I have a hard time believing this story, but the link is floating around. So here’s the report for future reference:

“US Firms Told ‘Take UK Jobs home'”
George Bush’s administration has called on US companies in Britain to relocate jobs to America in an astonishing move that could trigger a major trade war.
US-based multinationals have been told they will receive compensation from American trade authorities if they cancel contracts in Britain and take jobs home, according to CBI director-general Digby Jones.
. . .
Speaking at the CBI’s annual conference in Birmingham, Jones said: ‘Three chief executives of American companies investing in Britain have told me to my face that they have been told to close down, bring their stuff home and make it in the US.’
He said the companies were major employers in defence or manufacturing.
. . .
‘We are America’s biggest trading partner, but if this escalates into an international trade war it hits us worst because we are such a big player in the world market.’

I’m presuming somewhere there must have been a misunderstanding which lead to this story. But the Financial Times confirms Mr. Jones did talk about American protectionism in his speech:

Delegates at the annual conference of the CBI, the employers’ body, have been fiercely critical of what they claim are growing signs of US protectionism.
Digby Jones, CBI director-general, said a number of UK companies, including two defence contractors and an engineering group, had told him they had been frozen out of US government procurement schemes under “buy America” policies taking hold in many states.

A “buy America” policy isn’t nearly as egregious as a jobs recall. If there’s any truth to the latter, it will undoubtedly be substantiated by additional sources soon.
Via Brad Delong.

Under the heading “It Looked Like a Wal-Mart Job Fair,” Bill Hobbs links to a story on Mexican nationals applying for ID cards in Nashville and asks why the INS wasn’t there to round them up.
Why not? Precisely because it looked like a Wal-Mart job fair. Or that of a thousand other businesses. That’s why there’s no political will to change things. Business owners, who grease the political system with money, don’t want this cheap supply of labor to dry up. And when you boil away the rhetoric, it’s apparent that majority of politicans don’t either.
It’s probably impossible to put a complete halt on illegal immigration. But the government could make a dramatic reduction in the flow if it merely went in earnest after employers hiring illegals, removing work opportunities for them. Until that happens, though, the policy and rhetoric against illegal aliens remains a joke.

Is the blogosphere alive and well? According to David Sifry’s Technorati statistics it is:

One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.

That’s a lot of verbiage, isn’t it?

Funny stuff:

Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly said he may take a look at running for president, according to a story in Newsday.
He told the newspaper: “Certainly the option is open if I want it,” but “the country’s not interested in an independent candidacy. Maybe in 10 years they will be, but right now, you have 50 percent of Americans who don’t know anything — they’re totally disengaged from the process, the ‘Mall People.’ …The other 50 percent — and there was a recent poll on this — are a third crazy left and third crazy right and third in the middle. So the pie you’re going for is a very narrow pie.”

So what’s going to change in the next 10 years that hasn’t happened in the past 200?
To top it all, there’s this:

“I’m not a vanity player, I’m not gonna go out like Al Sharpton, to get on ‘Saturday Night Live’ to run for president, so unless I’m convinced I could pull it off, I wouldn’t do it,” he said.

O’Reilly? A vanity player? Why would anyone think that?

Some marketing outfit recently threatened to sue Justene at Calblog for comments made at this post. As a result, fellow Bear Flag League bloggers have come to her defense under the theory that “when one is attacked, all are attacked.”
This prompts my question: Does the Rocky Top Brigade have a similar NATO-style common defense strategy? As South Knox Bubba has noted, we have a number of lawyers in our ranks. And heaven knows, with all these blogs we can sure generate a lot of noise, if prompted.
Unfortunately, with the recent spate of blog-related legal threats, this issue isn’t as hypothetical as it once seemed. Moreover, those of us un-American types who tend to question what’s going on in the world these days also have Big Brother to worry about.