You hear frequently in public discourse — especially in times of war — about the cost of democracy. Well, did you ever wonder how much democracy really costs? Thanks to some publicly-available information, we’re able to tell you: About $30 million.

Yup — that’s how much the AFL-CIO and its various unions paid to well over 200 House candidates, both incumbents and challengers (and all Democrats) in the last election cycle. For that sum, these folks are willing to turn their backs on a central democratic principle — secret ballot elections — and support the anti-democracy card check bill.

In fact, of the top 20 House recipients of union PAC money – all Dems — all but one (Speaker Pelosi) is a co-sponsor of the anti-democracy bill. The Speaker, as you may know, doesn’t usually sponsor legislation. These top 20 alone hauled in almost $9 million of workers’ hard-earned dues. You can just scroll through chief sponsor George Miller’s (D-CA) FEC report and behold the embarrassment of union PAC riches.

So the next time you hear someone ask — rhetorically or not, “What price democracy?” Just confidently answer, “$30 million.” For this group of Democrats in the House, it appears that’s the going rate, the price at which they’re willing to throw democracy out the window.

Oh — and before any of you union gadflies post a snarky comment demanding to know how much we spent, the answer is, “not a cent.” We don’t have a PAC.

The plot thickens. Someone sent ’round this flyer from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) touting their “Organizing Incentive Program.” It’s not great quality, but scroll down to the bottom and you’ll get the idea: They are paying a bounty to organizers to come up with signed cards — $10 per card “at the successful conclusion of a card check.”

Don’t believe for a second that this process of collecting cards isn’t an intimidating one. The union organizers accost employees face-to-face — often in their homes — and lean on them until they sign the cards. Because many employees feel intimidated, they just sign the cards. But when election day comes, in the privacy of a secret ballot, they don’t vote for the union.

NAM President John Engler made a great point on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show last night: He said this bill is a metaphor for what’s wrong with the card check process in that a good number of these 230+ Congressional co-sponsors would never support this bill if there were a secret ballot election. They tell us all too often that they’re supporting it, but they have to, you understand — because it’s organized labor’s No. 1 priority and they won’t get any more, uh, $upport from the union$ if they don’t $pon$or the bill. Get it?

If this bill becomes law, watch the bounty rise on those signed cards, and watch the intimidation run amok. For our part, we continue to prefer elections, the only fair way to sort it all out — unless you’re consistently losing, in which case you wanna change the rules.

UPDATE (By Carter Wood, 9:20 a.m.): Video of the “card-check” segment on last night’s Kudlow show is available online here. NAM President John Engler debates the topic with Jared Bernstein of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute.

Former GE President and CEO Jack Welch speaks on the topic in the preceding segment (video available here), saying, “This is about the worst thing I’ve seen in the last 25 years.” Automatic unionization through card-check would return America to the lumbering economy of the ’70s, Welch said. “This is not about wages, this is not about health care, this is about productivity. This is about having a productive society where people get good wages, good benefits, but compete effectively in a good economy.”

Here’s a story that’s burning up the blogosphere…

According to the non-partisan Tennessee Center for Policy Research, Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion is burning up twenty times the energy of the average American household. Al’s in the midst of a big media love fest since a bunch of his contributors got together to give him an award on Sunday night for his movie which is part fact and — apparently — part fiction. But while he’s busy preaching, it appears his carbon footprint is matching his growing girth. We’ve noted here before that Al’s got a little hypocrisy problem — as do some of his Hollywood pals.

Here’s a link to one blogger who estimates that because of Al’s environmental impact on the polar bears, he’s killing almost four millibears a year. Ah, the carnage!

Who knows? Things may get so bad that Al will go back to flying commercial.

UPDATE: (By Carter Wood, 10 a.m.): The former vice president has responded, detailing his conservation efforts and noting he buys “carbon offsets” to balance his energy consumption. The Captain’s Quarters blog punches a hole in that defense:

[Purchasing] offsets only means that Gore doesn’t want to make the same kind of sacrifices that he’s asking other families to make. He’s using a modern form of indulgences in order to avoid doing the penance that global-warming activism demands of others. It means that the very rich can continue to suck up energy and raise the price and the demand for electricity and natural gas, while families struggle with their energy costs and face increasing government regulation and taxation. It’s a regressive plan that Gore’s supporters would decry if the same kind of scheme were applied to a national sales tax, for instance.

Kim Priestap engages in even more excellent analysis of Gore’s power-preening over at the Wizbang blog, providing lots of links, too.

This week marks EntrepreurshipWeek USA. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), The Manufacturing Institute and manufacturers across the country are celebrating this critical component of American inventiveness and economic growth. We are pleased to be a partner in this important initiative. Many legendary U.S. manufacturers started with an idea in a backyard garage, eventually growing into full blown icons such as Xerox, Caterpillar and Intel. Just click on the company to learn about the entrepreneurs who started them.

Within the nearly 300,000 manufacturing firms in the United States today, 99 percent of them are small and medium sized firms that have to be fast on their feet and entrepreneurial, especially in this global marketplace. So entrepreneurship is a highly valued skill set in our industry. During the past 15 years, businesses in all types of industries that are less than five years old have accounted for about 70 percent of the net job creation.

We see this in manufacturing. A few weeks ago I was in Fort Worth, Texas visiting one of NAM’s small manufacturers, Williams-Pyro. In the past few years, they have grown from 55 to 100 employees and a third of them are engineers, helping that company with new product development and ensuring the quality of their current production. That’s certainly entrepreneurial.

Be sure to visit the EntrepreurshipWeek USA Web site by clicking here. It’s particularly cool for young people and has an innovation competition that they can participate in. And that’s certainly entrepreneurial!

Watch for another entry on entrepreneurship on Tuesday.

Excellent, new analyses have become available debunking the economic arguments and sheer cant being spread by advocates of card check.

James Sherk of The Heritage Foundation provides a point-by-point rebuttal of labor’s claims in this primer, “Card Checks Would Not Solve Alleged Problems with Union Organizing Elections.” The conclusion:

Card checks would not remedy the alleged abuses that union activists say justify its passage. Labor activists contend that employers systematically threaten and even fire workers who want to join a union, drag out the election process, and prevent unions from making their case to workers. These allegations are either baseless or vastly exaggerated. But even if the unions are right, card check laws that make a workers’ choice to join a union public would do nothing to solve them. Card checks would actually make it easier for rogue employers to fire union supporters and more difficult for unions to contact workers. American workers have a fundamental right to vote in privacy that Congress should not deny them. That right should not be denied in favor of a process that would not address the allegations of problems with private-ballot elections.

Philip Klein, a reporter with The American Specator, describes the pressure he once faced from union organizers and capably lays out the partisan rationale behind the push for a House vote. Klein states an obvious point:

If unions believe that workers would benefit from their representation, they have no reason to fear submitting themselves to the democratic process in a secret ballot election, but instead they prefer coercion.

Phil Kerpen, policy director of Americans for Prosperity, explains in this column that labor is pushing the undemocratic card-check legislation out of desperation in the face of declining union membership. He argues:

The world is changing. The economy is more competitive than ever, and companies compete not just for customers but for workers. Unemployment is at historic lows and companies everywhere are recruiting aggressively. The sharp decline in private-sector union membership, down from 20.1 percent in 1980 to just 7.4 percent in 2006, has coincided with a prolonged period of booming economic growth and rising standards of living.

Can unions adapt to make themselves attractive to private-sector workers in the 21st century? If they can, workers will vote for them in federally supervised, secret-ballot elections. If they can’t, they deserve to continue on their slow march to extinction.

And if Congress rigs the rules to force workers to accept unions they don’t want, union bosses will win and workers will lose.

All three pieces are worthy contributions to the debate, but the best place to start is the Heritage essay, which demolishes labor’s arguments about employer wrongdoing.

Here we go with the regular weekly roundup:

This week, the House of Representatives is poised to deal a blow to secret ballot elections here at home. Congress is expected to vote on H.R. 800, the anti-democracy card check bill maybe as early as Wednesday. Here’s what you need to do:

Please take the time to weigh in. Much is at stake. In their haste to protect the unions, the majority of the House of Representatives is poised to do damage to a fundamental principle of democracy.

With the country’s governors in town for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program interviewed three state chief executives this morning: Mitch Daniels, R-IN; Kathleen Sebelius, D-KS; and Sonny Purdue, R-GA.

We caught the 8:30 a.m. interview with Daniels, governor of the most manufacturing-intensive state in the country; manufacturing accounts for 28 percent of Indiana’s Gross State Product. (NAM state fact sheet here in .pdf format.) Host Steve Scully covered the hot issues — Daniels’ proposed privatization of the state lottery, the leasing of the Indiana Toll Road to a private consortium, and Indiana’s remarkable success in attracting new investment in the automotive sector, specifically the major expansions by Cummins, Honda and Toyota.

Scully asked Daniels to contrast Indiana’s accomplishments to Michigan’s lagging economy under Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a comparison Daniels diplomatically declined to make. He did, however, offer his administration’s formula for success, which notably emphasizes infrastructure.

Get your house in order. Keep taxes down. Have a regulatory regime which is firm but also consistent, predictable, but most of all, quick. Get out and hustle and market your state to businesses, as I try to do everywhere I go.

And also have the best infrastructure possible. We tackled the roads and rails problems of Indiana directly, because it means everything to our ability to bring future jobs. Honda, Toyota, all these companies you’re asking me about, when asked why they picked Indiana, invariably mentioned access to transportation as either the No. 1 or No. 2 reason.

Darn good strategy from manufacturing’s perspective. Indiana’s experience reinforces the reason NAM’s agenda for the 2007 Congress stresses the importance of a revitalized, 21st Century infrastructure as a key to maintaining America’s manufacturing competitiveness. Whether it’s roads, rail, airports, ports or waterways, a top-notch infrastructure is essential for getting U.S. products to the customer. All the productivity in the world doesn’t matter if you cannot ship your goods.

Daniels had more to say about Indiana’s economic development strategies, including its goal of expanding on its manufacturing base. For his additional comments, please read below in the extended entry. And for a report on Indiana’s development efforts and successes, please see this column by Indiana Commerce Secretary Nate Feltman.

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The Pursuit of Happyness!

This according to the American Film Renaissance, a non-profit group with a mission to “spearhead a revival of timeless American values in film and to serve as a forum for voices and ideas often marginalized by the contemporary artistic community.”

AFR has just released its fourth annual awards (list here), in which its voters name The Pursuit of Happyness as best movie of the year. As cultural critic Peter Suderman writes in a sharp-edged column that eviscerates Hollywood’s narcissism,

AFR’s website states that its founders “love the movies, but [are] not so fond of films that wallow in victimhood and self-pity or that portray America, business and religion as the roots of all evil.” “Happyness,” which received generally favorable reviews but only one Oscar nomination (Best Actor for Smith), is a big-screen rarity: a slickly produced Hollywood film with a major star that places high regard on values like fatherhood, individual achievement, and capitalism. Captivating and finely acted, it eschews the sentimentality of most movies that get labeled “inspirational,” instead choosing to remain hopeful while recognizing the harsh realities of life.

Yesterday, suffering from an L&O hangover, we bemoaned the lack of any television series that portrayed businessmen and women in any kind of positive light. It’s reassuring to know that there are at least some movies out there that veer toward a fair depiction of business.

Funny thing is, cinematic fairness to business makes for good business. It’s profitable to produce movies that are respectful of religion, market freedoms and cultural traditions. As the president and founder of American Film Renaissance, Jim Hubard observes, AFR’s top five films earned approximately $150,000,000 more at the box office than the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture.

You can read AFR’s complete awards list for 2006 in the extended entry section of this post.

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Great op-ed by the above title in today’s WaPo from Bill Gates. It makes some great points, among them:

We’ve made all these points here before, but when they come from a successful businessman and billionaire, they carry a little more weight. He knows what he’s talking about. Gates notes that, “Half of this country’s doctoral candidates in computer science come from abroad.” It was former Sen. Allen (R-VA) at the NAM Board meeting who said of the foreign graduates of advanced US degrees in math and science that he’d staple a visa to their diploma. He’s right — otherwise we’re send the next Andy Grove back home to compete against us. Bad idea.

So yes, we need to increase the number of H1B visas. Microsoft pays their H1B workers the same as their US counterparts, like almost every other company. The notion that these high-end employees somehow depress America wages is laughable. And, we need to reform the green card process so we can speed the more permanent residence of the workers we need.

And while we’re at it, let’s do something about improving the schools. That’s something on which all of us — except maybe the NEA — can agree.