On CIA matters, The Solomon Scandals is fiction—not about what happened, but what could have happened. To this day we still don’t know the full story of why a U.S. senator held a secret stake in a CIA-occupied building in Arlington, VA, that the agency leased by way of the scandal-ridden General Services Administration. What has been established over the years is […]
Read MoreBeyond GSA ‘crats at play: Scrutinize office leasing
Tax dollars at work, GSA style Angry taxpayers are buzzing over the organizational “culture” at the General Services Administration, the federal procurement agency. I don’t mean Chaucer, Mozart or Van Gogh. Enjoy this spoof video for a GSA conference—rudely picked up by ABC News and others. Hey, you helped pay for it. GSA was supposed […]
Read MoreIf WaPo wants Apple-slick X…
The Solomon Scandals site has just ditched an older, more cluttered look in favor of a sleek new one. You’ll almost immediately find out what’s on the home page, through a mix of text and images. OK, Washington Post. Time for you to follow with your own radical redesign? You’ve just appointed a chief experience […]
Read MoreThreatened Virginia post office grossed $260K in a year
Updated October 24. See note at end. – D.R. A threatened post office near Sen. John McCain’s old prep school grossed almost $260,000 in Fiscal Year 2010. Nice profit opportunity for the Postal Service? The tiny branch even receives free space from Virginia Theological Seminary, the major user. Terri Huff, the popular postmistress at the […]
Read MorePostal mystery near Sen. McCain’s old prep school
Update: A link to an official postal complaint form is at the end of this post, although it might be too late to complain. Also see follow-up documenting the Seminary branch’s more than $250,000 in annual revenue. – D.R. Arizona Sen. John McCain‘s politics are oceans apart from mine—I’m far more to the port side. […]
Read MoreMontgomery County, Maryland, gives war a chance
The Montgomery County Council in suburban Washington killed a proposed resolution calling on the national government to throttle back defense spending and our wars abroad. Lockheed Martin, the biggest nongovernment employer in the Maryland county, apparently thought too much peace could be bad business. It put out word. Virginia began trying to woo away Lockheed […]
Read More$1B+ Quarter Pentagon bungle makes Time Magazine
The terrorist-friendly Quarter Pentagon, the twin towers formally known as BRAC-133, has made Time Magazine. Time depicts the 6,400-worker complex as a “soft target” for truck bombers. Jihadists or others might wipe it out if given a chance. Since last year, the Solomon Scandals blog has been warning of the security concerns among other issues […]
Read MoreEarthquake irony for Rep. Eric Cantor
Video by rhidoyakash California, not the Washington, D.C., area, is where Americans go if they want to flirt with the apocalypse, at least the seismic kind. Man-made disasters here in Northern Virginia? Well, there was 9/11 at the Pentagon several miles from me—Target Zero, of course, during the Cold War. But in Alexandria, we locals […]
Read MoreHow to ‘Scandalize’ your book group—either the online or in-person kind
The Solomon Scandals is fiction—a mix of suspense, tragedy and satire—but more than a little history lurks within in it. A high-rise collapsed in Northern Virginia, and a Senator really did hold a secret and illegal investment in a CIA-occupied building a few miles away. Characters and events are composites or imaginary. But Scandals still […]
Read MoreThe John Edwards campaign finance indictment: Should my almost-neighbor go to jail?
From ABC News Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, a multimillionaire benefactor of John Edwards, slipped him hundreds of thousands of dollars without the Federal Election Commission being the wiser. The alleged goal was to spare not just Edwards but also his presidential campaign from the public-relations Chernobyl that would result if the world learned of his secret […]
Read More‘Conde Nast Maidens’ vs. grubby defense workers as terrorist bait
Terrorists must love the Quarter Pentagon, aka BRAC-133, just off I-395 here in Alexandria, Virginia. We’re talking about 6,400 defense workers destined for an unsecured location, perfect for a drive-by missile shooting—and let’s not forget, either, the idiocy of the Army Corps of Engineer in bragging about its high-profile target. The geniuses even managed to […]
Read MoreE-trends and other fun for book people to mull over: A mix of reckless and not-so-reckless predictions
Note: This is an expanded version of my talk to the Washington Biography Group on Monday at Washington International School. By David H. Rothman Founder of TeleRead, Co-Founder of LibraryCity, and author of The Solomon Scandals SEEING the windmill blades turn—in Al Gore’s multimedia book Are we wasting our time talking about books and the […]
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