Felix Salmon has the goods on Ben Stein, who has gotten the boot from the Gray Lady.You’ll forgive me if I take some small measure of credit for this one: after something in the region of 35,000 words of the Ben Stein Watch, the world’s worst financial columnist has finally been fired from the New York Times. And I couldn’t be happier. The reason was his appearance in commercials for (and on the homepage of) freescore.com, a sleazy company which exists only to extract large sums of money from those who can least afford it. NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed this, telling Gawker that “Ben Stein’s fine work for us as a columnist for Sunday Business had to end, we told him, after we learned that he had become a commercial spokesman for FreeScore, a financial services company.”Sadly, Ben Stein still has his gig over at American Spectator, where he writes fun columns like this about how Obama and the Democrats are coming for his precious bodily fluids, or something.The Freescore issue really was a conflict of interest for a business columnist. Not so for a political one, however. Go figure.