My longtime fishing/hunting partner lost his job here at a manufacturing plant in Ozark six months before he could have retired with 30 years service. They closed the plant and moved it to Reynosa, Mexico, about 200 yards outside the Texas border.

They make small electric motors for ceiling fans and so forth, and the motor parts are now trucked to Reynosa for assembly, then trucked back to Cassville, Mo. for final assembly into the completed products. There are plans to soon move the Cassville plant to Mexico, also.

Adding insult to injury, the company paid my friend for one final week's work and sent him to Mexico to teach his replacement how to do his job. The new guy makes $2.42 an hour with no benefits - and that's what makes it worthwhile for the company to haul this stuff back and forth.

Thing is, it's not just cheap foreign labor that lets companies do this. Max said that Mexican plant was an awful mess with everything done on the cheap - dangerous bare electrical wires, no safety guards on machines, oil puddles on the floor, extension cords running all over the place. On the "environmental" side it's a mess, too, with waste oil, solvents, paint, and water, including water from the restrooms, simply run out onto the ground. They pollute the air, too - reclaiming the copper from trimmed-off wiring and metal from parts by burning off the insulation and paint in a big open bonfire outside the plant.

These companies avoid U.S. SAFETY and ENVIRONMENTAL laws, as well as LABOR laws, by manufacturing outside the country then shipping their stuff back in. These are laws that our liberals (to their credit, sometimes) felt strongly about and worked hard to pass - so WHY do they put up with companies avoiding those laws so easily and taking away American jobs in the process? It doesn't make sense.

I've noticed that liberals have a real tendency to "pass a law" to fix any perceived problem - and then they don't follow up. Once the law is passed they feel like they've fixed something and don't seem to notice or care when their law has unintended consequences and has made the problem worse (NAFTA, electric cars, ethanol fuel, etc., etc.). Seems like they just want to feel good, but never really fix anything and more often than not they make it worse.

BTW, my longtime partner, Max, died two months ago and I sure miss him. Losing his job like that caused him and his wife to have a real poor retirement, and I wanted to tell his story here. I can just hear how he'd tell it to you himself if he could: "Them a-holes - moving that plant was a bunch of CHIT!"

Yep, it was. R.I.P. Max.