The Land of Ozz

Here are a few links related to the Apprentice 4 finale. These links include stories on job offer that SYS-CON Media has offered Rebecca Jarvis. There are also links with updates on Donald Trump and Randell Pinkett.

JDJ - Trump’s Apprentice Runner-Up Rebecca Jarvis Has $150,000 Job Offer From SYS-CON Media
MSNBC - Readers react to ‘Apprentice’ finale: Was it racist of Trump to ask Randal to share title?
Rebecca Jarvis - www.rebeccajarvis.com

Blogging on the Apprentice
Cincinnati Black Blog - Apprentice: Black vs. White
Barers of Maple Valley - Apprentice 4 Finale: It’s Randall!
Donald Trump - Review of “The Apprentice Donald Trump” Dec 15, 2005 Week 13 … The Finale
About Donald Trump - Trump’s comment on the Apprentice 4 finally
The Most Valuable Network - Psycho-BLITZ BLOG: The Apprentice: Performance Psychology and Big-Business
RON’s Blog - The (New) Apprentice!
MUSC Tiger - I Hate Randal
Sir Linksalot - Apprentice Links

The Land of Oz - New Trump Apprentice Blows It

WakeUpWalmart.com has the Reverend Jesse Jackson on their side now. Their web site has a feature page that states, “Leaders of faith representing over 1.3 million Americans have joined WakeUpWalMart.com…” The disturbing thing is that WakeUpWalmart.com has listed a copy of a letter that was reported to have been sent to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott quoting scripture. It was not enough that they built their latest TV ad starting with a picture of what appears to be an open Bible and then go on to quote Luke 6:31 before addressing people of faith about shopping at Wal-Mart. WakeUpWalmart.com continues to prey on the emotions of American Chrstians to further their selfish cause. I quote the letter to the Wal-Mart from the WakeUpWalmart.com web site:

“The prophet Moses in Deuteronomy 25:13-15 teaches ‘Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy … lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee.’”

I have read Deuteronomy 25:13-15 in about a dozen different translations thanks to BibleGateway.com and my personal library of Bibles and other study materials. Here is one example:

“In all your transactions you must use accurate scales and honest measurements, so that you will have a long, good life in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Deuteronomy 25:13-15 TLB

I am certainly not a theologian, but I am not receiving anything near what these leaders of faith statement says when I read that scripture. I believe that this is another case of scripture being taken out of context. At least the letter that was supposedly written by a group of Baptist leaders of faith stripped out the scripture reference. You can read their version of the letter to Lee Scott in the comments of a blog post on WakeUpWalmart.com.

I found a post by La Shawn Barber where she went ballistic on Jesse Jackson for taking scripture way out of context in a posting titled Jesus was Liberal. That posting was done by La Shawn Barber back in August of 2004 and is well worth the time it takes to read it. I know that La Shawn Barber is not a big Wal-mart fan anymore after reading a post she did last month about a Wal-Mart immigration issue. The point of my story today is not to promote Wal-Mart, but to expose WakeUpWalmart.com for what I believe it is, and that is evil. They are using scripture to support their evil and greedy cause. I will use a bit of scripture to support my cause.

“Take no part in the worthless pleasures of evil and darkness, but instead, rebuke and expose them.” Ephesians 5: 11-12 TLB

Is mine out of context? I am not an Ephesian, but I try to read Paul’s letters as if he were writing to me.
The WakeUpWalmart.com web site does not add to their count of supports the 1.3 Million Americans who these leaders of faith supposedly represent. It has been four days since I reported that WakeUpWalmart.com was claiming to have 150,517 supports. This evening that number has eased up to 151.418. That is an average of approximately 225 new supporters per day since my last report. That is a slow growth given the WakeUpWalmart.com web site has been registered since 21 March 2005 and had seen an average of about 560 new supporters per day between 21 March and 13 December.

The root motivation of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers International Union) via the WakeUpWalmart.com web site may be buried in point eight of their facts page. This fact points out the anti-union stance by Wal-Mart. You can read Wal-Mart’s side of the Wal-Mart Union as well. Ultimately it is up to the employees to decide whether they go union or not. It would be best for Walmart employees to continue to save their wages and not bother paying the UFCW any dues to do the fighting for them.

My experiences with a union left a bad taste in my mouth even though I never actually had to strike. Fortunately I left that union job before they went on strike for several months. Why do I feel fortunate? I will do the math on that one for you. Let’s say I was grossing $40K on that union job. A three month strike would cost me as much as $10K in lost gross wages if I was not able to find other work during the strike. Never mind the tiny stipend you get from your local union while on strike because it will barely buy a week’s groceries. Now let’s say the strike was over an issue that was worth approximately 10% of my gross income. That is a gain of $4k per year worth of benefits if the strike is successfully. That means I would have needed to work another 2.5 years just get back what I lost while on strike if the total 10% example came in pure cash compensation. What kind a deal is that when a contract is only three years and you are likely to repeat it all over again six months after recovering from the last strike if the last strike was only three months long and was successful? I do not wish that situation on anyone.

I hope you will pass a link to this story along to any of your friends who might attend one of the churches represented by these leaders of faith referred to on WakeUpWalmart.com. They are feeding an effort that I believe is rooted in evil. I do not believe that the intentions of WakeUpWalmart.com are anything other than greed and anger because the UFCW can not get their hand in the pockets of the 1.3 Million Wal-Mart employees in the US.

How much is all of this worth to a union who can get upwards of 1 million new members? Let’s do some conservative math to answer that question. Let’s say that a union charges each new member $25 per month in dues. That would be $25 MILLION per month in dues pouring into the UFCW. That is probably a realistic number given this example of how dues are collected in one local UFCW in Canada. The local in Canada reports that they collect one half hours pay every week plus one dollar per month per employee. That would be just about $25 per employee per month based on an average of $8 per hour in wages for Wal-Mart employees per WakeUpWalmart.com’s own reports. That would be $300 million dollars per year in increase cash flow for the USCW based on my numbers.

Statistics show (from the years of the Clinton administration) that unions are not necessarily the the best thing for workers. A brief from 1998 found on the NILRR (NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LABOR RELATIONS RESEARCH) web site says that Right-To-Work states have better numbers that forced union states. You can check out Answer.com to learn more about the term Right-To-Work.

I will leave you with one more interesting statistic. The UFCW Union has a reported 1.4 million members already, but they have only been able to round up support from just over 150,000 people to support the WakeUpWalmart.com cause.

The link to this article is:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/18/139/

The trackback uri is:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/18/139/trackback/

The final two applicants were both stars in Donald Trumps eyes in last night’s finale of The Apprentice on NBC. Trump had a tough decision to make. Trump surprised many viewers by firing more than one applicant at a time on several occasions. It would not have been surprising to see him hire both of the finalist. The unexpected part was when Trump picked one of the two finalist as The Apprentice and then ask the winner if the other finalist should also be hired. That is exactly what Trump did and he seemed very surprised by the answer that he received from Randell Pinkett the season four winner of The Apprentice.

The Apprentice producers did a pretty good job of editing what The Motley Fool reorts:

Booing was audible as Randal turned to acknowledge them. I agree, and not just because Randal backstabbed a colleague he said he respected. More importantly, I believe, Trump turned away serious talent that wanted badly to work for him.

The runner-up to Randell was Rebecca Jarvis. Randall and Rebecca seemed to become pretty good friends in the closing episodes. Rebecca was rumored in some circles to have better odds of winning with her calm, cool, and collective approach to everything and everyone she came in contact with. The final episode of The Apprentice showed that Rebecca could definitely take the heat better than Randell. She sat calm with very little change in her facial expressions or posture as Randell tore her down in response to Trump’s final questions about why Rebecca should not be hired. The same could not be said for Randell. He would shake his head and squirm in his seat every time Rebecca uttered the least little bit of criticism. Randell nailed down any doubts about his loyalty towards his new found fried with his response to Trump’s inquiry about hiring Rebecca. He bailed on his friend and took the wind out of his own sail with his response. Rebecca sat with very little change in her expression as Randell responded to Trump.

It was a final scene that would make a person want feel sorry for Rebecca until her Apprentice finale task sponsor Yahoo! ran a Market Wire story in the Yahoo! Financial section of their web site this afternoon. The story tells of Rebecca getting a chance of skipping right past The Apprentice seat with SYS-CON Media who has been “listed in Inc 500 three years in a row as the fastest growing, privately held publishing company in America..” SYS-CON is a great fit for Rebecca and seems to be offering a pretty sweet deal on the surface.

SYS-CON’s offer to Ms. Jarvis will be to run the events division of the company as president and CEO with an annual salary of $150,000.

There are no reports on whether Rebecca will accept the offer from SYS-CON. There are also no reports on whether Trump is going to skip Randell’s advice and offer Rebecca a job in the Trump organization. It would not be surprising. Randell’s got his title and night of fame. He could have sealed the night by simply saying, “Mr. Trump, I want to enjoy the title tonight as The Apprentice, but why don’t you invite Rebecca back tomorrow morning so that you can discuss an offer for her in the Trump organization.” It did not happen that way. The Apprentice blew a great opportunity to seal a season filled with surprises.

Author unknown. Hat tip to Greg Carroll.

Linked to The Conservative Cat’s Funny Stuff, Bloggin’ Outloud’s Friday Funny Stuff and Don Surber.

I have successfully moved Caden’s Page over to WordPress. WordPress has accomodations for importing Blogger as well as other blog posts. The import from Blogger requires that you republish your blog using specific formatting that the WordPress import-blogger.php script can read. The documentation for this procedure is easy to find and the script comes with the standard WordPress installation.

My biggest problem was with Blogger was that the blog would not complete the republish without errors. I kept getting this error:

001 java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out/2005_12_01_wordpress.php

The problem is vaguely documented in the Blogger help area. The Blogger solution is that their server si busy and you should just keep trying. I did keep trying for a week with two different PCs and three different browsers. (IE, Firefox, and Opera) I was never able to republish via FTP to my server. I ended up using the blogspot server to republish and that even took a few tries.

I highly recommend Andy Skelton’s site Skeltoac if you are looking to move away from the recent problems with Blogger. You will be especially pleased with Andy’s ALTERNATE TEMPLATE instructions on moving off of Blogger when experiencing trouble republishing via FTP.

WordPress is a far more manageable than Blogger in my opinion. It is free and it allows for you to move your blog and all associated posting tools to a server that you have complete control over.

I started to have real problems with Blogger around the first of December. I saw my first “001 java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out” error on December 4th.

I am having second thoughts concerning my position on big retail stores like Target. I will continue to shop at Target and other stores like Wal-Mart who are also coming under fire these days for one reason or another. My beef with Target had to so their stance on using the word Christmas in their advertising along with their choice to not allow the Salvation Army to place bell ringers out in front of Target stores. You can read my original opinion Merry, Happy, Season’s Greetings from Target. I would rather just send them a Christmas card and request that they change their policy for next year.

I found a post on The Business of America is Business concerning a movement against Wal-Mart by WakeUpWalmart.com that got me to thinking. I don’t want my actions to cause an employee to lose their job because of the loss of business or realignment of company structure due to some big protest that I took part in.

Now I want to address this Wal-Mart issue. First of all I believe that the facts in this story are tweaked to meet the needs of the cause as with most statistics. For instance the WakeUpWalmart.com web site never tells states how many part-time employees are represented in 600,000 who have no health insurance. They also do not specify how many rejected health insurance because maybe they have veteran’s benefits that includes health care at no charge. The WakeUpWalmart.com web site shows a copyright reference at the bottom of their pages for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. They claim to have the support of 150,517 people world-wide as of this posting. That equals to less than 10% of the population of the workforce within Walmart based on numbers quoted right on the WakeUpWalmart.com site. The number of supports probably totals less than 50% of the number of Wal-Mart shoppers in my local area just to put it into perspective.

The real point here is not to defend Wal-Mart, Target, or any other of a number of major retailers that I am sure any one of us could dig up dirt on to start a campaign if we took a notion. My point is to remind each and every person who is considering a boycott of a retail chain to stop and think of the implications. WakeUpWalmart.com starts their big video campaign with a picture of what appears to be an open Bible and a reference to Luke 6:31 which says “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” according to the NIV on BibleGateway.com. What WakeUpWalmart.com is doing here is trying to play the self-proclaimed Christians against Walmart the company. They make it sound like you would help the poor employees, but what if things do not go as WakeUpWalmart.com wants? Have you considered your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who might be affected if Walmart gives in to the demands of this campaign in a little bit different way than WakeUpWalmart.com is asking?

Let me build a very simple scenario for you. Let’s say you live in a community where Wal-Mart is the largest employer. Never mind how that came to be, but just imagine a place where this is true. Now let’s say that Wal-Mart employs 200 people at that location where 50 are full-time and 150 are part-time. Now let’s say Wal-Mart decides to give health care benefits to more of their employees by making half of those 150 employees full-time. It is very likely at that point that some or even all of the remaining part-time employees will be laid off or have their hours reduced significantly. How do you feel about supporting a movement that could be responsible for ripping the financial rug out from under as many as 75 families in your local area?

This line of thinking is what made me reconsider my stance on big retailers this Christmas season. I am not sure what the underlying motive is for the WakeUpWalmart.com campaign, but I am sure that I don’t want to be a part of it. I have friends who work part-time at Walmart and other large retail stores. I do not want to be responsible for fueling a fight that could ultimately put them on the street. I am doing unto them as I would have them do unto me. I am sure that if my friends are that worried about the benefits or lack there of, then they will try to move to another job or take it up with their employer.

I know that Wal-Mart is a hot topic in a lot of communities. The bottom line is that Wal-Mart stores are a great asset to many communities even in places where they don’t like to admit it. These big stores are able to provide prices that small specialty stores would never be able to compete with in this day and time. Those lower prices also fuel my point. If Wal-Mart were to give in and raise prices a few percentage points then what harm would that do? Well, do you know anyone on a strict budget? I do and every single penny counts. So the idea of getting Wal-Mart to raise prices for all shoppers to help a group of part-time employees get health care benefits might hurt more people than it helps. A increase of a few pennies on each item could add up to someone not getting to eat a meal. Is that how you want others to do unto you? Do you want to see struggling families give up meals for this cause?

Here is the URL for this post:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/12/137/

Here is the trackback URL to ping for this post:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/12/137/trackback/

Links to:

Third World County
Bloggin’ Loud
Stuck on Stupid
Liberal Common Sense
Diane’s Stuff
The Real Ugly American
Don Surber
Freedom Folks
The Conservative Cat

Look at how tall that boy is getting! Caden has amazed his physical therapist with his latest skill. Caden has decided to show us that he can stand. He still seems to enjoy rolling around on the floor to get where he wants to go rather than trying to crawl.

Today Caden went for an eye exam per the recommendation of the Greenwood Genetics Center. I did not go on the appointment, but the results upset Sherry. I do not have specific technical terms so I won’t even try to explain the details. Caden will be checked again in the near future because there were some conflicting answers to Sherry’s questions over Caden’s need for glasses. They did admit that the issues they think they are seeing with Caden’s eye sight often correct themselves in young children.

Thanks again for your prayer and support.

A new version of Caden’s page should be back online in a few days.

The fight by some to take Christ our of Christmas is running hot. The American Family Association (AFA) is taking a stand against Target for its policy of not using the term “Merry Christmas”. Focus on the Family reports AFA Founder and Chairman Don Wildmon as saying that some other major retailers have taken note of this issue.

“Walgreens, for instance, just announced that next year ‘things will be different’ — that’s their words; they will incorporate Christmas in their in-store advertising,” Wildmon said. “Lowe’s has changed every one of their stores; they’ve taken down the ‘holiday tree’ signs and put up signs mentioning ‘Christmas trees.’ “

Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family reported last week during a radio address that Target has also stopped the Salvation Army from placing bell ringers outside of their stores.

I think it is time for us to take action and tell Target what we think of their policy. I realize that there will never be a perfect store to shop in but at least we can choose the lesser of the evils if no single retail store shines through during the remaider of this Christmas season. My wife and I purchased a CD player from a Target store in the Atlanta area during the Thanksgiving weekend. We opened it to play some music for our youngest son to go to sleep by while visiting and planned to wrap it up as a Christmas present when we got home. Well, the CD player skipped right out of the box using a CD that does not skip in any other player. I originally asked my wife go an exchange it, but I have changed my tune since hearing this story about Target’s attitude towards Christmas. I have now asked my wife to get a refund and find a CD player at another retail store. I will also be notifying Target of our decision to take our business elsewhere and why.

I believe that much of this attitude towards Christmas is rooted in the ACLU. Mark Tapscott says to Say “Merry Christmas” to the ACLU! Credit for this goes to Kevin McCullough by way of Hugh Hewitt by way of HolyCoast.com. I like Mark’s attitude on this subject.

What else can you do? Go to the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) web site for more information on what your rights are and find resources to help you take action to put Christ back into Christmas.

If you decide to take action, I highly recommend that you contact your local Target store manager or write a letter to Target to express your feelings about this issue. Taking your business elsewhere is a big step, but they may not know why business is leaving if you do not tell them. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a Target corporate address to send Christmas cards to so you will need to go to their online corporate information form page and enter a pleasant Christmas wish for them there. This page also offers a handy toll free number if you wish to speak to someone.

Hero of the day: David over at Third World County - I have the geographical size correct this time and made him a county instead of a country.

Send Christmas Cards to:

Target
Merry Christmas
1000 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55403

Merry Christmas Target!

This is an OTA open trackback post for Monday 12-5-2005. Please link to this posting using the following URL:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/05/131/

You should send trackbacks to:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/05/131/trackback/

Open post links to TMH’s Bacon Bits, Bloggin’ Outloud, Adam’s Blog, The Real Ugly American, Customerservant.com