• Oil — you’ll recall this commodity from that time before yesterday when we all owned cars and houses, yes? — is just $96 a barrel. [Reuters]
• Instead of getting started on revising the bailout plan, Congressional leaders keep blaming each other, but mostly Nancy Pelosi, for their terrible failures. [Washington Post]
• In response to America’s fuck-up, the Germans have turned to quoting Nietzsche, which, oh god, do you remember the last time someone gave a German a copy of Beyond Good and Evil? [Der Spiegel]
• Even the Big Business lobbyists couldn’t persuade their friends the House Republicans to vote for the bailout. [The Hill]
• Thanks mostly to the rejection of the bailout, Asian markets are suffering too. [AP]
• Some poison milk found its way into some Cadbury bars in Asia, and now chocolate is ruined forever. [Times Online]

While John McCain was waddling behind a housewife and knocking over the apple sauce in a grocery store, Barack Obama had a German Gym Workout with a young lady reporter from the German paper BILD. And she is not going to forget that anytime soon. Let’s enjoy her sexytime memories, together. 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.

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