Heritage Foundation Skewers Public Employee Pensions/Listen To Scott Walker!!!!!!

The Heritage Foundation has published a new series of research papers and reports on public pensions. The research shows what we knew all along: public employee pensions are fat and sweet. AND, even after the recent legislation in Wisconsin that reformed the public retirement system, public employees in Wisconsin are still sitting pretty compared to private market employees.

The first report, titled The Real Cost of Public Pensions, "refutes two of the most common arguments that public pension benefits are somehow modest." It's wonky but it's worth the read if you're into the nitty gritty of the issue.


The second report, published yesterday -- The impact of Act 10 on public sector compensation in Wisconsin -- shows that Wisconsin public employee benefits are still 4.5 times larger than pensions in the private economy and Wisconsin public employees are still paid 22% more in total compensation than their private counterparts. The Executive Summary is below:

After a protracted legal and political battle, on March 11, 2011, the Wisconsin state Legislature passed Act 10, the Budget Repair Act, which increased public employee contributions toward pensions and health coverage and restricted union powers of collective bargaining and dues collection. This study analyzes public sector salaries and benefits in Wisconsin, with a particular focus on disentangling the risk-adjusted value of pension benefits offered in the public sector from accounting conventions that can understate the cost and value of defined benefit pension plans.

We find that state and local government employees receive salaries roughly equal to those paid to private sector Wisconsin employees with similar education and experience or working in jobs with similar skill requirements.

However, even following Act 10, pension benefits for Wisconsin public employees are roughly 4.5 times more valuable than private sector levels while health benefits are about twice as generous as those paid by larger private sector Wisconsin employers. This difference results in a combined salary-benefits compensation premium of around 22 percent for state workers over private sector workers, with varying but often larger pay advantages for local government employees.

I heard Scott Walker interviewed yesterday on the Laura Ingraham radio show (see below). The guy is absolutely amazing! I don't think there's a more well-spoken or enthusiastic advocate of property, freedom and peace anywhere on the national scene. He doesn't speak in a measured tones or hedge his opinions. He is forceful in his beliefs and knows economics like the back of his hand.

I'd hate to deprive Wisconsin of the best governor it's had in its history, but this guy should be on the Republican ticket this year with Mitt Romney! Listen to this clip of Walker in action and see if you agree with me.

More good news! Read an excellent recap of the recall race in Wisconsin at Legal Insurrection. A new poll from Marquette University, which is perhaps the most respected poll in the state, has Walker up 7 points. Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (pictured at right), has a lead in the polls over her unionist competitor, but her lead is "statistically insignificant." She is not as well-spoken as Walker, but she is good people ala Sarah Palin.

Walker doesn't sound like a man with the election in the bag. He is a man on a mission and warns his supporters not to "spike the football on the 10 yard line!"

So, please, donate to Walker and Kleefisch and, if you're a Wisconsinite, VOTE !!!!!!!

Peace..."Sometimes A Messy Process"

Maximum Leader Obama announced Monday that the war in Afghanistan will end on time in 2014:

I don't think there's ever going to be an optimal point where we say, "This is all done. This is perfect. This is just the way we wanted it. This is a process, and it's sometimes a messy process."

Operation Enduring Freedom -- the patriotic euphemism for the war in Afghanistan -- began on October 7, 2001. Maximum Decider George W. Bush started the war by announcing it to Congress on September 20, 2001. He said young Americans would begin to fight and die halfway around the world in order to achieve certain, clear-cut goals, including...

"the destruction of terrorist training camps and infrastructure within Afghanistan, the capture of al-Qaeda leaders, and the cessation of terrorist activities in Afghanistan."^[11][12][13]

Did you feel good about that? I'm ashamed to say I did. The Twin Towers had just been brought down by suicide bombers apparently trained and based in Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered as a result of the attack on September 11, 2001. I wanted the bastards who did this terrible atrocity to die! And I dare say all but a small fraction of Americans wanted the same thing.


Now, over ten years later, over 3,000 coalition combatants (almost 1,900 Americans) have given their lives to accomplish the goals Bush spelled out. Have these goals been accomplished? Judge for yourself. You've been reading the same headlines and seeing the same pictures broadcast from that war-torn country as I have. My educated guess is No, No and No.

In my humble opinion the war in Afghanistan has been like a film noir version of Groundhog Day. US troops spend days and years dying for their country, destroying "terrorists," bombing infrastructure, rebuilding infrastructure, capturing enemy Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, imprisoning them in Guantanamo, releasing them from Guantanamo, accidentally dropping a mortar round on a friendly wedding party, apologizing to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, paying reparations to what's left of the wedding party, investigating Karzai for corruption...and then doing it all over again the next day and years! We've been doing this for over ten years!

Meanwhile our brave guys are still being blown up in Afghanistan by roadside bombs rigged by Taliban terrorists.

And there has recently been some debate about whether or not the Taliban are the enemy. Vice President Biden recently announced that they weren't. Karzai agreed with him.

Moreover, it's common knowledge that our guys are fighting the enemy (which may or may not be the Taliban) with their hands tied behind them. How many times have you read this headline: "Under Obama, Rules of Engagement in Afghan War Are Extreme Political Correctness Which Slow Down US Troops?"

Under the Obama Administration, the rules of engagement in the Afghan War are extreme political correctness, and this has brought well-earned criticism of the military's prosecution of the Afghan War from a very decorated source, Major General Robert Scales. Imagine if you're a Marine in Afghanistan, charged with fighting terrorists, yet you can't shoot at Taliban terrorists unless you see them actually holding weapons in their hands! If the Taliban terrorists only temporarily put their arms down, Marines are forbidden from shooting at them! Imagine that you also can't treat the captured terrorists "roughly"-as in using "harsh" language against them that may hurt their little, wittle, terrorist feelings-and that you must release your terrorist foe after 96 hours if you don't hand them over to the Afghan police. Think this is a bad dream, a cruel joke or simply a liberal's wildest fantasy come true? Think again, for this is actual war policy going on in Afghanistan right now under Obama.

And remember, the Taliban mentioned above may not be the enemy.

And this guy Karzai. What a piece of work! Every other day there's a news flash about this guy being corrupt, his brother being corrupt, him being offended by US troops, by US policy, by US politicians. The other day he banned a Congressman from visiting "his" country until the Congressman apologized for disrespecting him.

Hell, two years ago this moron threatened to join the Taliban unless he got what he wanted from the US. Of course, this might be understandable if, indeed, the Taliban is not the enemy.

I couldn't make this stuff up. Pretty funny, huh?

Yeah, if it wasn't for this:

CHICAGO (CNN) -- NATO leaders signed off Monday on President Barack Obama's exit strategy from Afghanistan that calls for an end to combat operations next year and the withdrawal of the U.S.-led international military force by the end of 2014. [!!!!!!!!!!!!]

And this:

And this:

Remember the faces of the fallen this weekend.

Property, If You Can Keep It

Inscribed at the top of this page are the keys to a prosperous and satisfying society of cooperating individuals: Property, Freedom, Peace. But, to paraphrase the Bible, the greatest of these is Property.

Freedom and peace are effete, obscure and puny concepts absent the notion of property. In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises writes:

"There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about. In a totalitarian hegemonic society the only freedom that is left to the individual, because it cannot be denied to him, is the freedom to commit suicide."

Of course, Mises understood that the essence of the "market economy" is property, i.e., the things which an individual rightfully and properly owns and controls. Property is not a natural right or a gift from God. Property is a consequence of human cooperative action in society, a derivative of mutual action's prime directive: Thou shalt not steal.

The concept of "theft" -- and its implied corollary, "property" -- does not occur to individuals acting alone in a jungle. All that a solitary man sees and discovers in the jungle is available to him for the taking, available for use as means to attain his chosen ends. He need not concern himself with the claims of others.

The concepts of theft and property can only occur to a human individual after he discovers another human individual like himself exists, and then only after both individuals conceive of the possibility of mutual, cooperative action.

Cooperative action is impossible without a mutual agreement to proscribe theft as taboo behavior. Individuals cooperate in order to attain goals they cannot satisfactorily attain by means of acting alone. But what is the point of cooperative action if the fruit of cooperative action remains uneaten? No rational individual cooperates knowing the purpose of his cooperative action cannot be attained. Therefore, when rational human beings cooperate, they agree, as a condition of their cooperative action, that they will not steal from one another the fruits of their cooperative effort. Thus, the ideas of ownership and private property are inferred and respected by all.

Cooperative action, properly understood, is necessarily mutual and voluntary. When human beings are forced by a strongman to work together, they do not work to attain their own ends. If they did, force and coercion would not be necessary. People forced to work together by a strongman work to attain the ends desired by the strongman. In such a circumstance, cooperative action does not exist except as a sideshow in which the oppressed cooperate with the strongman in vain and pathetic attempts to survive. In such a society, property does not exist for the coerced individuals. All property is owned and controlled by the strongman. As Mises points out, in such a society the only freedom that exists is the freedom to commit suicide, and even that petty liberty may require a struggle to win.

In Liberalism Mises wrote:

"Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted."

The United States of America was founded upon the principle of private property for all individuals. Prior to its founding the "sphere" of freedom surrounding ordinary individuals like you and me was tiny indeed. The King and his aristocratic favorites, including the Church, owned and controlled virtually all property. Common people only owned and controlled the rags on their back and what meager living quarters, animals and grain the nobility allowed them to have. And when the King demanded more property with which to pursue his ends, such as power, glory and a foreign conquest, he claimed as his own property even the meager holdings of the rabble.

The American Revolution changed all that. Americans, as part of their fundamental and mutual social compact, recognized the right of each individual to mutually and voluntarily cooperate with other individuals. Americans recognized that individual's right to own and control the product of their cooperative action no matter how voluminous or extensive that product may be. Americans recognized that a firm and unlimited right to property was an individual's only defense against state tyranny. Our founders greatest mistake was to assume this truth rather than spell it out in the founding documents of our society, our famed democratic republic.

The history of America since its founding has been a slow and steady whittling away of the individual's right to own and control property. And, as strongmen in the federal government whittled away this right, individual Americans became slowly and steadily less free.

Oh, we Americans make a show of our vaunted freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom of passage and all the rest. But of what significance are these freedoms if we cannot own and control property?

Our parasitic overlords in Washington, in state capitals and in county seats throughout this nation have levied confiscatory taxes on our land, our wages, our businesses, our profits, our investments, our homes, our purchases, even our drinks and our entertainment. Taxes levied on individuals in this country have risen from virtually zero at the time of this nation's founding to an aggregate confiscatory rate now of 50-60% on everything we produce as the result of our cooperative efforts.

And what property we have, that the parasitic state cannot tax away or has not yet taxed away, the parasitic state rules and regulates with every manner of legal restriction imaginable. Our food, our clothes, our shelter, our automobiles, our work things, our play things -- everything we produce and own for our own satisfaction is subject to some bureaucrat's watchful eye and sharp tongue, a tongue that is quick to command us, to order us, to tell us what we must do or what we must not do with what we (supposedly) own.

The truth is we do not own and control property anymore. We lease it from the state and, as a result, we are minions of the state and the politicians and bureaucrats who run the state. These parasites seize our property and redistribute it to their friends and sycophants, their followers, hangers on and court jesters. They are at the same time worse and more better off than King George of centuries ago. And we are no better off than the King's rabble.

Ladies and gentlemen, we Americans, we ordinary and common individual citizens, no longer have property and, as a result, we are no longer free. We are forced to lick the boots of our masters and grovel before them. But we do have the freedom to gripe about our plight, don't we? We do have the freedom to vote for the parasites who suck the lifeblood of property from our lives, don't we? We do have the freedom to pray to God in our own way and to petition Him to stop the plundering parasites, don't we? We have the freedom to marry who and whatever we want, to fornicate with whom and with whatever we want, and act and say whatever vile things we want in public, don't we?

Yes, we have truly become a mighty and free people. The Founders of this nation would be truly proud!

In 2008 we Americans elected a President and a Congress bent on destroying the very idea of private property in this country. Our Maximum Leader brags about it. He says we'd all be better off if we let him spread our wealth around.

Oh the next day he will deny it. He and his representatives will spin the proper tune. They will say they are staunch defenders of property for all, even the poorest among us, but their actions soon betray their words. The very means they use to defend their principle of fairness -- a fair amount of property for all -- eviscerates the meaning and spirit of the idea of property.

In their foreign adventures our parasitic commanders preach that they must destroy a village in order to save it, so in our own nation our President and his lackeys preach that they must destroy property in order to save it and make it flourish. What absolute bunk!

These parasites worship the principle of robbing Peter to pay Paul! They tell us with a straight face that putting such a principle into practice will preserve property rights for all and rededicate our people to the noble principles upon which our country was founded. What a crock!

Do you believe it?

Do you believe that giving up your right to own and control the means of production will make you freer? Happier? More prosperous?

Do you believe that concentrating ownership and control of all your property, either by rule or by title, in the hands of a small elite thousands of miles away will make you more satisfied with your miserable lot?

Maybe it will if you have no property to start with. Maybe robbing Peter to pay Paul makes sense to you if your name is Paul. Maybe robbing the rich to give to the poor satisfies you so long as the parasites in Washington consider you poor and your neighbor rich.

Can't you see by now that in order for we individual Americans to be content and satisfied we must voluntarily and mutually cooperate with each other? Can't you understand that in order to cooperate we must own and control property? Can't you agree that in order to mutually and voluntarily cooperate, we must outlaw theft rather than attempt to prosper by means of it?

A society cannot long survive being ruled by an elite faction of erudite strongmen and ruthless thieves.

What chance do we have if all of us embrace thuggery and become thieves ourselves?

Civil War In Wisconsin?

In my last post I described the vicious political battle now being fought in Wisconsin over the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker. Unfortunately, this political battle has spawned internecine warfare reminiscent of the Civil War which pitted brother against brother.

As you may recall, a night or so ago my sister put a bumper sticker on her car advocating Scott Walker's reelection. The next morning she awoke to find a nail driven into her tire. Well, word of my sister's plight reached my brother, who also lives in Wisconsin. He's a retired public school teacher, a former member of the largest public teacher's union in the state and an unabashed opponent of Scott Walker. He quickly fired off an email to my sister and it was game on!

My brother's first salvo was a suggestion that the nail in my sister's tire was a false flag attack by Walker's own supporters. Apparently, that sort of thing is going on in the state as each side seeks to discredit the other in the eyes of Wisconsin's undecided voters.

Frankly, I think my brother's suggestion is a bit farfetched. While false flag attacks are possible, it's obvious they are not the norm. It's highly improbable a Walker supporter vandalized my sister's tire. Heck, if you want to believe otherwise, then you might as well believe that my sister drove a nail into her own tire. My brother's second salvo is the one I want to comment on and analyze.

You see, in her initial email to family my sister charged that Wisconsin taxpayers funded public school teachers' pensions. Well, that was like waving a red flag in front of my brother. He would have none of it. He contended that the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) -- the state's public employee pension system -- is funded 100% by the employees themselves, He said the WRS receives not a single dime from Wisconsin taxpayers.

I found this contention a bit shocking. My brother is no dummy. He's an expert stock investor and is normally a clear thinker. He understands economics. Yet, I felt his argument flew into the face of everything I know about the WRS, not to mention my instincts about such state-run pension plans.So I did some research.

I started with an article my brother encouraged my sister to read: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed - Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee. Forbes published the article in February of 2011. Sure enough, the author of the article, Rick Ungar, says employees fund the WRS 100%:

If the Wisconsin governor and state legislature were to be honest, they would correctly frame this issue. They are not, in fact, asking state employees to make a larger contribution to their pension and benefits programs as that would not be possible- the employees are already paying 100% of the contributions.

Wow. Forbes! It's got to be true, right?

Not necessarily. Ungar's article is based on another article written by one David Cay Johnston, a real heavy hitter, Pulitzer Prize winner, ex-New York Times reporter and "one of the country's most important journalists." Well, I read Johnston's article, "Really Bad Reporting in Wisconsin: Who 'Contributes' to Public Workers' Pensions?" also published in February of 2011, at Tax.com, which may or may not be Johnston's website.

I found the tone of Johnston's article arrogant and condescending, but that's neither here nor there. The crux of Johnston's argument is summed up in the following paragraph from his article:

The fact is that all of the money going into these plans belongs to the workers because it is part of the compensation of the state workers. The fact is that the state workers negotiate their total compensation, which they then divvy up between cash wages, paid vacations, health insurance and, yes, pensions. Since the Wisconsin government workers collectively bargained for their compensation, all of the compensation they have bargained for is part of their pay and thus only the workers contribute to the pension plan. This is an indisputable fact. 

The problem is that this "indisputable fact" is also untrue. It turns out that the State of Wisconsin does not negotiate a "total compensation" package with state workers which the workers, then, "divvy up" after the fact as they see fit. In fact, the state and public employee unions negotiate a contract that is very specific about which dollars go where. In fact, Wisconsin state law mandates specifically how the WRS will be funded and how the funds will be divvied up.

In an article on JS Online, the website of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, Patrick McIlheran, names the relevant state statutes and explains their consequences. He also links a report from the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau that describes WRS finances in detail. I followed the links and continued my research. What I found directly contradicts Pulitzer Prize Winner Johnston's analysis.

According to this report the WRS provides specific benefits to individual retirees. State law stipulates that these benefits must be paid for by employer and employee contributions, which the WRS invests. State statutes also stipulate that if these funds fall short for any reason (for example, if the WRS fund managers invest the funds badly), Wisconsin taxpayers must make up the difference. In essence, the WRS is a government-operated trust fund backstopped, as all public trust funds are, by the taxpayer.

The good news is that the WRS, unlike the federal Social Security Trust Fund, contains real assets that are relatively well-managed. So the probability the state will have to step in to rescue the WRS is slim. However, backstopping is by no means the full extent of taxpayer financial involvement in the WRS.

The truth is WRS leans heavily on the infrastructure of state government administrative services (like the Legislative Fiscal Bureau) which are, obviously, paid for by taxpayers. These in kind services allow the WRS to operate more cheaply than comparable investment services in the private economy.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Johnston claims the state-run WRS operates more cheaply because state investment managers pool resources of all WRS members and realize economies of scale:

The concept, at its most basic, is buying wholesale instead of retail. Wholesale is cheaper for the buyers. That is, it saves taxpayers money.

I think it's obvious that economies of scale are available to huge, private market investment houses as well as state-run agencies. Nevertheless, that last sentence about saving the taxpayers money is an irrelevant, statist afterthought since, if state employees managed their own retirement funds in the private market, taxpayers would have no liability or related expenses whatsoever. Which begs another interesting question...

If, as Johnston claims, "all of the money going into these plans [i.e., the Retirement System] belongs to the workers," could state workers take their funds out of the WRS and invest them elsewhere, i.e., in a private equity firm? The obvious answer is no. As I stated above, state law mandates the funds be invested in the WRS. Moreover, state employees would have to be crazy to move "their" money out of WRS because they know full well that the state not only backstops the WRS but also contributes 99% of the funds to the system!

How can I say this with confidence? Because I read the state statutes and studied the report, referenced above, from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Here's how it works.

Wisconsin state law mandates that employees must fund the WRS with contributions amounting to 5% of their wages. The statutes say that state taxpayers must then match that amount with a 5% contribution of their own. But if this is true, how can Pulitzer Prize Winner Johnston possibly claim the contributions to WRS come 100% from employees?

In a word, sophistry.

You see, Johnston is a big picture kind of guy, not one to be bogged down in the nitty gritty details of process. His reasoning is a strange endgame kind of fuzzy logic reminiscent of Keynes famous dictum that "in the long run we are all dead." Johnston conflates economics and accounting, values and bookkeeping. He's like a football commentator who believes that his post-game analysis has more to do with deciding winners and losers than the playing of the game.

Johnston admits the state of Wisconsin, as employer, contributes a matching amount of 5% to the WRS. But this is merely a technicality, according to Johnston. That 5% the state contributes is part of the "total compensation" package the employees have already negotiated for and won. Therefore, the funds all come out of the same pocket, so to speak -- the employees' pocket, not the taxpayers'.

But wait. The sophistry gets worse.

Some years ago public employee union negotiators persuaded the state to "pickup" the 5% that the employees are supposed to contribute to the WRS! This fact alone would seem to pretty much destroy Pulitzer Prize Winner Johnston's argument that the employees contribute all the funds to the System, don't you think? Not in Johnston's warped way of looking at things. Thankfully, reality is found in the governing state statutes, not in Johnston's specious logic.

The following are the "real" facts as stated by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau report:

Impact of Employer "Pickup" of Employee-Required Contributions. Table 28 shows who actually pays the employee-and employer required contribution amounts. The amount shown as paid by employees is the aggregate amount paid by all employee classifications. WRS employers have actually assumed the payment of virtually all employee-required contributions in addition to their employer-required contribution amounts.

Table 28 indicates that the percentage of employee and employer-paid contributions has remained quite stable in recent years and reflects the fact that WRS employers generally pickup the employee-required share of WRS contributions.

Table 28, (Page 48), by the way, shows that "employers," i.e., Wisconsin taxpayers, contribute over 99% of the funds held by the WRS.

The bottom line is that in the WRS even the employee's contribution to the pension system is contributed by Wisconsin taxpayers!

This is what Scott Walker has changed. This is why public labor unions and their members are up in arms. This is what my brother either doesn't understand or is willingly to overlook for his own benefit.

(Sorry, Bro, I have to call 'em like a see 'em.)

Union Goons Hit Close To Home

I have a lot of family in Wisconsin. My siblings and my elderly parents live there.

Yesterday, my sister emailed me to say she was very proud to put a Scott Walker bumper sticker on her car. My sister is a proud conservative and a very caring and empathetic individual. Every Sunday she visits my parents in their nursing home complex and attends religious services with them.

Today she emailed me to say she can't attend church with my parents. She only has one vehicle in the family, and last night somebody drove a nail into her tire.

The goon who did it doesn't know my sister. His act of vandalism only made her more determined to work and vote for Scott Walker's reelection.

"No Soup For You!"

Remember the "Soup Nazi" on Seinfeld? If you don't, here's a reminder:

Believe it or not, Soup Nazi's really exist. Of course you know about The Fuhrer of Soup Nazi's, Michelle Obama. Combating childhood obesity is her mission in life. In January of this year she issued her husband's new food rules for public school meals. Good idea, right?

Wrong! Remember Jazlyn Zambrano? She is the North Carolina four-year-old who was told by her public elementary school principal in February of this year to eat lunch at the school cafeteria because the brown-bag lunch her mother had packed for her "did not meet the necessary guidelines."

The parasites in Washington know better than mothers what their kids should be eating for lunch, right?

Wrong! It seems the Soup Nazi's in Washington get their marching orders from "experts" who hang out in an Oxford bunker in the UK. Meet Dr Oliver Mytton from the Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, UK and Dr. Corinna Hawkes from the Centre for Food Policy, City University, London, UK. This dynamic nerd duo recently published scientific articles in the British Medical Journal recommending that a "fat tax" of 20% be levied on "unhealthy food and drinks" in the US.

Dr. Mytton, who came up with the 20% tax rate, calls himself a pragmatist. He "said that governments actually might see food taxes as a way to generate revenue." (Gee, do ya think, Doc?) Dr. Hawkes seems the more dedicated Nazi. She said “there remains a long way to go for food policies to reach their full potential.”

Good God! Americans would never stand for such tyranny, right?

Wrong! According to the British Medical Journal article:

Opinion polls from the US also put support for tax on sugary drinks at between 37% and 72%, particularly when the health benefits of the tax are emphasized.

Gives new prospective to the phrase "a nation of sheeple," doesn't it?

Here's what one American from Indiana had to say about the proposed "fat tax:"

"I'd pay 20 percent. It's worth it,” one woman said. "I would eat a lot more healthy just to save more money.”

I'm guessing she thought long and hard about that one...

Report: Romney Headed For The "Big House"

As everyone interested in politics knows, Ed Klein has written a new blockbuster called: The Amateur. Whether Klein's book is fact or rumor, it has created a political stir by resurrecting the infamous relationship between Obama and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Maximum Leader's former Chicago pastor and mentor.

Apparently, Klein's book has Wright hinting that at the time of their meeting, Obama was steeped in Islam and knew little about Christianity. Wright says he taught Maximum enough Christianity to get buy. Klein also has Wright saying that Maximum Leader tried to buy Wright's silence in the 2008 campaign for $150,000.

This fresh new controversy has apparently spurred some Chicago billionaire and Romney supporter, named Joe Ricketts, to form a PAC to dish this new, fresh dirt on Wright and Obama. Unfortunately, Ricketts has now changed his mind and disavowed the PAC message.

What I find interesting about this entire affair is that, according to the Los Angeles Times, Ricketts changed his mind about the same time Mitt Romney condemned the PAC effort:

Mitt Romney said Thursday that he did not approve of a proposal for a racially-tinged ad campaign from an outside group that considered invoking controversial comments of President Obama’s former pastor, telling reporters he wanted to “make it very clear I repudiate that effort.”

“I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign,”

This sure sounds like Mitt and his PAC are communicating in some "way, shape or form." I use these words because, according to a CNSnews.com report of December 20, 2011, Mitt used these exact same words in response to a question about a PAC ad from his supporters that trashed Newt Gingrich. According to the report:

Romney refused earlier Tuesday to disavow the group's ads, saying it would be illegal for him to coordinate with the super PAC. He did say that such groups are a "disaster" and have made a "mockery" of the presidential campaign.

"I'm not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form," Romney said. "If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house."

So Romney refuses to disavow a PAC ad that trashes Newt on the grounds it may be collusion, but has no problem repudiating a PAC ad that trashes Obama. It sure looks to me like Romney's public repudiation of the ad against Obama is communication and coordination in some "way, shape or form." Ergo, I expect the FBI to be showing up at Romney's doorstep any time now to haul him off to the big house.

OOPS! Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there wasn't any collusion. Maybe it's just crony capitalism as usual raising its ugly head. CHECK THIS NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE OUT. According to the Times, billionaire Joe Ricketts' plan to trash Obama didn't go over too well over at the Chicago City Hall. Why should that make a difference to Ricketts? Well, Rahm Emanuel, a rabid Obama supporter and former Obama chief-of-staff, is the current Mayor of Chicago AND, the Ricketts family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball club. This is significant because the family is currently seeking millions from the City of Chicago to renovate historic Wrigley Field:

A furor erupted in Chicago – Mr. Obama’s hometown – over the disclosure of the advertising plan. The Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs, suddenly became entangled in city politics because the Cubs are pursuing city and state assistance for a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field.

I guess politics as usual in the big city will save Romney from being shipped off to the big house.

Does anyone else out there feel like a chump, like all these parasitic political pukes are laughing at us poor, simple, taxpaying slobs?