gets TO the airplane. He/she goes to the airport, walks through the airport, sits at the gate, etc. If his/her attire is decent enough to do that (i.e. it complies with the law), it's decent enough to sit on the plane. I understand that airlines are private businesses and can make their own rules, but there was a time when we understood that they were also "common carriers" with an obligation to serve the public good. I'm tired of the most restrictive possible view of morality being imposed under the rubric of private property.

My guess is that there's not much of a motive. If pressed, I would guess that the airlines have some very loosely-worded rules to the effect that they reserve the right to remove anyone from the plane who's not dressed properly, which of course leaves a lot of room for flight attendants who've had a bad day to take a very restrictive view of the whole thing. And since we have, for the past 25 years or so allowed private property greater leeway in just about everything, it leaves the door open for this sort of arbitrary abuse. That is, there's not much of a remedy in court unless you can prove some discriminatory pattern or practice.

Some years ago I spent a good bit of time working to get the Green Party on the ballot in Texas. Basically that meant standing around asking people to sign petitions. That experience gave me a new understanding of the conflict between constitutional rights and private property. Basically, the more private property there is, the more restricted our constitutional rights are because they don't apply on private property. So that's why I referred in my first post to the "common carrier" concept. I don't know the history of it, but the concept of a common carrier used to mean that the airline, railroad, busline, etc was not exclusively a private enterprise, but owed some special duties based on the common carrier status. It's something we probably would do well to move back toward.

I think it's worth remembering the next time someone touts "privatization" of one thing or the other. Apart from the usual drawbacks, don't forget that as soon as something gets privatized, those coming into contact with that entity lose their constitutional rights regarding that entity.

where do you get your 25% figures? The notion that 25% of "elderly" women have been physically abused within the previous 30 days sounds like absolute nonsense to me. So I'd be interested in knowing your source.

I grew up in an era in which it didn't seem to occur to anyone that men were the evil we've portrayed them to be in the past 30 years or so. I can tell you that the difference in popular culture between the two eras is striking, as is the prevalence of intellectual dishonesty on the subject. That's why I'm interested to see acw's source(s). I'd be willing to bet there's something in them that is absolutely outrageous in its dishonesty.

As Linney Uston points out, it's hard to make the case that men are dangerous to children and simultaneously convince men to do more of the childcare. So everyone should realize when reading feminist demonizations of men what the consequences necessarily are. Women will continue to do most of the childcare and, as a result will be able to do less paid work and thus have less financial security. It's an obvious thing, but unfortunately it's escaped the notice of a good many feminists.

Thanks, though to Broadsheet for noticing (albeit belatedly) this trend in popular culture. Will this be the only time they raise the issue? What about other issues of anti-male bias in US society? Most of them have some form of anti-female blowback, so they'd be appropriate for the Broadsheet format. Will we see those as well? There's lots of interesting stuff there.

is extremely slight, but I still wear my seatbelt whenever I'm in a car. It's called being careful of known dangers. The same is true for false allegations of child-abuse. It probably won't happen, but I'd be a fool not to take a few obvious precautions.

Kamiya identifies is the tacit acceptance by the American people that, whatever we desire about the war in Iraq, it will be ignored by political and military elites who have the only say in the matter. At the beginning of this year, some poor misguided souls actually believed that the Dems would take their mandate for ending the war and run with it. It took nine months to put that fantasy to rest. Elsewhere, Kamiya terms this feeling "apathy." It's not. People are pretty passionate about the war and the Bush Administration's lies and incompetence. But why get excited when we know our wishes don't count?

to Bolton, not that it would do any good. Doesn't it occur to him that our current fiasco in Iraq is the more or less direct result of our fiasco in Iran in 1953? We overthrew the popularly elected government of Iran in 1953 because we were afraid they might be too cozy with the Soviet Union. So we supported the Shah and his brutal secret police, Savak. That gave us the Iranian revolution in 1979, the hostage crisis and a good number of Iranians who are implacably and understandably opposed to the US. To counterbalance Iran's anti-US power, we supported Saddam Hussein generally and specifically in his war against Iran including his use of mustard gas. Then Bush discovered that Saddam was a brutal dictator who might have mustard gas so he deposed him, further destabilizing the region. What's next in Iraq, a Shiite strongman? If we'd just accepted Iran in 1953 as a non-aligned country and dealt with it on that basis, none of this would have happened, but who'd notice a minor detail like that? Not John Bolton you can bet.

It's one cock-up after another with these guys. Don't they ever learn?