That's a new low.  I wonder if an indirect cause could be the pay this health insurance CEO was pulling down...from Gregg Easterbrook's espn.com column.   57k an hour

New Record for CEO Gluttony: Last week William McGuire, CEO of insurer UnitedHealth and a centerpiece of the latest corporate-boardroom scandal (backdated stock options) agreed to leave the company. The Wall Street Journal estimated that for his 14 years running UnitedHealth, McGuire pocketed a total of about $1.6 billion. That's $457,000 per day, or $57,000 per working hour. So McGuire paid himself more per hour than the median American annual household income. And this was during a period when UnitedHealth was cutting benefits to those it insures, cutting benefits received by its own workers, and cutting payments to physicians and hospitals for health care. Obviously this greedy little man is beyond disgrace: To experience disgrace, one must have a conscience. But why isn't McGuire's $1.6 billion simply considered theft from shareholders? UnitedHealth is a public company, and there is no possibility the fantastic amount was justified by market forces -- that is, that the UnitedHealth board could not have found a similarly qualified CEO for less than $1.6 billion.

"...Jimmie Ortega was the central player in a scheme that awared at least sixty phony citizenships in return for bribes of between $1,500 and $4,000 each."

[A prosecutor] said investigators were reviewing every case Ortega, 54, of Queens, had worked on over the last 11 years to learn how many bribes had been paid and false citizenships awarded.

Right now, the best guess appears to be "most of the cases he worked on."

The prosecutor said bribes cleared the way for people otherwise not entitled to citizenship to receive it without being interviewed or demonstrating they could speak English or pass the required civics and U.S. history examinations.

Long post, my apologies in advance.

Can we have simple, effective, efficient, automatic chronological viewing of comments back? Like we used to have before you moved to scoop?

As a result of the move, I prefer to view TL in "flat unthreaded" as that shows the comments
chronologically - like they'd always been shown in the past.

That way I can do some work and when I have a few spare minutes I'll shoot back to TL and skim the last few most recent comments.

Very easy to do in the past when the comments were automatically listed chronologically, and very easy to do now when the comments are viewed "flat unthreaded" - but very difficult, cumbersome and time-consuming to do when the comments are viewed "nested" which is now the default setting of this site.

Very difficult to do in any of the other settings, actually.

For example, this AM, due to what appeared to be some bizarre comments on some threads I had participated in yesterday and the day before, it occurred to me that maybe others are viewing and commenting via the default "nested" setting, so I changed my view preference to "nested."

Wow. What a difference. We really are forced to view in the default "nested" to actually get the context we need understand each other's comments, whether we like viewing in "nested" or not.

Jeralyn, as you undoubtedly know, effective communication is so difficult in general, and even more difficult by email/blog/written word,  so my question is: why confuse the issue even more with by providing 6 or more different ways to view the comments?

Especially now as a "subject" is required, and it's almost universally not being used as a true "subject" but as a continuously-morphing prologue or part of the comment itself, so you can't track a give-and-take conversation by a given "subject."

In the simple and effective old days, we simply quoted the sentence of the comment we were responding to, and responded to it. It got added to the bottom of the thread, chronologically, like every email conversation I've had for the past 15 years or so. Very little confusion.

I can find recent comments under the "Entries with recent comments" column, but, in "Nested" when I click on the thread, I now have to scroll through the entire thread searching for where the comment is buried, instead of simply finding it at the bottom of the thread like we used to.

Of course, if there were other comments before that last one that I didn't read, they're also buried somewhere in the thread and there is no way to know that they're there...

...unless I switch back to "flat unthreaded" to find the last comments, and then back to "nested" to read them in context. Boy, I'm tired just writing about it.

To me, simplicity usually is the best route.

For example, my business is designing "widgets" that are used in the MoPic industry.

Several much bigger, much smarter co's have tried to "knock-off" our main widget, but they've never been able to gain any traction for their designs.

Why? Because they can't stop themselves from adding so many additional adjustments and complex gee-gaws and whirly-gigs, that they vastly dilute the simple, efficient and effective purity and utility of my widget that
makes it so useful and practical in the first place.

Uncomplicated simple utility. Automatic chronological viewing of comments. Not "fixing" things that aren't broken. All good things, imo.

Thanks for reading this.

If the default was "flat unthreaded" I think most of this problem would go away.

I love nested, but I sympathize.  We nesters have the same sorts of trouble with you threaders: you keep replying to comments, but you don't attach your comment to the one you're responding to, you just put it out in the ether as a child of the story.

Nested has it's advantages though.  In the old format, it was a pain to see if anybody responded to a given comment.  I could search for the name of the original commenter, but sometimes it wouldn't be used.  Or I could skim and hope to recognize the words quoted, which usually worked, but got annoying when following more than a couple threads.  Or, under the new view, I can move my eye down and to the right.

Nested also makes it easier to see the full comment to which a reply is posted.  Old school, I had to search back by the commenter's name and hope I got the right one, or by the quote excerpted, hoping no typos screwed me up.  Then the response is probably off the screen.  Now I can move my eye up and to the left, and keep both comments on screen.

Similarly, having multiple responses to the same comment grouped together is nice.  I can immediately measure just how many people think I'm an idiot.  Or, if I don't care how many people point out the blatant falsehood in a given comment, I can skip over them all in about half a second.

Peters, 43, who joined the NYPD in 1996, had bragged that his status as an officer would shield him from suspicion. ...

Peters killed [his ex-girlfriend], a federal immigration officer, because she had been demanding he pay child support for their two children.

... Peters evaded arrest for four years by threatening to kill the witness Callender if he ever ratted - and even gained custody of his children.

Then savvy NYPD Cold Case detectives finally threatened to press immigration charges against Callender if he did not testify.

He relented and told jurors how Peters attacked Alexander - then shot him when he refused to help.

you would think that the person prosecuting the case would have, at the very minimum, talked to the parties involved, to get their story directly. i know every case i've been involved in, counsel wants to talk with me, even though they have my case file.

i really, really hope allen is bounced by webb. i've disliked allen since he was first elected to public office in va. he's always been a wannabe, pseudo virginian, and were it not for dad's fame, would currently be toiling in the obscurity he so richly deserves.

Excerpt: Federal officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, is secretly controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, according to two people familiar with the probe.

and:

Excerpt: Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."