I haven’t blogged yet about Barack Obama firing Gerald Walpin, the Geroge W. Bush-appointed inspector general at the Corporation for National and Community Service, even though the story involves Kevin Johnson, the current mayor of Sacramento and one of my favorite childhood basketball players. But Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post has a useful article on Walpin today that makes it sound like Obama was perhaps justified in his decision.

The suspicion is that Walpin was fired because he wrote a damning report on a Kevin Johnson-run AmeriCorps program and said that Sacramento shouldn’t get federal stimulus money. Johnson is a supporter of Obama.

But Walpin apparently had trouble answering basic questions to administration officials about how his agency, which among other duties runs AmericaCorps, was performing. And he may have produced an uncomfortable work environment with bad racial and sexual jokes. It’s worth it for Congress to keep investigating why Obama fired Walpin without much public explanation. But that doesn’t mean Obama did anything wrong.-MB

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