Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another installment of Freedom Friday. Before we get started, I’d like to throw something out there: GeoPet. Can y’all feel that contraction bustle off your palate, like so many Metro riders leaving the Georgia Avenue-Petworth station? I can. Petworth needs this, folks. Why should AdMo, CoHi, and BloMi have all the fun? It would be so much easier to give directions, too: “The Looking Glass Lounge? Oh, it’s one block south of GeoPet”; “I’m going to grab some groceries at the GeoPet Safeway“; “Hey, let’s meet for lunch at Sweet Mango—it’s across the street from GeoPet.” Gah, so cool! Hey, Prince of Petworth, what do you say? Gonna throw your blog behind this one?

The American Enterprise Institute‘s financial woes, Campus Progress‘ smear campaign, and creationists at the Smithsonian below the jump.

• The Washington Indepenent‘s Dave Weigel has a bang-up story out today about the belt-tightening at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The think tank most famous for providing George W. Bush with intellectual justification in the lead-up to the Iraq War has lost funding from General Motors and the Carnegie Foundation, let go of several scholars, and killed the print version of its political magazine, The American.
• Ross Douthat ofThe Atlantic will be taking Bill Kristol‘s spot at the New York Times. As one twitterer said, it’s hard to find someone in the political sphere who doesn’t think this is a good idea. Douthat bleeds red wine and wafers, sure, but he’s brilliant, curious, and upstanding. Which is more than anyone could say for his predecessor or the trouble-makers at Campus Progress, who have dug up Douthat’s college journalism clips and excerpted the most offensive bits in hopes of…Well, I haven’t figured out what they hope to achieve besides showing Douthat’s stellar journalistic development over the last eight years.
• If this lede doesn’t prime you for a laugh, I don’t know what will: “Every winter, David DeWitt takes his biology class to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, but for a purpose far different from that of other professors. DeWitt brings his Advanced Creation Studies class (CRST 390, Origins) up from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., hoping to strengthen his students’ belief in a biblical view of natural history, even in the lion’s den of evolution. Whole thing here, courtesy of WaPo’s Steve Hendrix.
• Also, Wayne Garciaof Tampa’s Creative Loafing has a great update from yesterday’s CL bankruptcy case, in which someone—can’t say who—tells a fib or two about the state of company morale.

Alright, folks. I’ll catch you later.