Charles Grassley, who will be 77 in 2010, is being frequently included in lists generated by political prognosticators like NBC’s Chuck Todd, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and The Atlantic Monthly’s Marc Ambinder of Republican senators quietly considering joining Voinovich in retirement. But apparently no one bothered to actually ask him.

“We appreciate you taking time to check with us. Those writing these reports haven’t ever done so,” said Beth Pellett Levine, Grassley’s press secretary. “Sen. Grassley has held eight fundraisers since Election Day, and 10 more are scheduled. Like he’s always said, Sen. Grassley is running for reelection to the U.S. Senate.”

Skeptics will be quick to point out that Voinovich’s spokesperson also flatly denied the Ohio Republian’s retirement rumors. And when it comes to fundraising, both men had more than $2.5 million cash-on-hand according to paperwork filed with the Federal Election Commission Sept. 30, so it wouldn’t be unprecidented for a veteran Republican lawmaker to walk away from a substantial campaign war chest. But for now, Grassley is trying to tamp down the rumors.

Amero coin design by Dan Carr, www.amerocurrency.com

The odds that King will buy into the greatest urban legend of all time greatly increased last month when he told constituents that he was connecting the dots on another popular conspiracy theory: the creation of a North American Union, a border-blurring confederation of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The North American Union theory takes various forms depending on who’s doing the talking or blogging. Some incarnations involve a “superhighway” linking the nations, others a common currency often called the “amero.”

Rather than dismiss the idea the St. Louis Post Dispatch calls an “urban legend” — as Republicans like U.S. Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri have done — King gives it credibility by saying he can see a case for the plan appearing, dot by dot.

“My own view is that if you look at all of the signals that are there, look at the evidence that exists and all the dots, and you connect the dots, you can draw that picture,” King said at an Aug. 19 town hall meeting at Cronk’s Cafe Restaurant & Lounge in Denison.

From the exhaustive Post Dispatch story on the North American Union theory:

Forget conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, black helicopters, Sept. 11, 2001. This is the big one.

We’re talking about the secret plan to build a superhighway, a giant 10- to 12-lane production, from the Yucatán to the Yukon. This “SuperCorridor” would allow the really big part of the plan to take place: the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Say goodbye to the dollar, and maybe even the English language.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul famously trafficked in doom-and-gloom predictions about a superhighway and a union of the three nations in the Republican presidential primaries. Federal and state trade and highway officials said Paul’s claims were a paranoid fantasy.

U.S. Rep. Steve King

A Boston Globe story about the North American Union’s emergence as an issue at GOP town hall meeting described it this way: “If you haven’t heard about the NAU, that may be because its plotters have succeeded in keeping it secret. Or, more likely, because there is no such thing.”

King acknowledged that such a plan, which would involve ceding some national sovereignty, would be hard to accomplish surreptitiously. But he said he sees signs of a developing union in official U.S.-Mexican counter-terrorism discussions.

“The idea is to not worry so much about our interior border but to take our security out to our ocean borders,” King said.

King said any notion he had of waving off the issue of a North American Union as a joke vanished about a year ago when he heard former Mexican President Vicente Fox speak at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake.

“I actually have notes in my briefcase out in the vehicle from Vicente Fox’s speech,” King said.

It is telling that — of all the papers on all the issues that a congressman sees — King would take these “notes” along on a campaign swing.

“He [Fox] painted a picture of a North American Union,” King recalled. “And I listened to it and I thought this is the first time I’ve heard somebody of that stature talk so openly about an idea that will be rejected by the American people.”

Fox, who served as Mexican president from 2000 to 2006, no doubt gave North American Union-believers grist for their mills. I covered Fox in Storm Lake last October and this how I reported that portion of his remarks:

In the bigger picture, Fox advocated an economic system for the Americas that he envisions as operating something akin to the European Union. He said the United States clearly has a labor shortage and that a younger Mexico with a “mature” United States, in the demographics of age, have complementary economies. What’s more, Fox said, many of the Hispanics working in this nation and hailing from foreign places just want to make enough to live more comfortably in their homelands and aren’t viewing America as anything more than a wage-earning weigh station.

But it is a stretch to go from big-picture, lecture-circuit, book-selling speeches (where Fox also sought to make news by endorsing Hillary Clinton) to King’s dot-to-dot conspiracy involving current lawmakers and bureaucrats in all three nations.

King even buys into North American Union blogger-conspiracy theorists’ beliefs that a distribution area is being built in Kansas City to facilitate a superhighway of tri-nation traffic (peddled by, for instance, Jerome Corsi).

“You look at the location in Kansas City that looks like it’s going to be a distribution warehouse that is port of entry, those things are pretty compelling,” King said.