Unfortunately, the whole family dinner out thing has been Chuckie Cheesified. Good old Chuckie Cheese, where "a kid can be a kid" meaning that he or she can run rampant, uncurbed by parents who are frankly relieved that they need not perform one of the most demanding of parental tasks; that is civilizing their children.

It has gotten to the point that many parents treat any restaurant as if it were Chuckie Cheese and they expect the same level of Chuckie Cheese tolerance everywhere.

Don't ban the kids but do demand a certain level of decent behavior. This isn't polarizing society, it is raising children that adults other than their parents can stand to be around.

In fact, it is the very anthitesis of polarizing. It may even be the first step in knitting our fractured society back together. Imagine, children raised to be courteous. Wow, I get goosebumps at the thought.

What Cary Tennis said.

As far as I'm concerned, twenty something women are welcome to all the high powered rich fifty something guys out there. Those guys are high maintanence and only a twenty something female would have the energy and the lack of self esteem to put up with them. As for me, if I can't tell a man that he's full of shit when he is, life is not worth living.

Sex is overrated and as for companionship, laughter and good times, I've got a circle of girlfriends who love to go out, eat, talk, drink margaritas and tease cute young waiters. Life is good.

As hurtful as it is, the tribes are not denying their freedmen really so much because of race as not wanting to cut their federal largess pie thinner. They say the same to so-called "whites" who claim indian ancestory without being able to point to an ancestor on the Dawes roles so it isn't that they are dissing African Americans in particular.

In fact, I have been told by a friend of mine who is Choctaw that there are descendents of members of the five tribes who refused to go on the roles and receive a parcel of land because they objected to tribal land being broken up in that manner and these descendents who are probably purer in their Native American bloodlines than those whose ancestors did go on the roles are also denied tribal membership.

If they really wanted to base membership on blood then DNA testing does the trick. But I'll bet what they really want is to limit membership as much as possible regardless and therefore the "Dawes Roles" criteria serves very well. Watch them cling to it fanatically. That's my prediction anyway.

look at that body language; squinty eyes cast up so as not to look at the devastation around him, arms crossed in front of him so as to block any approach of feeling or information that might lead to feeling or any human being that might lead to information leading to feeling. It is the very essence of "I'm not looking. Don't speak to me."

Yep, we have an I'm-not-looking-don't-speak-to-me president. I could weep.

I am an over 50 single woman. I don't have a devoted husband and two drenched in mother-love sons. Instead I have dozens of friends, my sisters, my nieces, my aunt, my cousins and my cat. I have never once felt alone or unsupported or unloved. There are all sorts of places where one can store up good karma. It doesn't all have to be poured into a husband or children. Joan Walsh pointed that up very nicely. Thanks Joan.

in the responses to this article, I think. Guys can and do behave badly when they run in packs. And, guys, there is no reason to attack Erin Sullivan for pointing this out. Girls have the potential to behave badly too, but mostly this has been a male thing. For Erin to be concerned that her boys might not be able to resist the pack mentality is not the same thing as believing males to be inherently bad.

When I have read or heard of such wilding behavior I have often wondered how those boys' mothers felt. Maybe it would have been a good thing if while those boys were growing up their mothers had asked themselves the same questions Erin asked.

I remember seeing an interview of a young man who was one of the few who resisted orders (and I'm certain the pressure of his comrads in arms) to shoot villagers at Mi Lai. He said, "My mama didn't raise me to kill old people, women and children." Now there was a woman who was on the job.

Too often I think mothers of sons truckle to the "boys will boys" bluster of adult males. I once watched while a woman allowed her son to run rampant though a hospital waiting room while at the same time curbing the same behavior in her daughter. Got that? The daughter was disciplined and the son wasn't.

I truly believe it's not that boys are inherently more rowdy, they are simply not curbed in the same way girls are. Time to stop that. Time to start holding them to the same standards of civilized behavior.

is Coulter's assumption that being "all over news" and stalked by "grief-parrazis" is something so very desirable and enjoyable that someone would use the death of a loved one to accomplish it. The unavoidable conclusion is that Ms. Coulter has described her own pathology while at the same time assigning it to someone else.

I suspect that, if it were her, she would be enjoying the hell out of all the attention and exploiting all that grief endowed credibility to the hilt. In short, I think her characterisation of those "millionaire broads" exudes more than just a whiff of envy.