A couple of notes on those fun little state pensions

Paul Levy has some thoughts on how to get those legislators to give up those embarrassingly outrageous pensions they got: Get Deval Patrick to call them up and play a little political hardball. Press conferences and repeated mentions of the legislators names if they don't agree would be involved.

Over at CommonWealth UnBound, Michael Jonas suggests the Globe stop taking quite so much credit for its pension scoops because, he says, they're not quite so scoopy:

"The Globe discovered the pension enhancements during a review of retirement benefits of former lawmakers, part of an ongoing series by the newspaper," reporter Sean Murphy wrote in Sunday's piece. But CommonWealth magazine discovered and reported extensively on this very abuse of state pension law back in 2002 and again in 2004. Indeed, the 2002 story caused such a splash that the Globe followed-up with a story the next day (full contents available only via paid archives) crediting CommonWealth with uncovering the abuse and highlighting the main findings of the CommonWealth story. Earlier this year, when the pension issue resurfaced on Beacon Hill, we pointed back to those stories and added some current context here, here, here, and here. ...