We've seen the rot in political and economic reporting. But science and technology are also key to public policy, and not everyone can see that they screw this up, too.

The NYT online today tells us about nuclear weapons -- or tries to, but not very hard.

(Disclosure: A contributer to this article recently misrepresented me in the NYT, so I'm pissed.)

The many-faceted throw-out-the-vote effort, Sproul and all, needs a name. Please make suggestions, criticize suggestions, and help promote good names.

Some issues and ideas --

I've heard that dKos has more unique visitors per month than the Fox News site. I've seen a screen shot of a dKos diary on the Google News front page. We're a source of news and analysis, but we're also a community that talks to itself. This creates a conflict which may have a partial socio-technological fix.

A problem: In the standard, "nested" view, the recent diary on electronic voting fraud had 12 screens of reminiscence about antique text editors before any substantive discussion of current -- possibly urgent -- fraud scenarios. This illustrates a familiar problem, but trying to get people to rate enjoyable off-topic comments as "2: marginal" isn't a solution. Chat, jokes, even personal messages in diary threads, are all part of what makes dKos a community.

A suggestion: Because diary comments are not created equal, we might benefit from having a better way to say what we're creating. What if we had two buttons for posting comments: "post" and "post side remark"? These might work like this....