“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.
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Joanne Liu: Enough. Even War Has Rules.
On Saturday morning, MSF patients and staff killed in Kunduz joined the countless number of people who have been killed around the world in conflict zones and referred to as ‘collateral damage’ or as an ‘inevitable consequence of war’. International humanitarian law is not about ‘mistakes’. It is about intention, facts and why.
The US attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz was the biggest loss of life for our organisation in an airstrike. Tens of thousands of people in Kunduz can no longer receive medical care now when they need it most. Today we say: enough. Even war has rules. [..]
Today we pay tribute to those who died in this abhorrent attack. And we pay tribute to those MSF staff who, while watching their colleagues die and with their hospital still on fire, carried on treating the wounded.
This was not just an attack on our hospital – it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated. These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflicts – including patients, medical workers and facilities. They bring some humanity into what is otherwise an inhumane situation.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The War on Planned Parenthood
For a likely future speaker of the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) isn’t much of a speaker. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” he boasted to Sean Hannity on Fox News last week. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought.”
Forget McCarthy’s use of the word “untrustable,” a term I trust you will not find in the Oxford English Dictionary. McCarthy’s real sin, as far as even Republicans are concerned, was that he accidentally told the truth. For years, the GOP has laughably pretended that the House Select Committee on Benghazi – which last week surpassed the Watergate committee as the longest special congressional investigation – was a sober-minded inquiry into the deaths of four Americans in Libya. Then the man likely to be third in line to the presidency admitted, on national television no less, that it was all just another partisan witch-hunt. To quote another tongue-tied Republican: “Oops.”
Republicans haven’t done this much hand-wringing since Donald Trump rode his escalator into the presidential race. But McCarthy’s “gaffe” hasn’t put the brakes on the GOP’s cynical strategy. In fact, they plan to replicate it.
Headlines foster stereotypes, suggest facile solutions
On Oct. 1, a gunman killed nine people and wounded 20 others at Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon. Headlines about the massacre have trumpeted mental illness as the cause. “Madman kills nine” led The New York Daily News. Fox News followed with “Issue of mental health part of national discourse again following Oregon college shooting.” “The CBS Evening News” featured “Mass shootings and the mental health connection.”
This is both the wrong explanation and a too-quick conclusion about the tragedy that contributes to the stigmatization of people with mental illness. Mental Illness Awareness Week (Oct. 4 through 10) offers an opportunity to step back and take a closer look at what mental illness is, how stigma makes it worse and what resources need to be marshaled to help those who have a mental illness.
Amy B. Dean: Labor rights by executive decree
With Congress gridlocked, President Obama must follow states’ leads to help working Americans
This summer, 1 million working people in Massachusetts won paid sick leave. This remarkable advance was the result of a 2014 referendum, which passed with the support of 60 percent of voters. It granted workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. With that vote, the Bay State became the third in the nation – after California and Connecticut – to extend such protections to its citizens.
In September, President Barack Obama went to Boston to announce a new regulation for federal government contractors, which will be required to offer their workers paid sick time as well. The federal standard will grant seven days of paid medical leave per year. The White House estimated that the executive order will benefit 300,000 people when it goes into effect in 2017. [..]
This summer, 1 million working people in Massachusetts won paid sick leave. This remarkable advance was the result of a 2014 referendum, which passed with the support of 60 percent of voters. It granted workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. With that vote, the Bay State became the third in the nation – after California and Connecticut – to extend such protections to its citizens.
In September, President Barack Obama went to Boston to announce a new regulation for federal government contractors, which will be required to offer their workers paid sick time as well. The federal standard will grant seven days of paid medical leave per year. The White House estimated that the executive order will benefit 300,000 people when it goes into effect in 2017.
Martha Plimpton: Those who decry abortion but condone gun violence are anti-woman, not pro-life
Another gunman opened fire on a classroom last Thursday, this time at Umpqua Community College in my mother’s hometown of Roseburg, Oregon. Nine people were killed and nine others seriously injured. It was the 294th mass shooting in our country in 274 days.
The same day as the massacre in Oregon, North Carolina’s law imposing a 72-hour waiting period to have an abortion went into effect. North Carolina is now tied with Missouri as having the longest waiting period for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to abortion.
What do these three things have in common? What possible corollary could I be drawing between such seemingly disparate events? The short answer is: North Carolina doesn’t have a waiting period to buy a gun.
Penny Okamoto: Guns kill people in the US because we pervert the Second Amendment
America’s gun violence, like our grief in Oregon, seems to know no bounds, no limits, no end. The reason is deadly simple: our very lives are chained to a constitutional amendment that is willfully misinterpreted by many and perverted by gun rights advocates for political ends.
That sullied amendment is the United States constitution’s Second Amendment which states, “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.” The gun industry and its supporters have turned that simple statement into a clever marketing tool, and Americans are paying the price in blood.
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