Wal Mart Woes

The problems keep piling up for America’s largest retailer.

These days, Wal Mart must feel like they’ve got a target on their back (no pun intended), as they continue to get hammered in the courts.

It started earlier in the year when several Wal Mart stores got jammed by immigration police for using illegal aliens on contracted cleaning crews.

Apparently, the feds believe it’s okay to sell lettuce picked by illegal aliens under a blistering sun, but border jumpers cannot be permitted to do a clean up in aisle nine.

They’re also being sued for various wage law violations.

It seems that it’s against the law to pay minimum wage to people who ARE from this country.

Of course, the folks doing the suing weren’t unhappy with the paychecks when they agreed to take the job, but somehow they realized a few years into their blue-vested career that it’s Wal Mart’s fault they can’t land a better-paying job.

Now, it’s the EPA’s turn.

It seems that Wal Mart has been using their own trucks to ferry hair spray and bleach and charcoal from their distribution centers to their various stores.

Nobody, not even the feds, seems to have a problem with that.

The rub comes when they put the same items into the same trucks to take them back to the same distribution center when the items don’t sell.

When the items don’t sell, they are no longer products.

They are called “hazardous waste.”

According to the federal investigation, these items must be loaded onto special trucks (translation: exorbitantly and unnecessarily expensive trucks) to be returned to the distribution centers.

Wal Mart has always used the haz-mat trucks to take hazardous returned goods to a special disposal facility.

But our wonderful government (too bad you can’t display disgusted facial expressions in a written document) has decided that the haz-mat trucks must back up to every Wal Mart loading dock to transport that incredibly dangerous White Rain.

Once the feds finish beating up our country’s biggest purveyor of discount goods, and succeeds in adding a few more cents to the cost of nearly everything in the store, they’ll be on the lookout for the next big Wal Mart violation.

Don’t be surprised next year when the big W gets jacked up for unlicensed laser beams in the check-out lanes or stock-boys filling racks with Star Wars toys without wearing a Darth Vader mask.

Every day, people gripe about businesses and jobs going overseas.

Meanwhile, the one company which continues to hire Americans (at least for positions that don’t require toilet scubbing), fights inflation with low prices, remains headquartered in this country, and tries to keep this sluggish economy going, must continuously battle the very government they prop up with their enormous corporate taxes.

Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?

NFL-Free Network Lunacy

It’s hard to believe that I’m old enough to remember the “Heidi Game.”

For those too young to remember Joe Namath back when women were debasing themselves trying to get a kiss from him, instead of the other way around, the “Heidi Game” was the 1968 football game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders.

The Jets were leading 32-29 with 1:05 remaining on this November day.

Following a timeout, one of the eggheads at NBC thought it would be a good idea to switch the broadcast over to the movie “Heidi” instead of back to the end of the game.

In that 1:05, the Raiders scored two touchdowns and won 43-32.

The outcry from enraged football fans reverberated through the halls of the Peacock channel for years to come.

But it seems the doofus brigade at NBC spent too much time in front of the boob tube and not enough time in the classroom, because they never learned what my seventh-grade civics teacher used to pound into our heads daily:

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

(Back then, I thought it was a more-than-subtle warning that if you couldn’t remember when the War of 1812 was fought, chances were good you would be taking his history class again next year.)

NBC has apparently forgotten the wrath and punishment meted out for incompetent networks who think they can pull the plug on the gridiron altar.

A few years back when the Fox network got into the game of bidding for NFL broadcast rights, pushing the cost nearly to Ralph Kramden’s figurative moon, CBS decided they could do without John Madden et al.

Within three years, CBS was at the bottom of the ratings cesspool while Fox found legitimacy on the broadcast landscape.

Three years ago, NBC made the same boneheaded decision, believing the Olympic snooze-fest would be enough to keep them sailing along in first place on the winds of Seinfeld and Friends.

Now, Seinfeld is gone.

Friends is gone.

NFL is gone.

And NBC is in the toilet ratings-wise, their best show barely beating the 3 a.m. kitchen knife sale on the Home Shopping Network.

It’s no accident.

Without football, particularly in the critical November sweeps, a network cannot stay afloat.

CBS, which is now in first place and boasts six of the top 10 shows on television, has learned their lesson.

NBC would be without a single top 10 show if not for “Law and Order: Ad Nauseum.”

So now ABC wants a reminder of life without the NFL.

Like Fox, ABC was the ugly stepsister of the network triumvirate for years until they scored a major coup with Monday Night Football in 1970.

Before long, the American Broadcasting Company was finally acknowledged as a real network.

Next year, the dorks at ABC are going to try the NBC dance, giving up their rights to a 35-year football institution.

Yeah, that “Desperate Housewives” thing is going to fill the gap nicely.

Not.

Mark your calendar, and tell everyone you heard it here first.

In 2010, NBC is going to bid about 80 kajillion dollars to get the NFL back on their network, and will throw in Al Roker and a small country to be named later in order to seal the deal.

ABC will try to mortgage Euro-Disney and put Minnie Mouse on a Las Vegas street corner wearing Daisy Dukes and a see-through Simpsons T-shirt, but it won’t be enough to lure the NFL back to their lame excuse for a network.

Meanwhile, Fox will continue to pay Terry, Howie, Jimmy, and JB obscene amounts of money to keep the NFL’s best pre-game show alive, and will finance their salaries by continuing to show night after night of insipid prime-time cartoons so they don’t have to pay real actors.

They may be stupid at Fox, and believe their audience is as well, but they’re not insane.

Too Damn Cold

Okay, whoever failed to pay Mesquite’s heating bill is instructed to immediately make amends with the appropriate utility company and return our desert oasis back to it’s intended condition of searingly hot.

For those who haven’t ventured outside the warm confines of their personal abode in the last week or two, let me give you a weather report:

It’s cold.

No, wait, that’s not accurate.

It’s way cold.

Hmmm…not forceful enough.

It’s damn cold.

Getting there, but not quite right.

It’s “I’m not a frickin’ Eskimo, I hate ice on my lawn, and I’m going to strangle the next idiot who asks ‘is it cold enough for you?’” cold.

There, that about sums it up.

The current cold snap is endangering Mayor Bill Nichole’s popular claim that “we play golf 12 months a year.”

That may be technically true, since there are some golf lunatics who will actually swing a nine-iron while wearing a winter parka.

But if you are a golf purist who accepts the standard definition of “golfer” as “someone clad in loud polyester pants and mismatched polo shirt swinging a lightning-conducting rod at an elusive white ball,” then what those guys in the carts are doing can’t be construed as “golfing.”

“Freezing their Titlists off” would be the correct term.

Aside from the personal inconvenience of bundling up against 35-degree temperatures in what is supposed to be the burning desert, this stretch of North Pole artistry has deprived local residents of their favorite pastime:

Calling their friends up north and bragging about the nice Mesquite weather.

The conversation loses some bragability when your friend in Brainfreeze, Minnesota replies “35 degrees? It was up to 38 here. Of course, you wouldn’t know it while lounging in front of this nice fireplace. By the way, is your air conditioner still making that awful noise when you try to pry the thermostat up to the ‘Almost Livable’ setting?”

It’s a cruel irony that, all summer long, Mesquetians hunkered down in their homes and cars, afraid to stand outside more than 10 seconds for fear of spontaneous combustion.

Now, it’s a fear of having body parts flash freeze and snap off on the way to El Rancho.

Face it, we’re not equipped emotionally or sartorially to withstand this climate.

Most residents gleefully sold their winter clothes and fur-lined underwear when they abandoned their previous warmth-challenged address to make room for all the new shorts and t-shirts that our Easy-Bake Oven existence demands 10 months out of the year.

Now, no matter how many “Wolf Creek” polo shirts you put on, hypothermia is going to win.

And regardless of what the song says, Jack Frost is not “nipping at your nose.”

He’s kicking our butts.