This is why I will never spend a dime in a Red State ever again. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is why we will never stop fighting the Civil War. This is why we will remain a third-rate first-world country. This is ignorant. This is stupid. This:

We have no idea who Paula Deen is, or why the Interwebs have taken a liking to animated GIFs of her Riding Things, but in contemplating how to mark the occasion of Stinque Post #6,000, she was all we could think of.

[via Know Your Meme]

“It started last week when people complained about letters a local businessman sent out in support of Deborah Pauly, a local councilwoman and a leader in the Orange County GOP who drew nationwide attention last year when she helped lead an angry protest against Muslims with chants like “terrorists go home.” Pauly is now running for a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors.” [TPM]

Left to right: Tasha Reign, star of “Baby Got Boobs 8” and “Farm Girls Gone Bad”; Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States; and Brooklyn Lee, winner of AVN’s “Best Sex Scene” award for “Mission Asspossible”.

Bill Clinton Surrounded by Porn Stars in Monaco [TMZ]

It wasn’t too long ago that Mitt Romney surprised political observers by abruptly reversing course on his criticism of the Obama Administration’s rescue of the U.S. automotive industry to begin, instead, taking credit for it.

Well now, in a similar vein, Mitt Romney is promising voters that if elected president, he will reduce unemployment to 6% by the end of his first term. How does that constitute taking credit for the hard work of others, you might ask? Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, unemployment is currently on track to being at 5.5% by 2017 anyway.

Maybe what Mitt Romney should have said is: “If the American people put me in the White House, I will see to it that my administration continues the amazingly successful economic policies of our current president.”

(Hat Tip: Talking Points Memo)

Our guest columnist is Albert Camus.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men…

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