Having successfully quelled the burning bushes of Texas by praying for rain, Preacher-in-Chief Rick Perry invites Christians to pray for solutions to all of America's problems in a new ad for modern day tent revival called The Response. Church and state: Awfully close together in Texas.

Bank of America feels just awful about it's role in packaging and selling a bunch of junk mortgages and inflating the economy with bad debt until the bottom fell out and more than 5 million people lost their jobs and more than 2.5 million went on food stamps, except for BofA's executives, who still got paid. So it's decided to pay $14 billion to BlackRock, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a bunch of other extremely wealthy institutions to make up for it. Are we square?

NewsweekBeast editor Tina Brown was on Morning Joe this, uh, morning and was asked about the controversial new Newsweek issue that imagines Princess Diana at 50 if she were still alive, complete with a creepy Photoshop on the cover. Despite the criticism, Tina still likes it!

College students: will they ever be able to judge political bias with any accuracy? No, they haven't even decided whether Ayn Rand or Chinua Achebe is cooler yet! So it's no surprise they think every gay teacher is biased.

Never believe anything Rudy Giuliani tells you about marriage. "I do"? Bullshit. "To have and to hold"? Lie. "I promise to preside over the wedding of my two good gay friends as soon as marriage is legal in New York"? Take a guess.

Google just launched its new Facebook thing: Google Plus. And it's invite-only. But people aren't exactly killing each for Google Plus invites. Oh, how times have changed since the Gmail Invite Gold Rush.

NBC's singing competition show The Voice, a terrible blend of American Idol and In It To Win It, has somehow scoured the globe and found two gay singers, who are currently in the top four. So half the remaining singers are gay people. What the hell?

James Franco is like that pretentious guy in your freshman dorm that you talk to because he's hot, and he's always going on about acting and writing short stories and all his other artistic pursuits even though he's not particularly good at any of them. And of course he's in a band, too. Of course.

Courtney Love takes David LaChapelle's car and chauffeur for a midnight joyride. David Duchovny and Tea Leoni split up again. Kim Kardashian hands out wedding confidentiality agreements. And Emma Watson talks about her first crush. Wednesday gossip asks, where's my car?

In the wake of the recent high profile assaults of hotel maids, hotels are handing out panic buttons to their employees in an effort to keep them safe from maniac members of the public. Now, The Pierre is taking it one step further, by training its maids in self-defense. But are they being lulled into a false sense of security? Let's examine, via the NY Post report on the self-defense class:

This former TV star may be a has-been but he's still going strong in the sack. This actor has a mysterious scar. This actor signed everything away for a reality show. And this other actor is having trouble with the feuding mothers of his children. It's tough living in a man's world!

If you were competing in the prestigious Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo barbecue cook-off and some other team started to annoy you, would you a. simply ignore them, b. taunt them for making "shitty bullshit food," or c. throw "some type of tear gas-like device" at them?

Jose Goncalves of Hartford, Connecticut, doesn't have a working right eye anymore, but he does have 925,000 new dollars. The money comes from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which agreed to compensate Goncalves for a botched cataract operation during which his eye, uhhhh, blew up.

All-around American girl Michele Bachmann hates on Medicaid because it helps poor people, and that's socialism. Yet since 2005, her husband has accepted $137,000 in Medicaid funds to "quality Christian-counsel" people so they don't become gay barbarians, as NBC has discovered.

Back in 2009—long before Anthony Weiner sexted his way out of political office and into an ice-creamy crucible of regret and derailed dreams, Louisiana pol Joe Stagni texted a chest-pic of himself to a colleague. Now the pic's resurfaced, because that's just how sextpics operate.

This week the Chinese are celebrating their Communist Party's 90th by buying it a sentimental birthday card, taking it out to Shoney's for the breakfast buffet, then swinging by J.C. Penney to get it a nice new cardigan sweater and some comfortable slippers.

The Federal Reserve vaults are sitting on $1 billion — that's with a "b" — in unused one-dollar coins, shunned currency that has been piling up since 2007, when a government program made their production compulsory. That number could double by 2016, when the program is scheduled to end.

Here's a trailer for War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg and slated to open in theaters on December 28. Set in Europe during World War I, War Horse tells the story of a boy, Albert, and his beloved horse named Joey. When the two are forcibly separated, Albert attempts to track Joey across Europe's war-torn trenches, which—as you'll see in the trailer—provide a visually stunning backdrop for what Spielberg is billing as an "epic adventure." Did somebody say Oscar?

Early this morning, TwitPic founder Noah Everett tweeted that he was being arrested and in the back seat of a police car. Then he TwitPiced a picture of his view from said police car. It's TwitPic-ception! [@noaheverett via Mashable]

Bath salts: Their steady emergence as the designer drug du moment is well-documented. Their powerfully hallucinatory effects on the human brain, legendary. And now, their peddlers have been busted.