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The Scandal: Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, fell prey to the technological paper trail when their racy text messages were discovered.

The Story: It's a regular Horatio Alger tale full of ingenuity and bootstrappery. When the Detroit-based Ohm Creative Group found out about the charges against Kilpatrick, they had a revelation, says co-owner Jesse Cory. "Why not put Kwame's mugshot on a mug?" And hell, why not churn out some T-shirts too? From there, their business, kwamemugshot.com, was born. And apparently it's booming. "We've made good friends with the post office," says Cory. "Our postal guy comes in every day with a big warm smile."

The Politics: For Cory and Co., it's less about politics than business. "What we are is a marketing and PR firm. We create the item and then we create the buzz around the item. His defiance to step down really makes the demand higher for things that are related to this issue. So, it's kind of that posturing that he's been doing that's really made this an epidemic."