First (and items are not necessarily in order of the headline), ponder the irony of this:

Wisconsin’s largest teachers union has a problem.

A union problem.

This week, National Support Organization, which bills itself as the world’s largest union of union staffers, posted an online notice discouraging its members from seeking work with the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

“Don’t apply for WEAC vacancies!” screams the headline.

The reason for the boycott?

Chuck Agerstrand, president of the National Support Organization, is accusing WEAC officials of “breaching staff contracts and destroying any working relationship with its employees.”

“WEAC management is taking a page out of Gov. (Scott) Walker’splaybook and making up new employment rules not in the (United Staff Union) contract,” Agerstrand said on the labor group’s website. “They should be looking to the 42 employees they laid off to fill vacancies before they go outside the state.” …

Agerstrand said in his online post that WEAC management recently came up with a new rule for employees who have been laid off. According to Agerstrand, the rule says “an employee must have successfully passed a year’s probation in the job he/she wants to bump into or the employee has no recall rights.” He said this rule is contrary to WEAC’s contract with the United Staff Union, which is challenging the provision.

WEAC apparently needs layoff rules because they’re laying off employees (instead of adjusting the pay of their overcompensated management) since teachers who now have the choice of paying WEAC dues are choosing not to.

This is not the first example of unions or union supporters saying one thing and doing something contrary. President Obama’s comments about collective bargaining at his Thursday stimulus speech might make you think he favors collective bargaining for federal employees. Don’t bet that proposal will get to Congress, because, among other things, every Democratic president since Wisconsin public employees gained collective bargaining rights in the late 1950s has declined to do so.

The most vile thing you will read about 9/11 that does not have a Middle Eastern source comes from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

What happened after 9/11–and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not–was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto demolishes Krugman’s entire argument:

Krugman goes on to observe that beside Bush, Giuliani and Kerik, “a lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits–people who should have understood very well what was happening–took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?”

He has half a point here. We remember one professional pundit who behaved quite badly, writing on Sept. 14, 2001: “It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents after an act of mass murder,” he observed, then went ahead and did so: “If people rush out to buy bottled water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy. . . . The driving force behind the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings.”

That was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who added that “the attack opens the door to some sensible recession-fighting measures,” by which he meant “the classic Keynesian response to economic slowdown, a temporary burst of public spending. . . . Now it seems that we will indeed get a quick burst of public spending, however tragic the reasons.” He went on to denounce the “disgraceful opportunism” of those who “would try to exploit the horror to push their usual partisan agendas”–i.e., conservatives who he said were doing exactly what he was doing.

What Krugman wrote (which was only online, not in the printed Times)  is bad enough, although in a free society he has the right to hold scumbag opinions. But try to find this on the New York Times website. You can’t, because after announcing “I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons,” the Times erased the post. The Times should erase Krugman’s employment too.

Fortunately, better things are happening. For instance,  Forbes covers the on- and off-field juggernaut that is the Green Bay Packers:

With some 112,000 shareholders, the Packers are the only publicly owned team in America. Add to that Green Bay’s distinction as the country’s smallest major league sports market and they seem a nostalgic aberration amid megamoneyed rivals like the Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots. The longstanding line among football aficionados pegs the Packers as a charming welfare case that exists thanks only to the sufferance of other, richer NFL franchises. They allow the team to stay put in tiny Green Bay as an emblem of the league’s working-class roots.

The problem with that story: It isn’t true.

In reality the Green Bay Packers are an emerging financial power in the NFL. Despite their minuscule market, revenues for fiscal 2010 hit an alltime high of $259 million, 11th out of 32 teams and well above major-market franchises like the San Francisco 49ers ($234 million) and the Atlanta Falcons ($233 million). The Packers are regularly one of the 15 teams that pay into the league’s reserve fund rather than draw from it (so much for welfare). Their Super Bowl win, coming enhancements at the stadium and the league’s new collective bargaining agreement with players will make them stronger still.

“They’re an anomaly,” says Andrew Brandt, president of the website National Football Post. “They’re clearly the smallest-market team in all of professional sports, yet they’re a high-revenue team with no debt. There are a lot of big-market teams that wish they had that kind of financial situation.”

I’ve followed the Packers long enough to remember when Lambeau Field was one of the smallest stadiums in the NFL. By the time construction on the south end zone expansion is completed, it will be the fourth largest stadium in the NFL —smaller only than MetLife Stadium in the New York area, Cowboys Stadium, and FedEx Field — in the smallest market in major professional sports.

Major professional sports has demonstrated that teams in the smallest markets do well only with superior management. On the other hand, the Bears and Vikings have access to the same league-wide resources that the Packers have, and the Bears are in a much larger market. And yet the Bears and Vikings (the latter in their final year of their lease at its stadium) significantly underperform.