disconnect

When your ruling party works to divide the country for their own political purposes, don't be surprised when stuff like this starts happening:

Accompanied by a half-dozen classmates, Ms. Khan was among the estimated 15,000 Muslims who came out for Muslim Youth Day on Friday, when the Great Adventure theme park was set aside for Muslims from as far away as Massachusetts and North Carolina. Many of the children were off from school, since public schools in New York City, Philadelphia and much of New Jersey were closed for Rosh Hoshanah.

"It's nice to see so many here," said Ms. Khan's friend Maheen Farooqi, a junior from Long Island. "I haven't really been around so many Muslims at one time before."

Shaista Barch, who was waiting in line at the giant swing ride with some of the 50 relatives who joined her here, concurred. "It's a good Muslim day," she said.

Yet Muslim Youth Day, intended as a day of relaxation and morale boosting, has not been a thoroughly smooth ride. The last week has been fraught with threats and racial epithets lobbed at the Islamic Circle of North America, the group that rented the park for the event, and the corporate offices of Six Flags Great Adventure.

Kristin Siebeneicher, Six Flags's spokeswoman, said she spent the week in interviews with radio performers from New Jersey, California, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma who wanted to know why the park was turning its rides over to Muslims and shutting everyone else out for the day.

"The concerns are that they believe the event is exclusionary," Ms. Siebeneicher said. "I don't think most people understood it was a day we're closed anyway, and we were not taking something away from the public to give to a private group."

In the spring and fall, Six Flags is open only on weekends, and the park is often rented out to groups on weekdays, Ms. Siebeneicher said. She added that the National Conference of Synagogue Youth regularly rented the park for a day, as well as the Catholic Youth Rally and an organization of home-schooled children.

Earlier this week, the words "for Muslims only" were removed from the sponsor's Internet advertisement for the event. Adem Carroll, a relief coordinator and spokesman for Islamic Circle of North America, said the event was never intended to exclude others, particularly because many of its members are in mixed families, with Muslims and non-Muslims. The intent instead was to provide a protected environment for those seeking to relax.

"A lot of people don't feel safe going on another day," Mr. Carroll said. "Because of our dress standards, they might be afraid of being taunted. There's a lot of hostility out there."

. . .

Ms. Siebeneicher said that the most disturbing thing about the questions she fielded about the event was the implication that Six Flags was playing host to a terrorist-friendly organization.

She said one talk show host asked if the company would rent the park to Nazis. The park's guest services phone lines and the company's corporate offices in Oklahoma were flooded by callers asking Six Flags to reverse its decision and threatening to boycott or sue the park.

"It's truly sad and very unfortunate that people feel that way," she said. "This is America. Six Flags doesn't discriminate against race, religion or sexual orientation. We're not about politics."

From what I understand, a lot of this was caused by the fact that that sponsor's site said "for Muslims only", implying that non-Muslims would be turned away at the gate or something. That's unfortunate, because we don't want the exclusionary "believers-only" policies of something like, say, a Bush-Cheney rally applied to our amusement parks. I figure they did that because places can have days like "Grandparents Day" where the park is open like usual but grandparents get half-price admission or something, but they wanted to assure skittish Muslims that it was, in fact, rented out specially by a Muslim group, so they wouldn't have to encounter a lot of religious intolerance that this article makes apparent is brewing very close to the surface. I particularly like the comparison of Muslim organizations to Nazis, kind of like Bill O'Reilly's comparison of Media Matters to the KKK. Why don't we just equate the DNC to Al Qaeda and get it over with? That is, if you don't count Richard Armitage's comments yesterday saying that insurgent attacks in Iraq are aimed at attacking George Bush's reelection campaign as saying essentially that. I mean, if the terrorists want Bush to lose, and I vote against Bush... that means I'm aiding the terrorists, right?

From the AP:

Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

. . .

The RNC also is running radio ads in several states urging people to register to vote.

"There is a line drawn in America today," one ad says. "On one side are the radicals trying to uproot our traditional values and our culture. They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial birth abortion, and working to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and force the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America."

They forgot dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Yeah, I'm sorry everyone, I forgot to tell all of you undecideds out there that John Kerry wants to ban the Bible. Those darn Catholics despise the Bible. He also hates families, hates them to death, and that's why he's working to undermine your own family the best way possible: By allowing two men you've never met to gain the legal benefits of marriage, and also by personally becoming a licensed minister and marrying off as many flaming homosexuals as possible before forcing you to divorce your wife and marry one of the guys from "Queer Eye". And I didn't know this, but apparently from the article it sounds like he's planning to appoint Jane Fonda and Martin Sheen to prominent cabinet-level positions. They didn't mention that John Kerry also supports devouring the flesh of virgins in demon worship sacrifices, but maybe that one couldn't clear the FCC censors.

Don't you just shudder to think of the days of the Clinton administration, where all our peace and prosperity was overshadowed by the fact that liberal radicals from Hollywood plotted and worked to destroy our culture in the name of the Prince of Darkness? That Dubya might be hemorrhaging jobs like crazy and getting hundreds of our soldiers killed for no reason, but at least he won't ban the bible any time soon. He gets my vote!

I just came across an interesting discovery regarding Mozilla Firefox and RSS that some people might like. Yesterday I downloaded Firefox 1.0 Preview Release, and I noticed that there's a small "RSS" box on the bottom right side of the browser on some sites, including this one. You can see what I'm talking about in this image, and you can also see what it does. Through a tag on the site's HTML it autodiscovers the RSS/Atom feed that I mentioned earlier. If you click on it and choose to subscribe to that page's RSS feed, you get that site's feed in your bookmarks (as that picture also shows), and you get links directly to the individual posts. And if you use Internet Explorer, you might also notice from that picture that the site looks a lot better in Firefox than it does in IE. That's what it looked like out of the box, and I've tried to fix it, but since I use Firefox anyway I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. Just another reason to use Firefox.

I was reading Kerry's remarks today in Detroit, and he touched on outsourcing of jobs, which I figure deserves to be discussed in a post on here. Here's the full text of his speech, but here's a snippet of what he said about outsourcing:

First, we will create good-paying, middle-class jobs right here in America. Today, if a company is torn between creating jobs in Michigan or Malaysia, we now have a tax code that encourages you to go overseas. George Bush thinks that’s right. I believe it’s wrong. And as President, I will end it.

I will close the tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping jobs overseas. Instead, we’re going to use that revenue to reward companies that create and keep good jobs here in the United States of America. Under my plan, we’ll cut the corporate tax rate by five percent, giving 99 percent of businesses a tax break.

What Kerry is referring to when he says "George Bush thinks that's right" is his top economic advisor outsourcing is good for the economy. Now that's true to an extent, and I'll get into that in a bit, but just to draw a contrast, I'm sure Bush doesn't support the wholesale outsourcing of every job in America overseas. ...He wants to keep the CEO jobs here, but the rest can go. OK, that's a joke, but the basic fact is that while Bush might say he's against outsourcing, he's not really going to do anything about it. It'll be like when he said he was against the assault-weapons ban expiring but then didn't really do anything to renew it. Kerry, on the other hand, pledges to do something about it. Specifically he's talking about removing loopholes that give tax breaks to companies that outsource jobs and putting the extra revenue that brings in towards lowering the overall corporate tax rate. That's a good idea, but more important is the acknowledgement that something has to be done about the problem, something that Bush has never acknowledged. Let me tell you why that's needed.

Not to get into Economics 101 here, especially since I have no real education on the subject, but let me briefly explain why outsourcing can be, and is largely, a good thing. The argument for outsourcing is basically that foreign workers can do easy, menial jobs and produce basically the same products we do for less pay. So instead of a TV costing you $500 because it was built in Poughkeepsie by some unionized workers making $45,000 a year, it's made by a 19-year-old Vietnamese girl who brings in $200 a month, and the TV is $199 at Walmart. That's good for you and I when we're in the market for a new TV, but it's not too good for the TV-making union dude, at least until you and I realize that we now have an extra $300 in our pocket that we didn't have to spend on the TV that we can now blow on some recliner with built-in massagers from the Sharper Image, built by the guy who got laid off from the TV factory last month.

So the argument for outsourcing is that it allows easy, unskilled jobs to be done by poor people in other countries who appreciate the money, leaving us with cheaper goods and more people free to do "skilled" labor - marketing people, programmers, financial workers and whatnot. An efficient economy should offload easy work to people who can do it sufficiently well enough for as little money as possible, and free up everyone else to do higher-value jobs that not everyone can do and that bring in the big bucks.

So obviously, it would be a bad thing if all outsourcing came to an abrupt end. But what if we take it to the other extreme and outsource everything? The entire argument for outsourcing is that the lower-quality jobs are to be replaced with better ones. The guy in Detroit getting laid off from the automobile industry is supposed to go and get training as an accountant or programmer, something more skilled that supposedly we have the edge on. The problem comes when one of two things happens - either we run out of high-value jobs for people to have, or we outsource those jobs too and there's nothing better to take their place. One can argue that both of those things are happening now.

As for what can be done about these problems, there are no easy answers. You can't simply tell everyone to stop outsourcing, the economic pressure on companies is too great a lot of the time. You can cut down on the incentives to outsource, which is what Kerry is proposing, but if there were a silver bullet to fix everything, I'm sure Bush would have found it and put it in place. ...Actually, I'm not so sure Bush could find Canada on a map, so maybe there is a quick fix he's overlooked, but assuming there isn't, the first step is to acknowledge the problem and get smart and qualified people working on answers. Kerry at least acknowledges that this could be a problem and that we ought to look into it.

I'm trying to take a bit of a break from all this blogging business lately. Cold, hard facts documenting Bush's failures don't seem to be getting through in this campaign recently. The Bush administration could be running a tobacco company, and when faced with evidence that 90% of their customers died of lung cancer, trot out the remaining 10% as evidence that smokers live a healthy lifestyle and anything to the contrary is a vicious attack by the anti-smoking special interests.

There's more evidence today of the terrible job the Bush administration is doing in Iraq, with dozens more dead in fighting, including a journalist and reports that an ambulance was hit in Fallujah as well. That'll recruit people to our side. Also, the initial attack on Fallujah in April and our subsequent retreat was apparently ordered by the White House, which shows that we've learned from our mistakes with political leaders directing military operations in Vietnam by repeating the same mistakes in Iraq. This time it looks to be going a whole lot better though.

I guess I don't get the Bush administration's rationale here... either Iraq isn't part of the "War On Terror", in which case we had no business invading, or it is part of the war on terror, and the war looks like it's going pretty badly.

Last week I was pondering the thought processes of people who won't vote for Kerry because he's not pro-life, and I wondered what it would take for them to finally vote for a pro-choice candidate. I'm imagining something like, "Well, I lost my job, the government's gone bankrupt, I just got drafted to fight in the second Korean War, Bush amended the Constitution to serve infinite terms, and my daughter was arrested by secret police for publishing anti-war materials on the Internet. Still, I just can't sit back and let innocent unborn babies die... I'm voting Bush in '08." Along those lines, what would it take for a conservative to admit that Bush's tactics in the war on terror aren't working? "Well, 2000 troops died in Iraq last month, Islamic radicals overthrew the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we're universally despised by both our enemies and our allies, Manhattan was rendered a ghost town by a dirty bomb and the President is blocking an independent investigation into the attack, and no Middle East country will sell us oil because they don't want to be associated with us. We need the steady and strong leadership of George W. Bush today more than ever!"

Three years after 9/11, our troops are dying in Iraq and killing as many civilians as terrorists in the process, life in that country appears worse for most people than it was under Saddam, the number of worldwide terrorist attacks has gone up, and various guys like Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are still around three years after we tried to get them in Afghanistan, but it doesn't really matter because there are so many splinter groups that even if we killed every card-carrying member of Al Qaeda it wouldn't stop the threat. The only positive thing you can really give the administration credit for is the fact that there hasn't been another attack in the U.S. since 9/11. Don't get me wrong, that's a good thing obviously and they deserve some credit for that as surely as they deserve some of the blame for 9/11 and any subsequent attack that they miss, but that one positive can be wiped away in seconds with one mistake. Besides which, events in Madrid, Russia, Jakarta and Baghdad show that just because there aren't any planes flying into American buildings, we haven't stopped the terrorists.

In other words, the Bush administration has failed in almost every way in the war on terror, and even started a new war, unrelated to terrorism and Al Qaeda (no matter how many times they try to insist differently), simply because they thought it was one that we could achieve victory in more easily. And they're losing that one too. But the war on terror is supposed to be the main reason to reelect these guys, I guess for the reason that you can't prove that Kerry will do any better. This would all be laughable if not for the fact that it just might work, and the consequences of keeping a proven failure in office along with crony-first buddies more interested in acquiring power than in solving problems could be too terrible to think about.