Our friend Carter Wood of the National Association of Manufacturers attended the press conference at which the "Worker Freedom" report card was unveiled yesterday. Carter informs us that the Alliance for Worker Freedom is part of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform organization. At the press conference, Mr. Norquist gave his view of why organized labor is still a force in politics despite decades of declining membership:

Every once in a while, you read about some guy up in Alaska who’s eaten by a bear that was shot so many times it was dying. Organized labor is a dying bear. It is still big enough to eat you. And the billions of dollars in union dues…"Well, it used to be, 30 percent, now it’s 7.4 percent. They’re almost gone.”

Well, it’s a 10 billion a year operation. Take your calculation, how much cash they can kick off and make free for political work. That’s a rather large institution. It may be a dying bear, but it’s a grizzly bear, and on the way out it can do an awful lot of damage.

Mr. Norquist would undoubtedly agree with advice that “the Stranger” (Sam Elliot) gave “the Dude” (Jeff Bridges) in the 1998 film, The Big Lebowski: “A wiser feller than myself once said, sometimes you eat the bar, and … sometimes the bar . . why … he eats you.”