You wouldn’t think that women’s right to vote would be an issue in the United States in 2009. But apparently it is — in Texas.

What’s going on here?

The controversy surrounds an El Paso Indian tribe which bans female voting. Watch the video at the link and despair as a bunch of lawmakers sanctimoniously discuss how they shouldn’t be imposing their views on a sovereign nation.

This reminds me of when Silvio Berlusconi took a bunch of flak several years ago, for saying that our Western culture is superior to that of Islam:

“We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well–being, respect for human rights and – in contrast with Islamic countries – respect for religious and political rights.” He hoped the “the West will continue to conquer peoples, like it conquered Communism.”

I remember, at the time, thinking: well, he’s right. Our culture is superior.

I’m not talking about religion. I’m not even religious. I’m talking about respect for human rights — in particular women’s rights. I’m talking about honor killings. About lashing women for the crime of being raped. About preventing them from voting, and driving, and working. And involuntary female circumcision.

A culture that engages in such barbaric practices is inferior. Period.

And so is the culture of an American Indian tribe that prevents women from voting.

I’m no expert on the laws of this country with respect to the interface of American Indian sovereignty and U.S. sovereignty. But, morally and practically, it seems to me that some basic principles have to be non-negotiable. Things like severe punishment for crimes of violence; respect for property rights — and voting rights for women. Anything else takes sovereignty too far.

And if we can make Islam respect women’s rights, I’m for that, too.

This morning I said: without capitalism, there is no freedom. A couple of commenters took issue with that statement. They are wrong, and the explanation is vital.

Understanding the relationship of capitalism to freedom is fundamental to understanding why Obama’s handling of the economic crisis is such a disaster. Now that we’ve moved beyond the President firing corporate CEOs to Barney Frank seeking to set corporate salaries, we have to be crystal clear on this point.

Let me turn over the microphone to Thomas Sowell, who wrote in his book Basic Economics:

Too often a false contrast is made between the impersonal marketplace and the compassionate policies of various government programs. But both systems face the same scarcity of resources and both systems make choices within the constraints of that scarcity. The difference is that one system involves each individual making choices for himself or herself, while the other system involves a smaller number of people making choices for others.

It may be fashionable for journalists to refer to “the whim of the marketplace,” as if that were something different from the desires of people, just as it was once fashionable to refer to “production for use, rather than for profit” — as if profits could be made by producing things that people cannot use or do not want to use. The real contrast is between choices made by individuals for themselves and choices made for them by others who presume to define what these individuals “really” need.

Simply put:

Capitalism is each individual making choices for himself.

Socialism is those who claim to know best, making your choices for you.

The former is freedom. The latter is anything but.

[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

My column on the recent horrors in Oakland is up on NRO today. I was particularly appalled by Oakland mayor Ron Dellums’s inability to condemn the behavior of those in Oakland who expressed support for Lovelle Mixon, the man who killed four Oakland police officers on March 21. below is a selection from the column, but I invite you to read the whole thing and leave your comments here.

Last week, Oakland mayor Ron Dellums met with reporters and discussed the shootings. One reporter expressed his surprise at finding so many people who seemed indifferent or even jubilant at the death of four police officers. “People in the neighborhood,” said the reporter to Dellums, “said they were not sympathetic — they expressed no sympathy for the officers when we went down there. What does that tell you?”

Incredibly, Dellums couldn’t muster the courage to denounce such people. “I don’t want to comment about that,” said the mayor. “This is a moment of tremendous grief and tragedy. This is not a time to politicize death.” Only in Oakland and a handful of other cities would it be considered “political” to condemn such execrable behavior. With leadership like that, is it any wonder that Oakland finds itself in its present condition?

I suspect that if the racial equation in this incident were inverted, Mayor Dellums would have had quite a bit to say.

–Jack Dunphy

David Horowitz has a piece titled Obama Derangement Syndrome. He makes two basic points. First, that Obama is not the anti-Christ, and that treating him as such makes us little better than the “Bush is Hitler” crowd we despised for eight years. Second, that Obama’s policies aren’t really that radical or worrying.

I agree with the first point and strongly disagree with the second. Horowitz mushes these two issues together into one global “Obama isn’t that bad” thesis, which is a mistake, because it gives Obama a pass on his radical socialist policies.

Let’s start with the part that will upset the conservatives:

I have recently received commentaries that claim that “Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history” and “never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people” and “Obama is a narcissist,” which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.

This fellow has failed to notice that all politicians are narcissists – and that a recent American president was a world-class exponent of the imperial me. So what? Political egos are one of the reasons the Founders put checks and balances on executive power. As for serial lying, is there a politician that cannot be accused of that?

I think that when people start comparing Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, we are indeed in “Bush is Hitler” territory.

I spent eight years watching a crazy set of people on the left use every trick in the book to attack and tear down President Bush on a personal level. They seized on every maladroit turn of phrase to suggest that he was a moron. They distorted his policy pronouncements, trumped up phony issues, and displayed an unyielding self-righteousness that justified literally any tactic used in service of their political ends. This is why they felt comfortable demonizing Bush to the point where they compared him to Hitler.

Remember how we hated that?

Now that our guy is out of power, we have to decide: did we hate those tactics because they were wrong? Or only because they were used in service of the other guy?

I do not want to see us becoming the conservative nutroots. It is not, as some suggest, that I am some “country club Republican.” I despise those people.* It is because I do not want to become that which I hate. When we make a mountain out of the molehill of Obama’s birth certificate; when we seize on a “Special Olympics” joke as the Height of Outrage and manufacture trumped-up howling rather than dismissing it as a dumb thing to say; when we insist on comparing Obama to mass murderers . . . when these things happen, we are becoming what we hated.

There are those who stand up against such nonsense; people like David Horowitz, or in the blogosphere: Allah, Ace, Charles Johnson, and others. We can start drawing up a growing list of Insufficiently Pure Conservatives and cast them out as apostates — or we can recognize that they have performed years of valuable service in support of the conservative cause, and that they are trying to keep us from taking on the worst traits of our enemy.

It’s seductive to take on those traits because of the justifiable anger we feel over Obama’s policies, which are ruining this country. And this is where I disagree with Horowitz. Horowitz says:

So what’s the panic? It is true that Obama has shown surprising ineptitude in his first months in office, but he’s not a zero with no accomplishments as many conservatives seem to think – unless you regard beating the Clinton machine and winning the presidency as nothing. But in doing this you fall into the “Bush-is-an-idiot” bag of liberal miasmas.

It is also true Obama has ceded his domestic economic agenda to the House Democrats and spent a lot of money in the process. But what’s the surprise in this?

No, it’s no surprise, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. We now have a situation where the CEO of a major American car company is resigning at the behest of the American president, and everyone is nodding their heads as though it makes perfect sense. It doesn’t. This is insanity. Putting the government in charge of our economy is socialism. It represents the end of capitalism, and without capitalism, there is no freedom.

FDR started to ruin this country with the New Deal, which gave us huge unsustainable government programs. LBJ kept the path of destruction going with the Great Society, which gave us new programs which essentially created a new underclass of people who maintain an irresponsible and criminal lifestyle using government funds. Obama is putting the final nail in the coffin, with trillions of irresponsible spending that will cripple our children financially, and with a mindset of centralized control of economic decisionmaking.

We have to fight it, and the first step is recognizing it for what it is — and how dangerous it is.

[Posted by Karl]

Yesterday’s Washington Times broke the story about AIG executives and their spouses being squeezed for donations to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT).  But who did the squeezing?

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.”

***

Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

Ed Morrissey thought the Federal Election Commission might want to investigate whether those donations were reimbursed.

Guess what? Cassano has bigger problems than the FEC:

The FBI and federal prosecutors are reportedly closing in on the AIG executive whose suspect investments cost the insurance giant hundreds of billions of dollars. The government is investigating whether or not 54-year old Brooklyn-native Joseph Cassano committed criminal fraud in virtually bankrupting the company.

“He almost single-handedly is responsible for bringing AIG down and by reference the economy of this country,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Ca.)

***

“AIG was insuring junk and it was the AIG insurance that made the junk marketable,” said tax law expert Jack Blum. “American taxpayers have been put on the hook for this insurance junk.” 

Even as the bad loans began to emerge, Cassano boasted to Wall Street analysts that his transactions, called credit default swaps, were foolproof.

***

An ABC News investigation found that Cassano set up some dozens of separate companies, some off-shore, to handle the transactions, effectively keeping them off the books of AIG and out of sight of regulators in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

 “This is the other very important issue underneath the AIG scandal,” said Blum. “All of these contracts were moved offshore for the express purpose of getting out from under regulation and tax evasion.”

But wait… there’s more!  AIG-FP’s internal auditor, Joseph St. Denis, alleges that Cassano deliberately thwarted St. Denis’ effort to do his job, reminding some of the Enron and WorldCom cases.  TPM Muckraker has a handy Cassano timeline with further details.  Cassano is based in London, but AIG-FP is reportedly under investigation by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office in addition to the FBI and Congress.  And at least one of the execs whose bonuses sparked the populist rage of the past few weeks was assisting in the investigation.

One thing we learned from the AIG bonus furor is that those populists are not very discriminating in their rage.  Consequently, the fact that 84% of AIG-FP donations went to the Democrats and that Dodd has a habit of legislating windfalls for the insurance industry at taxpayer expense suggests that Cassano was not the only one having a bad day yesterday.

–Karl

10 terms not to use with Muslims:

As President Obama considers his first speech in a Muslim majority country (he visits Turkey April 6-7), and as the US national security establishment reviews its foreign policy and public diplomacy, I want to share the advice given to me from dear Muslim friends worldwide regarding words and concepts that are not useful in building relationships with them.

. . . .

“Freedom.” Unfortunately, “freedom,” as expressed in American foreign policy, does not always seek to engage how the local community and culture understands it. Absent such an understanding, freedom can imply an unbound licentiousness. The balance between the freedom to something (liberty) and the freedom from something (security) is best understood in a conversation with the local context and, in particular, with the Muslims who live there. “Freedom” is best framed in the context of how they understand such things as peace, justice, honor, mercy, and compassion.

This is insanity. Freedom is at the core of American principles, and telling an American president not to use the term “freedom” in a speech because it might offend someone is nuts. There’s no need to go around deliberately offending people for no reason.

Do I want Obama to go tell Muslims that we’re on a “crusade” against terrorism? No, not any more than I want him to go speak to a group of disabled people and crack jokes about the Special Olympics.

But if you must offend people in order to communicate your core principles, so be it. (And by the way, I’ve never said anything different.)

And if an American president can’t talk about “freedom” to the people of the world, we may as well hang it up.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait writes about “Why the Democrats Can’t Govern”:

The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him.

At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama’s case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same: Democrats in Congress, and especially the Senate. At a time when the country desperately needs a coherent response to the array of challenges it faces, the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege. Obama has made mistakes, as did his predecessors. Yet the constant recurrence of legislative squabbling and drift suggests a deeper problem than any characterological or tactical failures by these presidents: a congressional party that is congenitally unable to govern.

George W. Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, with only 50 Republicans in the Senate. After his disputed election, pundits insisted Bush would have to scale back his proposed massive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items. Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline.

Chait may be frustrated by the current situation, but not surprised.  That a Democratic Congress would pose problems for Pres. Obama’s “too much, too soon” agenda could have been predicted from the history of presidents elected on Hope and Change about every 16 years since WWII.

But Chait’s ignorance of history does not stop there, as his review of the Bush era demonstrates.  The Bush tax cuts were passed on partisan votes, but the rest of his examples fall apart on examination.  The first war resolution passed with broad bipartisan support.  The Iraq war resolution passed the Senate by a vote of 77-23.  The Medicare prescription drug program passed the Senate by a vote of 55-44, but 11 Democrats voted in favor and nine Republicans voted against it.  The 2005 energy bill passed the Senate 74-26, with help from then-Sen. Barack Obama.  The No Child Left Behind Act, on which Pres. Bush collaborated with the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy, passed the Senate 87-10.  To the extent that partisan leverage was involved in the passage of these items, it was largely in terms of pressuring conservatives to expand the size and power of the national government.

Chait’s lack of grasp of history leads him to argue that the key to Democratic success is for Congress to blindly follow Pres. Obama, to project the image of strong leadership.  What history ought to teach him is that focusing on the immediate economic issues matters, and barring a foreign policy crisis, not much else does matter.

–Karl

The Washington Times gives Andrew Breitbart’s latest op-ed the somewhat misleading title, “Rules for Conservative Radicals.”  Breitbart writes about the Left’s use of Internet trolls and “seminar callers” to talk radio to spread disinformation, but he does not produce any “rules” for conservative radicals.

Of course, the title is a play on the “Rules for Radicals” promulgated by Leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky, so it may be useful to list them:

• RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
• RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
• RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
• RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
• RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
• RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid “un-fun” activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
• RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)
• RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)
• RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists’ minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)
• RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)
• RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)
• RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Alinsky may be an ideological touchstone for both Pres. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but Alinsky did not believe in working within the political system, whereas Obama and Clinton clearly do.  This means that the Obama Administration’s use of these tactics will tend to be covert, rather than overt — White House talks with partisan operatives and friendly media figures, White House authorized media attacks, messaging coordinated by the Sorosphere, preemptive attacks on rising GOP stars, etc.  It is a fair bet that Obama does not spend time analyzing reports on Internet trolling.

Conservatives or Republicans may be able to draw lessons from Alinsky’s rules, but the Obama example should suggest that roles can be as important as rules.  For example, having constructive alternatives will be more important to Republicans working inside the system than to activists organizing “tea parties” outside the system.  Ridicule will be more important to conservatives and libertarians in talk radio and the blogosphere than to Republican officeholders and party functionaries trying to appeal to the apolitical middle.  Storytelling can be valuable to a range of groups and blocs.  Recognizing that there will always need to be a variety of approaches, replacing “fun” tactics when they start to lose their punch, is also important.

Now that the Right is a low ebb in national politics, it is not surprising that its various factions are jockeying for position and quarreling over strategies and tactics.  The Right does not have (and by nature is not inclined to have) the sort of organized effort the interest groups of the Left can muster.  But the current competition just getting underway on the Right speaks to the fact that the Right generally believes in competition.  A competition of ideas and leadership should be part of the path back to a majority. 

The current factionalism also should remind us that the Right — contrary to The Narrative — has an appreciation for complexity.  For example, most on the Right believe in federalism, as opposed to a system where the national government effectively commands and controls state and local government in addition to regulating the private sector.  Similarly, the Right’s path back to majority will require a mix like that suggested above, with insiders and outsiders employing different strategies and tactics in the service of common objectives.

Eventually, these areas of competition and cooperation will become easier to see.  Until then, it should suffice to recognize that the disagreement among factions of the Right are generally smaller than their collective disagreement with the agenda of the Left.  In opposing that agenda, there is a role for everyone.

–Karl

Andrew Klavan in the L.A Times:

If you are reading this newspaper, the likelihood is that you agree with the Obama administration’s recent attacks on conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh. That’s the likelihood; here’s the certainty: You’ve never listened to Rush Limbaugh.

Oh no, you haven’t. Whenever I interrupt a liberal’s anti-Limbaugh rant to point out that the ranter has never actually listened to the man, he always says the same thing: “I’ve heard him!”

On further questioning, it always turns out that by “heard him,” he means he’s heard the selected excerpts spoon-fed him by the distortion-mongers of the mainstream media. These excerpts are specifically designed to accomplish one thing: to make sure you never actually listen to Limbaugh’s show, never actually give him a fair chance to speak his piece to you directly.

Putting aside any quibbles about the meaning of Rush’s recent comments, I agree with Klavan that, if you’re going to criticize someone, you should do them the favor of listening to their actual words.

I thought about this recently when a reader wrote me and asked:

Patrick: Just what is it about Rush that you dislike? . . . [T]here seems to be something in his personae that just has gotten under your skin?

Not at all. How could someone ask me that, when I have a long history of defending this man on my site?

If you’re going to criticize my attitude towards Rush, maybe you should do me the favor of looking at my actual words. Let me briefly set forth some of the history of my mentions of Rush Limbaugh on this site:

In August 2003, I attacked the Fairness Doctrine as the “Hush Rush” doctrine.

In April 2004, I praised the Dallas Morning News for noting that liberal media bias is not just a figment of Rush Limbaugh’s imagination.

In August 2005, Rush read from a piece I had published in the Los Angeles Times. I memorialized this proud moment on the blog.

In October 2006, I defended Limbaugh against an outrageous attack perpetrated on him by Glenn Greenwald.

In October 2007, I defended Limbaugh against a phony Tim Rutten attack regarding the use of the phrase “phony soldiers.”

In January 2008, I noted that Rush had mentioned an issue that I had done some work to popularize on this blog: thermostat madness, in which the government of California had arrogated to itself the right to control your thermostat in your home.

In February 2008, I mocked John McCain as indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton — in part because he was hated by Rush Limbaugh. That same month I busted Bill Maher for making the outrageous comment that he wished Rush Limbaugh had croaked from Oxycontin.

In September 2008, I boasted that the term “Tasergate,” which had originated on my site, had been used on the Rush Limbaugh program.

In October 2008, Rush read from a DRJ post on the site, which caused a bit of a meltdown with the site, .

In November 2008, I defended Rush against an unfair set of attacks by L.A. Times columnist James Rainey.

My valued guest blogger Jack Dunphy defended Rush in February in a spirited fashion.

In March of this year, I mocked David Frum for his unnecessarily personal attacks on Limbaugh.

Sometime after that came my posts about Rush’s “I hope he fails” formulation. In my first post on the issue, I said that “he articulates conservative principles very well” and added: “I love hearing the guy hold forth. I wish him all the success in the world for his radio program.” In my next post I added the observation: “Rush obviously doesn’t want to see Americans suffer.”

But, I argued, “he sacrificed clarity for controversy.” I also noted that Democrats had no right to be snooty on this issue, as they had said they wanted Bush to fail. (I believe this post was read on Mark Levin’s show.)

I’m sick of explaining why I thought Rush didn’t express himself in the best manner. I have made it clear that, in my view, “Speakers have no responsibility to self-censor to prevent unreasonable and bad faith misinterpretations of their words.” So don’t tell me that I’m covering for those who wish to distort Rush’s words. I’ve been quite clear I’m out to do no such thing.

I think my track record merits a defense, with links. Because I keep reading about how I hate the guy — even from my own readers like the one who e-mailed the question above — and I don’t. I don’t hate him. I have been a defender of Rush Limbaugh for almost 5 years on this blog. My track record is clear.

Comments in some recent posts mention a piece in the Washington Post claiming that the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaida did not foil any significant al Qaeda plots.

Marc Thiessen calls the piece “uninformed or intentionally misleading,” and catalogs the intelligence resulting from the Abu Zubaida interrogations. RTWT.