Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Charlotte's Web

A ROSE FOR BANITA JACKS' GIRLS

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:49:00 EST

There are so many questions to ask in the bizarre case of Banita Jacks.

If you have been following her story in the Washington Post, you know that, when U.S. marshals showed up to serve an eviction notice at her rental house at Sixth Street, SE, they discovered the badly decomposed corpses of her four children.

Ms. Jacks appears to have murdered the girls and continued living with their bodies. According to the Washington Post, authorities allege that Ms. Jacks ceased feeding the girls, aged 5 to 16. The oldest, Brittany Jacks, who would have been 17 last week, appears to have been stabbed in addition to starved, while Aja Fogle, the youngest, also may have been strangled and hit on the head. Apparently, when bodies are in such deplorable conditions, it's hard to be certain.

What nightmare went on inside that house? Why didn't at least one of the girls make an escape and tell somebody?

A story in the Post "Style" section raised questions as to why none of the neighbors did anything about the stench coming from the Jacks house. Coupled with the failure of the girls to appear, it was pretty good evidence of something very bad.

As usual, when children are maimed or lost, questions are raised about the child welfare agencies that should have protected them. Mayor Adrian Fenty is firing six welfare workers, including a division head, for bungling the case.

According to the mayor, a social worker told hotline operators that she was not allowed in the house when she went to check on Brittany, who had missed more than a month of classes at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School. "[Ms. Jacks] said she's not allowing her to go to school because she didn't want her to run away . . . she's a hostage in the home," the social worker said. The social worker saw two or three younger children in the house, looking unkempt. This was in April. There was still time to save at least several of the girls.

A Child and Family Services social worker visited the house twice after this, and no one answered the door. The case was closed by Child and Family Services after a report that the family had moved to Maryland to live with relatives. They did not bother to try to confirm the report. The case was handled badly.

Yes, of course, heads should roll, as they often do when children die. It was an abominable performance. People behaved in incredibly lazy and irresponsible ways. It's always the same story when children are murdered: the relevant welfare agency has failed, often because welfare agents did not visit the family or foster parents, or, if they did, didn't follow up. I have no sympathy for them. But I can't help thinking that such lapses are inevitable. Government, when you get right down to it, wasn't designed to bring up children. We need to come up with a better way.

What about the two grandmothers, who are now planning funerals? Didn't anybody in either of the two paternal families of the girls worry about them enough to get in touch before it became funeral-planning time? Wasn't there a kindly aunt or uncle who cared enough to see if the girls were all right? The newspaper reports that Jacks' "longtime companion" and father to several of the girls had died a year ago. A longtime companion is not a husband, and right there some of the societal web that children of married parents have to depend upon was lost.

Banita Jacks had become a single mother at the age of 16 and, as the Post describes it in singularly non-judgmental language, "eventually dependent on public assistance, she spent years tangled in court cases, seeking financial support from the fathers of two of her girls. She lifted herself up for a time -- learned a skill, cosmetology. With a new boyfriend, and two more daughters, she seemed happy, doting on her girls. Then she plunged into poverty and homelessness."

A new boyfriend may make her "happy" for a while, allowing her to dote on her girls, but without a marriage and responsibilities, a woman with four children is almost always going to end up "plunged" in poverty and homelessness. It seems obvious that Ms. Jacks had severe mental problems-but with a family in the traditional sense, people with mental illnesses used to survive in the past. Welfare pretty much puts the unfortunate children of such relationships into the tentacles of "the system" rather than somebody who cares about them.

When the Jacks story first appeared, I thought of Faulkner's gruesome short story "A Rose for Emily." In it, Emily, a well-bred spinster, poisons a traveling salesman and places him in her bed, where he remains for years. The townspeople also smelled the odor of death and did nothing about it. Emily said she'd poisoned a rat. But she had taken pains to select a traveling salesman, somebody whose absence would be harder for her neighbors to notice. But these, the Jacks daughters, were children. What kind of society misplaces its children?

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

Blogging Heads: Is the surge working? Is George Bush a Grown-up?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:10:00 EST

Blogging Heads: IWF's Charlotte Hays takes on L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks. It's quite a conversation! View the clip in its entirety at Bloggingheads.tv.

Merry Christmas!

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:44:00 EST

As George Bush prepares to celebrate his penultimate Christmas in the White House, there's a great big present under his tree-growing success in Iraq. Several Christmases have come and gone, overshadowed by bad news from that troubled country. But this year, there is a guarded sense of hope.

While I would be surprised if Time magazine were to name General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander on the ground in Iraq, father of the surge, as itsMan of the Year, I note that Petraeus is National Review's pick "for making victory in Iraq look possible again." A column in the Times of London hails Iraq as the story of the year:

"By any measure, the US-led surge has been little short of a triumph. The number of American military fatalities is reduced sharply, as is the carnage of Iraqi civilians, Baghdad as a city is functioning again, oil output is above where it stood in March 2003 but at a far stronger price per barrel and, the acid test, many of those who fled to Syria and Jordan are today returning home."

Victory is not quite at hand; things could still go badly wrong. But I am giving ashes and switches and my very biggest lumps of coal to the war critics, who rushed to microphones when things were going badly for us, and now are silent. It's premature to say "ho ho ho," and, besides, I don't want to take the war lightly. But why don't some of these folks say something?

Lumps of coal are in order for those in Congress who originally supported the war and who know that the president had the same intelligence they had in the lead-up but now say he lied. It's a slimy way to wriggle out of a vote, even if that is just about the only way to remain viable and still carry favor with the implacable left of the Democratic party.

Rep. John Murtha presents a momentary dilemma in my Christmas shopping. A nice box of fruit from Harry and David for stating, after a recent trip to Iraq, "I think the surge is working," or some switches for immediately calling for an "exit strategy." Let's go with the Bartlett pears-he drew the wrong conclusion, but told the truth, something many of his cat-got-their-tongues and formerly vocal colleagues find themselves unable to do.

No coal either for the Washington Post editorial page writers, who have had the courage to go against much of the liberal press on the surge. Thanks to National Review for quoting this maverick editorial from the Post:

"In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 - down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004. . . . It's looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus's credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq's bloodshed were - to put it simply - wrong."

But ashes and switches to the author of this Post headline for Monday, December 17: "Bush Faces Pressure to Shift War Priorities...As Iraq Calms, Focus Turns to Afghanistan." It takes nerve to make the successes in Iraq look like just one more failure for the Bush administration, and this headline drone has it. In theory, we love a leader who has the courage of his convictions; in practice, we don't. Bush has taken incredible hits, many unspeakably vicious, for defending our freedom. A lump of coal to all those who have allowed themselves to become so carried away by partisan ill will that they have injected vitriol into our national debate.

It's become distressingly formulaic to sing the praises of our soldiers, but this might be a good time of the year for all of us to do something to remember their sacrifices. Isn't it amazing that young men and women have the courage to do what they do? But for all our history, we've had young people willing to rush into German machine guns on Omaha Beach or to ride along the treacherous roads of Iraq. The Washington Post did an alarming piece on the failures of several charities supposedly dedicated to helping the troops-but there were a few excellent ones, too. Fisher House, which provides lodging for family members near military hospitals, received an A plus from the Post and is an excellent way to do something for those who do so much for us.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

The Right to Ban Arms?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:26:00 EST

Although the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear a case about banning guns in the District of Columbia, will be forced to rule on the lofty matter of the Second Amendment, I think in humbler terms: Is a gun ban good for the regular citizen?

The case the Supreme Court will hear grew out of a 1976 ban on guns that is one of the most extensive in the country, in essence prohibiting citizens from owning a functioning firearm. It was upheld in one court challenge but in March the Court of Appeals for The District of Columbia overturned it. Mayor Adrian Fenty subsequently decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. The fate of gun ownership around the country will be affected by what the Court decides.

I don't like guns. Coming from a part of the country where men (and sporting women, too) do bear arms, mostly to kill turkeys, deer, duck, and other innocent creatures, I've heard about terrible hunting accidents all my life. It is therefore not entirely with pleasure that I find myself arguing that having a gun in the house can promote safety.

The problem with banning guns is that such bans affect only law-abiding citizens. Your average criminal isn't going to think, "Drat, I can't get a gun now." He isn't going to think this because he has never limited himself to legal routes to gun ownership in the first place. The gun ban is irrelevant to him, except that he might be safer trespassing on the property of others-a definite plus, when you come to think about it.

"Killers who are not deterred by laws against murder are not going to be deterred by laws against guns," writes Robert A. Levy, co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the case that is now before the Supreme Court. Levy noted the situation of Shelly Parker, one of the plaintiffs, who lived in a high-crime neighborhood in Washington. A crime fighter, Ms. Parker was taunted and threatened by drug dealers but she nevertheless organized block meetings to enlist others in the fight against crime.

Trying to get into her house, a dealer yelled, "I'll kill you. I live on this block, too!" "For obvious reasons," Levy writes, "Shelly Parker would like to possess a functional handgun within her home for self-defense; but she feared arrest and prosecution because of the District's unconstitutional gun ban." Let me go out on a limb and posit that the gun dealers in Mrs. Parker's neighborhood weren't nearly so scrupulous.

Proponents of banning guns claim that such laws will reduce crime (they can't just say they hate guns and hunters, can they?). But, according to statistics presented by John Lott, author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime," in Congressional testimony two years ago, the District of Columbia has seen a rise in crime since the ban went into effect. The homicide rate was declining in late 1976, before the ban, from 37 to 27 in 100,000. In the next five years, it rose to 35. "While crime rates have fluctuated over time, the murder rate after 1976 has only once fallen below what it was in 1976," Lott said.

Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney David B. Kopel, now practicing law in Colorado, argues in a Cato Institute paper that gun bans are elitist. "Gun control," he wrote, "is based on the faulty notion that ordinary American citizens are too clumsy and ill-tempered to be trusted with weapons. Only through the blatant abrogation of explicit constitutional rights is gun control even possible. It must be enforced with such violations of individual rights as intrusive search and seizure. It most severely victimizes those who most need weapons for self-defense, such as blacks and women."

When the Supreme Court decides the issue, it is the wording of the Second Amendment that they will consider. It reads: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Does this give individuals the right to protect themselves with arms, or is a narrow reading in order?

I realize that the Court has to rule on the law. While I certainly hope they find that law-abiding citizens have the right to bear arms, I don't think of it that way. Here's the question for me: Who would you prefer to own a gun: crime-fighting Mrs. Parker or the drug dealers among whom she has lived?

New at IWF: Charlotte's Web

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:25:00 EST

In her weekly column, Charlotte Hays talks about Diana West's fabulous new book, The Death of the Grown-up. Charlotte also gives readers several reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving.

Give it a read here.

Western Civilization Isn't Doomed and That Should Inspire Gratitude

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:40:00 EST

Diana West's excellent new book The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization is one of those rare books that brings the world into clearer focus.

Although most of the perpetual adolescents of our culture get up and go to work and do many of the things historically associated with being adults, they retain a juvenile attitude born of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the sixties. For example, they find it "mean-spirited" or "offensive" to regard Western civilization as more intellectually advanced than, say, Maori culture.

The next time you are accused of being narrow-minded for insisting that a Shakespeare play is superior to a primitive fertility dance, you can say of your detractors: "Oh, well, they just aren't adults." Adults can make value judgments. Multiculturalism is the ultimate refusal to make value judgments and thus the ultimate in perpetual adolescence. It is both difficult to truly learn another culture, and childish to insist that they are all of the same value.

Diana West writes that our failure to confront the lethal challenge of jihad is one result of this perpetual adolescence. We prefer multicultural cant to admitting that we face an enemy who would oppress women, kill Jews, and destroy freedom. And just how, you might ask, is this a Thanksgiving column?

When Diana spoke at one of the Independent Women's Forum's Living Room Chats last week, she was asked if Western civilization is doomed. Have these perpetual children who refuse to face the perils that beset ensured that our civilization will decline as others have? It might be doomed, Diana said, but the fix is actually pretty simple-we have only to realize that something is amiss and make changes, some of them pretty simple.

With this in mind, I want to note three reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving:

An Impressive Group of Young Women Have Decided to Grow Up-and Reject the Childish Sexual Mores of My Generation: Wendy Shalit, whose new book is Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to be Good, Cassie DeBenedetto, founder of Princeton University's Anscombe Society (named for Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the great philosophers of the last century), and Dawn Eden, blogger par excellence, who now works with the Newman Society, spoke on a panel held at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy last week. Nobody in my generation would have the guts to advocate chastity or modesty. It wouldn't be cool. We wanted to be cool, even if it meant a great deal of unhappiness. These young women were all bright, well-spoken, and funny-and yes, they were attractive. They realized that something is amiss and they are trying to explain to other young women that it's okay if they don't feel comfortable in coed bathrooms. If you have daughters who are college-aged, you should be even more thankful for these three young ladies than I am.
Our President is a Grown-up: George W. Bush may not talk good, but he is an adult. As an undergraduate at an Ivy League college, he wasn't attracted to the youth movement that denigrated people like his father. He was a throw-back-and thank heavens! George Bush recognized the threat we faced on September 11. He knew that day that we are at war. He did not think that the attack on America was based on our policies or our insufficiently multicultural attitudes. As a result, he has not wavered. He is not only an adult-he is the most resolute adult on the planet. He doesn't care if the press, the last bastion of the Peter Pan generation, doesn't like him.
There are Grown-ups Who Put Their Lives on the Line for Us: The surge is working, and it is because U.S. soldiers, many of them from less pampered backgrounds than the sneering classes, have done the ultimate adult thing, which is to care about future generations more than themselves. A defeat in Iraq would have a profound impact on our ability to defend our civilization. Unlike the multiculturalists ensconced in American universities, our adult soldiers, young men and women, know this.

As you can see, the grown-ups who give us reason to be thankful have gone against the dominant, juvenile culture. It's hard to grow up, but it's certainly not impossible. It has been done in the past, and the young men and women mentioned above, plus George Bush, have proved that it is still possible. Happy Thanksgiving!

Carbon Offsets: The New Dr. Feel Good?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:57:00 EST

A bureaucrat in Washington has decided to spend $89,000 of your tax dollars to make himself and like-minded souls on Capitol Hill feel better. The chief administrative officer of the U.S. House of Representatives is purchasing carbon credits for the U.S. Capitol.

Daniel Beard, the administrator, is making his purchase from the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), a financial institution favored with a celebratory visit from Al Gore shortly after the former vice president and climate activist won his Nobel Prize.

As government spending goes, this is a pittance. But it is taxpayer revenue that is being spent on behalf of a dubious, but oh-so-politically correct, cause. This expenditure doesn't make me see green—it makes me see red.

In theory, carbon offsets are simple. As the Washington Post explained (in an article that was unusually skeptical for one on the environment), "You simply turn over some money, and the offsetters promise to absolve your sins by putting it to use on green technologies, planting trees, pumping carbon dioxide underground and the like."

The problem is that the buyer of carbon offsets doesn't really know what, if anything, he is getting for his money. "What are you buying besides a piece of paper that is well printed and that says you are a morally superior person?" says Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The institutions that sell carbon offsets, most of which are for-profit outfits, have a wide variety of ways of spending the money. They might contribute to a wind farm or to planting trees to absorb the carbon in the atmosphere. It is, of course, almost always impossible to measure the impact, if any, of carbon credits.

An investigation by the Financial Times newspaper suggested that some organizations are paying for emissions reductions that don't occur. Others have received credits for doing things that they were going to do anyway. The FT also found a "shortage of verification." A climate researcher from Princeton University told USA Today, "No one knows what to trust."

According to the Washington Post, researchers at Tufts University warned last year that "voluntary offsets are of limited value to solve the increasing threat of climate change. They should not be seen as a way to buy 'environmental pardons.'"

Will a $500 contribution to a wind farm really erase your carbon footprint, after you've flown around the earth in an emissions-producing jet? Planting trees is nice, but it won't do much for reducing emissions for years to come. Trees don't grow overnight. Ebell notes the irony: Climate alarmists often insist that we must do something now.

While rich companies, people, and nations can afford to buy carbon offsets, poorer nations can't—and they need high energy of the "bad," carbon-producing kind, if they are to develop their economies. Carbon reduction could mean economic stagnation for many of the world's poor. They are a luxury purchase for those who are able to enjoy the good things of life, and then pay a fee for absolution.

The outfit where Mr. Beard has chosen to spend our money may not have been a good choice. According to the Post, Chicago Climate Exchange has been criticized by an advocacy group, Clean Air-Cool Planet, which claims that some of the financial instruments offered at the Chicago Climate Exchange may actually be "undercutting the carbon-offset market because it is becoming difficult to judge whether such credits represent any real greenhouse gas reductions."

Mr. Beard is unfazed (as one often is when spending somebody else's money). "What can I say? I just disagree," Beard told the newspaper. "Obviously, this is an emerging marketplace, but it's a marketplace of the future, and the Capitol is leading. My question is, why wait?"

One good reason to wait is that a government study of the growing carbon-offset industry is expected in April. Reps. Thomas Davis (R-Va) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked Beard to wait for that study before committing taxpayer dollars. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.), a physicist and member of the committee, also asked Beard to delay. "Using our limited House resources for purchases where the measure of return is so dubious makes me very wary," Ehlers reportedly wrote to Beard. Well, actually that looks like three good reasons to wait.

As is often the case, taxpayer money was spent to make somebody, not necessarily the taxpayer, feel good.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

Taxes on the Installment Plan: I'm Not Rich, but I still Can't Afford Charlie Rangel's Tax Hike

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:00:00 EDT

Whew! I just talked to an eminent tax expert and discovered that I don't make enough money to be hit hard by Rep. Charlie Rangel's mammoth tax hike, the largest proposed tax hike in history. It may even be that I will get to keep several hundred dollars a year more, or that I if I lose money, it will be, at most, around the same amount. The tax code is so complicated I don't dare speculate.

Either way, though, I personally won't suffer immediate pain.

Being a single woman, I won't be affected, as will many far-from-rich families, by what the Rangel tax hike would do to married women who work. (See my colleague Carrie Lukas's analysis of this at iwf.org.)

Why, then, am I terribly worried about the proposals?

Well, not for reasons of sycophancy towards the rich. My reasons for intense opposition to the tax hike are based on justice, concern for the economy, and self-interest. Yes, self interest. Even if the tax rates don't directly and immediately empty my pockets, I know that eventually I will be adversely affected.

We all benefit when the economy hums, but the Rangel hike, as it is written, will stick it to small businesses, the engines of the economy, and especially to small businesses engaged in manufacturing. This will affect employment and investing. Bad as this is, worse would very likely follow. Rangel is just the beginning.

This is because Mr. Rangel's tax proposals, says J. D. Foster, a tax analyst at the Heritage Foundation, are a political statement. They won't become reality with George W. Bush in the White House, but they could signal the direction of a White House with a different philosophy. The most important fact to absorb about the Rangel proposals is that it would be a trillion dollar tax increase. And that, gentle reader, would not be the end of the matter.

"The only justification [for the Rangel hike]," Foster told me, "is that Congress wants to spend more money, and the Rangel bill is a down payment on the tax increases the Democrats will need to spend all the money they want to spend."

If the Rangel tax hike were enacted into law, government spending would skyrocket. Pay-go would become very go-go. I don't have a crystal ball, but I am going out on a limb here and predicting that, if the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, the Bush tax cuts will be repealed. With go-go spending, and projects that those in power deem worthy, there won't be enough money to do all these good things. There will be only one thing to do: increase taxes on people who haven't yet been hit by the Rangel hike. So those who breathe a sigh of relief that we won't have to cough up more than a few hundred dollars, are living in a fool's paradise. We will-and it won't be that far off.

Flush with cash (at least until the economy is chocked by high taxes), the government will spend recklessly. My least favorite programs are the entitlement programs that create a permanent underclass. The number of these programs will grow exponentially, and the number of people injured for generations will rise. It is not just to force self-reliant taxpayers to fund the indigence and, worse, the moral destruction of others.

When taxpayers are allowed to keep their earnings, they fund charities that they approve. These charities, if they have oversight and time limitations, can be far more effective than crippling entitlement programs.

Sometimes when I say my prayers at night, I thank the good Lord for allowing me to have my modest success with book sales while George W. Bush is president. Welcome added income, most of it has gone towards retirement.

And, frankly, I refuse to believe that there is anybody more deserving of my earnings than...well, me. I maintain that this is good for Uncle Sam, too, because the more I save, the less he'll end up doing for me. It's a win-win.

And don't call me selfish. It is selfish of Mr. Rangel & Co. to want to take my money for their programs. But they do.

Charlotte's Web is a weekly column by Charlotte Hays, Senior Editor for the Independent Women's Forum and can be contacted at info@iwf.org.

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A Woman in the Race: It Could be a Teaching Moment

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:18:00 EDT

Was Hillary Clinton's pollster Mark Penn correct when he told a Washington, D.C. gathering of reporters that up to 24 percent of Republican women may defect to Hillary Clinton? What follows are my purely personal thoughts on Penn's remarks.

First, here is Penn's quote: "I think the Republicans are not prepared for the loss of a substantial group of their Republican women voters. Even in the South, I think, you are going to see as much as 24 percent of Republican women defect and make a major difference nationwide....That will be a major unexpected factor here that will throw the Republicans for a loop."

Penn's numbers also threw Democrats for a loop. Senator Barack Obama, in particular, challenged him. The liberal Nationmagazine had Penn's response: "I was looking recently at Republican women voters (core Republicans and Republican leaners), and their support for Hillary has doubled in the last few months to 13 percent, from less than 6 percent," Penn wrote on a blog. "Also quite interestingly, ‘Don't Knows' surged to 11 percent, so a total of 24 percent would either vote for her or consider voting for her."

Passing over the pseudo-preciseness of the pollster's numbers (why not go for broke and make it a quarter?), I want to explore what I think underlies Penn's optimism: Isn't at least part of the basis of his claim the Woman Factor? This assumes that the most inspiring thing about Senator Clinton, who actually has a resume of success as a Senator, is being a woman; this will outweigh party-affiliation (though Mr. Penn's "leaners" presumably don't have a GOP affiliation?) and the issues for Clinton's fellow? women and catapult her into the White House (again).

He's right about one thing: There are those for whom Ms. Clinton's gender is the all-important, all-inspiring reason to vote for her-these people believe that gender politics are important. They are the ones who bring their daughters to rallies and who wonder if we troglodytes are "ready" for a woman president. When Penn said, at the same breakfast, that there is "an emotional element here of having the first women president," he was referring to those voters. There are lots of them, but most of them are Democrats.

Like most conservatives, I couldn't care less about the candidate's gender. I admire Lady Thatcher-but not because she's a woman. As with Senator Clinton, it is her political philosophy, her dynamism, and her commitment that made her a great politician.

To believe that a fourth of GOP women will defect to the banner of Hillary is to believe that they are less issue-oriented than they, in fact, are. It is to believe that the notion of a woman in the White House (which will inevitably happen, whether this election or not) is such a sentimental favorite that it outweighs their belief in lower taxes, school choice, and a solution to health care insurance that doesn't ultimately make more people dependent on Uncle Sam.

Whatever tugs of sisterhood GOP women might feel, they will remember a remark from Ms. Clinton herself: "I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." While some of her ideas may be attractive, women must ask: Who will pay for them?

This brings us to a factor that could, indeed, help Clinton among women: Time and time again, women have shown themselves susceptible to the siren call of government programs. Big government appeals to women, especially poor women, because of the services it offers. We need to make the point that somebody pays for these benefits: All of us, the taxpayers, including the many of the same women who want these very programs.

While I have no sentimental feelings about a woman president, having a woman in the race-may make 2008 the right year to talk seriously about what is good for women. Whether you support Senator Clinton or not, we have a golden opportunity to talk about women and what policies best support them.

Now, as never before, is our time to make the point that women will fare better when we have a strong economy, more options, whether for health care or good schools for their children, and smaller government.

No, GOP women are unlikely to defect for some sentimental reason. And perhaps can serve as a teaching moment for women who have always seen Uncle Sam as a sugar daddy. Perhaps a future poll will show that more than a quarter of Democratic women are considering defection from their nominee to support policies that give them more freedom to control their lives and their money. It's at least something to work toward.

Charlotte Hays is Senior Editor for the Independent Women's Forum.

May I Answer That Question, Please? Do You Wish You Could Participate In Those Candidate Debates?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:10:00 EDT

"Do you find yourself tuning in to the presidential debates and wishing you could join the candidates on stage and answer the questions for them? Did you feel you were going to kick in your TV screen several times during the GOP debate in Michigan? Me, too. Me, too.

Why can't conservatives just say what they really think? Why waffle or pussyfoot in the face of questioning by polite but overwhelmingly unsympathetic questioners? It does nobody any good, especially in the early stages of a campaign, when the candidates are trying to appeal to their bases.

Perhaps the most painful missed opportunity came in response to a question about oil (a subject that fairly oozed throughout the proceedings) and profits. It came from CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood, who asked: "Senator McCain, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, this past year, earned a combined $72 billion in profits. Is that too much? Should the oil industry pay higher taxes, or should it be required to use some of those profits to help solve our energy problems?"

While McCain at least said HE wouldn't PUNISH the oil companies via higher taxes, and, so, technically, got the answer right, he was tepid. McCain "would hope that they would use those profits to further the cause of alternate energy, nuclear power, OR? [of] a lot of other ways that we have to employ in order to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil." That's a C minus answer.

He could have said something better. Allow me to fulfill my Walterine Mitty fantasy and answer the question:

Is that too much? Not for shareholders, John, and since these are widely-held companies, the shareholders number in the millions. So these profits for American companies are great news, aren't they, John? Surely you aren't implying that there should be a cap on how well an American corporation can do? I hope you aren't saying this because that would be an attack on the very roots of the capitalist system, the system that had done so much to eliminate poverty and improve the lives of millions upon millions.
I am aware that some people want to haul successful oil companies TO [on] Capitol Hill and hold hearings-just because these companies make a profit, a profit that is passed on to shareholders. I'm not one of these people. I do not want to penalize companies for being profitable. And who would get these taxes, John? You seem to want them to go to developing alternative fuels. I'm in favor of developing alternative fuels.
But let me tell you, John, when it comes to alternative fuels, I don't need to stand here and sound sanctimonious. You can bet your bottom dollar that, when alternative fuels are promising, these giant oil companies will be in the vanguard of investing in them. They don't want to lose their market. Exxon, for example, already has invested heavily in ethanol but the company has said that other forms of alternative fuels won't be viable without government subsidies (which skewer the market and allow us to waste time on unpromising fuels because subsidies make research "free") anytime soon. Exxon, which is drilling off the coast of Russia for new oil, spends around $600 million in on research and development every year. Bravo! Let's hear IT [if] for the American system! Did I answer your question, John?

Another missed opportunity came when "Hardball's" Chris Matthews asked a question that could have afforded a golden opportunity to pinpoint a major difference between the two political parties. "Mayor Giuliani," Matthews said, "the private equity firms are making billions of dollars. I guess it's a mystery to me -- and you can explain it, as a New Yorker -- where these billions of dollars come from; where were they before; and is there any downside to this amazing bonanza in the hedge fund and the private equity firms?"

"I mean, the free market is our -- one of our greatest assets," Giuliani replied, launching into a good enough answer-as far as it went. But he didn't tackle Matthews' big question: Where does money come from? I think Mr. Matthews really wanted to know. May I answer?

"Well, Chris [I guess I have to employ the annoying tactic of being on a first-name basis with everybody, now that I have joined the debates], that's an important question: Where does money come from? Thank you for asking it. How you answer that question determines everything you believe about the economy. Liberals tend to believe that there is a pot of money-it's static, and what you have to do is make sure it's divided up properly.

"On the other hand, entrepreneurs know that money isn't static-you can make new money, money that didn't exist before, by coming up with a new idea, selling a new product, basically doing what entrepreneurs do. We don't want to fetter these people, the people who create money, because we want our society to have more money flowing about, for investment, physical improvements, and meeting our needs. This is where money comes from, Chris, our entrepreneurial spirit. Did I answer your question?"

The GOP candidates can't rely on sympathetic think tanks to make the points they won't. To borrow from Nancy Reagan: Just Say It!

How Should Teachers Be More Like Lawyers?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:26:00 EDT

Feminists complain constantly about perceived inequities in the work place-and yet most vocally oppose something that could provide real benefits for thousands upon thousands of working women: school choice.

Not only would choice allow teachers to improve their financial outlooks, but they could give them more autonomy. This is the argument of an important new study, Empowering Teachers with Choice: How a Diversified Education System Benefits Teachers, Students, and America, by Dr. Vicki Murray. The study is published by the Independent Women's Forum.

For those of us who remember and perhaps count among our blessings Miss So-and-So, that starchy Latin teacher who dragged us through all three parts of Gaul, or perhaps a female English teacher who helped us come to love Hardy, Murray's study will remind us how much things have changed-and how much they haven't.
In the stability department, the teaching profession remains a popular career choice for women. "Education is the second largest U.S. industry, and female employees outnumber male employees by more than 3 to one," writes Murray. It has ever been so. In the old days, talented women often had no other option. But now they do-the women who might automatically have become teachers in the past are just as likely today to become lawyers or doctors (though teaching does allow a degree more of flexibility for those women who want to bring up children).

With educated women now having the same choices as their male counterparts, schools, if they are to attract and retain bright women (and bright men, too, of course!), must present attractive career choices. Our current reliance primarily on the one-size-fits all public school no longer works in this more competitive hiring environment. But there is no reason that this system must be the only system. "Imagine," writes Murray, "if teaching resembled the medical or legal profession. Like doctors and attorneys, teachers would choose their areas and levels of specialization, and pick from a variety of employers that best match their unique specialties and interests. Similar to hospitals and law firms today, schools would operate according to various missions, attracting and serving general or specific populations. Schools would come in many sizes and operate in both the public and private sectors."

One of the best ways to achieve this is through school choice, as is reflected in the voucher and charter schools movements. In fact, as Murray notes, a burgeoning movement has a small number of teachers pioneering the kinds of schools where they can be happy and do their best work.

In a way, some of the great public schools really were charter schools-they just weren't called that. Take Boston Latin, the oldest public school in America, founded in 1635 (before Harvard), which was established to teach the humanities, with a grounding in Latin. Sounds like a charter school to me! My hometown of Greenville, Mississippi boasts a school named after Miss Carrie Stern, a school teacher from the 1920s and ‘30s, who taught generations to love the theater and art. She was famous for her theatrical productions, one featuring hanging Japanese lanterns for a Shakespeare comedy. Come to think of it, this too, sounds sort of like a charter school before we knew the word.

When Boston Latin's celebrated headmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, died in 1708, Cotton Mather, the famous preacher, noted, "We generally concur in acknowledging that New England has never known a better teacher." Having passed a portrait of Miss Carrie Lee every day of my life in elementary school, I can attest that Ezekiel Cheever wasn't the only teacher put on an Olympian pedestal. This kind of prestige is important to the profession, and it won't return until teaching becomes a more competitive field.

Many teachers today feel devalued. The charter school movement, by recognizing and utilizing their professionalism and knowledge, returns the esteem in which members of the teaching profession were once held. The point here is that when teachers can teach-really teach-they are respected.

Closely related to respect (I'm afraid this must be said) is money, and charter schools are conducive to merit pay. Teacher unions, which want pay raises without reference to the teacher's ability and dedication, vehemently oppose this. Murray quotes a study which argues that high-performing professionals are discouraged from entering "the one profession in which pay is decoupled" from performance.

"Uniform salary schedules are a significant obstacle to paying teachers competitive salaries," Murray writes, because this compresses the salaries of all teachers. About 75 percent of the decline of quality in the teaching profession, she writes, can be attributed to uniform salary schedules.

And what about the schools charter school teachers leave behind? If there is a brain drain, this might be all to the good. "The schools those teachers left behind," writes Murray, "are taking notice because their employees now have more appealing options."

Just like doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

HAVE THEY NO SHAME?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:55:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

We obviously didn't go into Iraq with the goal of creating an Al Qaeda stronghold there. But Al Qaeda came. And now we have it almost within our grasp to deal a devastating blow to America's number one enemy. It may actually be easier to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq than along the Pakistani border because in Iraq we don't have to worry about inadvertently toppling General Pervez Musharraf's shaky regime.

That the U.S. has turned a corner in the fight with Al Qaeda in Iraq was one of the conclusions one might take away from what General David Petraeus said in two days of measured testimony on Capitol Hill. And are our representatives rolling in glee over the prospect of a potential victory against Al Qaeda?

"Despite what I view is your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today," said Senator Hillary Clinton, the junior senator from New York and the frontrunner Democratic presidential aspirant, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

In other words, Petraeus' report was theatre. There is nothing in Petraeus' long and distinguished career that would lead us to believe that this is a man willing to stand before both houses of Congress and lie. But Senator Clinton, perhaps the most important member of her party right now, came very close to accusing him of doing just that.

Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, accused the general of carrying water for the hated Bush Administration. Lantos rejected outright the general's assessment of improvements in Anbar province. At one point, Lantos seemed to say that he is a better general than Petraeus. Lantos described flying in a helicopter with Petraeus in 2003. Petraeus pointed to an abandoned ammunition dump and said he didn't have enough people to guard it.

"Well, General Petraeus, you saw it coming," Lantos said. (You could look at this anecdote another way: Petraeus-not the overall general in charge of operations in Iraq in 2003-saw it coming and developed the surge strategy that has proven successful in Iraq, if not on Capitol Hill.) The Petraeus-Betray Us ad, a full page in The New York Times, paid for by MoveOn.org, was, of course, more despicable than anything said by elected officials. But MoveOn may have been, if you'll pardon the expression, carrying water for war opponents unwilling to make slimy charges themselves. Indeed, an unnamed Democratic senator was quoted as saying this in the Politico, a Capitol Hill daily, "No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV... The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us."

This despicable charge is merely a way to get out of discussing what many on the Hill don't want to see: good news from Iraq. A legitimate tact might be that George W. Bush is a monster who lied us into Iraq and got thousands of young Americans killed (not, by the way, my view-I believe he will go down in history as a great man who stood firm against our foes when his ratings were lower than Arctic temperatures before global warming), but now, if we leave, we'll cede victory to an enemy even more brutal than the Bush Administration, Al Qaeda. But the harshest war critics have, for the most part, opted instead for a smear campaign. They refuse to conduct a serious conversation about what happens (to us and the Iraqis) if we leave Iraq prematurely.

While Capitol Hill was preparing to receive General Petraeus, one of the country's leading war opponents, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Cleveland Democrat who is running Quixotically for president, was on a "peace" trip to Syria (Club Med for anti-war pols?) where he sucked up to dictator President Bashar Al-Asad. While there, Kucinich lambasted the Bush Administration, calling the Iraq war wrong, on Syrian television.

Kucinich didn't go to Iraq, he told the Associated Press, because he didn't want to "bless" the "illegal occupation." He instead, as his hometown newspaper noted, "blessed a government that harbors terrorists and is under a U.N. cloud for possible involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri."

Kucinich has every right to voice his sentiments-but to attack the United States on television while visiting an authoritarian regime known for its vicious suppression of its own citizens? Our political discourse has reached a level of viciousness that threatens the ability to govern. A heretofore respected general brings good (i.e., bad to some on the Hill) news and instead of discussing the report, he is smeared. A U.S. congressman denounces the war-in a foreign capital. This is truly unprecedented.

The Communal Pencil: What Do the New Rules About School Supplies Say About Us?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:42:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

At a time when some schools are failing to teach even the bare essentials of reading and math, a new problem is rearing its ugly head: commissar-style management of school supplies.

Comrade Parent, do not expect to take your kids shopping for their own school supplies this year. It was a pleasant fall ritual while it lasted, but now parents are likely to be presented with a list, some of it quite specific, of supplies.

A statement at the bottom will inform you that said purchases are not for your own little scholar but rather will be pooled for the use of the entire class.

While it is to be hoped that well-to-do parents won't be churlish about this mandatory sharing, it must be noted that charity must be voluntary if it is to have any moral meaning whatsoever. This goes for the receiver as well as for the giver. Nobody really wants to take what is not freely given-unless this healthy, natural reservation is bred out of them by programs such as this one.

There are so many things wrong with this idea. If it is designed to spare embarrassment for children from low-income households, it won't. In the tooth and claw world of young children, you can rest assured that no one will be fooled. Kids will know whose parents bought supplies and whose didn't; the elaborate scheme to conceal this information can only serve to convince kids that there is something inherently shameful in being poor.

Instead of being expected to hold your head up high, poorer kids are told that they own what other kids' parents supply. Or maybe it's the haves who are being shamed-your pencils and glue must be confiscated because you shouldn't have them. It is very unlikely that communal school supplies will encourage kids-rich or poor alike-to take good care of these expensive supplies. "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it," Aristotle, that great teacher, once noted. If you think class supplies are inadequate now-just you wait!

Some of the lists provided for parents are agonizingly detailed. An article in the Dayton, Ohio Daily News, for example, reported on one that stipulated "Fiskars-brand scissors (5-inch size, sharp), Clorox-brand clean-up wipes, two Dry Erase-brand black markers with wide tips, 36 No. 2 pencils, yellow only." One teacher specified that only crayons made in the USA were acceptable. "I'm all for buying stuff that's made in America," a conscientious mother was quoted saying, "but I had to go to three stores to find them!"

Apparently, the teacher figured it's never too early for a lesson in protectionism! If I had a child in school, I might prefer that she diagram sentences rather than absorb the teacher's seemingly innocent but somewhat misguided management techniques. This whole business reeks of being a well-intended attempt to instill values, but at what cost?

One value I'd like kids to embrace is caring for their property. Ironically, it may well be the case that if school administrators were more adept at balancing their own budgets they might not need this form of parental largesse.

To go back to ancient history, only slightly later than Aristotle, I recall that my public elementary school provided a lot of the supplies that are on these want-lists, while we kids bought our own satchels and other implements that screamed our individual identities. (What were those pencil nerds thinking with their plastic pocket penholders?) We have become accustomed to thinking of schools as being in dire financial straits, but it's becoming more and more apparent that many school districts in their efforts to meet competing priorities use their funds unwisely. Should parents be required to rescue them?

For me, though, the real issue is what the communal pencil says about the values our educators-and to a greater extent we as a society-seek to instill. Among these values is the idea that financial inequality is destructive. It isn't. I'll never forget a great moment in my own high school, a private girls school, that showed just how un-destructive it can be.

There were quite a few girls whose families were well to do, a category that did not include my friend Jane or me. One night we were coming back from a movie in the school bus, and everybody started talking about what they were getting as a graduation present. You know, cars and trips to Europe.

"What are you getting?" Jane was asked. "This education," she said. It was the right answer-and it was a proud one. If the school had forced us to pool our graduation presents, Jane and I would not have learned something important. Along with reading and math, kids need a chance to learn that we don't all start out in life with material advantages-and then learn that this is not what defines us.

Go Ahead, Turn Off the Lights, But Don't Let Government Turn Off Innovation

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

We've all had our laughs about Al Gore's energy-guzzling house in Tennessee and leaders of the green movement traversing the globe in carbon dioxide-releasing jets.

More than mere hypocrisy, these failings are tacit admissions of a truth: In an advanced, highly technological society, most of us can't or simply won't live as if we inhabit a less sophisticated society. It's impractical to take the slow boat when you can fly. If saving the planet requires that most of us adopt hunter gatherer lifestyles, I fear we are doomed. But we aren't.

The challenge of global warming will not be met solely by dimming the lights. It will be met by something that may not lift many greenie hearts: entrepreneurship. A free-market environment is the best way to fight global warming because it allows entrepreneurs to create, and sell, new technologies. Just to name a few technological advances of the last 100 years, disposable medical supplies, plastics, air conditioning all have made the world a better place, and all make more innovation possible.

Human ingenuity, not pretending that jets don't exist, solves problems. I'm only half joking when I say that, if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really is going to kill the planet, somebody out there should start working on a carbon dioxide gobbling process. Come to think of it, somebody probably is. 'Entrepreneurs are sub rosa,' says P. J. Hill of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a free-market environmental group in Montana. Hill jokes that every time the price of oil rises to a certain level, technocrats get busy pursuing alternatives.

Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), says that there is evidence that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is, indeed, going up and that the earth is "a little bit warmer." But, "This is not a scary story," Ebell says. There is sufficient time for "clever people to figure out new technologies."

One of the key obstacles to finding real solutions: government intervention, which is ever so warmly encouraged by most left-leaning environmentalists. Hill urges that government must not "step in and pick winners and losers" because the result is an inevitable rush for federal subsidies or tax benefits for programs that, in reality, promise little relief. Here think ethanol and wind farms. Nuclear power, which may actually provide solutions, is by contrast, widely derided by those in the technologically-hostile sector of the environmental movement.

While most people don't want to live like cave men, they are interested in products that will help us conserve the planet and be good stewards of the environment. There is a market for such products and good products will not need government intervention to succeed. Many consumers, for example, prefer "fair trade" coffee, which carries assurances that it was produced under acceptable conditions. As long as this is a choice, rather than government mandates, this is a highly appealing idea.

Many doomsday scenarios are predicated on the idea of stasis that people will continue to behave exactly as they do now; even as the world around them grows warmer, they will fail to adapt. But that is not how human beings behave. If it were, much of The Netherlands would be under water. Inhabitants of that region began to build 'artificial dwelling hills' as early as 500 BC, until dykes began to be constructed in the 1200's. There is no reason to believe that homo sapiens are any less sapient today. Human resilience will be the key to confronting the global warming challenge.

And what about my call for a machine or process to eat up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?In the process of researching for this article, I learned that there are actually people at work on a process to alleviate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One intriguing theory, which may or may not be promising, it's in the initial stages�is that releasing sulphur into the atmosphere will reduce carbon dioxide.

Imagining some space age device, I wondered how this would be done. Some have suggested a less avant garde way to get sulphur into the atmosphere: build more coal mines. Coal puts more sulphur into the atmosphere. Or maybe we should use more aerosol sprays? Aerosols were blamed in the 1970s when some scientists and prominent laymen including Isaac Asimov, feared that cooling, not warming, was the coming danger for the planet. Global cooling? Puh-leeze, not that again.

An Unsentimental View of Diplomacy

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

Diplomacy, once the province of wily men, has become an idealistic concept of late: We must talk to unfriendly regimes. Or, in the spirit of shedding our Bush era "arrogance," we should probably listen to them.

We have a homespun, democratic notion that, if we can just talk things over (and give enough things away), we can get to yes, even with our most intractable enemy. We can be friends. We are the world.

It's time for a reality check. Sir Winston Churchill was right when he said that "jaw, jaw" is better than "war, war." But jaw, jaw can at times be equally fraught with peril, if practiced as anything other than a hardnosed art.

Turning the famous quote from Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz that war is the continuation of policy by another means on its head, some wag suggested that diplomacy is "war by another name." I have a dreadful feeling that our enemies know this axiom better than we do. They are not crippled by our modern notion that we can just talk out our differences. "Let's iron out this misunderstanding," we say, when our enemies use the diplomatic process solely to gain advantage. A naiíve belief that two hostile nations can get together, listen, and inevitably become friendly nations is not a good negotiating principle, though it may be an excellent public stance for a canny diplomat. Just don't believe too deeply in the good intentions of your enemy.

During the Oslo talks, which produced the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that have, in turn, produced such disastrous results for the Middle East, Dennis Ross, then chief U.S. diplomat, felt that the big problem was that the two sides, Israel and the PLO, had different "narratives" and that, if these two views could be reconciled, peace was a likely result. We just had to get to yes.

Israel understandably eager for peace, and willing to put credence in the process, signed onto an agreement to give away land in return for peace. Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of the agreement, "For the messianic Israeli left, Oslo was more than a deal, it was a ratification [in their minds] of a new era in modern history, a new era in human relations and a radical break in history which they declared was occurring not at some point in the future, but now."

The Palestinians, on the other hand, had no such idealistic views of the process, they would simply wait until they got the land, and then return to war, war. Israel was hopeful and naiíve, pretty much the same as the American left today, the Palestinians were clear-eyed, not averse to trickery, and totally immune from any idealistic pulls of conscience, other than toward their own ultimate victory.

Sometimes diplomacy is the correct approach to solving a problem. Nobody is talking about going to war with China over that country's monetary policies, but some in Congress want to adopt strong-arm measures if China will not agree to raise the value of the Yuan. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is urging diplomacy instead. Indeed, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab have called the proposed punitive tactics "the wrong approach," in effect arguing for diplomacy.

But we must recognize that diplomacy is sometimes a waste of effort. We quite frequently have nothing to gain from talking to several regimes with which we share the globe, and their "leaders" (journalese for dictator) who may have a great deal to gain from talking to us. In addition to the prestige of negotiating with a superpower, they often wheedle a lot of goodies from us that go to prop up an awful regime. They may also garner enormous support from that segment of the American public that puts a touching faith in talking to our enemies. Do you think that Hugo Chavez would negotiate in good faith? You know the answer. Unfortunately, this harsh reality doesn't deter many Americans from idealizing diplomacy. The Y put a touching faith in dangling carrots before Kim Jong Il (though I understand he prefers porn and cognac).

We are understandably afraid of many developments in the world. It is not pleasant to know that perfect strangers are ideologically committed to killing us. There may be times when diplomacy can avail us. But I fear that all too often we advocate talking to our enemies because of a combination of naiveté and fear. We seem willing to make any concession. Arguing with several talking heads around the time of one of North Korea's mini-nuclear performances, I suggested that negotiating with certain regimes involves giving them too much. The pundits seemed ready to make all sorts of concessions. I could see barrels of supplies leaving the port for a rogue regime before we left the studio.

Diplomacy is a tricky art that developed in medieval times and was refined in the Renaissance. Because many of our enemies still live in the Middle Ages, I fear that, when it comes to diplomacy, they're more sophisticated than we are.

Hoping for Failure in Iraq?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:16:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

For the hardcore anti-war movement, there is no need to wait and hear what General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has to say when he updates Congress on Iraq on September 15. If in September we learn that drastic changes in the way the war is being fought are having positive results and that there is a reasonable chance of a successful conclusion, they still want out of Iraq.

Hatred of George Bush or a belief that war is intrinsically wrong or opposition to this particular war-or whatever-combines to make them determined to end the war now, no matter the consequences. Some appear willing to accept a bloodbath in Iraq if we can get our soldiers home sooner rather than later. That is to be expected of the anti-war movement.

But various members of Congress may be wedging themselves into a position where, from a political standpoint, they cannot afford success in Iraq. The heated rhetoric and recent sleepover in Congress have made some war opponents so vociferously and visibly tied with immediate withdrawal-before the Petraeus report, which had been agreed-upon earlier-as to introduce an important new dynamic: victory in Iraq would actually hurt them.

I am not accusing anybody of putting a political career before the good of the country (not that that would be unprecedented). I am simply arguing that the Congress had agreed to give Petraeus a chance with a change in military tactics (he is an expert on fighting insurgencies), and now many are doing and saying things that that make it difficult, if not impossible, to welcome good news from the general. The insistence on pulling out without regard to effect the surge will make it harder to vote to continue. But there could be a surprise beneficiary to their tough new stance: George W. Bush.

Can you imagine what it would do for George Bush's standing and the next year's presidential race if he pulled it off in Iraq? Needless to say, Petraeus's report, no matter what it lays before the Congress, may not persuade those on the Hill now irrevocably tied to withdrawal. It will take the president's utmost commitment if we are to remain until the job is done. Legacy wise, this can only help, if we achieve what it is beginning to look as if we can do-establish a stable Iraq that is not a safe haven to terrorists.

Whether we remain in Iraq or leave on an artificial timetable mandated by Congress, the price will be steep. If we finish what we started, we will expend blood and treasure; more American service men and women will die in Iraq. There is no way to avoid this terrible toll if we remain in Iraq.

The cost of leaving prematurely is far more terrifying. The New York Times admitted in an editorial calling for withdrawal of troops that genocide in Iraq is a probable cost. New York Times correspondent John Burns (who, by the way, is an excellent reporter of the old school for whom objectivity is a calling, no matter the affiliation) said recently on the Charlie Rose show that if U.S. troops are withdrawn the "levels of violence will eclipse by quite a long way the levels we see now." Burns called U.S. troops "a very important inhibitor of violence-where American forces are present, they inhibit violence."

We don't know exactly what would happen, but we do know that Iraq would become a horror story. Those who stuck out their necks to help the U.S. would have those necks chopped off-not necessarily metaphorically. Nobody would ever trust the U.S. again, and we would not trust ourselves to mount a military campaign. The hangover from a loss in Iraq would be far more devastating than the Vietnam syndrome. "Live with honor, die with honor," a sign on a Taliban residence read in 2002. Our enemies will know that this not an ethic we share if we pull out in Iraq, and that will embolden them to step up their war against us, a war we would like to ignore and that many among us do ignore.

If we leave Iraq prematurely, it will be not for peace but for the chimera of peace. "Today there is much discussion of the so-called Bush Doctrine and what may follow it," writes Robert Kagan. "Many prefer to believe the world is in turmoil not because it is in turmoil but because Bush made it so by destroying the new hopeful era. And when Bush leaves, it can return once again to the way it was. Having glimpsed the mirage once, people naturally want to see it and believe in it again."

We are in a dangerous situation, and it is made all the more dangerous because many leaders have put themselves in an awkward position where defeat of the Bush agenda in Iraq is good news.

Lost in a World of Urges. You know what I mean?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EDT

On a recent trip across town, I fell into conversation with an opinionated taxi driver (is there any other kind?). "What about that woman who killed her children?" he asked by way of an icebreaker.

While I am four square against infanticide, I mentioned, mostly in passing, that I am in favor of legalizing drugs. "You've got a point there," the cabbie said thoughtfully. "Then we could tax drugs that are now sold illegally and use the money to take care of addicts."

"No, no, no," I said, appalled. "I don't want the government to collect taxes to take care of people who have made the choice to destroy themselves. I don't think that's the government's job. The taxpayer should not be required to foot the bill for bad choices other people make. I just don't want deranged addicts to shoot innocent people while committing crimes to get drug money. What happens to the addicts is up to them and any private charity that cares to help them."

Now it was the cabbie's turn to be horrified. "You don't want to help people?" the cabbie demanded. Well, maybe as an individual, I assayed, but I don't want the government to be involved. "You're rich," the by now crabby cabbie said erroneously, adding, not erroneously, that I was probably the kind of selfish person who doesn't want to pay higher taxes to support universal health care. At least, he wasn't entirely lacking in perception.

The cabbie shared numerous concerns with me, including the lethal impact of Popeye's fried chicken on one's veins, but it all came back to health care. Come to think of it, that's how Popeye's entered the conversation. People who don't eat right might get sick and need medical attention. Obesity is another peril. Another reason for universal health care: growing population caused by, according to my friend, by an unbridled sexual urge. "You know what I mean?" he said. "No," I replied, "I don't."

A republic is in big trouble when a large segment of the population believes that the appropriate response to bad behavioral choices is governmental help. But the underlying philosophy is even more frightening: it's the notion that there nobody should bear the burdens of their behavior. Sexual urge? You can't stop yourself anymore than you can resist delicious Popeye's fried chicken or mainlining heroin, if that happens to be your thing. "Sex is like eating," my cabbie went on heatedly. "You can't control it. Know what I mean?" "No," I replied even more curtly, loath as I am to go into gory detail about human sexual urges with total strangers. "I don't."

As the cabbie saw it, many unhealthy people will be born because of this ungovernable urge for sexual activity. Mothers will send children to school who can't learn because they are hopped up on candy bars (because Mom is hopped up on something else). By now, I could see it would do no good to point out that a banana and milk might be better than a government nutrition program. I was going to ask where all these Snickers addicted youths are, but the cabbie would only insist I am too sheltered. But, surely, even poor parents want to and are able to make good choices for the children. But, according to the cabbie, apparently they can't. That is a key feature of modern policy. Nobody is responsible.

The list of formerly private matters that now require, or will soon be deemed to require, government intervention is shocking: obesity, a concern of my taxi driver, is one of the strangest. Can you imagine what the authors of the Federalist papers would have made of the notion that obesity is somehow the concern of the government? An intriguing article on the Hoover Institution website by Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., a research fellow at Hoover Institution, shows why such personal choice items should not be elevated to the position of public health issue: "Most of the costs from poor diet and lack of exercise are paid by the obese themselves. This does not mean that the government should do nothing; for instance, it is probably appropriate to warn consumers about the dangers associated with some foods, such as those with high trans-fat content. Also, government should get out of the business of subsidizing foods (such as high-fructose corn syrup) through its agricultural policies."

In other words, you eat the doughnut, you pay the price. It should not be something for which non-doughnut abusers pick up the tab. Health insurance had been such a theme of our conversation that I screwed up my courage and asked the cabbie the question that was now preying on my mind: "Do you," I timidly asked, "have health insurance?" He did not, and a minutes more of conversation elicited his thorough knowledge of emergency room policies. A cab driver is the ultimate in a small business operator he must buy gas, lease or own a car and pay for a medallion, either through his own wallet or by working for a company. But I still think it is selfish of him to expect somebody else to take care of his health needs either through universal health insurance or added emergency room costs for the rest of us.

What struck me most was that the cabbie had absorbed the attitudes of the elite. We now have public policy based on the ideas he had shared between my apartment and Union Station.

Shouldn't he be writing for the Nation instead of driving a taxi?

Three Cheers for the Two-Party System

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

A recent panel convened by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who may well be preparing to mount a third-party bid for the presidency next year, and put on by USC's Annenberg School for Communications, was headlined, "Ceasefire! Bridging the Political Divide."

"With the public feeling disconnected from Washington and having grown tired of the current political debate and lack of progress on major issues, this could be the most important gathering of the year," Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, was quoted saying in the promo material.

Ah, the woes of having a two-party system. Why can't everybody just be nice? It would be an improvement in public life if Washington were more civil nowadays, but the notion that the two parties are obsolete, or that there's not a dime's worth of difference between them, is simply wrong. The two major parties represent extremely different public philosophies. Talk of bridging the gap is really a refusal to recognize that the gap is wide and deep and meaningful. (There are, of course, crossover moments, George Bush on immigration or Joe Lieberman on the Iraq war, and sometimes the parties can work together on an issue such as human trafficking.)

I disagree with those who insist that we live in a post-partisan age. We live, in fact, in dangerous times and the Democrats and Republicans do an excellent job of setting forth very different solutions, based on different philosophical underpinnings. Democrats believe in big government, financed by the taxpayer; Republicans assert that a thriving economy, produced by tax cuts, will level the playing field and offer equal opportunities to all.

On our most important security issue "terror" the parties couldn't do a better job of setting forth the two main paths open to us: One party would rely on policing and negotiations, while the other views the situation in� terms of an existential battle in which mere arrests and "talking to" our enemies are insufficient. Democrats may be more focused on the need to inspect every container on every transatlantic ship; Republicans, until recently, tended to focus on military solutions, which they claim go to the root of terrorism. How could the differences be clearer?

Mayor Bloomberg is the chief post-partisan in today's political landscape. In announcing that he was leaving the Republican Party, the former Democrat decried to the New York Times that "partisanship that too often puts narrow partisan interests above the common good." He added: "Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology. Working together, there's no limit to what we can do."

Surely, we would all like to work together to be all that we can be. And who's against "real results"? Not me. As appealing as this might be, however, the quest for results sometimes leaves the issues along the path to results unaddressed. We can't afford to skip this part of the process, even in the name of getting along with each other.

I believe that part of the appeal of what supporters call non-partisanship is that we feel it would cut down on the unseemly racket of politics. We get so much rancor emanating from Washington every night on the evening news that some nights we want to cover our ears run screaming from the room like the tormented women in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." The idea of an ideological ceasefire is thus very appealing.

But the issues confronting us are ones of life and death. Our two major political parties have extremely different ideas on how to respond. They are doing exactly what political parties should be doing, setting forth intrinsically different alternatives. We are not at a juncture in history when we can safely afford the luxury of peace and quiet.

We must listen to both our noisy political parties and then make up our minds.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

Fourth of July Reflections

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

As the Fourth of July approaches, we might stop and reflect that we have not experienced an attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. This is either because: (A.) The terrorists have gotten together and decided, What the heck? We sorta like the Great Satan, or (B.) Somebody somewhere is doing something right to protect us.

Who could that be? Liberals certainly don't want to credit any of the tactics of the Bush administration with keeping us safe. They are too busy mocking the administration as stupid and/or Hitlerian. It is telling that the first installment of the Washington Post's four-part series on Vice President Dick Cheney bears this headline: "The Unseen Path to Cruelty." It deals with handling of detainees.

One of the cornerstones in Cheney's program for handling terrorist suspects is that they do not "deserve to be treated as prisoners of war." Cheney had argued that The Geneva Conventions, which since 1949 have regulated treatment of civilians and combatants in a war zone, do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield. It is my humble recollection that neither of these terrorists groups signed the convention.

We should not extend the assurances of The Geneva Conventions to those who in no way honor civilized rules of combat. Being a decent society, we intuitively want to do so. "Robust questioning," for which, according to the Post, Cheney argued, may include things we'd rather not know about (I'd be more interested in establishing rules, though not necessarily making them public, that restricted more severe forms of barbarity than prohibiting, say, water boarding). But given a choice between your child and a terrorist's civil rights (which probably wouldn't be honored in his own country!), even a liberal might end up being nasty.

Does our society take a risk engaging in such forms of interrogation? Yes. But given a possible alternative, ceasing to exist as a society, we should be glad that some men and women are prepared to make these hard choices. Almost despite itself, the Post series portrays Cheney in such a heroic mold: When Cheney and others watched the attack on the twin towers on television, "The people who were present, not all of them admirers, said they saw no sign then or later of the profound psychological transformation that has often been imputed to Cheney. What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. While others assessed casualties and the work of 'first responders,' Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies."

As for the alleged "cruelty," I agree with columnist Mona Charen, who wrote this on National Review's blog: "If Cheney took the position that the executive has broad constitutional authority in this area, as the article suggests, it was not because he is a cruel man, but out of genuine conviction that this was the best way to protect the American people."

One of the arguments in the piece is that policies of cruelty developed in Washington spread to Abu Ghraib, creating one of the worst scandals in recent U.S. history. But Abu Ghraib did not involve high-ranking officials, charged with conducting clandestine interrogations running amok. It was not a stench that somehow spread. It was lower ranking men and women who became involved in pornographic behavior.

It is possible to take a civil libertarian position that criticizes the administration. But it's the mockery of the men and women who have most likely prevented another attack on America that is so infuriating. There have always been such people. In Victorian England, Rudyard Kipling had their number:

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.

This, of course, was before the left developed the ingenious formulation of supporting the uniform but not the country for which it stood. Still, mockery of those who like Cheney have to make decisions most of us would rather not make persists. It's, as Kipling said, cheap. The real root, though, of much of the mockery is that so many of us don't value the United States. Yes, I know that liberals will say they value it so much they don't want it besmirched by the likes of Bush and Cheney. But I think that is a subterfuge. They aren't sure that America is worth the terrible cost our survival is extracting. You can't die for a country if you don't believe in it.

Mockery is cheap; survival is not. As we celebrate the Fourth, let's remember how many died for this country and honor them.

Charlotte Hays is the senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

The Prosecutor Is Down. What about the Media Persecutors?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

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When Duke prosecutor Mike Nifong lost his license to practice law a few days ago, it was an appropriate outcome for a district attorney who capitalized on a racially-charged accusation to pursue a non-existent rape case to bolster his chances for reelection. But what about the other culprits?

While Nifong vigorously prosecuted the now unraveled case, many in the media persecuted with equal vigor the falsely accused players, their parents, and those jocks in general who had the misfortune to be both male and white. New York Times columnist Serena Roberts, along with her reporting colleagues at the nation's most prestigious newspaper, was a prime offender.

In a now infamous column, Ms. Roberts penned for last March 31, two weeks after the rape charge was made, the columnist opined:

At the intersection of entitlement and enablement, there is Duke University, virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside. This is the home of Coach K's white-glove morality and the Cameron Crazies' celebrated vulgarity.

The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.

While admitting, sarcastically, that the rape charge could be "baseless," as the accused claimed, Ms. Roberts noted that the players "had been forced" to give DNA samples but that "to the dismay" of investigators, nobody had come forward to provide a damning account of the evening in question. Ms. Roberts charged that the silence stemmed from fear of being a snitch. "Does [Duke University President Richard] Brodhead dare to confront the culture behind the lacrosse team's code of silence or would he fear being ridiculed as a snitch?" she added.

We now know that the culture that President Brodhead might have dared to confront but didn't was the professorial culture of radicalism that led the so-called Gang of 88 members of the university's faculty to take out a screaming newspaper advertisement applauding those who demonstrated against the accused players (see Charlotte Allen's classic piece on Duke's "tenured vigilantes").

It was obviously a rush to a false judgment. But, you argue, Ms. Roberts is a columnist and they are allowed to take liberties. While not conceding that Ms. Roberts' column was anything short of reprehensive, I'll admit: reporters have different standards from columnists. Unfortunately, the Times reporters were, in their own sneaky way, worse than Ms. Roberts.

According to K.C. Johnson, the Brooklyn College history professor who moved to Durham to produce the highly regarded Durham-in-Wonderland blog on the case (and whose book on the Duke scandal, co-authored with Stuart Taylor is due in September), the Times' reporting consisted of "duplicitous news articles that come across as neutral if you didn�t already know about the case."

The newspaper was careful to quote sources from both sides. But its reporting might have convinced all but the most skeptical that the lacrosse players were guilty. Perhaps the most significant article was a five thousand plus piece by Duff Wilson that treated a memo by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, one of the investigators, as pivotal even though the memo had been written from memory nearly four months after the initial interviews (for which Gottlieb made no notes) by a man who very much needed to bolster the prosecution's case.

Stuart Taylor wrote:

Gottlieb's memo is contradicted on critical points by the contemporaneous notes of other police officers, as well as by hospital records seeming to show that the accuser did not have the injuries Gottlieb claims to have observed. The Times blandly mentions these contradictions while avoiding the obvious inference that the Gottlieb memo is thus unworthy of belief.

It is almost entirely on this Gottlieb memo that the Times rests its summing-up fifth paragraph:

[A]n examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution ... shows that while there are big weaknesses in [District Attorney Mike] Nifong's case, there is a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

Taylor called this a "sly formulation." He explained:

Whoever thought it up chose to focus on the legalistic question of whether Nifong can avoid having his case being thrown out before trial, while glossing over the more important question as to whether any reasonable prosecutor could believe the three defendants to be guilty and force them through the risk, expense, and trauma of a trial.

Unlike the Times, the Raleigh News & Observer, which like the more prestigious news outlet had also initially published stories that would lead an objective reader to accept the case made by the prosecution, reversed course when the DA's case began to unravel. Johnson gives the News & Observer high marks for this quick change which was "critical to the outcome." A scant five days before the hearings that led to Nifong's disbarment, Johnson pointed out, Duff Wilson of the Times was writing stories that bolstered Nifong. Johnson said any reader relying on Wilson's coverage was bound to be "surprised" that Nifong was punished.

The New York Times, which splashed these Duke students' pictures on the front page, along with inflammatory charges against them, and went ballistic on its editorial page, carried the story of Nifong's disbarment for prosecuting them on page 16, columnist Thomas Sowell pointed out Tuesday. Ms. Roberts, declining to join the two liberal columnists who have publicly said they were wrong (syndicated columnist Susan Estrich and the News & Observer's Ruth Sheehan, whose apology to the team is noteworthy for its graciousness), has chosen another route.

Instead, in March of this year, when it was clear that the case was going to hell in a handbag, Ms. Roberts stuck again with a column that said, "There is a tendency to conflate the alleged crime at the Duke lacrosse team kegger on March 13, 2006, with the irrefutable culture of misogyny, racial animus and athlete entitlement that went unrestrained that night." But that is exactly what she did. Ms. Roberts has engaged in "revisionist history to suggest she has never been wrong," as Johnson put it.

Now that the case has gone kaput, the players and their families have reached a financial settlement with Duke University. Johnson notes that part of it is that they will not take action against the Gang of 88 (which like Roberts has not apologized). So the university finally did use its financial resource to take a stand in favor of the professors who were delighted to see Durham's African-American community up in arms about a rape charge that turned out to be bogus. But it had fit in with what Charlotte Allen called their "meta-narrative," or radical picture of how society works.

"What's so striking about the early coverage," K.C. Johnson told me, "is that it's not just as if these people rushed to judgment and presented the case as if a rape had taken place but that they drew from this incredibly significant moral judgments."

We don't have a procedure to disbar reporters and columnists. And I am glad we don't. But we must always remember that, whether it's a rape case in Durham or a war in Iraq, they are biased. They wear blinders. Be grateful that today there are more sources of information than a press corps inhabited by those whose values are different from ours and are likely to lead them to duplicitous reporting. Don't blame them. Their meta-narratives make them do it.

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Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

SUPPORTING WOMEN AROUND THE WORLD: A WHITE MALE "LIVING" WHO GETS WHAT'S AT STAKE

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

A piece by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal is must reading for anyone who feels strongly, pro or con, about the U.S.'s continued presence in Iraq. As I noted elsewhere one columnist was so impressed that he compared Maliki's article to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (he dubbed it the Baghdadysburg Address.)

That is hyperbole; nevertheless Maliki's article, which does, indeed, invoke the American Civil War in talking about how fraught with peril is the creation of a nation, is an antidote to the often appallingly frivolous debate on Iraq in the U.S. Congress. The prime minister traces the story of Iraq from its status as a province of "an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance" to the present struggle. Please click on the link and read this important op-ed.

For those of us who see Iraq as part of a larger, existential struggle known as the war on terror (one English news outlet has taken to placing war on terror between quotes, as if it's some silly construct of Bush & Co.), Maliki's article triggers both hope and dread, hope that Iraq is making the slow progress Maliki reports, not that you'd know it from the evening news, and dread that we will abandon Iraq and those there who have worked with us and allow this nascent nation to sink into a jihadist abyss.

Oddly enough, there is one group that doesn't seem that troubled by the possible defeat in our existential war with jihadists in the Middle East: women "obsessed with draping themselves in pink and protesting the US government rather than protesting the terrorists who murder, rape, and oppress women" in the Middle East in the name of religion.

Strangely, one of the best assessments of the need to support women around the globe, and particularly in the Middle East, came from a living, white (perhaps we could even say white bread?) male named Newt Gingrich, who made his remarks at an IWF event last March in a talk entitled "American Solutions for Winning the Future."

For starters, Gingrich said:

Some crises are clarifying because they force people and nations to choose sides. The Third World War similarly forces us to make a decision. We must have a national debate, indeed a worldwide debate, between those of us who believe we're in a war between civilization and terrorism and those who believe the forces that threaten us can be appeased.
Central to this debate are the rights of women. Our enemies in the emerging Third World War are enemies of women. The great tragedy for America is that none of the leftwing groups that claim to speak for women are prepared to stand up for the rights of women in this war. For them, the enemy is George W. Bush, not the men whose goal it is to eliminate western civilization and all the advances for women that it has produced.

Gingrich went on to ask, "Where are the marches for justice for Saudi women?" and to praise Ayaan Hirsi Ali, remarkable whose book "Infidel" tells the story of her life in Somalia and Saudi Arabia and subsequently in the Dutch parliament before she was forced to flee the country for safety. She has committed the unforgivable sin in the eyes of the left: she has praised European values, especially those that grew out of the Enlightenment period of our shared history.

"For her full-throated embrace of western values," Gingrich said, "Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been called a 'fundamentalist' by critics on the left and compared to the Islamic fundamentalists that call for her death. Unbelievably, Newsweek recently referred to her as a 'bomb thrower.'"

While the U.S.-led removal of the Taliban from Afghanistan allowed four million women, who had never before cast a ballot, to vote, Kim Gandy, president of NOW, was loudly braying that Bush and "the right wing leadership in Congress" had "undermined and eroded" the advancement of women. "We are declaring a state of emergency for women's rights," said Gandy.

Would that they might declare a state of emergency for women's rights in the Middle East! But I have a hunch it's not as easy to bully the guys in power in terrorist organizations as it is to scare American lawmakers.

Tough Love for New Orleans

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

After attending a funeral in Mississippi last week, I found that the quickest way home was to catch a plane from New Orleans. I was delighted because I'd wanted to see New Orleans where I lived for many years for myself.

If I expected to feel as if I were in bombed-out Dresden or Berlin after World War II, I got a surprise. The raw oysters at Felix's on Bienville were cold and delicious, though the turtle soup has gone sadly downhill. Lavender ice cream topped off an excellent crab salad at Café Degas, just off Esplanade Avenue. But this was just part of the story: Our drive into town that took us past neighborhoods that remain entirely empty because city services have not been restored. A Six Flags amusement park without a soul in sight or a ride moving was a ghostly sight. Tennessee Williams might not recognize Elysian Fields, which is not too far from Esplanade, and which is now notable for boarded up houses.

You can say that because it was once so lovely, New Orleans has to come back. But I am not optimistic, and neither was my host. His house is worth a lot just now, as is any piece of property that escaped flooding, but already bicycle brigades of sinister young men with dew-rags, that prison-inspired fashion statement, are patrolling his neighborhood by night. You see, it is civic rot, not rotting buildings, that may well prove lethal to the city.

Future flooding, the threat you hear about on the news, may be the least of New Orleans' worries. Indeed, there are innovative plans to create a post-levees only flood control program. It can be done. But, and I feel awful saying this, do we really want to build an expensive flood control system just to preserve a crater of crime and civic corruption?

Many people insist that the first two problems to be solved are flood control and jobs. I disagree. Do crime first, and, if that can't be solved, the other two are irrelevant. Why even attempt to create new jobs in a crime-infested shell of a city that will be most intimidating for the poor? On the other hand, is there any doubt that, with safer conditions, job-creating entrepreneurs would flock to this architecturally breath-taking venue, otherwise so ripe for new ventures?

The social rot was there before Katrina. It was behind the seedy glamour. A study that the Metropolitan Crime Commission released in 2005 found that just 12% of people arrested for murder in New Orleans are convicted and put in prison. About one-fourth of felony drug defendants are convicted and sent to prison, as compared with the more than two-third conviction rate nationally. "All that happened with Katrina is we kicked over the anthill and now we see what's underneath," an official told USA TODAY.

As my friend explained, however, it is much worse now. "You don't have to go to Baghdad to see what happens when government loses its monopoly on force; just visit New Orleans," the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas wrote in the Dallas Morning News. "More than a year and a half after Katrina hit in late August 2005, violent crime -- already a grave problem long before the storm -- pervades the city, endangering its recovery by driving some good people away and keeping others from returning."

Critics are saying that the federal government owes New Orleans money for displaced citizens and to rebuild the city. The feds did contribute to the city's woes nobody who's driven past the acre upon acre of unused FEMA trailers (they cost around $60,000 each) doubts that the government contributed to the radical mess that is New Orleans today. But I'd say that the blame goes beyond FEMA and the Corps of Engineers' mistakes. It started with the Great Society programs that, while well-intended, destroyed the family structure of the recipients of federal aid. Does anybody doubt that, if hundreds of citizens had ended up in the Superdome in the 1950s, the fathers and sons would have done a better job of caring for families than distant old Uncle Sam? The decline of the family structure also contributed to crime.

A culture of corruption and violent crime are enough to keep people (including me I'd always planned to go back to New Orleans one day) away. I wish we could agree that New Orleans gets no more federal "help" until the city paves the way by solving its crime problem. Maybe we could tie government largesse to the conviction rate for violent crimes? With every five percent improvement in the conviction rate, the city gets more funds. This is a place where benchmarks might truly be beneficial. Only when people are safe and criminals are in jail can the restoration of New Orleans begin. The public should be loath to pay for a federally-funded crime haven.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

WHAT IF WE'D HAD NETWORK NEWS IN 1607?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

As some of you already may know, I went to Jamestown to celebrate the former colony's 400th anniversary. I've already written about my inspirational weekend there. Jamestown is a powerful story, but I have become more and more downhearted the more I have thought about Jamestown in comparison with us and contemporary values.

I wonder if we aren't in the process of eradicating the very values that helped Jamestown succeed. I promise I'll stop talking about Jamestown before the 800th anniversary rolls around. But will you indulge me just once more? I can't get certain unpleasant thoughts on this subject off my mind.

What if we'd had network news in 1607, when the first batch of men put ashore at Jamestown? Let's engage in some "thought experiments" of an admittedly fantastical nature. If the members of our 1607 press corps (let us picture them in Elizabethan ruffs) had values similar to what I believe to be those of our contemporary news media, they might very well have opposed Jamestown from the start. Jamestown was an intensely capitalistic venture, with important people in London hoping to make a bundle.

I can imagine that the death toll, and it was considerable, would have been exploited to make people in London feel it was time for the colonists to come home. In one year, 440 settlers of the 500 settlers then at Jamestown perished. "You have been walking on them," Dick Cheatham, a historical re-enactor dressed as John Rolfe, the man who married Pocahontas, said. "They're in the dirt around here by the hundreds."

Can you imagine viewing "the fallen" on the 1607 Town Crier (with Shakespearean music in the background)? But there was no televised Town Crier, and the people at Jamestown buried their dead and went on with the terrible chore of surviving. Jamestown was saved from extinction one time by (as he is recalled in the records) "an honest, lowborn man" named Captain John Smith. Smith may well be the first American hero, and you can bet your bottom dollar he wouldn't have appealed to the elites in the media. He was a braggart who sometimes falsified the record, and a fighting man who had been all over the world with his sword. (Actually, Smith was a bit much even for those heartier days he eventually ended up sidelined in London and did something very modern: he wrote his memoirs.)

But in his heyday he asserted control over the colony and kept it going. He put forward a formula that would for a long time would be a particularly American approach: "He who does not work, will not eat." There were a lot of lazy folks in Jamestown, but Smith made them work. He would not have been amused if colonists had said they needed job training first. This was self-reliance in the service of survival (and ultimately of creating a great country). I sometimes fear that in our day we won't face adversity. We want to give up, as so many do in Iraq, because the going is just too hard. It helps if you don't have TV.

After Smith left the colony, Sir Thomas Dale, the governor, introduced something that is not always held in high esteem by the left: private property. David Boaz, a vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, has written about this aspect of Jamestown. At this point things were so dire that the colonists had almost thrown in the towel. They had boarded ships to return to England when Dale arrived with three ships and supplies. According to Boaz:

Dale's most important reform was to institute private property. He allotted every man three acres of land and freed them to work for themselves. And then, the Virginia historian Matthew Page Andrews wrote, 'As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans -- an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention.' John Rolfe said that once private property was instituted, men could engage in 'gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.'

"It was here that free enterprise flourished, making this the land of boundless opportunity," Harrison Schroeder, governor of the Jamestowne (sic) Society, said over the weekend. I think that we have lost sight of something important: free enterprise can save people, and, while charity is a wonderful thing, government programs that reduce self-reliance ultimately handicap those they were designed to help.

Of course, bad things happened at Jamestown. Slavery, an enduring shame, was introduced, a terrible ill in our nation's history, one from which the United States still suffers. Slavery is not the only aspect of Jamestown we devoutly wish had been different. There was also the terrible conflict with the Powhatan tribe, a noble people. The best you can do with the unjustifiable in history is to look it in the face and tell the truth.

But the achievements of the colonists, flawed as are all human endeavors, were magnificent. Could we survive such dire circumstances today? Will we achieve a good end in Iraq or will we decide it's not worth the suffering? It is not a matter of whether we are tough enough. It is a matter of whether our values, especially a belief that enterprise alone can truly make us prosper, would allow us to call into being the toughness required to prevail in a dangerous world.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

The Pentagon Ethics Report

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte's Web

When Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of the killing of a village of innocent people at My Lai, he was seen by many on the left as the typical U.S. soldier in Vietnam--out of control, uncaring about civilians in a war zone and perhaps driven mad by the tension and brutality of combat.

Much later, Alexander Cockburn, then a columnist for The Nationmagazine, quoted journalist Ron Ridenhour, who was instrumental in bringing the massacre to light, as saying that the Calley trial showed the public an unsuspected heart of darkness in Vietnam: "A lot of Americans learned, a lot of middle-class people learned, 'Gosh, these guys will do anything.' I learned that. These [deleted] will do anything. There really are no limits."

Apocalypse Now, the post-Vietnam movie with enough half-baked literary allusions to make it the perfect movie going experience for the half-educated, contains these epigrammatic words (uttered by a war-crazed American soldier: "S*#t... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?")

I've resisted comparisons of the Iraq war to Vietnam. Nevertheless it is that popular image of the crazed Vietnam soldier that came to mind a few days ago when a damaging ethics survey on the military was released by the Pentagon, of all places. Yes, the Pentagon is reporting that our troops aren't up to snuff morally. One of the findings was that fewer than half the Marines and slightly more than half U.S. Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent of those surveyed said that torture would in some cases be justified to save the lives of fellow soldiers. One newspaper reported that the ethics of our troops in Iraq are "at variance" with the norms of the general population. This report was welcome ammo for the anti-war crowd, many of whom view war itself as immoral and corrupting, and, while there were genuinely disturbing findings (more on that in a second), I did not find one of the alleged shockers even remotely shocking.

Come on, do you really think that it would be immoral to torture somebody to save your buddy or buddies from certain death at the hands of a brutal and unprincipled enemy? I don't. Our society as a whole has been too squeamish to engage in a calm discussion about torture--we've allowed the accusatory left to dominate this issue. But these young men and women on the front lines (you know, the ones who risk their live so we won't have to) in a practical way engage the issue, and, I think, come out on the moral side.

Added to this is the question of what constitutes torture--is cuffing somebody torture? Making them stand too long in a cold room? I propose that considerably more than this is morally correct to save the lives of our soldiers. Most people do--they just flinch from talking about the matter. I am not, by the way, in favor of situational ethics. If I didn't think a case could be made for these actions, I would side with the newspaper headline writer and grandly proclaim that these grunts in the field of combat have a moral system "at variance" from my own.

Quoted in a newspaper report, Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute had what--I consider a good answer: "I don't want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military-- look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in," said Preble. "There's a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk."

Soldiers and Marines are forced to make instant decisions. These are irrevocable moral decisions that will affect their own lives and perhaps take the life of another. Because of the underlying pacifist idea that war is intrinsically wrong, an idea that began to prevail starting in the 1920s, many in our society tend to regard all military actions as inherently suspect, all killing, even of an enemy, as murder. With these attitudes, and without an appreciation of a military code of ethics that must be honorable, we have a hard time with these issues.

Mostly, we simply refuse to talk about them-as we do with torture, which is only broached in hysterical tones. Without debates about these issues, the media, which loves snitches (they are called sources), then becomes our arbiter of morality. We also refuse to acknowledge that the great radical feminist triumph--putting women close to the front lines, where they can be killed or maimed--mentally breaks down the barrier between civilians and fighters.

The rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl by U.S. Marines and the abuses at Abu Ghraib are instances that should, without question, have been reported. For the notion that a soldier's killing a civilian should not be reported, there is no defense. But the rest of the report did little to convince me that our military personnel in Iraq are descendants of Lt. Calley or the fictional fighters in Apocalypse Now. In fact, only ten percent said that they had behaved abusively towards an Iraqi civilian. This is not perfect but it is a far cry from a military composed of murderers.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.