Governor Dave Heineman of Nebraska this week met with the members of Nebraska’s Career Dream Team, a group of young adults seeking careers in advanced manufacturing. A photo of the team with the governor is here, as is the caption:

The Career Dream Team is a key part of the Dream It. Do It. campaign to reach out and inform young adults, parents and educators about the many exciting, good paying careers in our regional economy. Gov. Heineman kicked off the campaign in August to reinforce the efforts of the Nebraska Advanced Manufacturing Coalition (NAMC), a partnership of business, government, education and labor, to stress the importance of educating a skilled workforce to strengthen Nebraska’s economy and global competitiveness.

And, from the August launch, a governor’s news release. Nebraska’s Dream It. Do It. webpage is here.

President’s top economic advisor stepping down.

Mr. Hubbard joined the White House as director of the National Economic Council following Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election. At the time, the White House had high hopes for overhauling Social Security, transforming the tax system and curbing litigation. But little of that agenda came to pass. The Social Security plan, which would have given people more responsibility for their retirement money, proved unpopular with lawmakers of both parties.

“I guess [in] basically every initiative I’ve worked on, we’ve made progress, but unfortunately we haven’t gotten it across the goal line for the most part,” he said.

Good projects for everyone to keep working on.

Being a Hoosier — and Indiana being a manufacturing-heavy state — as well as experienced in the world of regulatory reform, Hubbard had a role in keeping manufacturing on the President’s agenda. So thanks for that and best of luck.

We get hundreds of spam comments every day, requiring this blogger to go through and weed them out one by one while at the same time searching for real comments from real people.

Sometimes the spam slows this site down, so if you ever have difficulty posting a comment, please just give it time and try again. If you’re a real person, that is.

In case you’re interested, the most popular pitch lately seems to be for ladies’ handbags. Along with the usual: ringtones, fake drugs, scabrous stimulation, and all things Russian.

Today, though, a first: Harold Pinter spam.

Guess his politics overwhelmed his gift. Sad, really.

Today’s papers report that the inventor of Gatorade has passed away. Dr. Robert Cade invented the now-famous sports drink in 1965 to help football athletes at the University of Florida replace carbohydrates and electrolytes lost through sweat during training. Everyone is interested in the innovation process and the creation of this multi-billion industry is a good insight into how new products are born.

It doesn’t always take a huge research budget to innovate. The need for Gatorade was identified when Gators football coach Dwayne Douglas asked Cade, “why don’t football players wee-wee after a game?” Dr. Cade, who was a professor of internal medicine at UF, jumped on that question with some of his researchers and learaned that a football player can lose up to 18 pounds — up to 95 percent of it water — in a typical three-hour game.

With about $43 in supplies, Dr. Cade and his team developed a brew that replaced the water and minerals lost by players, but their first step on this road to innovation didn’t meet with a lot of success. Dr. Cade said sometime ago in an interview that it tasted like toilet bowl cleaner. After adding some sweeteners, the coach tried it out on freshmen because he didn’t want to hurt the varsity players.

Eventually the drink became a standard part of the Gators’ playbook and caught the attention of others after the 1967 Orange Bowl, where UF defeated Georgia Tech. The GT coach remarked that they lost that game because “we didn’t have Gatorade….that made the difference.” After that, the sports drink was commercialized and has become a popular beverage around the world, a development that Dr. Cade never envisioned when he created his first concoction. Inventions can be like that: one good thing leads to another.

Our condolences to the Cade family on losing a man who is one of American’s true innovators.

By dint of a prominent link at the Drudge Report, this story about converting sewage to drinking water got a lot of attention by bloggers. The “ick” factor, we’re sure.

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.

But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

All the better for that manned mission to Mars.

In any case, we were reminded of a recent interview in The Financial Times with Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric. It’s a very interesting interview heavy with a discussion of energy needs, but this answer from Immelt is relevant ot the world’s rising demand for potable water.

FT: What other parts of the infrastructure business would you like to pick out as an example of a growth field?

JI: Water treatment is a big and expanding area for us. We get about $2.5bn a year in sales from this sector now. I’d be very disappointed if it is not $5bn-$10bn in the next 5-10 years. We’ve made a number of acquisitions in this field and would be interested to look at more, such as in membrane technology [for cleaning up water supplies through filtering or osmosis technologies]. We are setting up a new research centre in Singapore – where there is a lot of expertise in this field – to examine new applications in these disciplines. Water is just the kind of business that suits GE to be in. It’s a global field with a lot of potential in the emerging economies. There’s a great deal of commercial and government focus to improve countries’ capability to provide a safer and more cost-effective water supply.

A large portion of GE’s website is devoted to water treatment technologies.

UPDATE (12:20 p.m.) Should have seen this earlier: “Prague- Incumbent Czech President Vaclav Klaus has become the first and so far the only official candidate for next February’s presidential elections, representatives of the senior governing Civic Democrats (ODS) told journalists today.” Apparently they’re not scared off by a politician who speaks his mind and calls global warming bunk.

Original post below:

President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic is a brave politician, an economist whose free-market views were shaped by decades of living under Communist tyranny. He’s also a fierce critic of climate extremism, offering withering critiques of the conventional wisdom being forced down the public’s throats.

In a November 23rd interview with the German newspaper, Die Welt, entitled, “Climate Protection is the New Socialism,” Klaus pulled no punches. So interesting and edifying to see an elected official challenge the machine in such a direct manner.

Interview Ulli Kulke notes that in his recent book, Klaus compared two ideologies hostile to the free-market, socialism and environmentalism. In 1968, Prague produced a powerful impulse against socialism, the Prague Spring. Are we seeing something similar today, a Prague Spring of the environment? Klaus:

I don’t want to be that optimistic. But it does seem like there are a few things coming into motion. People are becoming more thoughtful. A small turning point might well have been the Nobel Prize for the ideologue and propagandist Al Gore. If the Nobel Committee really wanted to help the climate alarmists, they didn’t do them a favor. As an economist, I recognize the law of diminishing returns. If you continue to invest in the one and same project, it begins to produce smaller returns. That’s what happening now with the same warnings against climate change, on and on and on.

And what of President Bush, who accepts climate change and now follows the lead of German chancellor Angela Merkel? Klaus:

It is not my job to analyze the debate between these two politicians. But this year I’ve spoken with Bush a number of time and I have my doubts that he’s changed his mind. He’s a politician, and he, too, must play to the public, react to them.

The topic of religion also surfaces several times. Indeed, the first exchange:

Q: Germany’s environmentalists love this dictum: “We have only borrowed the world from our children.” What’s meant by that is this: We must leave to the coming generations the world as we had it left to us.

A: I simply cannot accept that. Naturally we must treat the world as carefully as possible. But the conceit that the only the world is important and mankind is not, that’s unbearable. On the contrary, we must live on and with the world. And: Without people the world has no sense and worth, although there we’re almost to the point of religious matters.

We’ve put the entire interview in the extended entry below. It’s our quick-and-dirty translation, so may be off on a point or two, but the thrust is clear.

(continue reading…)

“Follow the Fundamentals,” Brooks writes in today’s New York Times.

So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.

And that’s just not true.

Brooks cites the World Economic Forum’s recent report that ranked the United States as the most globally competitive country in the world, saying the foundation’s of U.S. prosperity are strong.

P.S. Good thing the Times dropped its subscription wall putting Brooks and his editorial page colleagues off-limits to general readers. Hurry up, Wall Street Journal!

And we don’t mean as in the Princess and the Pea.

Stefan Kaner in The City Journal explains:

Take the term “featherbedding,” a pejorative that Webster’s defines as “the requiring of an employer usually under a union rule . . . to hire more employees than are needed.” The current strike by Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—stagehands—is about just such a practice.

When the members of Local One walked off their jobs, Broadway essentially went dark. The League of American Theaters and Producers refused to buckle, presenting its side to the public on the local TV station New York One. Richard Frankel, general manager of Young Frankenstein, spoke for his colleagues: “There are several ways that the featherbedding manifests itself. We cannot hire the number of men we [producers] need, we have to hire the number of men [the union tells] us to hire.”

From The Union-Free Employer blog. Blogger Seth Borden of Kreitzman Mortensen & Borden has had lots of interesting labor-related stuff lately, on the stagehands strike and more.

John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, says there will be no choice as to signing up for health care when he’s president. From ABC News:

I’m mandating healthcare for every man woman and child in America and that’s the only way to have real universal healthcare.”

“Everytime you go into contact with the healthcare system or the government you will be signed up.”

During a press avail following the event Edwards reiterated his mandate:

“Basically every time they come into contact with either the healthcare system or the government, whether it’s payment of taxes, school, going to the library, whatever it is they will be signed up.”

When asked by a reporter if an individual decided they didn’t want healthcare Edwards quickly responded, “You don’t get that choice.”

For some reason, the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution comes to mind.

(Hat tip: Rob Port.)

Just because we find Novak agreeably disagreeable. And his take on taxes, at least here, is more visceral than Seib’s or Kudlow’s.

From his online chat Monday at the Washington Post.

Toronto: Good afternoon. Why is there such an aversion to paying taxes among conservatives — how else can a country maintain the infrastructure and services necessary for long-term prosperity?

Robert D. Novak: If you enjoy paying taxes so much, you’re more than welcome to pick up mine as well. I think the Treasury would take a check from a Canadian.

A little later:

Maryland: Actually the fellow from Toronto had a good question, which you didn’t really answer. Why do you think that we can cut taxes and run a real war against terrorism at the same time? At some point, someone has to pay for the several trillion that we have spent on the war and will be spending in the future. Isn’t it selfish and short-sighted to put that burden on our children and grandchildren when we can afford to pay the taxes to cover the war now, but just don’t want to do so? You certainly can afford the taxes, but don’t want to pay. It is just that simple.

Robert D. Novak: Let’s be candid. People like you a) always want to raise taxes and b) want to use taxes to redistribute income.

And then…

Re: Toronto and Maryland: You still aren’t answering the question. How can the United States pay for the war on terror, as it is currently being fought, without raising taxes?

Robert D. Novak: By cutting all government spending.

A good Christmas book for the political junkie in your house: The Prince of Darkness
50 Years Reporting in Washington