Have to agree with Anonymous here. I've spent time with street kids and homeless people now and again, on the East Coast. I suspect that this cult-gang-like "street family" phenomena is a figment of Denfeld's own inner fantasy life.

Yes, street folk are often drug-addled and sometimes violent. Big surprise. But these wild and unsupported allegations of a million kids out there part of organized "street families" are BS.

There's no need to be paranoid here. This is about whether or not a person has a cause of action for prenatal injuries causing illness during their life. It would be hardly be just to deny someone any recourse just because the incident occurred prior to their birth, when the injury (illness, suffering, economic and other damages) occurs throughout ones lifetime.

Thanks to these Christians, an ex-offender who was doing his best to rehabilitate is homeless (still listed as transient on the California Megan's Law website), unemployed, and ostracized from the community.

The four things that ex-offenders, and especially sex offenders, need are a will to stay on the right track, a secure home, regular employment, and strong community supports.

As a result, Pliska is now much more dangerous to society (including those who petitioned against him) than when he was first released.

"What happened to Pete can't happen in Texas."

Sure it can't. The system never breaks down, girls never get winked through by bouncers, it scans licenses from all 50 states and the Canadian provinces, and nobody gets fake ID's of states other than the one they are in. Additionally, girls never lie about their age, especially not girls who look older than their age.

And of course, only a pedophile would want to have sex with anyone under the age of 30 without checking out their official birth certificate registration from the county in which they were born.

It is a lesson though; statutory rape, in almost every jurisdiction, is just about the only strict liability offense with no good-faith or best-efforts defense. If you voluntarily have sex with someone, and that someone is underage, then you are guilty of statutory rape, no ifs and or buts. It's not fair, but chalk it up to one of the more nightmarish potential consequences of random hookups with anyone youthful-looking.

I was just reviewing my old comments and deciding whether it's worth renewing my Premium subscription again. In the past I've held out and ultimately been lured back by various bonuses. On the one hand, there was the increasing number of fluff pieces, worthless stolen pop culture bits, and so on. On the other hand, every now and then there would be an original piece that would remind me why I read Salon.

PLEASE chalk up nixing the Fix solidly under the "Got It Right" column. I for one respect that. I missed your "farewell" post and had thought it was still on "hiatus." Now that it's officially gone there's more room for the material that I actually WANT in Salon. If I wanted tabloid gossip, I can get the Post for 50 cents, it's much better at entertaining gossip and the fix's tidbits are, since most of them are simply stolen from and linked to the Post anyway. If I wanted a daily gossip digest I could look at any one of the innumerable blogs out there.

Anyway, I suspect that most of those who wanted the Fix constitute only a small minority of nonpaying Salon readers. Thanks again, and keep it gone.

I see that the pro-fixers have already weighed in. Yes, I know I can ignore the Fix glaring out at me every day from it's titillating position near the top of the Salon page. I still think its parting is a good thing for two reasons:

1. As Joan mentioned, Salon was paying Scott Lamb to write the fix at the crack of dawn on a daily basis. This diverts a significant chunk of my premium dollars to this worthless throwaway feature that could be spent on the dwindling amount of original journalism going on at Salon. Salon has never exactly been financially secure, so this is always a concern. If there was an option to turn the fix off from even appearing on the front page (a la Slashdot), I'd do it. I pay a higher annual rate not to see ads on Salon, and as far as I'm concerned, the Fix is worse than advertising. It's an ad for Rupert Murdoch.

2. The more features like the Fix appear in Salon, the more they define it. I don't was to be subscribing to the online edition of Cosmo. Reputation drives the kind of readers and writers that frequent Salon. Even having the Fix attracts new people coming to Salon for the Fix, who in turn demand more Fix-like features. It's not elitist, it's that I am trying to believe in Salon and don't want it to go to pot. There's no shortage of outlets out there for tabloid fodder. Let's keep it to a minimum on Salon.

If I program a robot to post cryptolibertarian drivel to Salon's letters section in your place, will you go away?

Weiss is strangely silent about Salon's own embarrassing IPO. There was a time when you could buy SALN stock on NASDAQ. I guess the only thing keeping the likes of Murdoch from buying Salon outright in the OTC market with some forgotten pocket change is the stock's illiquidity and the Salon corporation's perpetual lack of revenue.