Back from my moderating days.... it is a lot of work to delete the comments.... I get hand cramps deleting just the profanity.  I was really sore during campaign season.  Keeping track of chatterers, banning people, even having long timers take a break.... but there is nothing like clicking on and reading a that is on topic.

Strictly a reflection of personal style as to the tone of a blog.

1. do away with ratings

2. implement some kind of software routine whereby a "parent" that accumulates more than, say, 6 "child" comments (not to be confused w/a "childish" comment) is put into a separate "room" that other commenters can enter & play in w/out disrupting the rest of the thread - in other words give the thread jackers their own subthread

3. use software that detects comments containing insults (moderator/admin would decide what terms constitute an insult) & automatically puts those comments into moderation

"People are being really circumspect, not pointing the finger at Salazar and Obama," says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands. "But the troublesome point is, the administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling - yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge."

Don't read unless you have a nearby window to scream out of:

And the comments tend to be bunched in groups.  And that the "usual suspects" exist on both sides.

As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. In 2008, as prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon, President Bush had lifted an executive moratorium on offshore drilling outside the Gulf that had been implemented by his father following the Exxon Valdez. On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling "will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence." But once in office, he bowed to the politics of "drill, baby, drill." Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration's top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.

Undeterred, Obama and Salazar appeared together at Andrews Air Force Base on March 31st to introduce the plan. The stagecraft was pure Rove in its technicolor militaristic patriotism. The president's podium was set up in front of the cockpit of an F-18, flanked by a massive American flag. "We are not here to do what is easy," Salazar declared. "We are here to do what is right." He insisted that his reforms at MMS were working: "We are making decisions based on sound information and sound science." The president, for his part, praised Salazar as "one of the finest secretaries of Interior we've ever had" and stressed that his administration had studied the drilling plan for more than a year. "This is not a decision that I've made lightly," he said. Two days later, he issued an even more sweeping assurance. "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," the president said. "They are technologically very advanced."

Eighteen days later, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon rig went off like a bomb.

Arguments go in cycles.....No need to try and shut down the discussion.....

As to "trolls,"  we don't really have any....There have been a couple of conservative commentators; and there is Jim, and I have engaged him in the past but am learning....He did say that he had changed his view in capital punishment but most of the time he just tosses out standard talking points not worth the effort to respond to.

I suppose outright name calling such as "eff you" and the like could create a problem.  But there is little of that....If you try to clamp down, you will inhibit discussion.

I think your points are often valid.....People should engage them directly rather than this sideways way of criticizing.

I believe you have been here longer than most....and yet some try to brand you a troll.....

this is a freakin political blog.  the point of it is discussion which sometimes leads to disagreement which I think Jeralyn handles beautifully.

what the whining is about is beyond me.  
heres a suggestion, if you (or whoever) dont like it here there is always the possibility of starting your own blog over which you can layer all the draconian rules that would make you happy.

"Who started it" was really irrelevant to my point.  The fact is we all do it, and I don't find it beneficial to play the blame game when it comes to comments - unless we are prepared to take responsibility for our own.

It would be interesting to figure out which types of blogs attract the BS and which don't, and why.

my take is that all blogs attract BS

this blog is too big for one person to enforce the blog's commenting rules

but it's also just small enough for people who want attention (or w/ever it is they want) to jack threads w/personal attacks - prolly the whole reason why some comment here, b/c they would quickly be exposed as out of their intellectual depth on other blogs

such attacks always suck but on larger blogs they are less noticeable b/c there are many diaries & many FP posts - personal attacks on TL stand out b/c there is less going on overall

10 Million dollars is about what we spend every half hour of every single day in Iraq an Afghanistan.

For the first time in her nearly three decades at the world's largest magazine company, there are no active libel suits against Time Inc. In fact, there hasn't been an active libel suit in 11 months.

And she isn't alone. "It's never been lower," said George Freeman, the New York Times Company's vice president and assistant general counsel, on the number of libel suits his company is facing.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Already infamous for being the then-socialist who called Margaret Thatcher sexy and as the contrarian who loved George W. Bush's war in Iraq, Christopher Hitchens now wants to rewrite the Ten Commandments.

Seventy-seven percent of Americans now say they know someone who is gay or lesbian, a new CBS News poll finds - an increase of 35 percentage points since 1992, when a majority of Americans said they did not.

Ever wonder how the siblings of the Columbine murderer kids felt? Or all the family members? Well, I was a family member of a situation with certain similarities when I was a kid -  a long time ago. In my case, the murderer was known. The victims were too. There were probably many other victims not known. Family members were on both "sides" at the same time and a compassionate defense humanizes the person who commits an act that society has determined is not acceptable. It does not let the criminal off the hook. We were happy our criminal went to jail for the rest of his life, and we were happy he got a trial. In many ways that trial also humanized the victims (at least the known ones). The world is so much more complex - and rich - than :

TL is not reflective of prison nation mentality. She said that if you want to be rooting against someone accused of a crime you should take it to another pro victim, tough on crime site.