Namecoin is definitely being manipulated.

Look at Vircurex.com for example these are the current buy orders

Amount        Price         Total(BTC)
5.0000   0.01303300   0.0652
5.0000   0.01303200   0.0652
5.0000   0.01303100   0.0652
5.0000   0.01303000   0.0651
5.0000   0.01302000   0.0651
43.0000   0.01301000   0.5594
2.0000   0.01300000   0.0260
100.0000   0.01160000   1.1600
27.0000   0.01102000   0.2975
200.0000   0.01100000   2.2000
196.9957   0.01088000   2.1433
30.0000   0.01010000   0.3030
26.5524   0.00999900   0.2655
49.0000   0.00841100   0.4121
49.0000   0.00821100   0.4023
10.0000   0.00820000   0.0820
40.0000   0.00810000   0.3240
100.0000   0.00801200   0.8012
49.0000   0.00801100   0.3925
29.0000   0.00791100   0.2294


Its been like this quite a few times for the last day or two.

I think that all the new people hearing about Bitcoins means quite a bit of uninformed money is entering the market, and thats whats allowing these pumps and dumps to occur without actually crashing the value of namecoins.