Saturday, January 03, 2009

Sunday Clearinghouse

Getting some tabs off my girlfriend's computer before I leave for Chicago tomorrow.

Reversing its previous stance, AirTran has apologized to a Muslim family kicked off a plane for discussing where the "safest" place was to sit. The family was cleared to fly by the FBI, but AirTran still refused to rebook them.

There are a bevy of international law analyses floating out there of Israel's Gaza operation: An overview written prior to the attack by Avi Bell and Justus Weiner, Eric Posner, Kevin Jon Heller, and Marko Milanovic. The most important things you can draw from them, collectively, are:
(1) The legality/morality of Hamas' attacks on Israel have little bearing on the legality of Israel's response, and vice versa;

(2) Most lay commentators don't know what "proportionality" means in the context of international law; and

(3) Determination of whether Israel is, in fact, violating international law in the current operation depends on a lot of facts that most of us simply do not possess. Speculation on either side of the question tends to simply mirror pre-existing political commitments and works to obscure more than it illuminates.

Norm Coleman is not thrilled with how the recount is progressing.

The Worst Americans of 2008.

Massachusetts police are balking at enforcing the state's newly relaxed laws on marijuana, which make it only a civil offense. The reason appears to be less a belief that pursuing marijuana users is a waste of police time, and more a protest against the new lenient law, which they view as fatally flawed.

1 comment:

PG said...

"apologized" is a bit misleading. The airline made a non-apology apology: "We apologize to all of the passengers — to the nine who had to undergo extensive interviews from the authorities and to the 95 who ultimately made the flight. Nobody on Flight 175 reached their destination on time on New Year's Day, and we regret it."

See, getting racially profiled is just like having a weather delay -- regrettable but unavoidable. We're sorry, but not in a way that will cause us to act any differently in the future.

BTW, do you know of a good place to get a fairly neutral rundown of what's happened in the MN recount? Every conservative I meet is convinced that it's being stolen because all of the temporarily misplaced ballots have been in Democratic-leaning precincts; every liberal I meet is convinced that the whole "ballots in a trunk" story is a myth.