For Lou Dobbs, this is the rapture. The Senate is debating the immigration bill, a bill that might legalize — gulp — more immigrants, and President Bush is off to Lou’s least-favorite country, Mexico, for an economic summit with his NAFTA partners. For a guy who spends night after night after night hammering away on the issue of immigration, this is like the Super Bowl, World Series, Daytona 500 and Pamplona all rolled into one. The Mexican-American War of 2006. “Put me in, coach”, says Lou, “I’m ready to play.”

To make matters worse, Lou is headed to Mexico himself where he will broadcast live, the anti-ambassador of good will, the piñata pundit twisting over the heads of those he so detests. Indeed, it seems this week at times that CNN has become the voice of the angry white guy, with Dobbs — looking pretty shiny at times — ranting for seemingly hours on end about the evils of immigration. Every now and then he’d have to stop his divisive rhetoric long enough to clarify that it was “illegal” immigration he opposed, as it was never entirely clear from his comments that he drew any such distinction. He would also occasionally inject the obligatory platitude about immigrants — if they came here legally, of course. Almost sounded like, “Some of my best friends are immigrants”. Right. He probably waves to them as they mow his lawn. Loves ‘em.

So stay tuned to Lou this week. For him, it is harmonic convergence, it is the rapture. In Mexico, he’ll be blasting away at Mexican Presidente Fox, at President Bush and maybe at Canadian Prime Minister Harper, for all we know. And during the lulls in the summit, he will be lobbing rhetorical grenades at the Senate and its immigration debate. He is in his element, he was born for this moment.

And he just might blow.

A regular blog reader dropped us a note yesterday to ask if anyone else noted the irony in the protests here and in France this week. The images of the rioting French juxtaposed against images of rallying American immigrants was just too much for them, and they were probably right. It is indeed a tale of two countries, each with their own unique histories and hopes. We are a nation of immigrants, while France has clearly not assimilated its immigrant population. But for them, the good news was that it wasn’t the immigrants protesting this time, it was a general strike and the under-26 set, protesting new laws that would make anyone under the age of 26 basically employable at will (horrors!) for the first two years of work. They protested for more government restrictions while our immigrant population protested for more opportunity and hope.

It’s been said that its American optimism that’s so unique and that gives us such a special place in the world, as compared to pessimism and cynicism in other countries. We saw that on the world stage this week. Regardless of where you stand on the immigration issue, while the debate rages, we must remember that we are still the country of hope.

May it be ever thus.

No, we’re not talking about their idiotic protests, more on that later….

There was a great front-page article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about France and it’s zeal for nuclear power. They are so well-known as a so-called “green” economy that it usually startles people to discover that they get almost 80% of their power form nuclear plants. They have built them ambitiously and have an excellent safety record with them. Given their incredibly burdensome employment laws, their reliable, affordable power is one way they can stay in the global competitiveness game.

Here in the US, it’s a different story. We remain hamstrung by some pretty lousy policy choices we’ve made on energy. The enviros have all but achieved a moratorium on nuclear plants here. They don’t want us to drill for oil, or for natural gas, or to mine — or burn — coal either, by the way. And so we sit and watch our energy prices soar while our competitors can only look at us and scratch their heads. We are the only country that restricts access to its own natural resources. Who else among our competitors would be dumb enough to do that?

And so we dither while France of all countries is bullish on nuclear. Maybe it’s time we revisited our strident opposition (as a nation) to nuclear and begin to emulate our competitors. It’s about the only area — other than their food and wine — where we’d want to emulate the French.

Good op-ed in today’s WaPo by Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup. Says Prince: “In an increasingly global economy, labels such as ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ have become less relevant.” Amen to that. A good read. Send to your favorite xenophobe.

Most of the troops are back at headquarters after being gone part of the week last week for National Manufacturing Week (NMW).

By all accounts, it was a very successful show and one of the highlights noted by many was the presence of Small Business Television (SBTV).

SBTV is the first television network on the web devoted 100 percent to the small business market – from business start-ups to established enterprises.

They sent a crew to NMW to tape different speeches and have recently posted that content on their Web site.

Check out www.sbtv.com for highlights from NMW. Things that you can watch include:

An overview of the show;
The well-received speech by Caterpillar CEO, Jim Owens, and
A speech by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, to name a few.

Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby correctly identified world-leading productivity as the foundation of a new “heyday” for American business [ Why U.S. Business Is Winning].

But he’s wrong to say that “American business is not especially good at coaxing productivity out of factory workers.” In fact, U.S. manufacturing’s productivity has soared a dizzying 24 percent since 2001. That’s 76 percent higher than the 13.6 percent productivity growth for all non-farm businesses, and it was the primary reason our manufacturing sector comfortably outgrew the overall economy in both 2004 and 2005.

Innovative U.S. manufacturing now produces and exports more than ever before, albeit with fewer workers. America’s economy would struggle to grow without a healthy manufacturing sector.

In a Rose Garden ceremony this morning a few blocks from NAM HQ here in Washington, the President announced the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. OMB Director Josh Bolton will take his place in one of the most stressful, difficult and demanding jobs in Washington.

It’s been said that a person with no enemies hasn’t really done anything. If that’s true — and we’re not sure it is — then Andy Card would be the exception to the rule. He is one of the nicest, most decent people not only in Washington (a low bar, admittedly), but on the earth. A former member of the NAM Board of Directors, we have known him through many past lives, including his stint as Secretary of Transportation. Throughout it all, he has been the consummate professional, the uber-public servant, always level-headed, and always, always decent. You hear that word a lot when people describe him: “decent”. In a soulless town he is a man with a soul — and a heart.

We congratulate him on a career marked by decency, on his many years of service — including some very difficult times surrounding 9/11 — and we wish him well. We look forward to working with him in his next life, wherever that may be.

With a bill being voted out of the Judiciary Committee last night, the Senate promises to tackle the thorny and complex issue of immigration. It is one of those issues where the far right some times meets the far left, and strange bedfellows abound. Some see it from the unskilled worker side, some see it from the national security side. For our part, we tend to look at the high end and the need for more visas for smart, skilled workers. That’s where our innovation — the seed corn of manufacturing — is going to come from. Our worry, of course, is that the noise from the other pieces of this debate will drown out discussions of these very important issues of attracting and keeping the best talent in the world. We noted the Wall Street Journal editorial from yesterday which pretty much hit the nail on the head.

The problem is, unless the Congress can agree on some much-needed reforms (the high-end visas are called H1B’s), these folks will go back to their home countries and compete against us. In 2001, only 8% of all degrees awarded in the US were in engineering, a 50% decline from 1960. South Kora, an economy about one-tenth the size of the US — graduates about the same number of engineers as we do here. China graduates at least four times as many. In fact, here’s a great PowerPoint presentation from Paula Collins of Texas Instruments, given at our Public Affairs meeting in Arizona last week. It pretty fairly lays out the magnitude of the problem.

And, since this is a multi-lateral game, foreign student immigration to Australia has doubled since 2000, while ours has remained flat. People will go somewhere to get the education. We need to make sure the world’s best and brightest continue to come here — and stay here.

Of course, someone — or ones — will write to say, “What about American workers?” In most of these professions, according to Michaela Platzer of ContentFirst, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, the unemployment rate is almost immeasurably low: 1.6% for aerospace engineers, 1.4% for computer hardware engineers, 1.7% for electrical engineers. There are jobs that are going begging. The work will go somewhere, and we want to keep it here.

As regular blog readers know, we have been pounding away on the need to improve US education. Hopefully the H1B issue will be moot some day, but that day isn’t here yet. We need to move on two simultaneous tracks, it seems to us: continue to work to improve the quality of the primary and secondary school system in the US and also make sure we keep the world’s best and brightest minds right here in the US.

Stay tuned for updates on this issue as it plays out this week. Also check out the CompeteAmerica website for more facts on this debate.

Time magazine is the latest to weigh in on the global warming hysteria, with a cover story this week. Near as we can tell, it’s a lot of hype and hooey. Seems there is no consensus among scientists that it’s happening, no consensus among those who think it’s happening about why and no consensus among those who think it’s happening about what to do about it.

We went and checked out GlobalWarming.org, got some interesting info there. Also discovered from our friends over at JunkScience.com that 30 years ago, both Time and Newsweek ran stories a year apart about “The Coming Ice Age”. Whatever. Hard keeping up with the crisis du jour.

For more in-depth info, here’s our white paper, submitted to the Senate Energy Committee a week or so ago. Here’s an excerpt:

“However, there remains considerable scientific uncertainty and disagreement regarding human impacts on climate, and there is an inability to predict accurately future climate change. In fact, observational data have not confirmed evidence of global warming that can be attributed to human activities.”

Pretty straightforward, but doesn’t really feed into the hysteria, so it’s much less newsworthy. It’s why we have blogs…..

As we noted last week, Sens. Schumer (D-NY) and Graham (R-SC) went to China last week to talk to the Chinese about their currency, which has been pegged to the dollar for the last dozen years or do. Here’s the New York Times editorial from yesterday with which we agree, more or less (agreeing with the Times? Horrors!) and here’s a 10 question “Q&A” on the topic from this week’s Time magazine. We’ll be writing more on this topic this week.