Thanks to Rush for this one, but apparently Al Gore was speaking up at the UN in New York — for like three hours (gawd!). Along the way, among other whoppers, he apparently said that cigarette smoking is a significant contributor to global warming. What’s next, exhaling?

Oh yeah, and he said that “Greenland runs a real risk of splitting in two, and if that happens substantial parts of Manhattan, Shanghai, and Bombay will disappear.” Apparently, plain hysteria wasn’t working so he’s now in hysteria overdrive. Maybe it’s time for Al to lay off the anti-oxidants.

Fresh from our visit with our Aussie friends (see below), we can only say, “Crikey!” The guy just gets kookier.

Oh, and by the way, reportedly the UN has decided to renege on its original plan to post a video or transcript of his remarks. That’s OK, sounds like it’s not worthy of such a prestigious site. Probably more suitable for YouTube.

Had a good meeting yesterday with Stephen Smith and Sharon Cullen from the Australian Industry Group, known to the Aussies as “Ai,” essentially our Australian counterpart. They’re on a 7-day whirlwind tour of the states that includes New York, New Hampshire, DC, Chicago and LA, among other places. They’re collecting info from us on some best practices in the area of non-dues revenue products.

They also came to talk about blogging, believe it or not. Somehow our humble little blog has made it all the way Down Under. We know our friend Bob Carter (we’ll be posting something form him here soon) is there, and apparently we have a few more Aussie readers. Who knew? They wanted to talk to us about it: the hows, the whys, the results. We happily obliged.

The Aussies are simpatico with us on any number of fronts, have been great US allies. Recall that they also did not sign the Kyoto treaty (the one that failed 95-0 in the US Senate during Bill Clinton’s years). They also have a slew of new labor laws that we can only covet here. One, for example, allows private contracts with individual employees to trump collective bargaining agreements with established unions. Must make the unions happy. We’ll fill you in on some other Aussie innovations in the workplace as we learn about them.

So we just wanted to give Stephen and Sharon a little shout, say, “good onya” to them and wish them safe travels. Here’s a link to the Ai site.

There are few things in this world as pure as the sound of James Galway’s flute. His famous CD Legends – the top-selling CD in Ireland for a long spell — made with pianist Phil Coulter — is hard to beat for some great tunes on the flute. We have a special place in our heart for the flute since the blogteen actually plays it as well, even made the Honor Band (OK, we’re bragging now).

So when we got this 15-minute video from the good people at Selmer, we were happy to post it. It really reminds us once again that something that sounds as beautiful as the flute is just one more manufactured product. You see it here as it moves from drawn seamless tubes of either nickel silver (for student flutes) or sterling silver (for the high-end flutes), through the process of adding the holes, the springs and the keys. It is so meticulous, so precise. It is the story of manufacturing once again.

What a quiet world we would have without the sound of this great instrument and what a quiet world we would have without manufacturers to make the great instruments of our time.

Click here to watch this week’s video of Selmer flutes being made and feel the musical manufacturing vibe.

On America’s Business this week, host Mike Hambrick covers the NAM’s newly released “cost study” demonstrating that manufacturers in the United States face a 31.7 percent structural cost disadvantage compared to our major global competitors. The culprits? Wrong-headed government policies on taxes, energy, legal reforms, benefit mandates and regulation.

Mike’s weekly discussion with Renee Giachino of the American Justice Partnership focuses on major cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and outrageous lawsuits from around the country.

“America’s Business” follows up with a profile of the Manufacturing Skills Standards Council’s new program to certify manufacturing production workers. The initiative was launched this week at the NAM.

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana calls in to talk about government efficiency and economic development, emphases that are helping to bring thousands of new jobs to the state.

And our regular segments feature “Factory Floor” — a first-person report from Sandra Westlund-Deenihan, president of Quality Float Works, Inc., of Schaumburg, Illinois. There’s a Soap Box, and NAM President John Engler closes with his “Last Word” commentary.

For a full line-up of the program and to listen on-line, please click here.

UPDATE: The Associated Press picked up the interview with Governor Daniels. (Story here.

INDIANAPOLIS – Gov. Mitch Daniels says he will never seek a different political office.

“This is the first office I ever sought or ever will,” Daniels said in an interview for this week’s “America’s Business,” a radio program of the National Association of Manufacturers.

There has been talk that Daniels might use his current office as a springboard for a U.S. Senate seat or even the presidency.

However, Daniels, who served as President Bush’s budget director, said he ran for governor only “because we saw our state slipping behind in way too many ways – economically, educationally and in terms of its future potential.”

We know the WaPo long ago lost any semblance of balance when it comes to the theory of global warming. They wrote this editorial yesterday and if we weren’t so busy with the NAM Board of Directors meeting we would have written on it then.

There’s this “new” study out that supposedly shows the globe is the warmest ever. Pardon the pun, but it’s not really new, it’s just, well, re-heated. But there are a bunch of sites that doubt it and some are pretty wonky. This one, by a Harvard professor, notes that whenever Jim Hansen writes a paper, the media descends like a horde and promotes the heck out of it. He pokes holes in it and in a post right before, points out that the temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere are actually dropping. Let’s ignore that, shall we?
This one, from Steve McIntyre is similarly wonky and presents a blizzard of data to debunk this latest study.

Finally, for the less wonky, is Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This is a guy who actually knows something about climate change. Carter Wood wrote on his recent floor speech a day or two ago. So what did the MSM do with his torrent of info rebutting climate change? Well, CNN for its part blistered him. He’s undercutting their dogma, after all. Again, these folks have lost all semblance of fairness. And so Inhofe blasted back, pointing out the obvious flaws in CNN’s story. Good for him.

We’re sure if we had the time we can fins plenty of sites that are debunking this latest study, but we’ll leave it at this. Just want to remind our friends in the MSM that there is another side to this story.

For those of you who can’t live without a wrap-up of the just-concluded NAM Board of Directors Meting here in Washington, we’ll do one in the next day or two. We’re all frankly a little out of gas at the moment, been a lot of early mornings, late nights and busy days in between. Will write when we catch our breaths. Bottom line is it was a great and productive meeting, with some of the greatest manufacturers in the world in attendance. Stay tuned for more details.

It’s been a long week ’round the blog corral, lots going on. We had our NIST speech, the NAM semi-annual Board meeting, and just a lot of activity. Yeah, we’re a little punch drunk — so when Carter Wood sent this video around, we all fell off of our chairs.

You all remember Weird Al Yankovic for his many famous and ridiculous parodies, from “Another One Rides the Bus” to his great parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” he has always been reliably ridiculous.

So when this appeared, a parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” (a song that would not be suitable for a family blog), we thought it was funny. Reminded us a little of “Tea Party.”

Click here to see Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy”. It may be funny, or we may just be really, really tired.

Our friends at General Electric (GE) have started a blog. And, since one good blog deserves another, we wanted to provide a shout out to them and encourage y’all to check it out.

You may recall a few months back that the GE research division started a blog called “From Edison’s Desk.” Well, here’s more proof that this innovative company really understands how to communicate in new and innovate ways. Their new blog can be found at http://www.bloggingnext.com.

GE’s blog is part of Wired’s NextFest. According to their Web site:

WIRED’s vision of a new world’s fair, WIRED NextFest is a four-day festival of innovative products and technologies that are transforming our world. Patterned on the great World’s Fairs of the past, this year’s NextFest in New York features more than 130 interactive exhibits from leading scientists and researchers around the world. Experience the future of exploration, entertainment, transportation, health, communication, design, security, and green living. Visitors of all ages are welcome.

GE is filled with ridiculously smart people, and it’s exciting that they’re allowing comments and letting their writers speak in their own voice, rather than imposing a top-down blog discipline. Also of interest is that they have over a thousand photos on an unedited Flickr stream. Let a thousand bulbs shine!

We had an opportunity to meet up with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit earlier this week at a panel discussion hosted by Pajamas Media at the National Press Club. We mentioned our Web site CoolStuffBeingMade and it must have made an impression upon him because he linked to us. Thanks Glenn!

For all of you who are new to our site, we want to say “Welcome!” On CoolStuffBeingMade, you’ll find a new video every Saturday. If you forget to check back every Saturday, then subscribe to the CoolStuffBeingMade feed. We publish our videos in windows streaming media and (for all you Mac fans), also an MP4 video podcast feed.

We started Cool Stuff Being Made as a service to the public to illustrate that people still make things in America; that products don’t just drop out of the sky. It’s grown into the Internet’s largest collection of videos of how things made. As you scroll through the category you’ll see we’ve got products ranging from how aluminum cans are made to how we make the Campbell’s soup that goes into those cans…and most everything in between. You’ll surely find something for the whole family. For all theKenny Chesney fans, we even have a video on how tractors are made! If there’s something here that we don’t have, let us know and we’ll search our archives and find it.

If you’re not interested in how things are made, but care about business issues like Global Warming, Unions, or even Lou Dobbs, you’ll find our site to be great place to hang out, too.

Special thanks to our blog technical guy, PJ Doland, who helped us come up with this idea and to the Webcast Group that keeps our streaming media costs affordable.

Yesterday NAM, The Manufacturing Institute and the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI released one of the most important reports of the year for manufacturers and those who care about the U.S. standard of living.

The Escalating Cost Crisis is an important followup report to our 2003 report, How Structural Costs Imposed on US Manufacturers Harm Workers and Threaten Competitiveness. That report showed that U.S. manufacturers had a 22.4 percent cost disadvantage when compared with our nine largest trading partners.

The 2006 report is an update which shows that Congress hasn’t done enough in the past three years to make manufacturing here more competitive. The gap has grown to 31.7 percent–a 42 percent increase. Manufacturers are doing their part by investing in R&D, training workers and developing new products and processes at a furious rate. Government needs to more clearly see its role. There are three myths that are debunked in the new report:

* Myth: US business taxes have been cut to the bone. Reality: the report shows that the United States is standing still while the rest of the world is cutting corporate taxes. The OECD average rate is now a full 10 points BELOW the U.S. rate. In our report, only Japan is higher. It telltale when even German socialists are cutting corporate tax rates but the U.S. hardly budges.
* Myth: Europe is greenest. Reality: The report looks at the costs of pollution abatement regulation and finds that this country spends more of manufacturing output on it than France, Germany or the UK. What does this mean? It could mean that those countries are more efficient regulators, gaining environmental improvements without saddling their manufacturers with extreme costs. Or it could mean the U.S.is greener.
* Myth: Energy is a disadvantage for the US. Reality: Just ten years ago, the US had a large international advantage because of our large natural gas reserves. That’s been turned into a cost–a disadvantage–in the past decade though and it is one of the saddest elements in the cost study report. That’s because we have ample natural gas resources that manufacturing needs, we are just not deploying them. So US manufacturers pay more for this fuel than counterparts in Canada, UK and elsewhere. Sad because we can remedy it easily by allowing more drilling but Congress can’t seem to get there.

For the full report, click here….