I pulled out some old clothes the other day to see if I could fit into them again. I found something very rare inside -- a Union label.

I have always been frugal with my clothing dollars, so I know the clothes were within a certain price range. Pretty much the same price range I see today for clothes made in China or India or some other country without child labor laws.
My American made clothing did not become so expensive that I had to start buying foreign made goods. Gradually, Item by item made in the USA started to be substituted by items made elsewhere. Now, it is hard to find anything made here. If we aren't manufacturing anything any longer, how can we afford to buy anything?

So the next time I hear the argument that food/clothing/shoes/electronics/houses/cars are affordable because of foreign labor I don't choose to believe that line because they were affordable before outsourcing and before our factories moved offshore and before illegal immigration was so prevalent that it became an issue. It isn't that the cost of these items is coming down, it is that the rich are getting richer off of wider profit margins. Yes, they are getting richer and the middle class is getting poorer. It is time to bring back tariffs on imported goods.

Think about it. Reinstating tariffs would make companies move back into the US and put Americans to work. Having a "Hire Americans first" policy would strengthen our economy and reduce the influx of cheap labor from other nations. If our government provided the health insurance and took that burden off businesses, our companies could compete better in the global market.

Our country is large enough and has such a diverse climate, we should be able to grow all of our food domestically. After the recent pet food poisoning, the importance of this should be more than clear.
Our population, collectively, should be able to provide all the labor we need to be self sufficient. If we don't have a workforce that is properly trained to fill the jobs available, it is because higher education is becoming too expensive for the average family and needs to be subsidized. It isn't fair that an American should be in debt for as much as $100k in student loans and have to compete for the same jobs with an Indian who was educated in India for free. Starting out with that imbalance, which one do you think will have the better lifestyle?

When we have lifted our impoverished out of poverty, then we can make a bigger difference on the rest of the world. We have a responsibility to our descendants of the American enslaved to raise their status -- their economic status, their educational status, their responsibility status to that of the average US citizen. We owe the same debt to the Native American. These are debts we can not ignore as we divvy out "citizenship" to those who only want to earn money here to take back to their home countries.

Lately, the Zogby polls have been asking do you consider yourself to be a citizen of: A) Your community, B) Your country, or C) The world? I don't know how to answer that question because the answer to all of them is Yes. We have to start somewhere and for me that would be closer to home. I will hire the kid next door to cut my grass before I will hire the kid across town. I will buy the Girl Scout cookies from the girl next door and the girl across town. I will contribute to the local Red Cross as well as the International Red Cross. But before I can do any of this, I need that job that just went over to China or India or to the PO Box in the Bahamas.

I was in a discussion of state politics, who the best Virginia Dem Senate candidate should be. I was stating my pros and cons about the two candidates. A negative for Miller was his past association with the Electronic Voting Machine people.

I stated my belief that I do not trust a non-verified electronic ballot and I do believe that the 2004 Presidential election was NOT completely honest. The other Dem supporter disagreed, so I started citing the Ohio discrepancies and stated that we depend on exit polls to verify honest elections in other countries, so why do we think they do not indicate foul play in our own?

I believed that exit polls ask bluntly, "Who did you vote for?"

He said they are worded on issues and trends (like the Zogby poll I take online occasionally), with questions like, "How often do you go to church?" -- "Do you belong to a union?" -- "Do you have minor children living at home?" -- "Do you have a family member in the Armed Services?" -- "How do you feel about Gay Marriage?" The questions are then processed and the vote is extrapolated from the combination of answers.

Has anyone here done Exit Polling? What kind of questions are asked?

It isn't just the machines that can be the problem. If there aren't enough Dem Election officers, it could be the process that is hacked.

We have poll watchers and we have election officers at the polls. The election officers are paid by the county electoral board for one day of work and are required to be there from setup to cleanup without leaving the polling place. The watchers are volunteers representing a party who can come and go as they please.
Outside the polls, we have people handing out campaign literature and other people taking exit polls. They can all be called poll workers. It is a catch-all term.

My first time as an Election Officer was Nov 2000. It was chaos. The lines were long and most of us in charge were inexperienced. We had problems and we had vote discrepancies of more votes than voters. It was an exhausting day. When I got home, my husband told me Gore had won. Then the TV news told me the results were not yet conclusive. I stayed up all night waiting for Florida to turn blue on Tim Russert's election map. Then there were the angry mobs of Republican staffers trying to prevent the recount process from playing out. Then stories of the Butterfly ballot in Palm Beach that was not easy to punch without a magnifying glass. There were more stories of people showing up to vote only to find themselves purged for having a name similar to a criminal. and more...

It was quite an initiation election. The problems we had were microscopic compared to other regions. I later became Chief Election Officer for my precinct. My purpose for living on election day is to run a FAIR election.

In 2004, we had a massive turnout. One of our machines went down. I wanted to go home and hide under my water bed. At the busiest time of day, we had nearly a thousand people in line. I had to ask my election officers at the pollbooks to slow down because we had no more room for the line waiting to use the machines.
There was another precinct in the same building with shorter lines. I was so afraid that some of our voters who had already checked-in would go over there and vote on their machines. We have a method to prevent that, but the other precinct had ignored that part of the process.
The lines were long and there were all kinds of distractions and problems throughout the day. Two voters who had checked in shortly after the polls opened, needed to catch a flight and asked if they could vote on our provisional ballots. We let them.
Many of the voters said they had changed their voting address at DMV when they changed their drivers license address. We had to send them to their old precincts because they weren't on our pollbooks. One fellow registered a day after the registration deadline. I was so sorry to have to turn him away, but he hadn't made it onto the pollbook. Whenever a person was not on our pollbooks, we had to call the county registrar to find out where they were registered. The registrar could even tell if the voter was registered out of state. I don't know if that one lady made it to her old precinct in New Jersey that day.
After noon, the lines let up a little and we made another kink in our snaked line to accommodate the after work crowd. We didn't need it. We had peaked at around 10:30 am. We hardly had anyone waiting when the polls closed.

There was a volunteer who brought in voters from the senior housing down the street. I asked her to bring them around 3:30 when the line was light so they wouldn't have to wait so long. There were other seniors (or people with canes or crutches) who came in at the busy time. I brought them to the front of the line to check in and then took them to some chairs I had set up by the voting machines. I was told later by the election board that I wasn't supposed to do that. No one complained about it that I knew of.

Someone came up to me while I was trying to resolve about four other voter problems and said they had a missing child. I referred her to the school office. Word to parents -- If you bring your children to the polls, don't expect the election officers to babysit for you. We have more than enough to do. I wanted to put up a sign saying, "Unattended children will be fed to the dragon in the dungeon." but thought maybe I shouldn't.
One man complained about how the pollbooks were split. Each section had about the same number of names, it just so happened that a lot of people with a last name starting with "H" came in at the same time. I let him complain, even gave him a form to make an official complaint to the state electoral board. I didn't, however, take him over to the other precinct in the building and show him that their books contained 2/3 the number of voters and that they had the same number of machines. Maybe I should have. Then he would have had a valid complaint.

We did not have press coverage inside the precinct, but we did have foreign election observers and of course, we had poll watchers from both parties. I was compemented on my professionalism by poll watchers from both parties.

At the end of the day, I got the biggest thrill of the day when I learned the number of voters checking in at the pollbooks exactly matched the number of votes on the machines. My team ran a successful election in spite of all the problems in processing about three thousand voters.

Oh, and our precinct went for Kerry, too. I tried not to show partisian leanings, but I may have allowed my Dem Election Officers to cheer too long when I announced the results. I'll have to limit the celebration of the results to 30 seconds or something the next time.

Working the polls keeps you from stressing out over exit polls. I never knew Kerry was ahead in the exit polls until I read it here on DU.