the U.S. may not be Bestest Buddies with the LDS church, they seem to be tolerant and not openly hostile.

Recently it hit me that the issue is not based in religious dogma (Mormons do not, as Evangelicals often claim, reject the divinity of Jesus) or in codes of conduct (Mormons reject most of the same behaviors rejected by Christians, including polygamy, gay marriage, and other hot-button political issues). It's about competition. The megachurch dwellers hate Mormons because Mormonsism is a proselytizing religion, one that has been phenomenally successful in the past few decades. When George Romney ran for president or governor in the 1950s and 1960s nobody cared that he was a Mormon because Mormons were as common as Zoroastrians. Now there are over 14 million Mormons and LDS missionaries (Sound familiar?) in 167 countries according to the church.

In competing for the same customer, if you will, Mormons have the distinct advantage of being almost absurdly friendly and outwardly tolerant of other belief systems, whereas the average ultraconservative Christian Bible-banger has a mouth like a puckered asshole and uses Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards as a blueprint for spreading the word. Mormonism has slick ad campaigns (they have billboards all over Atlanta, commercials on every TV network, and a sponsored YouTube channel that pops up at least once daily for yours truly) and they distance themselves from the anti-intellectualism of the Christian right. It's the kind of thing that middle class people – particularly Hispanics – appear to find appealing, based on the number of new recruits. And like other parts of the Republican base, the Christian right is terrified at the prospect of losing the Hispanics as a potential recruiting pool.

This isn't Ed's Ringing Endorsement of Mormonism. To me it is no better or worse than any other religion. The point is that the Pat Robertson crowd is scared shitless of the success and polished appeal of the LDS church, not any particular aspect of its dogma. Since so many religions differ wildly from evangelical Protestantism, I can't think of a more plausible explanation for why Mormonism is singled out for such intense hatred. Why not Gingrich's Catholicism, with its blasphemous Roman popery? Why not Judaism? Why not Islam? Oh wait, I guess they do hate that last one. Different reason, though.

I am not the world's most open minded person. I detest Scientologists, Juggalos, and the Irish. OK, just the first two. But my reasons are rooted in their beliefs and practices. I'm becoming convinced that the anti-Mormon sentiment on the right is based on something entirely different. Megachurches are in constant competition with each other and with other religions to put more butts in seats. And they're getting very worried that this new kid on the block, Mormonism, is to Evangelical Christianity what digital photography was to Kodak film.

“The police state in this country is growing out of control,” Ron Paul’s campaign said. “One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.”

Wow, what a compelling controversy.

The TSA is of course a signature issue for the paranoid Liberty-loving Pauls, and the bedraggled agency has become a lighting rod for criticism from conservatives of all stripes in the past few years – surely you recall the enthralling "Don't touch my junk!" brouhaha from 2010. It's the kind of don't-you-dare-inconvenience-me hissy fit that stands in for a serious discussion of political issues in this country. The rich irony, of course, is that the TSA is direct creation of the right-wing histrionics that followed 9/11. On the one hand they demand the illusion of security provided by wars, technology, and lots of people in badges performing searches (badges being the Authoritarian-Follower personality type's version of a favorite blankie). On the other…you know, privacy and The Constitution and I'm a Very Important Person who doesn't have time for long lines at the airport.

These apparently contradictory urges actually make sense as long as we recognize that right wing suburban America does want more airport security, just not for themselves. Why is the TSA inconveniencing all of us with searches? Why don't they just pull the brown people out of the line and search them since we all know who the real terrorists are anyway? People like Rand Paul want a TSA that accomplishes the primary task of government as people like him see it: making white people and people with money (to the extent that the two groups do not overlap in his mind) feel safer. It's the best of all worlds, an America in which the the people with badges keep their eyes on the colored folks while good God-fearing patriots like Us are left to enjoy our freedom.

I can't read Rand Paul's mind, but let's say there is smoke suggesting fire on this issue. You may recall his statements against the Civil Rights Act during the 2010 campaign, or perhaps Ron Paul's various statements suggesting some problems with race issues (note that his "plausible deniability" argument regarding his newsletter evaporated last week thanks to some good investigative journalism). Maybe the Pauls are true Libertarians, or maybe they have some racist tendencies, or maybe they're just garden variety modern conservatives who demand total freedom and total security simultaneously – for themselves, of course. Everyone else is fair game.

1. Graphic artist Mike Joyce has put together a gallery of dozens of old rock & punk show flyers re-done in the International Modernist style. It works eerily well for reasons I can't pinpoint.

As an added bonus, maybe some of you old bastards actually went to one of these shows.

2. For the comic book nerd dwelling deep inside of you (or perhaps right on the surface) here is Marko Manev's gallery of "minimalist designs" for superheroes.

Something tells me that if they actually existed and needed to advertise, this is how they'd do it.

3. Photographer and artist Lilly McElroy has a series entitled "I Throw Myself At Men" wherein she would find men through Craigslist, meet them in some public place, and proceed to literally throw herself at them (while what I assume is a colleague of hers took photos in mid-throw). The reactions of her unsuspecting (victims? dates?) are priceless.

4. You've probably seen this one already; NASA released a 21st Century version of its famous Apollo 17 "Blue Marble" photo courtesy the Suomi (Finland?) satellite. The original resolution (8000 x 8000!) makes it the most detailed picture of the entire planet ever taken. That's stretching the truth, though, since this is actually a composite image that, as is the case with so much photography of natural phenomena, is probably "enhanced" and Photoshopped in a dozen different ways. Still, this is pretty amazing. Zoom in on a few different spots to get the full effect. The amazing level of detail reminds me of my favorite Earth-from-above photo, of Sicily's Mt. Etna volcano erupting in 1999.

All that said, if you're gonna drive it's obviously better to have a vehicle that uses less rather than more. Hybrids and plug-in hybrids, even though they are technological stopgaps at best, make sense. Last year Chevy (part of "Government Motors", as our rapier-witted colleagues on the right call it, especially those ignorant of the fact that the first bailout payments came from George W. Bush in an effort to push the automakers' bankruptcy into the Obama administration) released the first plug-in, range-extended vehicle, the Volt. It's expensive because the technology is new, but for those willing to take the plunge it offers the ability to travel about fifty miles on electricity and then engage a small gasoline engine to recharge the batteries. The end result, accounting for the power that it draws from your home, is a vehicle that gets the equivalent of 93 mpg. That's pretty impressive.

So we have an American-designed vehicle, built in Detroit and its suburbs, that represents a substantial leap forward in technology. And it's probably going to be a flop because Republicans are desperate to see anything related to GM fail. Because they love America so much, they want to kneecap the company and its products in an effort to score cheap political points against Obama to the presumed delight of their legion of mouthbreaters.

Last year a Volt's battery pack caught fire after a crash test. And by "after a crash test" I mean three full weeks after the vehicle was totaled in a side-impact crash. Just so we're all clear: the thing didn't burst into flames on impact (as cars full of flammable liquid sometimes do, of course). It was crashed, left outside in a parking lot for three weeks, and then developed a fire in its smashed battery pack. Non-story.

But the House GOP, led by Darrell Issa – yes, the only convicted felon currently serving in your Congress – have decided that they can accuse the administration of conspiring to conceal this incident, supposedly to protect their cronies at GM (who, for the sake of their argument, let's pretend actually exist). Their theory is apparently that the NHTSA failed to disclose the fire "quickly enough"…what exactly that means is neither clear nor, for Republicans, relevant. In the process they have publicized the hell out of this crash test incident, culminating with televised hearings before a House committee today. There a GM higher-up patiently explained to Inmate Issa that the battery fire could only be reproduced in testing by impaling the battery pack with a steel rod and waiting several weeks for the fire to start, leading to this revealing exchange:

GM's Akerson stood up for the Volt, saying that the fire that's caused so much commotion only happened "after putting the battery through lab conditions that no driver would experience in the real world," according to his prepared remarks. Strickland said NHTSA "pulled no punches" in the Volt fire investigation – which recently ended after finding the Volt to be a safe car – but Issa was having none of it. He told Strickland: "I hear you, I don't believe you."

In other words, "The facts don't align with my talking points, so you must be lying. Also, Obama bad."

The end result of all of this, if today's flurry of news items about the hearings is any indication, is that the buying public will probably associate this model with fires. Every headline contains some combination of the words "Chevy Volt" and "fire", and products that develop reputations for being unsafe, whether or not it is warranted, tend to have a hard time shaking it. Like everyone over the age of thirty automatically associates "Ford Pinto" with "exploding gas tank", our Country First^tm GOP wants to make sure that Americans think of Chevy Volts as giant bombs that will, like, electrocute your kids and then set their corpses ablaze.

It's pointless, it's counterproductive, it's selfish, and it's a great example of how scorched Earth tactics are the sum total of what the modern GOP is capable of doing. The party that exists solely to suck up to corporate interests is proving that it will even throw those under the bus if they happen to be between it and more power.