It’s that time of year again when the little trick or treaters will be scurrying around your neighborhood, fleecing you out of all sorts of gooey treats. However, don’t let that “trick” be a lawsuit — protect yourself!

Here’s a link to last year’s post with a hilarious (but all too real) disclaimer that we urge you to get your little goblins to sign tonight. This comes courtesy of the good folks over at the Center for Consumer Freedom, who are used to battling specious lawsuits on novel and unproven theories.

Click here to see the “Halloween Liability and Indemnification Agreement.” Go make a ton of copies and keep a few crayons handy so the kids can sign it. Oh, and be careful of the disappearing ink.

Happy Halloween!

We depart from the usual manufacturing-related subjects to enter the realm of media analysis, or rather, media-frenzy analysis. Last Tuesday, October 24, WDAY radio host Scott Hennen allowed us to join him for his White House Radio Day interview with Vice President Richard B. Cheney. It was a heck of a get for the Fargo, N.D. broadcaster; Cheney did only three radio interviews that day, the other two being with Juan Williams of National Public Radio and Sean Hannity, the prominent conservative talker.

The interview occurred about 10 a.m. in the Vice President’s West Wing office, and for the first day or so, no one in the media outside of WDAY paid much attention to Cheney’s comments. And then the story blew up, as they say. And today, six days later, the interview remains prominent in the news (or at least in Al Kamen’s reliably mocking “In the Loop” column in the Washington Post).

The topics? Waterboarding, interrogations, terrorists and perfidious CNN. And since we were there at the story’s inception, we thought shopfloor.org’s readers might like a behind-the-scenes account of how a story starts small and becomes HUGE (and increasingly hysterical).

A lengthy post follows below the fold. And we emphasize that the NAM does not have any position on the issues examined.

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The Manufacturing Institute is the research and education arm of NAM. We have issued a lot of new, insightful reports on manufacturing in the past six months. A bumper crop, in fact! Now the magicians who manage the Web site have streamlined the page where we list them and made it easier to access them, so if you want to know more about what makes today’s manufacturing tick, visit our new reports page. Just click here.

Here from the Office of the White House Press Secretary is the President’s public schedule for this week, mostly consisting of road trips.

Click here to see it.

Thanks to one of our regular labor skate readers, one of the many who are fed up with John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO, for sending along this gem.

Here’s the set up: The AFL-CIO headquarters sits on the corner of 16th St. and I (also known as “Eye”) Street in Washington, DC. In an attempt to get their message out, they have hung this westward-facing “Had Enough? Vote” banner from the corner of their building. Never mind that its rife with inaccuracies and that it portends flushing more of their members’ money down the drain, supporting causes and candidates which the members don’t support. We’re so over that.

No, to get the full impact, you must look at this picture, which includes a view of traffic on Eye Street. Notice the “One Way” signs and note which way the traffic is moving. That’s right, Eye Street is a one-way street, going westbound. That means the sign faces the wrong way on a one-way street, away from the hordes of people who might otherwise see it each day.

As we picked ourselves up off the floor from laughing over this latest colossally stupid move by the boneheads over at the AFL-CIO, it occurred to us that no, this was actually quite fitting. Why? Because for the hundreds of thousands of people driving westbound down Eye St. in the Nation’s Capitol each week, they see labor’s message the same way the rest of America can see all that was great about the American Labor Movement: In the rear view mirror.

Two takes on the topic du jour, i.e., what will the Dems do if they find themselves in control of one or both houses of Congress? For its part, here is the WaPo’s take from yesterday, trying their darnedest to be hopeful and positive but ultimately failing. Says the WaPo of the Dems, “Their agenda is a hodgepodge of good ideas, bad ideas and no ideas.”

The Wall Street Journal over the weekend printed this editorial, which is even less optimistic than the Post’s. The Journal’s lists tax increases, easing union organizing and a windfall profits tax among the likely items.

We pass ‘em along FYI, as both pieces are worth reading. Not really uplifting, but worth reading.

UK Chancellor Gordon Brown has announced he’s enlisting Al Gore’s help “in an effort to push climate change up the international agenda.” Remember that Al Gore was the President of the US Senate when the Kyoto treaty –which he championed — failed 95-0.

Oh, well — at least he can go to the UK and keep repeating that there’s consensus (when there’s not) and keep declaring the debate “over” in the hopes that serious scientists don’t continue to question him.

We saw this interesting article in the New York Times the other day, “In Clean Politics, Flesh Is Pressed, Then Sanitized.”

Its about how much politicians, with all their hand shaking they have to do, depend on a nice little product called Purell.In case you were wondering, its made in America by an NAM member, Pfizer. Proving once again that politics would be incomplete without manufacturers.

Here’s the lead editorial from today’s New York Times, lamenting all these Bush tax cuts. This in spite of the fact that the tax cuts have led to more spending and yes, even to greater tax receipts. The deficit dropped dramatically as a result, although the Times notes that they, “result in less tax revenue than is needed,” whatever they heck that means. They resulted in more tax revenue. Isn’t that enough?

Also, as any high school civics student can tell you, there are actually two sides to the budget: taxes and spending. In pursuit of a balanced budget, you can increase one or decrease the other. But once again, the Gray Lady refuses to acknowledge the spending side, seeing only one solution to curing the deficit.

The tax cuts should be extended and the Times ought to go back to school.

Everyone thinks of Wisconsin as the Dairy State because it produces more cheese than any other state. Who can forget those crazy cheesehead hats at the Green Bay Packers games?

Nipping at the heels of America’s Dairyland are cheesemakers in California, which may soon pass Wisconsin as the largest maker of cheeses in the United States. Last year, California manufacturers produced 2.14 billion pounds of cheese, which is about 25 percent of the U.S. total. That’s a big surge from only 20 years ago when they produced about 7 percent. Wisconsin is still king, though, with 2.4 billion pounds each year. A recent AP story makes it clear that the trend favors the west coast producers.

Food production is the largest single manufacturing sector in the United States, eclipsing autos, electronics and other sectors you might have thought were the largest. So it is indeed interesting to see this shift within that sector. The Manufacturing Institute just released the 7th edition of The Facts About Modern Manufacturing where we discuss this and other neat things about U.S. producers. Click here for a link to the page about today’s largest manufacturing sectors.

In some ways, this migration is not surprising. California is far and away the largest manufacturing state in the nation, followed by Texas. So making cheese there is no more surprising than making aerospace components, auto parts or semiconductors. (From a policy aspect, what is surprising is how little many of that state’s elected officials prize manufacturing and seem to find new ways every year to drive a good share of it out to other regions). Our new Facts Book ranks the states, too, so check that out too while you are visting our Web site.

To read the full AP story about California vs. Wisconsin cheesemakers, click here.