• Technical improvements to comments threads are always welcome. Personally, I can get by without an ignore feature; I've wasted time on enough troll-infested threads here and elsewhere over the years to have a fairly sensitive scroll-finger.

And apart from trolls, I also tend to scroll past stretches where the comments are spammed by two or three verbose regulars having catfights; like Mark Twain's description of "reading" the Mississippi river as a steamboat pilot, one learns to pick up "indications" of such stretches, e.g. when one notices a serve-and-volley between the same commenters arguing back and forth.

I may be missing interesting and useful information and insights, but so be it.

However, I would be thrilled if the comments could be tweaked to modify or even reject those long URLs that break the page and complicate scrolling by causing the page to shift from side to side while one is scrolling. It makes me seasick, and I have scant hope that everyone will eventually learn to use TinyURL or the like. Similarly, excessively long alphanumeric strings, e.g. "Arrrrgh..." should be blocked or modified to preserve the integrity of the page.

And of course, one dreams for a single-click feature that returns one to one's comments in situ. I do appreciate Salon saving my comments in one location, but I'd like it even more if one could readily return to them in context.

• I'm not about to go back (up?) and identify the comments that prompted this observation, although I believe that Retired Military Patriot largely inspired it with a comment that essentially sounded like, "Come on now, buck up and return to the realization that there's no one else to support but Obama!"

I appreciate that it was honest and well-intended, but it flashed me back to a little running campaign between my sister and my niece when my niece was in high school.

My sister was somehow acquainted with a boy who lived nearby, and attended the same high school as my niece. My sister thought this kid-- let's call him "Obama"-- had it all: he was good-looking, an honor student, an athlete, and was personable. (How reliable this assessment was is an open question.) Since my niece also possessed these qualities and achievements, my sister apparently saw a match made in Heaven.

So my sister used to encourage my niece to get to know him, etc. Whenever his name popped up, my sister would wonder aloud why my niece wasn't making a run at him, etc. She did it facetiously, with a tongue-in-cheek tone, but it was clear that beneath this, my sister really did think highly of the kid and genuinely hoped that my niece would share her opinion.

Of course-- as my sister probably realized, even though she couldn't help herself-- the more she touted Obama, the more annoyed my niece got, and the more resistant she became. And, possibly because I am not myself a parent, I didn't find my niece's resistance symptomatic of "immaturity", and conclude that my sister was "right" and my niece "wrong".

Nothing ever came of it, and eventually it did become more of a "joke". But I'm reminded of it because it has the same tone as the commenters who argue in Parent Knows Best terms that Obama is still the go-to guy, and that it really isn't thinking very clearly to repudiate him because he's doing the best he can in a tight spot.

I appreciate that Glenn hasn't repudiated or rejected Obama for flinging down and dancing upon the Constitution, and urges us to stay the course and institute damage control. But he's not self-righteous about it. Otherwise, not only am I increasingly put off every time some Pragmatic Political Parent tells me what a lovely boy Obama really is-- I resent their attempt to minimize the fact that their Golden Child just backed over us in the parking lot and drove away smiling.