Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Maureen Dowd: When a Pirate Is the Voice of Chivalry

In a campaign season when many men – and women – are taking harsh stances that could hurt women, a chivalrous voice has at last arrived.

Oddly enough, it belongs to a renegade pirate whose motto is “Keep it dark”: Keith Richards.

You’d think that an only child whose mother killed all the pets he kept as companions would not grow up to be so positive about women. . . .

“I’ve never been able to go to bed with a woman just for sex,” writes the author, happily married for decades to the former model Patti Hansen, whom he is supporting through bladder cancer. “I’ve no interest in that. I want to hug you and kiss you and make you feel good and protect you. And get a nice note the next day, stay in touch.”

The consummate gentleman. Who knew?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Just say yes to common sense on pot policy

With all the hand-wringing over a Democratic “enthusiasm gap,” one effort to turn out young people at the polls this November is showing real energy and promise. What’s the secret? In a word, as 78-year-old John Burton, chairman of the California Democratic Party, put it, “Pot.”

Proposition 19 would make it legal for Californians over 21 to possess and cultivate marijuana for personal use, and it would authorize city governments to regulate and tax commercial production and sales. Its passage would signal a major victory for common sense over a war on drugs that has been an abysmal failure in the Golden State and throughout the country. As states devastated by the fiscal crisis look for more efficient and effective alternatives to spending $50 billion a year on incarceration, a shift in California might presage changes across the nation.

It would be great if young people would take to the streets and the voting booths on issues like Afghanistan, historical levels of inequality and poverty, or to protect Social Security from a Republicans takeover. But they’re not. And if it’s reforming an ineffective, wasteful and racially unjust drug policy that mobilizes young people — who are at the core of the rising American electorate along with African-Americans, Hispanics, and unmarried women — so be it. According to Public Policy Polling, for those who cite Prop 19 as their top reason for voting, 34 percent are under age 30.

Ruth Marcus: Which Darrell Issa would run House oversight panel?

There are two faces of Issa — Good Darrell and Bad Darrell. Good Darrell sounds responsible, measured, almost statesmanlike. Bad Darrell tosses red meat to a ravenous base.

Good Darrell, writing in USA Today on Oct. 11: “Oversight is not and should not be used as a political weapon against the occupant of the Oval Office. It should not be an instrument of fear or the exclusive domain of the party that controls Congress.”

Bad Darrell, to Rush Limbaugh on Oct. 19: “You know, there will be a certain degree of gridlock as the president adjusts to the fact that he has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”

Paul Krugman, Krugman % Co.: Friends, Romans, Countrymen: We Are Ages Apart

The United States is not ancient Rome – we are not Romans, and they were not Americans.

In an Oct. 2 column in The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman quotes a passage from Lewis Mumford’s “The Condition of Man,” a book about the decline of ancient Rome and its parallels with the United States’s situation today.

Mr. Friedman reports that he got a chill down his spine when he read that in Rome, “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

Amy Goodman: War Should Be an Election Issue

Just days away from crucial midterm elections, WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website, unveiled the largest classified military leak in history. Almost 400,000 secret Pentagon documents relating to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq were made available online. The documents, in excruciating detail, portray the daily torrent of violence, murder, rape and torture to which Iraqis have been subjected since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” The WikiLeaks release, dubbed “The Iraq War Logs,” has been topping the headlines in Europe. But in the U.S., it barely warranted a mention on the agenda-setting Sunday talk shows.

First, the documents themselves. I spoke with Julian Assange, the founder and editor in chief of WikiLeaks.org. He explained: “These documents cover the periods of 2004 to the beginning of 2010. It is the most accurate description of a war to have ever been released … each casualty, where it happened, when it happened and who was involved, according to internal U.S. military reporting.”

New York Times Editorial: Haiti’s Latest Misery

The cholera outbreak in Haiti – the first in 50 years – has layered fresh anxiety atop long-standing misery. By Tuesday the disease had sickened more than 3,000 people and killed more than 250. While the authorities have expressed cautious hope that the outbreak might soon stabilize and remain largely confined to the rural Artibonite region, there is still fear that the disease could overwhelm the shattered capital, Port-au-Prince.

The United Nations and foreign relief agencies deserve credit for an energetic response, rapidly setting up mobile treatment centers and delivering clean water, medicine and public-service messages urging cleanliness and caution.

Aid workers have been heroic in keeping people relatively safe and healthy since the Jan. 12 earthquake. And the truth is that many of the hundreds of thousands of people who are now living in camps are in some ways better off than the millions more in Haiti’s slums, because they have better access to services. That is not very comforting. And it is not sustainable.

Dana Milbank: Obama isn’t ducking role in election reprise of ’94

Get out your Wonderbras and your “Forrest Gump” videocassettes. It’s starting to feel like 1994 all over again.

The Democratic president’s approval rating now, as then, is a lowly 44 percent. His party is forecast to lose about 50 seats in the House and eight in the Senate — about the same as in ’94. Voters now, as then, are in a sour mood, and some Democrats are again afraid of being photographed with the unpopular president.

But the strangest similarity may be in President Obama’s speeches. As he barnstorms the country in these closing days before the midterms, he has borrowed Bill Clinton’s 1994 stump speech — in some cases, word for word.

David Sirota: Thank You Sir, May I Have Another: Labor Leaders Destroy Their Own Ability to Influence Democrats

A few weeks back, I wrote a post on the politics of organized labor — a post that was fundamentally about how political power is wielded through both both the carrot of reward and the stick of punishment. Same thing for the converse: If you only use the carrot — or worse, if you hand over the carrot without something in return — you incinerate whatever political power you have, as politicians will know they never have to do anything you ask.

This is not some great revelation — it’s about as rudimentary a political principle as there is. Which is why it’s truly stunning to see that some top professional labor leaders in Washington — i.e. people paid lots of hard-earned union dues to engineer political strategy for labor union members — either A) don’t seem to understand this idea, or B) refuse to understand it out of a corrupt willingness to sell out labor union members on behalf of these leaders’ partisan affinities and/or their personal loyalty to cronies inside the Establishment Democratic Party.

Robert Scheer: The High Price of Patriotism

t’s over for the U.S. in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean the death and destruction are about to stop. Quagmires don’t just go away. However, the signs are everywhere that the American course in that nation is doomed, that those directing this forlorn attempt at occupation of a country that has never tolerated occupation know there is no positive end in sight, and that the locals from President Hamid Karzai to the competing warlords and the Taliban are cutting their own deals on the assumption that our wishes no longer matter.

Predictably, the U.S. media dismissed Karzai’s denunciation on Monday of the role of American mercenaries in the wanton destruction of his society. “Karzai rails against America in a diatribe,” was the way a New York Times headline summarized his press conference, suggesting that his complaints were nothing more than the temper tantrum of an ungrateful child.