Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland delivered a 28-minute State of the State address on Thursday. The second-term governor, a Democrat, mentioned manufacturing several times in the context of building a “new economy” for the state. The word “green” was used.

Excerpts:

As President Obama said last week, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

To make this new economy ours, we must make the right choices and investments to create jobs by spurring innovation: innovation in the classroom; innovation in public safety; innovation in science, discovery, healing, manufacturing, green energy and trade; innovation in public health, innovation in our own experiment in self-governance.

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To create more jobs, we must leverage the power of our diversity,… we must leverage the power of our geography,… And we must harness the potential of Maryland’s Innovation Economy: bio-tech, green-tech, clean-tech, cyber security,23 information technology, aerospace, global trade, and next generation manufacturing

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Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, delivered his State of the State speech in Annapolis Tuesday. As we continue our search for governors’ references to “manufacturing” and its variants, we find this in the Governor’s speech:

To rebuild and restore our economy, we must help our businesses create and save jobs. Jobs from innovation in science, security, and discovery. Jobs of noble and valuable service. Jobs that create and rebuild our vital connections of travel, trade, and business. Jobs that revitalize and restore our environment. Jobs in teaching, manufacturing, and healing – they all matter.

This month we concluded a nation-leading public/private partnership at the Port of Baltimore that will create 5,700 new jobs in construction and port operations; and just last week General Motors announced that it will build its new generation of electric hybrid engines in our State, in Baltimore County – creating new green manufacturing jobs and new opportunities. This job-creating partnership was only possible because of the investments of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, along with the strong actions of the State of Maryland, County Executive Jim Smith of Baltimore County, and businesses, and labor – all working together.

These are the remarks as prepared for delivery, with the unusual approach of including footnotes. Sixty-three footnotes!

Mmmmmm…..

Interesting little story today about labor/blogger activism in the Washington Examiner, “State economic Web site touted low union numbers until bloggers rallied.” The Examiner reports that the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development has pulled online promotional (read, business recruitment) materials from the Choose Maryland” site that highlighted the state’s relatively low union membership.

A pro-union blogger spotted the materials and a flurry of activity followed.

Outraged e-mails are flying across the state’s entire labor movement,” Maryland Politics Watch’s Adam Pagnucco wrote. “We cannot believe that rhetoric typical of Georgia and Oklahoma would be sanctioned at any level inside the [Gov. Martin] O’Malley administration.

CNBC last week released its second annual “Top State for Business” rankings. Here are the top 10:

Mock Georgia all you want, Mr. Pagnucco. Maryland ranked 36th overall.

What’s notable from the list of top states is that the first nine have right-to-work laws.  Average union membership, per se, doesn’t worry business, and wages rarely figure as a top concern. But unions do limit managerial flexibility, making it difficult to adjust production practices and schedules to the realities of the modern, global economy. No wonder right-to-work states head the list in attracting new business.

So the bloggers have managed to kill one of Maryland’s economic development selling points. Congrats! Although… businesses familiar with Maryland’s economic environment probably would have doubted it in the first place. According to CNBC’s rankings, Maryland’s workforce ranked 41st in the nation. Hard to spin that as a positive.