And to think we spent time pasting School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s face onto Donald “You’re Fired!” Trump’s head — clearly we should have saved that honor for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who this week fired nine city employees after they were caught watching a whole lot of porn on their work computers.

NBC4 reports that each of the fired employees had at least 20,000 hits on pornographic web sites in 2007 alone, with one racking up more than 48,000 hits. Thirty-two other city employees with fewer numbers of internet porn hits are facing lesser disciplinary actions, such as two-week suspensions. The actions came as a result of an internal investigation led by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. The fired employees came from four different agencies: the Office of Property Management, the Office of Contracting and Procurement, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Child and Family Services Agency. No child pornography was found to be accessed.

The City Paper has more, detailing the city’s use of the WebSense filtering program to determine which sites viewed by employees were pornographic or not, and exactly how City Manager Dan Tangherlini decided how much porn was too much porn:

Tangherlini said thresholds were determined as to how many hits warranted termination versus other forms of punishment. About 20,000 hits for the year was considered sufficient grounds for immediate firing, which represents about 100 hits per working day. “That seemed to be a logical cutoff,” he said. Anything over 20 hits a day, he says, represented “something that’s no longer possibly accidental” and required a lesser sanction.

Thank goodness all those more reasonable porn connoisseurs working for the District government, who limited themselves to only looking at pornography 15 times a day, are still safe!

In all seriousness though, this is the second round of firings Fenty has announced this month, the first being six employees from the Child and Family Services Agency in the wake of the Banita Jacks case — a decision which didn’t exactly make him popular with our civil service employees. Fenty deserves some credit here for not being afraid to find ways to clean house within a city government that’s been known for cronyism and corruption.