Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a federally-funded boondoggle throwing money at the usual gang of idiots.

The visionary prospectus that gave us the Wilkes-Barre video surveillance/Wi-Fi project was apparently cobbled together just in the nick of time. Pending legislation aimed at keeping municipal governments out of the communications business would have made things a bit slippery, so it's easy to see how they may have cheated a bit...

Like something you might expect from a Red Bull swilling, Luzerne County College sophomore pulling an all-nighter, the Wilkes-Barre wireless proposal contains passages lifted verbatim and without attribution, from a proposal for a similar project in San Francisco...

(Oops! Top: San Francisco proposal. Bottom: Wilkes-Barre proposal)

Of course, the left-coast document eschews the goofy, ass-kissing intro that seems to be an integral part of any Wyoming Valley municipal effort...

The 2.3 million dollar, federally-financed project led to the newly minted, non-profit organization with the ominous-sounding moniker: Hawkeye Security Solutions. (Proper branding instincts might have avoided a tag that reads like a special-ops program from a Robert Ludlum novel. Why not call it “The Happy Rainbow Safe Children Program?” Or in a pinch: “D.A.R.E.”)

Hawkeye's board of directors is currently led by (drum roll please...) city hall insiders like former Wilkes-Barre police chief/current city council member Bill Barrett and Mayor Leighton's boy-wonder, Greg Barrouk, son of former chamber prez Steve Barrouk.

(We're told Greg did a wonderful job providing landscaping services to Louis DeNaples' estranged son-in-law, Leo Glodzick. In addition to being on the short-list for various city hand-outs, Glodzick holds the lucrative Wilkes-Barre city towing franchise and -big surprise- over the years has put more than $10,000 into Leighton's campaign war-chest. Glodzick's move to acquire the defunct River Road Bakery from the city of Wilkes-Barre (for one-tenth of its estimated value) hit a bit of a road block when county officials cried foul. But Greg did put up some very nice Azalea bushes. (Greg Barrouk did not respond to e-mails requesting clarification.)

Hawkeye Security Solutions laughably minimal website was provided by www.startaecuritycompany.com. An air of legitimacy is just a mouse click away for those with the inside track on lucrative city contracts. For a couple hundred bucks, you too can get a neat little “security company” website up and running. For a few dollars more, you can download handy e-books like “How To Land Security Contracts.”