Another fact to consider is Southwest only flies 737 series aircraft, and this is the only aircraft type they have flown in over 30 years of operations. I think it's safe to say that Southwest has more experience flying and maintaining the 737 than any other airline in the world, and if they thought that a 737 wasn't safe, they wouldn't let it fly. Why would they jeopardize their good reputation by compromising safety? They already make a profit. I'm thinking this has to be some type of paperwork or FAA oversight issue going on here, not a real safety issue. In fact, it looks like an FAA supervisor has already been demoted for improper oversight of the Southwest 737 inspection program. Also, Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737, even signed off on the Southwest compliance program and said the planes were safe to fly. Who knows the 737 airliner better than the company that designed and built it? 

For several years, human rights groups, the media, and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the war on terror have tried to portray the U.S. as a “torture state” that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles, and even its soul under the leadership of a president who believes in an ominous-sounding “unitary executive” branch. We’ve been barreling down a “slippery slope,” making America indistinguishable from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

The slope toward more torture and abuse has gone up, not down, and it is today more difficult to climb than ever. According to existing law and Justice Department rulings, the practice has been proscribed for several years now — except, that is, for the thousands of U.S. servicemen who’ve been subjected to it by the U.S. military as part of their training.

Democrats continue to charge that the administration wants “blanket immunity” for the telecoms (much the way they misleadingly repeated that warrantless eavesdropping on cross-border al-Qaeda communications was “domestic spying”). In fact, the proposed immunity is very limited. It applies only to telecoms that either did nothing to help the government or that helped only on the basis of a written representation by the government that the program had been reviewed by the president and determined legal.

Thus, the immunity would not protect, say, a telecom that permitted surveillance on an informal request from a rogue agent without a written assurance of lawfulness -- which, in fairness, is the only type of conduct over which it might be appropriate to hold them liable.

This past December, the United States settled a trade dispute with Canada, Europe, and Japan over the recently enacted Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

The problem is that the law carves out exemptions for some forms of gambling, such as state lotteries and domestic horse racing, while banning most other forms, most notably poker, the most popular form of online wagering.

The most popular online poker sites are all based overseas, where online gambling is legal. This gave rise to the trade dispute between the U.S. and most of the rest of the western world.