Bent Corner

Sometimes somebody posts a comment that makes me re-think my position on a subject that I blogged about. This is not one of those comments.

ilike_kidrock@hotmail.com wrote:

thank all this is bull shit i am not a nazi but i like the nazi stuff every mother f***er need to get over the Sh** it is a part of history we shouldn’t forgit it yea and go ahead and call me what you want but we do have a fredom of speach and yea it may offend people but it is something we don’t need to forgit everyone wants to forgit it but we shouldn’t

Normally I try to cut people slack that are even worse spellers then me, but this fella that loves to profess his admiration for Kid Rock doesn’t even know how to use a period.

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I hate to do this, but I feel the need to once again weigh in on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy. I promised myself I wasn’t going to blog about it any longer. I don’t want to be known as the Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt guy. It might already be too late for that. Also, there are other bloggers doing a much better job with it then I ever could. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. Look to the The Consumerist. It is the number one place on the Internets to find out the latest on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy.

This morning I received an email Google Alert telling me that “BentCorner.com” had appeared in a news story. I set up a Google Alert so I would know when my blog appeared in a newspaper article. Most of the time I know ahead of time when my blog or myself is mentioned in a newspaper article. The reporter doing the article usually contacts me to ask questions. I believe it’s something people in the news business refer to as professionalism. Sometimes like in the case with The Miami Herald, the reporter didn’t even try to contact me to get facts. Instead they just made stuff up.

This morning’s Google Alert pointed me to something called the American Thinker. I’ve never heard of it. That seems like a shame too since I am an American and I think about things. It sounds like the American Thinker would be right up my alley.

When I went there, I realized two things. It’s not really a newspaper. It appears to be a blog. A rather nice looking blog, but it’s still a blog. Also, it appears to have a right-wing slant to it. That would account for me not knowing anything about it.

This from the article about the Nazi t-shirt:

Back in November the blog BentCorner.com revealed that Wal-Mart was selling a T-shirt that displayed the Nazi Totenkopf–the “death head” emblem, which was worn by Adolf Hitler’s personal guards. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) sent a letter, signed by a bipartisan group of 21 representatives, to Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. asking the retail giant to remove the shirts immediately from store shelves.

So far so good. I would have pointed out that Rep. Barny Frank (D, gay) also signed the letter. Nothing gets Right-Wingers more worked up then a good Barny Frank story. It’s right up with a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton or something that attempts to disprove Global Warming by quoting the Bible.

The only issue I had with the piece over at the American Thinker was this:

Even though Wal-Mart did take immediate action, directing all stores to remove the shirts and deleting the item barcode from their computer system, about three dozen of their 3300 stores have not successfully removed all shirts.

This just is not true. Though Wal-Mart said they were taking immediate action, they never did. They allowed these shirts to remain on their sales floor and be sold to anyone with an extra $7.88 in their pocket. People continued to find these shirts at their local Wal-Mart weeks and even months after this story originally broke. The Consumerist did an excellent job chronicling the on going status of these shirts.

Though Wal-Mart did delete the barcode from their computer system, it took them almost a whole month to do so. Even then, people were reporting that they could still buy the shirt. They would simply take another similarly priced shirt to the register and ask the person (Wal-Mart prefers to call them “associates”) to scan the other shirt.

Make no mistake. Wal-Mart continued to sell these shirts. If your local Wal-Mart no longer sells them, it’s because someone bought them all up. It’s not because Wal-Mart actually removed them.

I got a call yesterday afternoon from a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. It was concerning my not-so-recent discovery of Nazi t-shirts being sold at my local Wal-Mart. I blogged about it at the time. Feel free to go back and read my posts if you want to.

I haven’t blogged about the ‘controversy” since November 21. I did write about some idiot that emailed me about it, but that doesn’t really count. I wasn’t blogging about how bad Wal-Mart was for selling Nazi paraphernalia to kids. I was blogging about how much of a tard some guy was. Others have been blogging about it though. Some have been quite active on the subject. Just not me.
It seems that congressperson Jan Schakowsky from Illinois has learned about Wal-Mart selling Nazi swag. She is pissed off about it. She wrote a letter to Wal-Mart and even got other members of Congress to sign the letter. In fact, she even got Representative Barny Franks to sign it.

Nothing demonstrates just how angry you are then than getting Representative Barney Frank to sign your letter.

The reporter from the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about it that was published in today’s issue. She mentioned in her article that I was the one who first wrote about Wal-Mart selling the shirts.

I hope this does not get me in trouble. There is a chance (albeit a small chance) that I am a wanted man in Chicago. The last time I was in the Windy City I drove through a toll without paying. I wanted to pay the toll. I had the money to pay the toll. Sort of. Illinois has these unmanned toll booths where the driver has to throw change into a big orange plastic basket. It’s really quite easy. If you have any change that is. I had just flown in and I didn’t have any change. I only had paper money. Not knowing what to do, I just drove through without paying.

I haven’t been back to Chicago since. I haven’t dared.

Maybe he’s just a big fan of terminating a pregnancy via abortion and doesn’t want to support the oh so powerful birth control industry. Perhaps he is just an idiot and he has no business being a pharmacist. I’m guessing the truth lies somewhere in between.

Brent Beams, the pharmacist, told The Dispatch that he denied the couple’s request for the contraceptive pills because “I do not believe in ending life, and life begins at conception.”

It doesn’t matter what he believes. The woman who asked for the medication has a legal right to the morning-after pill. She has a right to practice birth control. The pharmacist does not have the right to withhold medication from the woman. The pharmacist needs to do his job or he needs to not be a pharmacist anymore.

Maybe he needs to be “promoted” out of the pharmacy and into the Tire and Lube center. Then again, maybe he doesn’t believe in tires needing tread. He might refuse to replace worn out tires for “ethical” reasons.

Link

This is just too funny:

Wal-Mart has placed banner ads on the Pirate Bay, one of the largest sites indexing pirated music and movies via BitTorrent technology and leading tormentor of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

I guess it makes sense. Sort of. Go to Pirate Bay and search for BitTorrent of The Simpsons or The Sopranos and you might just see a banner ad for either one of these TV shows on DVD at Wal-Mart.

Link

Yesterday I posted something about how Wal-Mart is changing the way they schedule their employee’s work schedules. Why is Wal-Mart doing this? Is it really to save money on labor as they are claiming?

No. The reason they’re doing this is to purge their employment rolls of single mothers. An internal Wal-Mart memo leaked last year reveals that approximately half of Wal-Mart employees’ children are either uninsured or rely on state-subsidized programs for health care.

States are finally getting fed up with picking up this tab.

Here in Maryland, lawmakers recently enacted a law aimed squarely at Wal-Mart that would have dealt with this problem. That is until a federal judge stepped in and stopped it from taking effect:

A federal judge in July struck down the so-called Wal-Mart bill, aka the Fair Share bill, passed at the beginning of 2006 over Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s veto. The law would have required large employers in Maryland (Wal-Mart was the only company the law would have applied to) to spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on employee health care or contribute the difference to a state health fund.

One sure fire way to decrease the amount of Wal-Mart employee children that are either uninsured or receiving health insurance from state-subsidized health care programs is to simply get rid of those employees. Employees with the children without health insurance. They cannot just simply fire these employees. No, that would be illegal. Instead, they create a work environment that is all but impossible for single mothers to exist in. Such as forcing them to work “flexible” shifts.

It’s only a matter of time before Wal-Mart is forced to finally trickle down some of it’s massive profits to it’s workers so their workers can provide health care for their children.

Wal-Mart announced today that December sales at stores open at least one year would rise 1.6% instead of the 1% gain it had initially expected. They also announced that they will soon be moving all of their 1.3 million employees over to a new “flexible” scheduling system.

It will force employees to be flexible with what hours they work.

This means that a single woman working for Wal-Mart who must rely on daycare to watch her children will have a much harder time making those arraignments. They will be forced to find daycare providers that are just as flexible as Wal-Mart is forcing them to be.

This will not only adversely effect single mothers. It will throw a monkey wrench into any working family.

Wal-Mart claims to be making this change to it’s scheduling system to cut labor costs. Something I wouldn’t think would be necessary when you consider how much profit Wal-Mart makes. Whatever happened to the trickle down theory? Wal-Mart rakes in massive profits yet still comes up with new ways of paying less money to the American worker.

That’s not the way it is supposed to work. Sales are up. Higher then they expected. They still find a new way of cutting pay to American workers.

Wal-Mart moving employees to new schedule system [Yahoo!]

I’m still getting email about the whole Wal-Mart Nazi SS Totenkopfis t-shirt controversy. Is it really a controversy? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Some of the email messages I get are positive and well thought out. Others, not so much. Some of the messages sent to me are so idiotic and stupid that they are actually quite funny. Here is one such email I received this morning.

Steve Cook <keywest63020@charter.net> wrote:

Emblems similar to nazi emblems on wal-mart t-shirts….!

To quote john Stoessel (sic) “give me a break”..so what…..do you have any idea howlong the skull and crossbones have been around? The skull and crossbones is also an insignia for the fighter wing aboard the USS Washington aircraft carrier(I think that is the correct ship). I saw it on the History channel the other night. You gonna contact George Bush and have him change that also?

The swastika has also been around since the dawn of civilization and was used by many civilizations including the american indian…..it can actually be traced back to ancient judiaism (sic).

The ss symbols are from the ancient Runes symbols…shall we outlaw all of them also?

Why dont you get your panties in a wad over something that matters and not some vague reference to last mid-century.

If you wanna get mad @ wal-mart about something ,why not complain about the crappy produce selection .

Nothing personal…..but if you really want to make a difference in this world quit looking back and try to look forward.

I am pretty sure that no one was gonna walk into wal-mart and say.” Dude!…look….an SS deathshead t-shirt..i gotta have one!”

Steve

My favorite part is where my new friend Steve invoked the name of ABC’s 20-20 John Stossel. He’s the guy that’s always trying to argue that global warming is fake or that it’s perfectly acceptable to charge $20 for a bottle of water during a disaster because it ensures that the person who really needs that water gets that water.

As though there are some people that don’t need water.

Steve takes me to task for “looking back”. He advises me to instead “look forward”. This is interesting since he’s the one commenting on a blog post I made over a month ago.

Talk about being relevant.

An 18 year old girl that worked at a Kentucky McDonalds was made to go into her manager’s tiny office and remove all of her clothing to facilitate a strip search. Some guy on the phone claiming to be a cop told the McDonalds manager to do it. The girl proceeded to be humiliated and even sexually assaulted by the manager’s boyfriend. All because the guy on the phone said to do it.

Oh yeah, the whole thing is captured on video surveillance tape.

As it turned out, the guy on the phone of course was not a cop, but a wannabe cop. He turned out to be a prison guard.

He lives in Florida and has been pulling this same scam for years. Armed with a AT&T calling cards purchased at his local Wal-Mart, this guy called various fast food restaurants across the country and told them to do strip searches on someone “suspected” of a crime. Sometimes it was an employee. Sometimes it was a customer.

He was tracked down down by real cops in Kentucky and charged with a whole host of crimes. Being that he was tried by authorities in Kentucky with a jury consisted of people from Kentucky, he was found Not Guilty. Even though they have the surveillance tape from Wal-Mart showing the man buying the actual AT&T calling card used to call the McDonalds. Even though they found another AT&T calling card in his trailer used in a similar stunt to another fast food restaurant.

He was still found NOT GUILTY.

The young woman humiliated by the McDonalds manager is suing McDonalds for $200 million. Though I’m sure she won’t get $200 million, she will most certainly get something.

People need to know their rights.

Case Closed? [ABC News]