Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Other Issues

Kind to Cows, Cruel to Interns

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:52:00 EDT

Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on PETA's latest antics.

"Do Union Leaders Make Too Much?"

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:46:00 EDT

That isn't a question you're likely to hear. Much more common is the claim that corporate executives make too much money. But it turns out that union leaders aren't doing so bad themselves (and their salaries come from the dues of union members, not company profits):

The Plumbers paid former General President Martin Maddaloni $1.3 million in total compensation, and Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Patchell almost $900,000 - after they were ousted for disastrous pension investments in a Florida hotel. According to the Association for Union Democracy, the buyout agreement included "salaries and benefits plus free use of cars and other perks through the end of 2006."
AFSCME President Gerald McEntee recorded total compensation just shy of $585,000.
General President of the Laborers Terence O'Sullivan made more than $528,000.
National Education Association President Reg Weaver made almost $439,000.
The presidents of unions for players in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association made more than $1 million each. The NFL union head, Eugene Upshaw, made $2.4 million. Moreover, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb received $900,000 from his AFL-CIO affiliated union as a player representative.

More here.

Need Weekend Plans?

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:01:00 EDT

If you're in the D.C. area, consider checking out The Singing Revolution, a new documentary that tells the inspiring story of Estonia's struggle to free itself from Soviet rule. It will be at Landmark's E Street Cinema for one week, starting on Friday.

Here's a preview:

Debunking, Even Further, the First Lady War Zone Myth

info@iwf.org (Anne Trenolone) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:36:00 EDT

As I was reading The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" piece on First Ladies and visits to war zones, "Further Debunking the War Zone Myth", I found it interesting, but by no means complete.

"The Clinton campaign has cited newspaper accounts, including one in The Washington Post, to bolster the senator's claim that her now-famous March 1996 trip to Bosnia was the first visit to a "war zone" by a first lady since World War II. She is overlooking a trip to Saigon by Pat Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War as well as a trip by Barbara Bush to Saudi Arabia two months before the Persian Gulf War began."

While I give the Post props for getting down to brass tacks regarding Pat Nixon's visit to Saigon in 1969, I also felt the history of First Ladies dredged for the article was quite shallow. First Ladies and American wars go much farther back than Eleanor Roosevelt. So let's give some credit where credit is due.

OK, yes this historical tidbit does go back farther than World War II, but how soon we forget the trials and tribulations of our young country. Chief amongst First Ladies in war zones and in danger, I would place one Dolley Madison, our nation's fourth First Lady. Note this from the White House Historical Association:

"Dolley Madison continued entertaining at the White House until war virtually reached her doorstep. The dinner table was set for 40 guests the day she left the White House. She and a few servants had remained at the White House, packing up valuable documents, silver, and other items of importance. With limited space, she made choices about what to take and what to leave....Even the soldiers assigned to protect the White House had fled before Mrs. Madison."

Oh, yes, Dolley Madison—she didn't just save the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from any-old-average fire at the White House. She saved it from being burned by British troops who sacked the executive mansion on the night of August 24, 1814 during the War of 1812. Washington at that point was very much an active war zone. In fact much of the city was burned. Dolly Madison and countless American treasures and documents escaped the White House in a scavenged wagon before British troops arrived, rendezvoused with the President and watched the city smolder from a distance.

Following the war the President and First Lady returned to Washington and Dolley Madison committed herself to restoring the White House as a symbol of national pride.

Welcome to the new iwf.org!

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:40:00 EDT

You'll undoubtedly notice that we've made some changes here at iwf.org. We've got a lot of cool new features including:

-An RSS feed that allows you to bring IWF's content straight to your inbox

-Audio and video podcasts featuring original content as well as IWF appearances on radio and television

-An online bookstore

-A new, user-friendly search feature that will help you locate all of IWF's material

As we continue to launch our new website, there will be broken links, stray characters in articles, and possible redirects to the old website. Please bear with us as we continue to enhance your experience at iwf.org.

The two women behind the New York Times?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:20:00 EDT

Have you enjoyed the latest New York Times correction?

It involves, in case you missed it, a magazine cover story on Navy veteran Amorita Randall, who claimed to have suffered a brain injury from an improvised explosive device in Iraq and to have been raped. There are, a good piece in National Review notes, some problems with the article:

"The trouble is that according to an editor's note in this past Sunday's Times Magazine, Navy records report that in 2004 Randall was in Guam, not Iraq. And, by the way, she was never in Iraq. Further, there are no records that back up Randall's claims she was raped. While lots of traumatized women don't report rapes, unfortunately her claim that she was in Iraq certainly casts doubt on everything Randall says.

"For their part, according to an article in the Navy Times, the Navy is understandably 'annoyed,' particularly because a Times Magazine fact-checker didn?t contact them until three days before the story went to press - not enough time to verify much of the article."

Ms. Randall isn't the first gal to apparently be less than totally candid with a scribbler from the paper of record:

"[The Randall story] comes on the heels of another, criminally ignored scandal at The New York Times Magazine last year. Jack Hitt's cover story on April 9, 2006, centered on abortion restrictions in El Salvador, relaying the story of a woman named Carmen Climaco who had been sentenced to a 30-year jail term for aborting a fetus at 18 weeks, or as Hitt put it: 'Something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It's just that she'd had an abortion in El Salvador.'

"After Hitt's article, pro-life groups howled in protest. Climaco had not, in fact, been sentenced to 30 years for an abortion; she'd been convicted of strangling an infant that had already been born. It turned out that Hitt had received much of his information about Climaco's case from a translator with close ties to an abortion-advocacy group - one which immediately used the Times Magazine piece in an online fundraising appeal. The claim that she'd had an abortion at 18 weeks came from an estimate submitted by a doctor at Climaco's trial who hadn?t seen the infant. That report was found by the judges in the case to be flawed, and was totally at odds with the report of the doctor who performed the infant's autopsy."

Could these reports have possibly been affected by bias? NR's Mark Hemingway was interested in Sara Corbett, author of the Amorita Randall piece:

"After I read the about the Times Magazine's problem over the weekend I immediately Googled 'Sara Corbett' in conjunction with 'Mother Jones.' Sure enough, Corbett has written for the ballyhooed liberal bimonthly. As had Jack Hitt. Further, while there were no problems found with the article per se, another recent Times Magazine article on abortion rankled quite a few people; Emily Bazelon questioned whether women who've had abortions suffer as a result, titled "Is There a Post Abortion Syndrome?" Bazelon is, not improbably, Betty Friedan's cousin and previously had written a skeptical article about the group Feminists for Life for -- you guessed it -- Mother Jones.

"Now, I'm not advocating a political-neutrality litmus test for magazine writers, nor do I even think that because you've written for Mother Jones you necessarily must subscribe to whatever brand of watered-down socialism the magazine is currently selling. Further, there's plenty of good journalism to be had at Mother Jones, which is why it's an incubator for The New York Times Magazine which, accuracy-issues aside, is usually full of good writing.

"But clearly there's a pattern here with the Times Magazine. From the outside looking in, it seems as if the Times Magazine is fond of hiring writers normally aligned with liberal publications and foundations. They then are given a long leash to write on contentious issues and end up making major distortions of the truth that would seem to reflect a strong liberal bias.

"Not that the journalistic establishment is likely to see it that way."

"Stone Age" Termed "Offensive"

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:09:00 EDT

Use of the words "stone age," "primitive" and "savage" has been labeled unacceptable by the UK's Association of Social Anthropologists, according to the BBC. These professors are backing a campaign by an advocacy group named Survival that claims the terms peg living tribal and indigenous people as "backward" and damage their welfare.

Unfortunately, you don't hear the ASA word police sticking up for private property rights, free enterprise, rule by law, and defense against tyranny -- a campaign that might actually do tribal peoples some good.

Is the real parallel 1936?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:03:00 EST

I've been reading a nice collection of essays that appeared in the (London) Spectator in the pivotal year of 1936 -- the year King George V died, the year Charlie Chaplin's movie "Modern Times" opened and the last year in which an article entitled "Is Germany Preparing for War?" could be published.

Here is the passage that put me in mind of our current state of denial:

"The fact remains that the Fuhrer, since attaining power, has with logical persistence put into practice the programme formerly laid down by Adolph Hitler. To read the closing chapters of Mein Kampf is in this respect very illuminating. The Fuhrer's general political conceptions here link up with the special concerns of the army chiefs, who have themselves, for years past, been constantly and methodically pursuing the same objectives under cover. The result is that at the present time, behind the social concerns of the Nazi regime, there is an unprecedentedly close agreement between the civil and military leaders; and that we may well wonder whether the former, planning only to build up an unrivalled National-Socialist Reich, and the latter, filled only with thoughts of their 'revenge,' may not both be uniting in the selfsame preparations, although impelled by different motives."

Sound familiar? The two things that jumped out at me in this piece (by Count Wladimir D. Ormesson) are: It was all there all along, in Hitler's own writings - just as it is all there in the assertions of our jihadist enemies. All we have to do is listen; but we refuse to listen. And that pride and revenge, so entertwined, are great motivators to war. The Islamic word, quite strangely, blames the west for its own failures. They want revenge.

Reading this essay, I do find a modicum of hope: ultimately, Hitler lost.

Mailbag: An Even More P.C. Planet

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Allen) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:54:00 EDT

Reader J.C. comments on my post about the demotion of the planet formerly known as Pluto--and the fact that in the process the International Astronomical Union seemed to put the kibosh on naming new heavenly bodies after trendy Third World gods and goddesses (such as "Sedna") instead of the classical deities after whom the planets, stars, and constellations have been named for thousands of years (see my "No More PC Planets," Sept. 14):

"You don't know the worst! Forget the relatively sedate and sane Sedna. What about Quaoar? A goddess of an obscure and possibly extinct tribe native to California. It's a four-in-one: non-Western, hits the Native American guilt button, feminist, AND opposes the tyranny of English with a word that's almost unspellable!"

Ah, yes Quaoar. Not only is the name of this midget "planet" discovered in 2002 almost unspellable; it's almost unpronounceable. I'd thought it was pronounced "Kwore:"--or maybe (a la francais) "Ka-war"--or maybe "Kwower" or "Kwoor." Wrong on all counts--it's "Kua-ore."

I had skipped Quaoar, which is about half the size of Pluto in diameter and much smaller than our moon, because frankly, the name sounded to me like something out of a computer game. I was wrong: Quaoar is actually the name of a deity sacred to the Tongva people (that's the new politically correct name for the San Gabrieleno Indians of Southern Calfornia). The bad news is that Quaoar doesn't actually seem to be a goddess, which might be frustrating to the goddess-people; but the good news is that's he's something even better: he's unisex. Here's the scoop on him:

"'Quaoar' the great force of creation sings and dances the high ones (Deities) into existence. While Quaoar has no form or gender he is usually referred to with the male pronoun. He dances and sings first 'Weywot' who becomes Sky Father; they sing and dance 'Chehooit' Earth Mother into existence. The trio sing 'Tamit' Grandfather Sun to life. As each divine one joins the singing and dancing, the song becomes more complex and the dance more complicated. In turn 'Moar', Grandmother Moon (a very complex deity), 'Pamit' the Goddess of the sea, 'Manit', the Lord of dreams and visions, 'Manisar' the bringer of food and harvests, 'Tukupar Itar' Sky Coyote (who is also our major hero), 'Tolmalok', the Goddess of Shishongna (the underworld) join in the singing, dancing and creating. And finally the great seven giants who hold up the worlds are created. The High Ones in turn are aided by 'Eagle, Duck, Bear, and Frog' in a grand earth diving story. Frog brings up soil out of the deep dark sea, and the four animals dance it flat and wide. The 'Gods and Goddesses' then furnish the world 'Tovangar' with hills, mountains, trees, rivers, etc. 'Tobohar' (first man) and 'Pahavit' (first woman) are also part of this great 'Creation song and dance cycle'."

Now, sad to say, Quaoar will be singing and dancing himself, Pluto, and Sedna out of planetary existence and into a new monicker: big rock.

Oriana Fallaci, 1929-2006

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:24:00 EDT

Oriana Fallaci, one of the twentieth century's toughest interviewers, who in her later years took to warning the West of the perils posed by militant Islam, has died in Florence. She was 77.

A woman of the left, known for her fearless interrogations of such powerful people as Henry Kissinger, Fallaci was widely reviled after her last book, "The Force of Reason." Well, more than "reviled."

Describing the book and its aftermath, Tunku Varadarajan wrote last year:

"Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the ‘sons of Allah'. So, in a nutshell, Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs - which is one reason why she has chosen to stay in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment."

Fallaci was an atheist. Her jeremiads came from a purely secular mentality, and, in a way, are therefore all the more compelling. She was a great journalist and a great woman. Do read all of Tunku's piece.

Here is another snippet:

"Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: ‘Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia', a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense but also in a mental and cultural sense.

"‘Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought and for the concept itself of liberty.'

"Such words are deeply, immensely politically incorrect and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message that attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo and made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites.

"‘Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder,' the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: ‘The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.'"

"There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavour of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilisations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask what ‘solution' there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, she flares up like a lit match."

We shall miss her flare.