Trample the poor with horses.

Here you go. If you can't get those blue collar workers to work for minimum wage, trample them with your mounted police. You heard me take them down with your horses.
Well that's what the city of Houston did. Read this article, let me know if you share in my outrage.
"The Houston janitors continue to get attacked viciously, this time through legal means, for standing up for their economic welfare. At first they were trampled by horses, then they were arrested and mistreated in jail, and now bail is set at a ridiculous level so the 44 people arrested can't pay it." This is a direct quote, the first paragraph of this article.
I hope everyone is aware of the hidden truth, they don't want to increase the wages of those people because it would mean that the CEO of that company might have to forgo the planned outrageous raise he / she had planned for themselves, or, heaven forbid, a salary cut.
I have an idea Mr. / Mrs. CEO, pay them a living wage, honestly, you will get to work in the same amount of time in a stock factory car as you would in your Bentley. Sell the Bentley buy yourself a nice Chevy, Ford, Dodge, off of the lot. Pass the savings on to your employee's.
I hold nothing against you if you live better than your employee's. You worked hard to start your business. Do you really need to make a thousand times more than your employee's. Buy a good house, leave the million dollar homes for rot. Take care of your people and I bet your business will boom even bigger.

A Texan Helping Texans

I meet John Fenner today. He has a mission of his own, he is trying to raise $10,000 by December 2007 to donate to the American Cancer society. I know this is not an American Blue Collar Poverty issue. It is a ministry and I respect anyone fighting the good fight.
One thing each and every one of us can do to support people fighting the good fight is to share this information with as many people as possible. If you have a web blog, link to them, if you have a web page link to them. Links across the world wide web help increase your traffic for both your site and the person you are linking to. You can take that a step further and not only link to them but bookmark them in your favorites and visit their site often.
John is trying to raise his money by selling autographed memorabilia on e-bay, and his prices are low. His first auction is for an autographed chair that belonged to Stone Cold Steve Austin. You can visit this auction here. John has the starting bid at only $100.00 start your bidding.
The link A Texan Helping Texans is John's Blog, go ahead and visit his blog and meet this noble man, with a noble cause.

Tidy says 0 Errors / 0 Warnings

Ok, still working on the web site. Everyone says to much purple. Check it out now, contrasting colors. Viewable in any browser. Validated, W3C, 508, WCAG Priority 3, Validated! Can anyone say woo hoo, goggle has 0 errors and 39 warnings and all they have is a search engine, yahoo 0 errors and 158 warnings, the Cynthia says validator site (the site that gave me a perfect score on the WCAG Priority 3) 0 errors and 25 warnings, come on Cynthia lead by example.

Ok the people of viewable any browser campaign said to steal their code and their .css, so I did, I thought that would be simple, change some color numbers comment some stuff out and woo hoo a shrink to fit web page. Wrong.

With lots of help from my wife, mostly because she is trying to get me off of her computer so she can back to her relationship with her appliance, I have one really cool and perfect code page to build everything else off of.

Anyone wanting to drop another 150 Million to build a poverty website give me a holler, I will put the money to better use. I might break down and buy my own laptop, but so far, it's cost me time, $150.00 bucks for the external hard drive. I have lost no friends, woo hoo. I have learned a little bit about html, buy the way the site looks great on a cell phone, and I have had some great fun in the learning process.

Let me know what you think. In His Grip.........

One more thing to say about this ...........

"As we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of President Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty, we are reminded that economic growth alone is not sufficient to combat the problem. Today, the war on poverty must be fought not on the margins but in the very mainstream of our economy. It must be a war to restore the promise of work." To read this article GO HERE.

I just have to say one more thing about this article. Did I read that right? As we CELEBRATE ..... I did not know that wars were things of celebration. The return of our soldiers safely and unharmed is cause for celebration. Our victories over oppressors are cause to celebrate. Freedom from oppression another reason to celebrate. Poverty? A reason to celebrate, NO, NO, NO. Victory over poverty would be a reason to celebrate, but to celebrate that we are in our 40th year of this "War on Poverty" is an insult to the American People, and the improvised.

The dictionary defines Indigent as: lacking food, clothing, and other necessities of life because of poverty; needy; poor; Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation

Does that need any more explanation? No where in that definition did you read. In need of research, in need of government policies. In fact they really don't even need this blog or F.H.C. Ministries. The need all of American business owners, every single American Citizen, every Christian to step up to the plate and do their part. It will take more than just money, it will take changing the minds and the hearts of many people.

Many people would say that because the American Blue Collar Worker owns stuff they are not indigent, just poor. There is no difference between poor and indigent. When you work for a company that's CEO makes the same salary in a day that you make in a year there is something really, really wrong.

This reminds me of a story I am going to share. The reason I don't own a computer, I had one about 4 years ago, a really nice Toshiba Laptop. My son (bless his heart) spilled a full glass of Mountain Dew on it. Killed it, dead. Out of the kindness of their hearts (bless them) some people who care about me, went down to a local pawn shop, and for $125.00 brought me home "a new desktop computer", it was a Windows 3.0 system, it pre-dated the 486, it still used those giant 5.5 inch disks.

I love them for the thought. But that is what is wrong here. You can't give someone the old cans of food out of your cabinet (you know the ones you won't eat), well it's food isn't it, if it wasn't good enough for you why should it be good enough for someone else, just because they are hungry, how many cans of creamed spinanch can you eat in a day. What about nutrional balance.

We are all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve and their is no exception, not by race, not by belief system, if you believe in God and call yourself Christian their is no exception to this rule.

Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, 19 honor your father and mother, and 'love your neighbor as yourself." - Matthew 19:19 NIV

So, how do you feel about you? Do you love yourself enough to make sure your family eats a nutritional diet everyday? Do you love yourself enough to make sure you family gets the best education possible? Do you love yourself enough to make sure your family is not in harms way?

Where is your love? Where is the love?

Web Design - Part Two

More about web design and web design in my world. I will get back to calling out the researchers tomorrow.

As I mentioned I don't own a computer, my wife does. For the record, I may not live to see another week go by if someone does not help me out soon. Why you ask? Remember my wife used to design web pages for a living, you try and hog a web designer's computer and see how long you survive. Love is the only thing standing between me and 40 lashings with a wet noodle. If there are any Alienware Employees out there reading this blog, call your boss, talk him / her into sending me a laptop, and help save a life today. Tell them I hooked them up with a link on my blog and I will hook them up with a big Thanks and link on F.H.C. Ministries Website. It really has to be a laptop, we are a traveling ministry, and keeping a desktop alive in an RV is challenging. Back to that Alienware employee reading this, here is my configured Alienware wish list - Ok the link doesn't work the way I hoped it would. Have your boss e-mail me, I will be glad to provide my detailed wish list.

Back to my wonderful wife, she did hook me up with RSS today. What the heck is RSS, don't ask me. Click the link on this blog to answer that question. That's were she sent me to answer that question.

I read somewhere in all the reading I did yesterday that some organization (and I will re-find you) received a grant for $150 million to write a web page about poverty in America. They should have called me, I could have told them how to do it with an external hard drive, an internet connection, oh and of course - someone else's computer.

I am happy to report that I only have about 5 of my planned pages left to do. I still don't like my buttons but I have not attempted to do anything about them yet. January 1st is creeping up quick. I hope to see you soon.

Calling out all the researchers

Working Poor Families Project - sponsored by the AECF or the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a great organization whose primary focus when founded in 1948 were orphans, today they focus on the children of American Working Families. However, the Working Poor Families Project is a an organization that provides assesment reports, research and policy advice to non-profit organizations, state agencies and federal agencies. They publish "Family Econmic Success Quarterly Newsletter". They get paid to do that, I could not find their fiscal statements online, I could not find a list of subscribers (so who knows who really reads this garbage).

I have an idea, stop with the focus on publications, start passing that grant money out to the people that need it, learn to live in a comfortable pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Try shopping at your local discount store or better yet, purchase your household items, furniture, dishes, pots, clothes like the rest of us do - les chic yard sale.

"To understand poverty in America, it is important to look behind these ..." what else? Facts, statistics, data. LIP SERVICE...published in "Understanding Poverty In America" Robert E. Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D.

The authors Robert E. Rector and Kirk A. Johnson "Ph.D." have determined from thier comfortable and lofty desks that poverty in America basically does not exist and where it does exist, is solely the fault of those impoverished. He says poverty in America is not as bad as we are made to believe, because people "own things" like cell phones and television sets. In fact he says it's an "easy" fix because the real problems are: "Their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home." Then he goes on to say (your gonna love this): "If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty."

I have idea, I double dog dare you, live life as a Blue Collar Worker. Spend a day at a local women's shelter lecturing them about their problems and tell them if they would have just married the jerk that gave them the black eye everything would have been OK. Pick up the classifieds and go compete for an un-skilled labor job. Work it for 6 months. I know what will happen next, you'll being calling F.H.C. Ministries inside 6 months cause you can't pay your rent, cause your car needs to be fixed first so you can go to work. It does not have anything to do with a better standard of living today than yesterday. The problem is the little things that happen on a day to day basis that you cannot be financially prepared for when you are living paycheck to paycheck!

This is today's list. Come back tomorrow for a new list.

Charity is not reform and solving the problem is complicated. The solution is a mix of complicated and controversial steps we must take. However Step one remember as a Christian you have some rules and you don't get to pick and choose which ones you like. Step Two - stop talking and get busy. I hope to see you on the road.

Enough with the Lip Service and Research

I worked on the F.H.C. Ministries website for about 6 hours tonight. It would be real helpful if I knew HTML and CSS better.

Anyway that's a sidebar. I decided to pour some coffee and search the internet for articles and this is what I found. (P.S. I am no longer in a very good mood).

"The Bush administration and Congress have scaled back programs that aid the poor to help pay for $600 billion in tax breaks that went primarily to those who earn more than $288,800 a year." To read this article GO HERE.

"As we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of President Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty, we are reminded that economic growth alone is not sufficient to combat the problem. Today, the war on poverty must be fought not on the margins but in the very mainstream of our economy. It must be a war to restore the promise of work." To read this article GO HERE.

I did not know that President Johnson had declared war on poverty. That would mean in the history of wars this one has been going on for a very very long time, and it would seem that we are not winning any ground, but instead loosing ground and fast. Economic Growth? From who's point of view?

40 years ago, I would have been 4 years old, let's see, since 1966 we have put men on the moon (at what cost and for whose benefit?), fought in the Vietnam War, fought in Granada, fought in Iraq and gone back to Iraq for some more fighting. TV has gone from Perry Mason to CSI, music has gone from Peter, Paul and Mary to 50 Cent. Statistics say the working man's dollar is worth $2.00 less than it was (that would mean really a -3) if my math still works, I did not do that on a calculator, and technology has gone, well, who can really describe it. Oh did I mention that the working man's dollar is worth $2.00 dollars less.

Ok we have 40 years of research, statistics, and progress = none, in fact progress = -3.

God could have a called a much more qualified person than me. I have been resisting His calling for years. He could have called one of those politicians, or CEO's, someone with some money to get things started. He could have called anyone but me. I have wondered many times why me. I am not someone the average person really wants to have conversations with when they first meet me. I have very long black hair. I have tattoos. I really don't like to shave. I really don't mind a cold glass of beer on a hot summer day. I am a soldier.

I guess that's why God called me, I am a soldier and enough is enough. If I read one more article about the past 20 years of research and how they spend all their grant money on publishing reports for congress I am going to puke.

Yes that was not very pastoral of me, yes that was not very professional of me. That was the soldier in me.

For more non pastoral Comments from me, in a very unprofessional tone, keep reading. For the sensitive and conservative readers - KEEP READING!!!

For those organizations that are doing research and more research - I double dog dare you to break out your checkbooks and send me one huge check. I said huge.

For those of you shaking your heads and saying go Reverend Thomas go, I double dog dare you to become an F.H.C. Knight or Crusader (just visit our web site).

For those of you who are hungry, poor, need to get your car fixed, I am coming, and no I am not waiting for the huge check. God has made it perfectly clear to me, that I have to be on the road by January 1st, 2007.

I need a bigger rig, insurance, a truck to pull the bigger rig, a computer, some cash for gas, and lots of cash for the people. That by the way is in a month and a half. I am going to Arizona first, I don't know, don't ask, it's what I was told to do, and I coming to a town near you soon too. I have my armor, my sword and my shield. (Ephesians 6:10-18)

If you are one of those researchers I want to talk with you too. However, if you wish to avoid me (like most people do) send that HUGE check and send it now. I won't bother you one bit, heck, I will probably post a nice little thank you on F.H.C. Ministries website and call you one of the good guys.

I had this blog reviewed by a professional editor, their suggestion was to change the above paragraph. I don't want to. This was an inspired writing. Please understand this is not a threat of violence. I am a God fearing and peace loving man.

The next blog is already started and I am calling you out. I will name the research organization the grant they got and what they did with it.

You can mail that huge check to:
FHC Ministries
PO Box 4543
Bryan, TX 77805-4543

Visit http://www.fhcministries.org/ for more contact information

Web Design - Part One

I decided to include some comments about F.H.C. Ministries Website and design, I have to give major thanks to many people but let me tell the story and the thanks will follow.

Ok, F.H.C. Ministries was born out of a calling God placed on my heart, and just as important, the drive initiated (you could call a good swift kick in the backside) by my wife. After long conversations with friends and family, lots of prayer I decided that combining the internet with old fashion door knocking would be the best approach to F.H.C. Ministries. F.H.C. Ministries Birthday is March 2006.

Well, let's start with the internet, first you need a computer, I don't own one (and as of the writing of this article I still don't, hint, hint), the computer I have been using is borrowed, and I have borrowed several peoples computers. How? Well it turns out you can buy an external USB Hard Drive and keep all your own files, all you really need then is a computer. Second I understand you are supposed to know HTML and CSS, if you are going to create a webpage everyone can enjoy, read and see.

Well I need advice and I turned to my wife who used to build web pages professionally. I expected to be able to create the website myself and was confident I could with her advice here and there. She is the one that explained to me some "simple" rules: You need to know HTML (sure), CSS Style Sheets (whatever) (she is by the why sitting here and telling me I have already made more mistakes on this page, she said; honey, "CSS Style Sheets is a redundant statement"), the web page should be "viewable" by every browser (yes dear) and lastly that it should be validated as accessible (no problem). Just a few rules and that seemed easy enough to me.

When I say I don't have a computer, I personally don't own one, my wife does, remember she used to design web pages her self and she loves to spend time on her computer; it was after all her computer before we met, which means she has had this computer longer than she has had me. You can develop bonds with appliances over time, and she still working on developing her bond with me. I get shifts on the computer (when she takes a nap). She is fussing in my ear again, "oh, please, oh, please, give me a break", I guess I get more than shifts.

Step one was to pick a color theme: I love the color black, she said it would not be a good color choice for F.H.C. Ministries, we talked about colors and purple is (as you can tell) another color I am really fond of.

Thanks to Mr. Chipman of Slayer Office I got the opportunity to pick all colors purple that match. The colors of www.fhcmininistries.org go like this: Background is #260026, Text Color is #eae6ea, Link Color #c9bfc9, Visited #938093, Active #594059, Matrix Even #5d405d, and Matrix Odd #938093.

At first when I was building this site (round one of several hundred to follow) I decided that I would use a tool like Front Page, which by the way was not a good choice according to my advisor, but, I am stubborn and I tried it anyway. Nothing went well, and I mean nothing, so I made another choice, I decided to download a free web page template and use that as a guide. I downloaded Template # 44 from Steve's Free Templates. If you look at that template I did not use much of it, I tried, I tried real hard to make it work for me. In the end I used his basic top banner graphic, I made it shorter, I reduced it's size (more on that later), you can see all the pictures I made for this website by clicking on the graphics link on this blog.

I love all the pictures, ok I will call them what they really are, all the images I made them with PSP 7, and yes it's old, but I owned the program and could install it on my portable computer (the hard drive I took to everyone's home when I wanted to use their computer). There are several computers out there with shortcuts on the desktop to the F Drive (sometimes the G Drive) that don't function 'cause I have the drive :).

PS. I still don't like the buttons much, I would love to make some really cool, yet simple flash buttons or even a flash menu, but that will have to wait.

Now I am dealing with the "rules" my "advisor" gave me. Accessible to everyone, accessible in any browser, and easy to navigate, (she also said as a suggestion that the page should be pleasant to the eye of the viewer). That's what all of those icons at the bottom of my pages are. Not all my pages have the same icon, not all have passed all the validation tests. I am working hard at getting them all to pass. That is not easy, Google, Yahoo, and Many of the big websites can't come as close as I have to passing in their wildest dreams. What I thought was the craziest though, I would win the little icon, copy and paste the code from the validation site, and then I would have to fix their code so it would pass again. Hats off to the people involved in the viewable in any browser campaign, I am still trying to figure out how they did that, but that is what the coffee cup icon means, the only thing you really need to view F.H.C. Ministries website is hot cup of coffee.

You should know I am being corrected again, :) my wife is reminding me that you do need more than a cup of coffee to view F.H.C. Ministries Website. You need a working computer, (with keyboard, mouse and monitor) an internet connection of some sort, and a browser of some sort.