If you were head of a spiritually totalitarian regime held together by spit and superstition, and your traditional methods for acquiring and controlling membership-- miracle, mystery, and authority-- had been slowly rusting away since the Enlightenment... why, you'd be trolling for bigots too!

Salvation, shmalvation... it's really all about putting asses in the seats.

1.) doc, my comment applied to situation where one has posted a comment to an article, and the article afterwards turns up missing.

Since you "found your way" to one of your comments, I'll call your attention to the link I copied into the "subject" line above. Notice that it appears on each of your published comments; when clicked, it will take you to your "Letters Archive".

2.) I suggest you bookmark your own Letters Archive page, or "add to favorites" depending on what browser you use. That way you can always go directly to the Archives if the article gets "lost".

3.) Once you get to your archive-- which is unfortunately in oldest-to-newest order, but the less said about stuff like that the better-- just click on the last page (p.73, in your case) to view your most recent comments.

As you'll see, I hope, each comment has a link back to the original articles and a link to the comments page.

I hope I'm not making it sound more complicated than it is: click "Read doc's other letters" to get to your letters archive; bookmark your archives so you can go to it directly; once there, view comments and click back to either the original article or directly to the comments for that article.

Hope this helps. It may all be improved to extinction by the time I click publish. ;)

I'm not taking back a word of my comments here and to SalonFugly's feedback site.

Nor am I apologizing for expressing my ballistic anger, frustration, and disappoinment. The cliché about it not being so much what was done, but the way it was done is entirely on point.

In this case, it's both. But I have no compunction about admitting that I've been so put off by the atrocious manner this "project" has been handled that I'm not trying very hard to be a good sport and focus on developing helpful little "tweaks" to make the best of an irreversible situation.

Those "continue reading" links are particularly offensive. Yeah, I know this crap feature is "standard" on other sites, and has probably has technical, statistical, and ultimately "business" ramifications we technically ignorant don't understand.

Even this possibility screams a condescending and supercilious attitude: readers just have to run the maze and press the buttons; they don't need to know why we've jiggered it like this!

The rank Newspeak quality of an obstacle named "continue reading" that manifestly forces one to discontinue reading is an affront on its face.

But I digress, and really ought to move on to something more elevated. I just wanted to note that I noticed the Article fading in and out also. Like the "feedback" link published in a dark blue (?) that gets lost in the oversaturated red, red, red, it smacks of manipulation.

An old hand, I know that one can always go to one's Letters Archive to "backtrack" to an article and comments thread. (Whoops, won't be long before they "improve" that little capability out of existence!)

But it really is pitiful that the perky "Ta-Da!" articles and feedback links alike are appearing and disappearing like the Cheshire Cat. And I feel a little sorry for the "messengers", who are in the hopeless position of brightly and cheerily selling a product that nobody ordered or likes.

In a nutshell, SalonFugly is Fawlty Towers, and the incidental "customer service" is entirely in the spirit of Basil Fawlty.

I first read "Presidential precedence" as "Presidential preference", which works about as well.

During the campaign, Obama candidly, if not insistently, disclosed first and foremost that he is indeed "a politician" [read: "a politician's politician], and a cautious, centrist, conservative, neoliberal hawk with an unconcealed disdain for the political "left" rooted in cordially despised Sixties counterculture to boot.

But there was much to keep the optimistic, desperate, and plodding masses from twigging to the Bad News embedded in the award-winning Brand Obama marketing campaign. For all of the warm, liberal zephyr of "Camelot" Revenant, Now in Living Color! International Rock Star Gala Tour festiveness, the rush to Obama nevertheless evoked the rush to the departing helicopters during The Fall of Saigon.

With a brain-numbing chopper blade-song of "Consider the Alternative".

So, I was just now ruminating on all that, and decided to Google for a look at that folk tale of many versions: the "Frog and the Scorpion", fka "Indian and the Snake".

On the way, I found this one. If one accepts that a "bundle of thorns" is essentially a fasces, it's even more apropos, I think:

The Fox and the Snake

A Snake, in crossing a river, was carried away by the current, but managed to wriggle on to a bundle of thorns which was floating by, and was thus carried at a great rate down-stream. A Fox caught sight of it from the bank as it went whirling along, and called out, "Gad! the passenger fits the ship!"