When I go to manage comments and use the QuickFilter to show Spam Comments, there is a button labeled "Empty." When you click it, all the selected comments are approved and published! The button's alt text reads: "Report selected comments as Not Spam and Publish"

Shouldn't the "Empty" button delete all comments marked as spam? Why the heck would "Empty" mean to mark as not spam and publish? I think it's a bug.

I'm using MT 4.1.

Confirmed in 4.12. There are actually supposed to be three buttons there. The missing one is "not spam" (unsurprisingly) and a glitch in the HTML is making its function bleed over to the "empty" button.

If you want a quick fix for this, from your MT directory, grab tmpl/cms/include/comment_table.tmpl and open in any text editor.
Line 24 looks like this:

Change it to this:

Re-upload, and it should behave.

This is already fixed in the 4.2 code(I'm looking at RC3) if anyone else is watching.