The Huffington Post and TPM Muckraker highlight the newest activities of Roger Stone, whose past includes a stint as the "youngest dirty trickster" for Richard Nixon and a recent alleged prank call to Eliot Spitzer's father. Stone has formed a new 527 campaign group with a name that forms an obscene acronym. The group's purpose, according to Stone, is simply to sell T-shirts associating Hillary Clinton with that expletive. Stone praises 527's as a campaign vehicle: "A 527 doesn't have a wife.. It doesn't have a brother-in-law who knows a lot about politics, or a union president who calls and doesn't like the color of the suit, or bimbo eruptions. It's the perfect candidate, because it has no personal characteristics."

The Hotrodders.com website has launched a satirical spinoff, SpankMyMarketer.com, aimed at exposing "illegal stealth marketing" on behalf of companies including General Motors, Holley, Comp Cams and Dynomax, which they say has been posted on theirs and other auto-related websites. The first example, they write, was a "Spank My Monkey/Anti-Christ" campaign in which "Gas Monkey Garage, a fairly well-known hot rod shop," spammed websites with a "promotional photograph" that "featured the owner of Gas Monkey Garage, Richard Rawlings, posing in women's thong underwear with his shop manager," accompanied by a video in which Rawlings declared himself the "anti-Christ of the Hot Rod World." More recently, a viral marketing company called PowerTV has been posting on auto forums under usernames such as "powermelissa" who calls herself "a big-time car girl" as she posts promotional videos for clients' products.

A new report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) suggests that U.S. universities may be jeopardizing their academic integrity by giving oil, gas, and other polluting industries influence over the research that companies fund on campus. CSPI surveyed nine universities with industry-funded research programs studying global warming, including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois, Stanford, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Davis. It found that many of them let corporate executives sit on boards overseeing grants, gave companies first rights to intellectual property, and let companies review and possibly delay publication of studies. "It's a cheap subterfuge for carbon-emitting companies," said Merrill Goozner, director of the Integrity in Science project at CSPI and co-author of the report. "They get the prestige of associating themselves with major respected universities, yet can control the direction of research, get first rights to intellectual property, and can delay any finding that doesn't help the bottom line."