In our usual scour of all things blogging today, we found out that we got a mention by Glen Reynolds of Instapundit.

For those of you who don’t know Glen, he’s considered the “Gold Standard” of blogging; a mention of your Web site by him often has what is commonly referred to as a “Insta-lanch” for deluge of traffic a mention can often bring.

Indeed, traffic has been through the roof these last few days. So, to our new found friends, just want to say, “Hi” and we hope you’ll come back often.

This is a blog dedicated to manufacturing and related issues, more or less. You probably came for the Lou Dobbs article, and you’ll find more like it on our Web site, www.DobbsWatch.com. Also, if you like cool things or watching how things are made, then you’ll love, www.CoolStuffbeingMade.com, our weekly trip to the factory floor that shows, well, how Cool Things Are Made. On most Wednesday we post a vintage manufacturing poster—you know, the kind of posters your grandma remembers that were printed during World War II, every Friday we do Friday Follies, a random collection of stuff. In between, you’ll find ruminations about energy, trade, unions, trial lawyers.

In any event, we’re glad you came by…hope to see you back here again real soon.

A regular blog reader, knowing of our great affection for Lou Dobbs, dropped us a line last week to ask if we knew that globalization guru Tom Friedman called Lou “a blithering idiot” in a lecture at Yale Law School last week. Apparently, they knew someone who was in the room and heard it. Our interest, of course, was piqued and so we did a Google search and found nothing. Turns out, the session was not open to press.

Imagine our surprise upon receiving an-e-mail from this same blog reader over the weekend, who sent us this link to the February 23 lecture, posted in its entirety on the Yale Law School website.

Unfortunately we were not able to download and excerpt it, but we found the actual time sequence.

If you click on the video link and move the slider to the one-hour mark, you’ll see a student in a blue button-down shirt stand up and ask a question. In his question, he references Dobbs and asks about “the nativist spirit” and protectionism, asks about the way issues are presented, and whether this is all more about mindset than about policy.

Friedman, three time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of bestsellers “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” and more recently “The World is Flat” (which sold a million and a half copies, far more than Dobbs’ viewership — or ours, by the way), begins his answer. “One of the problems”, he begins, explaining that we need leaders who can explain the complexity, not who will just stir the pot, “is we have politicians that are making us stupid, who are throwing sand in our eyes.” But then he goes on:

“And then you have a blithering idiot like Lou Dobbs, in my view, who’s using the platform of CNN in…the frame of a news show. This is not news. And so we have a political class not making sense of the world for people and that’s why the public…is so agitated.”

Ouch.

We know that an hour long video may be too long to watch, but Friedman is at times downright spellbinding. “We can’t protect our way to prosperity”, he says (didn’t the President say that in the State of the Union Address…?), and launches into an explanation of the difference between the old model of lifetime employment vs. the new model of lifetime employability. “Education isn’t a place”, he says simply, “It’s a process.”

So while we were coaxed in by the Dobbs line, we stayed to watch it all because it’s so damned interesting. No two ways about it, though, his message is the anti-Dobbs, and is ultimately one of hope and optimism.

Once again, here’s the link to the site, where you’ll need to download the latest version of Quicktime, and here’s a link to the actual video.

Got invited to a briefing at the Labor Department yesterday on the new union financial disclosure forms. You’ll recall that the unions fought valiantly to keep the Department from entering the 21st Century (or more accurately, the 20th) by requiring these forms to be filed — and available to the public — electronically.

While the Labor Department certainly gets credit for taking this huge leap forward — in the face of withering political pressure from the unions and their allies on Capitol Hill — it’s not the most user-friendly site in the government. They have built a site that is chock-a-block with information and again, they get credit for this, but having done so, they have taken this great light and put it under a technological bushel basket. To mix our metaphors, in our view they withstood the storm and then stopped ten yards short of the goal line.

For example, if you heard about these and decided to go looking for them and went to the DOL main page, you’d find nothing. Where the various agencies within the Department are listed, you’d have to know enough to click the “More” tag and in a box of alphabet soup, under one labeled, “ESA”, find “OLMS“, an acronym familiar to very few. Once on that site, you’d have to click on the “Internet Public Disclosure Room” tag and then on “LM-2 Reports“. Clear as mud, no? In fairness, they have created a short cut: www.union-reports.dol.gov, but that is nowhere to be seen on the home page.

To us, what would be very interesting to know is, for example, how much did a given union pour down the political rathole, and how much did they give to left-wing causes with which their members vehemently disagree? Come to think of it, this is what the average working joe (and josephine) would want to know, too, isn’t it? It’s not that easy to find.

So we say “Bravo” to the US Department of Labor for taking a bold and brave step. But at the same time, (the sound of one hand clapping), we would urge them to make this more user-friendly so that the average person who wants to know where in the heck their dues are going could find out in a click or two.

And, when DOL gets really proficient at that, they need to add a tag that lets union members get their money back.

Great editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by the above title, hitting the nail on the head on the topic of the verdict last week in Rhode Island against makers of paint for alleged lead exposure. Interestingly enough, as the editorial points out, the plaintiff here was the Rhode Island Attorney General, not anyone claiming to be injured by ingestion of lead paint.

No matter that one of the defendants last had lead in its paint in the 30′s and that it virtually disappeared from the market entirely in the 50′s — or that this is harm alleged from a use not anticipated by the product, a legal theory we’ve seen many times before, in many forms. The penalty phase continues and no doubt the over-eager court will throw the checkbook at the defendants when the time comes.

Of course, the Motley firm (that’s not an adjective, it’s a surname) stands to gain 16-2/3 of any recovery amount. Once again, cherchez the lawyers and another target, this time the paint industry. As the Journal concludes:

” The bizarre tort theory….is terrible news for the paint business and the thousands of people it employs, and it has potential ramifications for other industries that make lawful products that years later turn out to have healthy or safety problems. It also demonstrates once again that ‘liability’ in America has become completely untethered to either legal precedent or basic fairness.”

The Journal got it right, the court in Rhode Island got it wrong. One more bad example of regulation through litigation.

Sorry folks, we got a bit behind over the weekend and are just now getting around to posting this week’s radio show for you to enjoy. In any event, this week, we begin by talking with George Mason University Economics Department Chairman Donald Boudreaux on trade deficits. Then, the President the of Association of Washington Business joins NAM Senior Vice President Pat Cleary for a discussion on Competitiveness and a preview of the the 2006 Competitiveness Redbook. Later, we hear from Commerce Department Undersecretary Frank Lavin on the high cost of sugar and its impact on American jobs and then we speak with Mike Schmid, Managing Partner for Marketing at new NAM member, the Wolfgang Candy Company of York, PA. All this along with music by Bobby McFerrin and The Archies.

Click here to listen to the show.

A “Fair Share” of Disappointment for Some … Progress for Many - the recent legislative override of Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich’s veto of the so-called “Fair Share Health Care” (a.k.a. the Wal-Mart) bill (and the subsequent introduction of a follow-on bill covering employers of all sizes) might lead some to believe the Union-led state campaign to mandate health benefits is inevitable. We disagree – as the evidence in several other states bears out. Click here to view a status report from the friendly folks at Wal-Mart showing the successful defense against “Fair Share” bills (actually patently unfair for workers and employers alike) in the states of: Washington, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and Virginia.

We have no room for overconfidence, but clearly there is reason to be encouraged for the additional fights ahead. As I’ve noted before, no employer of any size should feel safe from the reach of these mandates. This Union-led effort is manifestly anti-employer in both form and content.

Health Care Spending to Reach $4 Trillion by 2015 – one out of every five dollars in the U.S. economy. Current projections (given our aging population and sagging waistlines) are that health care spending will grow from today’s $1.9 trillion system to a staggering $4 trillion by the year 2015. This fate is not certain in our view; changing the emphasis of our health care system from treatment to prevention could help mitigate the growth in health care costs to a more sustainable level.

We issued a press release on the implications of these new reports on employer-based coverage. Also, be sure to visit the NAM’s HC5 Coalition on Catastrophic and Chronic Health Care Costs for more information on how to counteract the trend of ever-rising health care costs.

Villains and Snake Oil Cures – for those of you fond of finding villains in health care, it’s the hospitals that the Health Affairs report fingers as the leading culprit. Growth in hospital costs (7.9% last year) is projected to outpace the economy [5.1% predicted growth] from 2006-2015. Certainly the aging of America accounts for some of this, but will we really need all those new urban hospital beds? What about rural America? Why not spend more to keep people out of hospitals in the future?

And for those of you who think this would be a lot easier if it could all be dumped on someone else (or even fixed as a percentage of payroll), you might want to rethink those assumptions. Not only does it not solve the cost increase problem, but it would also create delays in health care (ala Canada) and reduced quality from a less responsive system (ala England). Ultimately it would create a hollow kind of competition on an artificially leveled playing field.

Employers compete on many levels and should continue to compete for workers based on the attractiveness of their workplace, salary and benefit offerings. Don’t buy the artificial “level playing field” argument.

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This week, there’s a lot going on. The Senate is expected to press ahead on its lobbying reform efforts. We’ll have some thoughts on that going forward.

This is also the week of the semi-annual NAM Board of Directors meeting, in Arizona. We’ll be there on site, surrounded by the best manufacturers in the world, reporting on the proceedings and passing along some bon mots.

There will also be a video surprise for you regular blog readers. It’s at the video studio now but we hope to have it ready to post tomorrow. Suffice it to say it will be newsworthy. Stay tuned.

We’ve been invited to the Labor Department to hear about the new union financial disclosure requirements and website. We likely will not be blogging live from there, but we will be posting a full report either later today or first thing tomorrow morning, to fill you in on where you can get the latest information on the spending habits of various unions. We learned last week, incidentally, that the SEIU spends some 65% of its budget on organizing. That’s incredible. We heard that the nearest union to them is spending in single digits, like 7%. The rest is going down the political rathole. We hope to be able to shed some more light on that later today. This would also explain why the SEIU is growing while the others are shrinking.

Also, the NEA is expected to announce an affiliation with the sinking ship that is the AFL-CIO. Not sure what that’s about but will have some observations on that this week as well. Like we said, a busy week. Stay tuned.

Asked what improvements he thinks are needed on the national scale (outside of health care issues), Gov. Huckabee says simply that in Arkansas, they have to balance the budget, observing that he believes that this alone would “singlehandedly change” Washington if the budget had to be balanced.

On partisanship, he says, “If it’s polarized, it’s paralyzed”, noting that Governors of both parties must solve problems or they won’t last very long. At the end of the day, he says, the voters want to know if the potholes got fixed. “Political posturing”, he adds. “Is not a luxury we [Governors] can engage in.” Some 86% of elected officials in Arkansas are Democrats, so he has worked across the aisle to get things done, thinks we need more of that in Washington. Hard to argue with that. “We deliver by our record”, he says, “Not our rhetoric.”

According to the NAM Competitiveness Redbook, Arkansas is ranked 42d out of 50 for cost of doing business. This is a good thing. He said that 5 Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Arkansas and that he’s tried to create a climate that will encourage business to settle and expand there, and for entrepreneurship to flourish.

On energy, he says we not only need to end our dependence on foreign oil, we need to end our dependence on oil, period. He favors research and development of new sources. However, in the meantime, we need nuclear, hydrogen, need to explore ANWR (he calls ANWR a political, not an energy issue) and the Outer Continental Shelf.

As for the future, he says the government needs to create the financial incentives for development of new sources. Government needs to create, as he calls it, “The ‘Google’ of the gas tank”, the next big idea for energy. He says that like the race to space, government needs to challenge the country and needs to invest in the research to get it done. “Capitalism drives great decisions”, he says.

On competitiveness, he closed simply by saying that the future is based on our ability to be creative and innovative (has he been reading the blog?!?), “not on our ability to ‘bang it out cheaper’.”

All in all, this was a great session with a smart and sincere and dedicated public servant. We don’t thin we’ve heard the last of Mike Huckabee. We get the impression he will be a figure on the national stage for some time to come.

And, by the way, bravo to him for reaching out to the blogosphere. This was a smart move on his part and shows that he ‘gets it” when it comes to new methods of communications. Not sure Washington’s ready for that….

Sorry it took us ’til today to report on our visit on Friday with the very engaging Arkansas Governor — and National Governors’ Association Chair — Mike Huckabee. We got so caught up in the Pi contest that we got a little distracted. Sorry.

To begin, he is a very engaging and sincere guy. Sitting in a small room with him along with a handful of other bloggers, it was easy to forget that you were talking to a Governor and possible Presidential candidate. He is a bass guitarist, has a band that plays classic rock (there is no other real music after all) and knows his stuff when it comes to music and rock and roll facts and trivia. His passion for that topic is as palpable as his passion for health care and heath issues. By the way, he and his wife both hail from Hope, Arkansas, although unlike Bill Clinton, he was actually born in Hope as well.

Huckabee is most recently famous for dropping over 100 lbs. His book, “Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork“, chronicles his personal journey and lays out a program for emulating his success. For him, the day of reckoning came when he met with his doctor, who told him he had Type II diabetes and would likely die within 10 years. As Huckabee tells it, the doctor went on to describe in grim detail what those ten years might look like for him. It was then he realized he had control over this and resolved to do something about it.

But to say he is most famous for this is to sell him a bit short. This personal journey has led him to a passion about issues of health writ large — admittedly a huge public policy issue for the US — as well as to solutions which balance the role of government with personal responsibility. He is in town for the National Governors’ Association meeting where they will focus on his Healthy America Initiative. ( And click here for a copy of the agenda for this week’s meeting).

He talked about past health issues like smoking, the use of seat belts and drunk driving. In all cases, we changed the public attitude through a mix of education and enforcement. The same must happen with eating and obesity. Asked about the recent lawsuit against Nickelodeon for advertising what some parents claim isn’t “healthy food”, Huckabee says “where we don’t begin is in the courtroom”, adding that people must be educated, but we must give them the right to make choices. “My extra 110 lbs. was my own fault”, he says unflinchingly, “I made bad choices.” In addition to the personal responsibility, he says we need to make sure people have good information and that there are incentives to good health. In Arkansas, they did a body mass index of every child in Arkansas public schools, grades K-12. Knowing the facts is a great first step, as he says. They have provided the tools for state employees to quit smoking and have paid for health screenings as well. And, state Medicaid recipients get the same incentives as the state employees., In the end, says Huckabee, the result will be a healthier state, with ultimately lower health care costs.