Wonkette

At the Ottawa Herald of Franklin County, Kansas, even the guys who work the newspaper printing press can write a column for the “op ed” section. And proving once again that small-town papers are like blogs without the quality control, pressman Gary Sillett contributed a terrific “community viewpoint” about the upcoming presidential election.

“To elect Barack Obama to the highest office in the land would be nothing less than spitting on the graves of the victims of 9/11,” Sillett wrote last week. You know you want to read the rest. MORE »

America’s craziest Founding Father was born on this day back in Seventeen Hundred and Six in Boston. Benjamin Franklin loved wine, physics, France, string quartets, vulgarity and all the ladies. He was also a pretty good cartoonist and authored what is remembered as the very first American political cartoon: a chopped-up snake that was somehow supposed to encourage the 13 colonies to get it together against the French colonists and American Indians to the west.

It is safe to say Franklin would’ve been named an Enemy Combatant by the current administration. “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” wrote the good doctor in his 1759 Historical Review.

Come learn more weird stuff about America’s Number One celebrity of the mid-eighteenth century, after the jump.

MORE »