at event with former NBA star and current Sacramento Mayor – Kevin Johnson – good man..speaking at northern lincoln club now

Kevin Johnson is the man whose charitable work drew the investigative eye of Gerald Walpin, the conservative lawyer who was fired last month as an Americorps Inspector General and has spent the time since arguing that he was canned in a political purge to protect Johnson, an Obama ally. This seems like a sign that the Walpin story (which The Washington Times called, repeatedly, “Walpin-Gate”) is petering out.

“I would never say President Obama doesn’t have the capacity to continue to serve because of his (statement) that there are 56 states,” Walpin said, adding that the same holds for Vice President Biden and his “many express confusions that have been highlighted by the media.” Obama mistakenly said once on the campaign trail that he had traveled to 57 states.

The “57 states” flub — thirteen months ago Obama apparently meant to say he’d been to 47 states, but said “57″ — is famous on the Fox News circuit and the conservative blogosphere, if pretty much forgotten everywhere else.

Now, a skeptic of the administration is not a bad guy to have investigating contracts. But Walpin had been attacked in 2008 as a “right-wing Republican” who said at a 2005 fundraiser for former Gov. Mitt Romney that Massachusetts was run by a “modern-day KKK” of the “Kennedy-Kerry Klan.” He gave one of his first interviews about this story to WorldNetDaily, the fringe site that’s hounding billboard companies that refuse to sell space to run ads about Barack Obama’s citizenship. None of this discredits Walpin, but it’s making him a less sympathetic figure at the very time that some Republicans, such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), are wondering if they can make a scandal out of this.

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In 1993, just after Bill Clinton was elected and Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, a lone Republican congressman, Rep. Bill Clinger, wanted to investigate the suspicious firings of the White House Travel Office staff. But majority Democrats had no inclination to pursue the matter. Clinger tried and tried, wrote letter after letter, and jumped up and down, but he didn’t begin to get results until after November 1994, when Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.

The Travel Office? Really? To call “Travelgate” a phony scandal is to bring discredit to the concept of “phoniness.” After a seven-year investigation (nearly seven years after five of the fired employees got new federal jobs) all the inspectors discovered about the Travel Office firings was that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made some false statements about how it began. The Americorps story, like that story, might take on momentum, but “Travelgate” is typically and correctly remembered as an example of how politicized scandals can be spun out of nothing. If the Obama administration didn’t realize this before, it really should now.

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From CNN:

“Fran Drescher, actress, women’s health advocate and public diplomacy envoy for the U.S. State Department, announced that she is throwing her hat into the ring of contenders for the senate seat being vacated by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Drescher spokesman Jordan Brown told CNN in a written statement late Monday.

Now, I have to admit I was shocked in September to learn that the nanny would be representing our country abroad as a State Dept. envoy, but apparently she’s done some valuable work as a health advocate after recovering from cancer herself. And I suppose that Al Franken’s possible election, the governorships of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura and the elevation of half of the 1990s Phoenix Suns starting lineup to political office (Kevin Johnson is now the mayor of Sacramento, and Charles Barkley will run for governor of Arizona in 2014) would inspire confidence in any aspirant with a healthy dose of celebrity.

So rather than passing judgment, let’s take a dispassionate look back at all the joy that Fran Drescher and her sinuses have brought us over the years: