Attorney Amata disingenuously says, "it's against the law for kids to hit their parents, but not the other way around." There is a difference, of course, but it's not as extreme as he makes it sound. Parents are allowed to use reasonable force to control and discipline their children; the law does not give children the right to use force against their parents, but there is still the self-defense exception. There's no blanket parental immunity. It's not, for instance reasonable to have a bar-room brawl with your fifteen-year-old. If there's a mutual fight, both the parent and the teen can be charged and pleas worked out based on what actually happened. I wouldn't take Amata's word for it that that's not what usually happens.

I'd chalk up the increase in teens being charged to the mandatory arrests and perhaps an increase in reporting. It also seems, from the article, that parents are more willing to use the courts as a tool for disciplining their kids, perhaps because of decreased stigma for doing so?

The anti-abortion people sounded completely crazy at first too. How many people have you heard say, "the Supreme Court will never overturn Roe v. Wade." Now it looks likely to fall within the next few years. Where will birth control be in twenty years, how many petty restrictions will there be on it and what will the national attitude towards it be?

I agree that kids being kept inside contributes to the obesity problem. When one kid is kidnapped in a far away state, the media goes nuts over it and children hundres of miles away lose a bit more of their freedom. Organized afterschool sports, such as soccer, seems to be taking the place of free play. Perhaps more supervised large-group activities would be best, though without the wins/losses being tracked so as to reduce competitiveness and make it easier for heavier kids to participate without them feeling that they've let their teams down.

I don't think more PE would help. I remember PE being in the middle of the school day, so most of us didn't really exert ourselves. A class period was 45 minutes, we were given 5 minutes to change clothes after gym class. Maybe the boys were able to shower and change in that time, but we girls certainly couldn't. Moving PE to the last class period might have helped.

Also, community-sponsored events for families to participate in together, such as mini-marathons or walkathons might be good.

He let the pregnant woman and the three women who had babies with them go. It wasn't that he was letting all the adult women go, a teachers aide was shot. I wonder what the thought process behind letting the mothers go was.

If the evening was advertised as being BBW Night, why did anyone who wasn't in to that show up? If the dissatisfied customers were too stupid to read the posters/signs then it was very nice of the club to give them refunds.

Bet that in twenty years those who are teens now will still wear the burqas and rationalize it as, "really a statement of how far we've come, that I can chose to wear a burqa if I want. My husband says he'd be fine with me not wearing it. I guess I'm just old-fashioned. Isn't feminism about choice?"

Damn, Broadsheet finally posts a good game and it's for a portable rather than a console.

I'm a woman, a feminist, and a Massachusetts voter. Kerry Healey's misleading scare-tactic advertisements have been in heavy rotation, while Deval Patrick's advertisements, in which he speaks about issues rather than attacking his opponent, do not play as often but are more effective. After watching all of Healey's ads, I cannot wait to vote for Patrick. I would have voted for him anyway (I did in the primary), but now I'll be singing on my way to the polls.

On a tangent, the grammar in Healey's ads is atrocious. She's not only lost the attorney vote, she's probably lost that of English teachers as well.

Barbara Boxer is going to fuck up the trains? I take the train on short trips to avoid the airport nonsense. Now she wants to make the train station as much of a misery as the airport? Why? Anyone who wants to blow up a train can just lob an explosive at it, or put a bomb on the tracks, or put something big on the tracks and cause it to derail.

Goddammit, I'm going to wind up driving four hours whenever I want to see my parents/brother. I hate driving.

Sometimes I don't know which is worse, the evil Republicans who come up with manipulative shit or the clueless Democrats with their pathetic "me too" posturing.

A person who uses the phrase "good-paying job" cannot possibly be well-paid (unless she's stripping or dealing drugs).

When Russian Jewish men became citizens of Israel, they didn't have to have circumcisions. It was enough for "six thousand years of Jewish history" that a drop of blood be drawn instead.

I hope the author won't let his parents bully his wife again. It must be heartbreaking to be nine months pregnant and know your husband failed to protect you.

Schaeffer said:

"What's Gawker? All I know is one day the hits on my site went up and somebody told me it was because I had been linked on Gawker. But I abstain from all media."

and then a few minutes later he said:

"Most people who write into Gawker are people who love talking gossip about people."

So he's not just a liar, he's a stupid liar.