Al Gore at a forum in Singapore, bemoaning debate:

There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community…In actuality, there is very little disagreement.

And from Advertising Age, “Madison Ave. Warms to Climate Change — Shops Vie for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection Biz”:

[Now] one of the most hotly contended pitches out there is for the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization formed last year by Al Gore.

Four elite agencies — Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the Martin Agency and Y&R — are squaring off for the business and are expected to present to the former vice president himself early next month, according to executives familiar with the review. The budget for the “historic, three-to-five-year, multimedia global campaign,” as the request for proposals puts it, is contingent on how much money the alliance raises. Media spending will likely be more than $100 million a year.

So, Al’s propaganda machine is 10 times as oleaginous. And he’s complaining about being challenged?

(Hat tip: Ken Green at Planet Gore.)

As noted below (in this post), the House has already cut the budget for the Office of Labor and Management Standards, the part of the U.S. Department of Labor charged with oversight of spending — and misspending — by the labor unions. The OLMS received special attention in the appropriations process from partisans who seemed to think the office had already committed quite enough oversight, thank you.

So even at the risk of repeating ourselves, this is an informative and punchy op-ed by Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, on the topic. It appeared in Tuesday’s Indianapolis Star, highlighting an obvious inconsistency of the OLMS’s critics.

Take the onerous accounting standards now imposed on companies under the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Businesses must file detailed quarterly reports with federal regulators, and the CEO must personally certify his company’s bottom line each year.

Meanwhile, unions must file financial statements only once a year, don’t have to have their audit certified and are rarely investigated by the government. That doesn’t stop them from complaining, of course. As Labor Secretary Elaine Chao points out, the AFL-CIO claimed that it would have to spend “more than $1 million” to comply with OLMS’s reasonable terms. “In fact,” Chao points out, “filling out the new disclosure form cost the AFL-CIO $54,150.” Quite a difference.

Unions control some $22 billion, a staggering amount of money. All of it comes from their members. These workers deserve to know what union leaders spend their hard-earned money on — whether it’s the $65 million the National Education Association gave Jesse Jackson’s liberal pressure group in 2005 or the $130,000 salaries earned by 49 union leaders at AFL-CIO headquarters last year.

Transparency for thee, but not for me?

The NAM has just released its 10th annual Labor Day Report, a review of the U.S. economy, with particular emphasis on the manufacturing sector and — it being Labor Day — workers. You can see the entire report and additional resources by going to the NAM’s page, www.nam.org/labordayreport.

The report began a decade ago to provide balance to the inevitably dour view of the economy offered annually by organized labor. No matter what the figures said, labor’s take was always something along the line of, “Workers are getting a raw deal.”

Now, the NAM doesn’t shy away from the facts. As NAM Chief Economist David Huether explains in the video above, the last four quarters have seen the biggest downturn in housing in 16 years.

Still, the economy is strong, and workers are doing remarkably well. Key highlights from the Labor Day Report:

In real dollar figures, that final fact translates to the average yearly compensation for a full-time worker in manufacturing rising to $68,860, compared to an average of $53,500 in the rest of the private-sector workforce.

Good news for manufacturing workers, definitely, but the sign of lots of headaches for employers. NAM members we’ve surveyed report serious difficulties hiring skilled employees; indeed, the issues ranks only second to health care as a concern for NAM members.

With Labor Day also arrives the start of the new school year, and we think the NAM’s Annual Labor Day report serves a pedagogic purpose. Hey, you young people: You want to earn a good wage? Study math and science, gain some technical skills, and get into manufacturing.

We really need you.

Again, the report is: www.nam.org/labordayreport

From Page 3 of the NAM Labor Day report:

This positive trend extends to other broader forms of worker compensation, including disposable personal income and hourly compensation, which includes employer-provided benefits. Real manufacturing hourly compensation has increased 3.4 percent over the most recent four quarters — the fastest pace in three and a half years. To some degree, this is a case of history repeating itself: it was not until the unemployment rate moderated over a similar four-year period (1992-1996) that real wage growth began to take place during the expansion in the 1990s.

Our bolded sentence, which brings to mind the arguments of Mickey Kaus, a reform-minded Democrat who writes on politics, economics, the media and lots of other stuff over at Slate.com. When discussing welfare reform or immigration policy, he reminds readers of a basic reality, that demand for labor increases wages, and the phenomenon was notable in the halcyon ’90s. His June 18th post at Kausfiles, really insider-blogball, but still interesting:

Update: I Rest My Case! Kevin Drum sneers about my “new role as champion of the common man,” arguing that if, in fact, chicken pluckers unionized and struck demanding $10 an hour I’d “denounce Democratic support for a strike like this.” I might! I think Wagner Act unions bring unnecessary inefficiencies, and wages (above the minimum) are generally best set by the market. If the market sets the wage at $7.50, the better way to boost the incomes of those workers is through the Earned Income Tax Credit, which I’ve consistently supported. But when the market raises wages above $7.50 — due to the sort of tight labor supply we had in the late 90s — I’m all for it.

So, an identifiable and welcome trend…

As we noted in previous posts (here and here), the simple media storyline about Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta is that pits investors against big business, implying the powerful corporations are sticking it to the little guy. Really? Suppliers and manufacturers who could be sued for only a tangential connection to securities fraud if the Supreme Court holds for Stoneridge. Don’t they have investors too?

Ted Frank at the American Enterprise Institute sees it the same way, as recounted in his letter to the editor in Legal Times:

No, It’s a “Pro-Investor” Ruling

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Legal Times
Publication Date: August 27, 2007

I appreciated the chance to speak with reporter Tony Mauro about Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, an upcoming Supreme Court case that will be discussed at an AEI panel on Oct. 5. Unfortunately, a sentence in his Aug. 20 article ["High Court Head Count at Issue," Page 1] incorrectly implied that I thought the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in the case was an “anti-investor ruling,” when that characterization is solely Mauro’s.

On the contrary, as I have written in The Wall Street Journal and told Mauro, I believe that the 8th Circuit’s dismissal of the case redounds to the benefit of investors in general and that the best result for investors (if not for trial lawyers) would be affirmance by the Supreme Court. And I say that even though I am a putative class member in Stoneridge.

Ted Frank is a resident fellow and director of the Liability Project at AEI.

In other AEI legal news, the National Law Journal reports:

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, will absorb the National Legal Center for the Public Interest next month, creating the new AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest.

The merger of the two conservative-leaning organizations will be effective Sept. 4 and is happening after leaders from the National Legal Center moved to new posts. Richard Hauser, the most recent president of the center, in June became the senior attorney for Boeing Co. in Washington.

Fred Fielding, another top leader, became White House counsel in January.

Good luck!

The House minority leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, did an interview the other day for the NAM’s weekly radio program, “America’s Business with Mike Hambrick.” Lots of good stuff about the fall session of Congress, including his anticipation that President Bush will veto the appropriations bills for being too expensive. Which means an interesting autumn…

We were struck by Boehner’s thoughts on CAFE, which we hadn’t seen before. He has good things to say about H.R. 2927, the Hill-Terry bill, and critical comments about the Jobs-Killer CAFE version that passed the Senate and its Ed Markey-mate in the House. Excerpt from Boehner:

[While] a lot of us want to make changes that will help clean our air, because obviously we all breathe it, we don’t want to do things that are going to wreck our economy in the process, especially when we don’t know if it’ll have some impact on what happens to our air.

When it comes to CAFE, I think the proposal that was passed in the Senate, that’s being
sponsored by Miss Pelosi and Mr. Markey from Massachusetts, will wreck America’s economy. I think that’s very bad for our country.

And so I believe that the Hill-Terry proposal, sponsored by Congressman Baron Hill and Congressman Lee Terry, a Democrat and Republican, presents a path forward that will help clean up our air. It’s achievable, it’s realistic and will not harm our economy.

He has a few more comments on CAFE in a soundbite we’ve posted over at America’s Business Blog – the blog of the radio program — and very sharp commentary about congressional spending. Here’s a link to the post.

At the risk of being branded an evil “denier,” Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board confesses his doubts about global warming. Excerpts:

I confess: It’s easy to be indifferent to far-off and diffuse threats. It’s hard to work toward solutions the benefits of which will not be felt in our lifetime.

Then again, if Americans are not fully persuaded of the dangers of global warming, as Newsweek laments, don’t chalk it up to the pernicious influence of the so-called deniers and their enablers at ExxonMobil and Fox News. Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy. Yet the 20th century offers excellent reasons to be suspicious of monocausal explanations for the world’s ills, monomaniacs intent on saving us from ourselves, and the long train of experts predicting death by overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling, nuclear winter and prions. Also, hypocrites. When we are called on to bike to work, permanently abjure air travel, “eat locally” and so on, we expect to be led by example, not by a new nomenklatura.

I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

So he wants to address global warming through reason, not faith. Interesting concept.

Caught a bit of the Independent Women’s Forum program on C-SPAN Radio this morning, “Energy Today, Energy Tomorrow.” The IWF favors a free-market approach toward energy policies (part of a coalition against the congressional bills to tax energy producers), so they’re a good source for perspective.

Margo Thorning, chief economist for the American Council for Capital Formation, was on hand to talk about the ACCF’s latest report, “A Reality Check on Initiatives to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California, Oregon, the Northeast and in Europe.” If there’s one thing the statists need, it’s a reality check, and the report is definitely worth reading. Key excerpt:

Climate change policies should continue to strive to reduce energy intensity as the capital stock is replaced over the business cycle, promoting the development of new, cost-effective technologies for alternative energy production and conservation while encouraging the spread of market based reforms in the developing world. This approach is likely to be much more productive than adopting mandatory CO2 reduction targets that would sacrifice economic well-being and job growth with little or no long-term impact on global GHG emission growth.

If experience is any guide, the regulators and controllers, when faced with the failure of their environmental policies to achieve their sweeping goals, will determine that their mistake was not going far enough with their regulating and controlling.

The ACCF paper provides a helpful and persuasive counterpoint to that approach.

From The Financial Week:

The AFL-CIO wants auditors to step up their reviews of corporate books and records in order to curb illegal stock option backdating.

In letters to the Big Four accounting firms, AFL-CIO treasurer Richard Trumka said independent auditors should dig deeper into corporate disclosures and stock option practices from the past five years—especially during the months surrounding passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which tightened disclosure rules for backdating.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Bluey reminds us that labor and their congressional allies are trying to slash the budget for the Office of Labor Management Standards, the Department of Labor office that in recent years increased its oversight of union spending and disclosures.

The increased transparency has revealed some embarrassing expenditures for unions, such as the $1.9 million spent by the International Association of Machinists on its very own Lear jet. But while transparency is a good thing for union members who expect good stewardship from their leaders, it has met resistance on Capitol Hill, where many liberals count on union leaders for fundraising help.

Bluey notes that Rep. John Kline of Minnesota introduced an amendment to restore $2 million back to the office. No go.

Citing the agency’s success in winning restitution for union workers, Kline said, “Some of my colleagues may dismiss these monetary results as just small change compared to the billions of assets held by labor unions, but they miss the point. Stealing from your fellow union members is against the law, regardless of whether the theft is $10,000 or $100,000. And anywhere in the country but Washington, D.C., $10,000 is a lot of money.”

Apparently some forms of malefaction aren’t worth worrying about, at least judging by the AFL-CIO’s curious standards.

Today’s Baltimore Sun features a page one story on the increasing use of information technology in hospitals, with pictures of a pill-delivering robot and wireless-connected computer tablets to update patient records.

The thesis of the story is that health IT can bring much-needed efficiencies but it takes some time for people using it — nurses, especially — to adjust, and they complain that the electronic gizmos take away from patient care. Also, the younger generation of medical personnel seem more welcoming. For example:

Hopkins nurse Monica Wilt, 31, is deft as she logs into a prescription-ordering system, pulling up a list of her patients to see who needs medication.

She loves the software. “For people really familiar with computers, this is all very intuitive,” she said.

Colleague Rosmond Lynch, who has 23 years of nursing experience, was not so quick to embrace changes. “At first I was scared and anxious. It seemed easier to glance at papers than the computer,” Lynch said. But with training and support, Lynch said she welcomed technology as an aid rather than a hindrance.

Just seems like a case of human nature, resistance to change. The need for efficiency and quality patient care will win out in the end.

Anyway, good story about the actual application of health IT. Oh, and the lead photo is of Bret Anderson, RN, using a Motion C5 tablet to enter patient info. Here’s a link to the Motion device. Very cool.