Let us recap the Gerald Walpin situation.

[UPDATE] Now that I’m done laughing at that Walpin response: welcome, Instapundit readers.

We can begin with this video, which goes over the basic points:

Short version: Walpin was investigating Obama crony’s involvement in an AmeriCorps-related scandal involving misappropriation of funding. Case was settled, to the mild detriment of crony*. Walpin disagreed with settlement. Complaint made against him. So far, this is all he-said, he-said.  Continue reading Let us recap the Gerald Walpin situation.

Movie of the Week: Mars Needs Women.

Early switchout today of Movie of the Week: and would you believe, I still haven’t gotten through all of Gran Torino yet? I blame Bush… you know, I have absolutely no idea why saying that seems to satisfy a certain type of person.

But enough about peculiar religious rituals: this week’s offering is Mars Needs Women, because it was on while I was finding Sesame Street for the boy. We almost didn’t keep going; but he’s not old enough yet to really appreciate the classics.

Hoax paper causes hoax journal editor to resign.

This is somewhere between ‘practical joke’ and ‘proving a point’:

The editor-in-chief of a journal is to resign after claiming that the publisher, Bentham Science Publishing, accepted a hoax article for publication without his knowledge.

The fake, computer-generated manuscript was submitted to The Open Information Science Journal by Philip Davis, a graduate student in communication sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at The New England Journal of Medicine. They produced the paper using software that generates grammatically correct but nonsensical text, and submitted the manuscript under pseudonyms in late January.

Davis says he decided to submit the fake manuscript after receiving several unsolicited invitations by e-mail to submit papers to open-access journals published by Bentham under the author-pays-for-publication model.

…either way, it’s funny. Particularly the fact that the article in question purported to be from the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, which has at least three layers of funny there to unpack, from the aesthetic to the scatological.  Almost as funny is that the verification procedure apparently involved getting the author’s credit card number. Continue reading Hoax paper causes hoax journal editor to resign.

Winning with ‘No.’

From last week’s article on the growing awareness of Democratic corruption, by the always-interesting Jen Rubin:

…with the growth of government and the enormous amount of cash sloshing through Washington, the corruption problem is about to get worse. The stimulus money could, according to the FBI, be the breeding ground for its own crime wave. If the experts are right and 10% of the $787B stimulus plan will be lost to fraud and abuse, then $80B worth of graft and the congressmen, officials, lobbyists, and donors with their fingers in the pie will make fodder for plenty of headlines — just in time for the 2010 races.

No wonder the MSM is nervously sounding the alarm. There is the prospect that the age of “liberal dominance” could come screeching to a halt before it’s even gotten up to speed. Not only does it portend an electoral train wreck and loss of a governing liberal majority, but it sheds doubt on the notion that government was the knight in shining armor needed to ride to the rescue when the free market “failed.” If bigger and bigger government gets us more and more crooks and tens of billions in fraud, then maybe there is a better way to go than inflating the size and scope of the federal government.

Continue reading Winning with ‘No.’

Arlington rap song.

We’ll start today with something that should be of local interest only:

…only, local in this case is “inside the Beltway,” which means that it’ll get infinitely more play than a rap song about say, New Hope, PA*. A shame, in its way: it’s hysterical in its own right. But I say it as a guy who has always been Straight Outta Green Line.

Well, since I moved down here, at least.

Moe Lane

*But not Lynwood, CA.

“Solisbury Hill.”


Solsbury Hill, Peter Gabriel

…it’s not really as deep as I remember it being. Mind you, this song is firmly from my Sit on my buddy’s couch and help him and a bunch of other people drink a lot of actually very good homemade mead period of my life.  Then we all got respectable, not to mention reliably sober on weekends.

Moe Lane

PS: I only partially miss those days; the truth of the matter is, most of us were pretty much always strapped for cash.

Spielberg threatening to make an Indiana Jones V?

(H/T: @baseballcrank) Dear sweet merciful Jeebus no.

Shia Says Spielberg Has “Cracked” Indy 5

[snip]

In the UK to promote Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, LaBeouf talked to the BBC and revealed that he had spoken recently with Spielberg about another Indiana Jones movie: “Steven just said he cracked a story on it before I left. I think they’re gearing that up.”

Now, I admit freely that both my wife and I enjoyed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull… well enough. We had low expectations – “Do not do to this franchise what Lucas did to Star Wars” (i.e., murder it and prop up the corpse on the front porch) – and Lucas managed to exceed them, more or less.  There were aliens.  Commies were punched.  They brought back Marion.  LaBeouf’s character didn’t even offend me.  I did not declare kanly against Lucas.  Everything was… acceptable.

So that’s where it should end.  Before Lucas drags down Spielberg with him.

Moe Lane

Mayors inexplicably upset over White House’s priorities.

This is fascinating, really:


Mayors angry with White House no-show

America’s big-city mayors are steaming over what they view as “a very dangerous precedent” set by the Obama administration in its decision to shun the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting in Providence, R.I., this week.

In its attempt to honor the picket line of a local firefighters union involved in a labor dispute with the city, the administration has inadvertently angered some of its staunchest supporters in urban America, who argue that by declining to send an official contingent to the three-day mayors’ conference, the administration is caving in to labor and snubbing local governments
at a time of economic strife.

“It was a horrible decision,” said Mayor Michael Pizzi, an independent from Miami Lakes, Fla. “No matter where Obama goes, no matter what city you go to in the United States, you’re going to have some union that’s having problems.”

Continue reading Mayors inexplicably upset over White House’s priorities.