Menards to Send Wisconsin Workers to North Dakota

Need a job? Head to North Dakota.

Bismarck, N.D. - Home improvement retailer Menard Inc. says it will hire workers from its home base in Wisconsin and fly them to North Dakota to staff a store in Minot, which is near the state’s booming oil patch and has more jobs than takers.

The company said in a statement that it plans to hire 50 workers in Eau Claire where it has its headquarters, and fly them weekly to Minot, which is also in the middle of an unprecedented building boom as it recovers from record flooding last year.

Menard, which has more than 200 stores in the Upper Midwest, said this would be the first time it has ferried in workers by airplane, but it believes jetting in employees for weeklong stints and housing them in hotels “is going to be a permanent solution for as far as we can see.”

Minot is North Dakota’s fourth-largest city and had been growing rapidly even before the flooding that swamped some 4,100 homes and displaced thousands of residents. Its population grew from 36,500 in 2000 to about 41,000 in 2010, U.S. Census data show. City officials say the present population is nearing 50,000.

That means there’s strong demand for building materials. Minot store manager Phil Graef said business is the busiest in the five years he’s headed the store, the only big-box building supply retailer in town.

“We were starting to stay even with the oil boom, and then the flood happened,” Graef said. “Now, we’re trying to get ahead of both of those.”

Finding workers to keep up has been tough, he said.

“Everybody has a ‘now-hiring’ sign in their window,” Graef said.

Businesses struggle to attract workers throughout North Dakota, which has some 22,000 more jobs than takers and the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, at 2.4%, Job Service North Dakota data show. The unemployment rate in Minot is 2.3%.

Mustache Implants

Hmmmm… there’s an idea.

Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay says the number of mustache implants he performs has boomed in the last few years. He now performs 50-60 of the procedures a month, on patients who hail mostly from the Middle East and travel to Turkey as medical tourists.

He said his patients generally want thick mustaches as they felt they would make them look mature and dignified.

“For some men who look young and junior, they think (a mustache) is a must to look senior ... more professional and wise,” he said. “They think it is prestigious.”

The Week In Review

I’ll be on WPR for the Week in Review tomorrow with Joy Cardin. Ben Manski will be weighing in from the Left. We’re going to talk about… stuff.

Barrett Weighs in on Palermo

Well, Barrett finally weighs in and this is all he can muster.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett on Wednesday called for a “timely and fair union election” at Palermo Villa Inc., making his first public comments on the Milwaukee pizza manufacturer’s labor dispute.

Barrett’s written statement comes a week after the National Labor Relations Board made a ruling in its investigation of alleged unfair labor practices by Palermo.

“I’m hopeful that the National Labor Relations Board’s recent ruling regarding Palermo’s will lead to a timely and fair union election for the company’s workers. Workers have the right to organize, and I’m pleased that Palermo executives have publicly expressed their support for an employee vote,” Barrett said.

Syria Goes Dark

This doesn’t look good.

BEIRUT (AP) — Internet service went down Thursday across Syria and international flights were canceled at the Damascus airport when a road near the facility was closed by heavy fighting in the country’s civil war.

Activists said President Bashar Assad’s regime pulled the plug on the Internet, perhaps in preparation for a major offensive. Cellphone service also went out in Damascus and parts of central Syria, they said. The government blamed rebel fighters for the outages.

With pressure building against the regime on several fronts and government forces on their heels in the battle for the northern commercial hub of Aleppo, rebels have recently begun pushing back into Damascus after largely being driven out of the capital following a July offensive. One Damascus resident reported seeing rebel forces near a suburb of the city previously deemed to be safe from fighting.

The Internet outage, confirmed by two U.S.-based companies that monitor online connectivity, is unprecedented in Syria’s 20-month-old uprising against Assad, which activists say has killed more than 40,000 people.

Roggensack Announces Reelection Bid

Make no mistake... after the liberals in Wisconsin handily lost the recall election and the general election - they are going to pull out all the stops to try to flip the court. This will be one of the nastiest elections in state history.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack says she is running for re-election.

Roggensack announced her re-election campaign Wednesday. She says as a justice, she has “called the balls and strikes” as each case has required.

Roggensack also notes she is the only justice with the court who previously served as a state appeals court judge.

Roggensack is part of the conservative majority on the high court. She was elected to a 10-year term in 2003 and faces re-election next year.