As we continue to explore ways to improve the Propeller experience, we sometimes come across decisions that benefit one group of members yet hinder the experience for another group. We try to minimize this hindrance whenever possible. However, as of today the behavior of the story headline link is changing, and we anticipate that it will cause temporary discomfort for some.

Here's what changed: Going forward, all logged-out visitors that click on headline links will be sent to the story source, instead of the Propeller discussion page. Logged-in members will also be sent to the story source, but can adjust a "Browsing" preference to restore the Propeller Discussion page as their headline link destination.

You can adjust your preference on your Edit Profile page (login required). Scroll down to the section titled "Browsing" and choose your preference. Your options are "Read Full Story", with which clicks to headline links will take you to the source story, and "Propeller Discussion", the previously default behavior, which takes you to the Propeller Discussion page for the story. Once you have made your decision, scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save Changes". Your preference once saved should be immediately reflected on Propeller.

Regardless of your headline link destination preference, you can always go to the Propeller discussion page by clicking the "Discuss" link below the story description, and you can always go to the story source by clicking "Read Full Story at ...", directly to the right of the Discuss link. This is an important change being made, but by no means does your choice of headline link destination cut off access to either page.

The Propeller staff debated whether or not to automatically update member preferences for all active members to keep the experience the same and send those clicking on headline links to the Propeller discussion page. However, in the end, we decided not to update member accounts preemptively, as we wanted members to choose the behavior most appropriate for them.

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with headline links or with setting the new preference.

Happy Propelling,
Tom (tdrapeau)

Congratulations opiczka2 on winning the 2009 Propeller Halloween Avatar Contest! The field was particularly strong this year, and our celebrity panel of Netscape and Propeller staff, both past and present, were up to the challenge. Celebrity judges included former GM and Editorial Director C.K. Sample III, now of CrowdFusion, original lead developer and Propeller Member #1 Alex Rudloff, now of Emurse, and James Marcus, who took a pause from his editorial duties with AOL News to cast his vote.

Voting was spread fairly evenly across many great submissions, including these top runners up:

Member epiphannyy had a strong 2nd place showing (and certainly did better than the witch):



Member StevieGee came in 3rd, with this:



Other strong finishers included the "Scarecrow Moon" by STONERS and the most popular vote for the scariest avatar, sent in by fiftynine.



Congratulations and thanks to all who entered this year's contest. Don't forget to claim your rewards opiczka2!

Have a Happy Halloween all.
Tom (tdrapeau)

As the deadline for submissions approaches (5pm EST today), we thought it would be fun to take a look at all of the submissions thus far. Which do you think is deserving of this year's crown?







Thanks and good luck to all for entering! The winner will be chosen tomorrow--let us know who it should be.

P.S. A few entries have come in since this morning's post. There is still 90 minutes left to enter, get your entries in!



P.P.S. Here are the stragglers, looks like this will be the lot.


P.P.P.S. A few more for consideration:

Friends and Fans of Propeller--

As you may have already noticed, over the past few days we have been testing a new module on Propeller's home and category pages with the header "Latest News From Our Friends". The module will be populated with the latest news from sites both inside and outside of the AOL network, and will be updated regularly throughout the day.

This module will be viewable within the story list on the home and category pages, although you might have to scroll down a bit to see it. We hope that this module will serve as a consistent place for timely news--as always, let us know what you think.

Tom (tdrapeau)

The Propeller team invites all Propeller members to submit their entry for the 2009 Propeller Halloween Avatar Contest! Entries are being accepted right now, and the deadline for entries is October 29th. The winner will be chosen on Friday, October 30th, and will receive tons of great prizes, including:

-Featured Member status
-A haiku written about your avatar by Richard (no quality guarantees)
-9,000,000 Propeller points, redeemable only for a coffee at Blaine's favorite coffee shop 2nd Moon Coffee in Minneapolis (no deliveries, must redeem in person!)
-Shrimp from Bubba Gump's on the Santa Monica pier (travel not included), courtesy of Ryan

A note about the entries... they'll have to at least be better than mine (I carved the pumpkin myself):



To enter: Send an email to us referencing your avatar at feedback at propeller dot com--you can attach your avatar picture to your email, but you must also update your avatar on the site to win.

Good luck to all!
Tom

After last week's comment filter update, we received numerous reports from the community that the filters weren't quite right. Many were not interested in filtering comments at all, and the consensus was that the "Neutral" comment rating unnecessarily hid initial reactions to posted comments. I am pleased to say that we've worked on addressing these concerns, and hope that today's update alleviates them.

Here is a look at the latest iteration of the comment filter box:


Choosing the new "No Filter" option will show all comments (down to second level replies, as the system did before the comment filters were put in place), and will save that preference for future story viewing. In other words, if you don't want any part of the comment filter, choose the No Filter option once, and you should not have to deal with it again. Also, the "View All Comments" link has been restored, and, as before, leads to the comments page with all comments shown.

We fixed the comment rating bug that was reported last week, where rating a comment caused the "Neutral" placeholder to appear, instead of the rating percentage. We have also changed the role of "Neutral"--now, only comments without any ratings at all will show up that way.

We hope that these updates allow both those who want to filter comments, and those who don't, to be able to exercise their preference on Propeller.

Thanks to all for submitting feedback--it is much appreciated.

Tom

As a follow-up release to the moderation features launched a few weeks back, today we have released new comment filters. These allow members to choose to see all comments for a story with 25% or more, 50% or more, or 75% or more positive ratings, as well as an option to see all comments. Comments that have less than 5 ratings are considered too new to filter, and are now marked as "Neutral".

A look at the new comment filter:


The first time a story page is loaded, the default filter of 25% is selected. The system will remember your latest chosen comment filter and reuse it for all stories you view.

We hope that these updates make reading comments on Propeller a more enjoyable experience.

Tom

Active members on Propeller have seen the temperature rising in comment threads over the past few months. Hot button topics, such as health care reform, Obama's birth certificate, conservative and liberal pundits, and of late, Ted Kennedy's passing, have served as fodder for some very unpleasant exchanges. We have for the most part stood back and allowed members to talk it out amongst themselves, although it has become clear that we have fallen short in our duties to police the worst of the worst. This failure has hurt our active members, as well as passive readers who would consider becoming members but decide against it after reading the comment threads. We want Propeller to be a place where people can argue the merits of a story, while feeling safe from undue personal attacks in retaliation for one's point of view.

Towards this end, we are releasing a few new features that will be transparent to most but will help Propeller staff to respond more effectively and promptly to member reports. Also, we'll review the rating aspects of the site and discuss the ways to use each that best help Propeller.

At some point tomorrow, we will release a new version of the site with a few minor changes. One will help speed up the delivery of member reports, to help get them into the staff's hands faster. We need to be more aggressive and timely in triaging member reports--and we will do so. Also, the system will start closing stories automatically once a story receives a certain number of reports. When the system closes a story, it will also send a message to the staff on the closing. We hope that this new feature will allow for comment threads to be frozen on stories that are getting out of hand, while alerting the staff to them to review to make sure that closing the story is the right way to go.

Lastly, we are going to collapse comments that have less than a 50% approval rating, once they have accrued enough total comment votes. The collapsed comment will look like this:

Fans of Propeller-

I'd like to cordially invite you all to become fans on Propeller on Facebook! Facebook, for those living in a cave (with internet access), is the wildly popular social network that is connecting friends and family the world over. We have written about Facebook previously, in our post about Propeller's use of the Facebook Connect platform.

We have recently created a fan page on Facebook where we will post interesting links we find on Propeller, and general news about the service. Please show your support for Propeller and become our fan!

Here is the link to our brand new fan page on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Propellercom/97972566876

Thanks to all for your continued participation on the site, you make reading the news more fun.

Best,
Tom (tdrapeau)

P.S. There will be punch and pie.

Friends of Propeller-

I wanted to let you know about a few additions to the Propeller web site today, designed to better serve our community. The first affects the URLs that are added to our Facebook and Twitter share feature. Up until now, we have been using the TinyURL shortening service to encode Propeller story links to better fit into the message length restrictions of Twitter. As of today, we are using our own URL shortening service, which uses the domain http://pplr.us.

The pplr.us service is different from TinyURL and other shortening services in that pplr.us links will only point to Propeller story pages (we may extend this beyond Propeller story pages in the future.) For those who have used our Facebook or Twitter share already, this change will be fairly transparent--you will notice that the links that end up in your Facebook/Twitter feed have the new pplr.us domain. Beyond that, nothing has changed with story sharing.

Additionally, thanks to a great suggestion by a relative newcomer to the Propeller community btatman22, we now have 2 separate Politics categories: Political News and Political Opinion. Since its initial launch 3+ years ago, the Propeller community has been interested in both the play-by-play and the color commentary of politics. Adding this new category will help distinguish between news reporting and opinion, and (we hope) reduce any related confusion. All existing Politics posts now appear in the Political News category, so that old links can be preserved, and the Political Opinion category is now open for business--members, please begin to use it for your opinion posts.

That's all for now--let us know how we're driving.

Live Long and Prop It!
Tom (member tdrapeau)

One of the most common member requests we receive on Propeller is for members to have the ability to edit stories they have posted. Specifically, to be able to fix typos, small grammar mistakes, and errant category choices. I am pleased to announce that we now have such a feature! For all stories you have posted, you will now see an "Edit" link wherever the story is displayed. Clicking on the link will bring you to a page where you can edit the story title, description, category and/or the story tags.

Let's take a look--first, the story listing with Edit link:



Notice the Edit link at the bottom, between the Discuss and Read Full Story links. And now, the edit page:



Once the edits are done, click "Save Changes", and you should see your edited story. That's it!

As always, let us know what you think.

Happy editing,
Tom (member tdrapeau)

In its article on TinyURL, the first widely used URL shortener, Wikipedia defined the service as one "that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs". The launch of Twitter in 2006, with its 140-character limit on posts, prompted the development of many new URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tr.im.

Some content publishers and aggregators have followed suit and integrated URL shortening into their own service to facilitate sharing of links to their content. Examples of these are tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) and digg.com (Digg). Web sharing services have also joined in the fun, a recent example being shar.es (ShareThis).

Here at Propeller we have secured the domain pplr.us and will be launching our own URL shortener shortly. However, up until today, we did not accept shortened URLs as Propeller story submissions. I'm happy to report that we now accept shortened URLs. Story submission has not changed at all to accommodate this--simply submit the shortened URL, and we will save the original ("lengthened") URL as the source of the story.

So for example, a recent Propeller Week In Review blog post has the following URL:

http://blog.propeller.com/2009/06/05/propeller-week-in-review-greatest-hits-edition/

Using the tr.im URL shortener, the alias for the above URL is:

http://tr.im/nyv6

As of today, you can now submit tr.im URLs (as well as any other URL shortening service). Simply enter the shortened URL (in this case, http://tr.im/nyv6) into the URL box. Propeller will then save the story with the lengthened blog.propeller.com URL.

And that's it! Let us know if you have any questions.

Happy shortening,
Tom (member tdrapeau)

P.S. Follow Propeller on Twitter!

Another week, another bouquet of acrimony and amicable fun at Propeller--but folks, this time around, it's different. I'm to sorry announce that this will be my last WIR feature. At the end of June I will be moving over to AOL News. It's been a privilege to know you all, and to do my weekly round-up with color commentary. Perhaps some energetic Propeller member will take up the mantle and post a weekly, informal summary of the best conversations--in fact, maybe several will, and we can witness a regular Battle of the WIRs. ("My comments can beat up your comments!") In any case, I will miss cranking it out every Thursday afternoon. It's been a pleasurable routine.

Under the circumstances, I though we could skip the last week's activity and take a longer view. We've trawled through the database and come up with the most popular stories over a two-year period, ranked by props, comments, and page views. I'm going to concentrate on those today. There are some predictable items, but also some surprises. And needless to say, some of the commentators have since moved on greener (or possibly grimmer) pastures.

LOOSE CHANGE

Which legitimate story had the greatest number of comments? That would be "Change You Can Believe In! Obama's Approval Index Down 22%," posted on March 2, 2009, with 43 props, 33 drops, and an astounding 7,431 comments. (It's possible that the last 6,000 are ads for Viagra and Acai Berry nostrums--still, that leaves plenty of genuine opinions.) NoWayMan questioned the very premise of the article, which blamed the new Democratic president for the crumbling stock market: "Anyone who knows anything about the markets knows that there are just too many variables in play, and you can't pin performance on one person's possible future actions." But injest accused Obama of having "spooked the markets. Ramming through his 'wish list recovery act' didn't impress anyone, and the markets dived again."

Said wtagg: "I am more than willing to give Obama 38.7% of the blame. Bush owns the rest." To which dmoney2318 replied: "Bush's policies had us on a sharp incline. It wasn't until the Dems took over and blocked his policies that our economy went down the toilet. Now we're paying for not listening to the Bushes [presumably both father and son], and instead letting people like Bill Clinton and now Obama lead us down a path of total destruction." Responded djn3nunez3: "Only if you own Haliburton or Raytheon stock. Bush was a disaster in foreign affairs, domestic affairs, and economic affairs." Added DaneL: "What a trifecta: Obama, Reid and Pelosi. You libs bet on them, now you can reap the rewards." AbuAmirah shot back: "Dude has to clean up a mess that started with the Contract with America and the deregulation that it wrought. Yeah, and we thought that businesses could police themselves."

SCOOTER PIE

Another all-time hit was "Bush Spares Libby From Prison," posted on July 2, 2007. The story rang up 320 props and 1,220 comments, including this one from UnusualSuspect: "The funny thing is, Bush said all along he would not tolerate anyone in his administration leaking (ended up not being Libby, but Armitage), or hindering the investigation. I guess Bush forgot he said that." But libsRfunny dismissed the whole investigation as a tempest in a Beltway teapot: "They were trying to hang it on Rove, not Armitage. How can you possibly impede an investigation into something that never happened? The guy just didn't recall conversations made three years earlier. You have any idea how many conversations people have in DC?"

Lurch, meanwhile, tried to add some historical context: "This administration and these contemporary cons sure make Clinton look like a mix between Churchill and Alexander the Great. Dubya is Caligula to Clinton's Augustus Caesar." Then ceolmor took the classical theme and ran with it: "Hmm, [this] brings to mind Plato's comment, 'The rulers of the state are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying'." But chiefss stuck up for Bush's decision, insisting that his predecessor had given a free pass to many, many more miscreants: "Jesus, I sure didn't hear all you clowns screaming and hollering when Slick Willie pardoned hundreds of convicted felons. Bush just commuted the sentence, didn't pardon. The conviction still stands."

Other stories with impressive comment totals included "Propeller's Incorrigibles," posted on November 27, 2007, with 259 props and 968 comments. (Said Spadecaller, who posted the story: "The level of debate at Propeller matters to many of us. I'm sick of personally abusive commentary that targets member's race, age, sex, nationality, ethnic background, or disability. What about you?" Replied Endoscopy: "One of the major problems that starts this is the abusive political ranting. It starts out bashing the opposition and descends into doing the same to posters on the opposite side.") There was also "Simpsons hit for not-so-gay crack," posted on November 5, 2008, with 875 comments. And let us not forget "Texas School Board Rejects Intelligent Design," posted on August 27, 2007, with 228 props and 783 comments. Said joeblowe: "How about that, there's enough common sense and intelligence in even a ONE STAR state to realize that it's a bad idea to teach idiocy in a science class."

COPY CATS

And what about stories that inspired the most members to hit the prop button? The undisputed champ was "World should ban human cloning, except medical: U.N.," posted on November 11, 2007, with 424 props and a relatively reticent 77 comments. "Hooray!" said 1-2-Oscar. Replied Commodore1: "Yes, I agree. As long as the liberals don't use it to increase the number of votes they get." On a more serious note, reviewer saw the cloning and genetic manipulation of livestock as a definite Pandora's Box: "I wrote an article on cloning for food, and the main thing that scares me about cloning cattle just to have a larger T-Bone is the loss of genetic diversity in the species. Anyone who raises or breeds animals knows the short- and long-term health consequences." Another member, tkyrchncs, argued that this particular train had already left the station: "As to food species, it should be possible to maintain much smaller and greatly more diverse herds by cloning the desirable PARTS of an animal. To all intents and purposes modern herds and flocks ARE cloned. How much genetic diversity do you think there is in a modern egg or fryer producing population, as in comparison to an equal number of wild chickens?" But angelitobcn got in the last, theological word: "Do souls have clones?"

There was also "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Resigns," posted on August 27, 2007, with 336 props and 754 comments. Bkumm greeted the news with a kind of victory jig: "Adios, muchacho! NOW, who's gonna protect King George? Rove? Gone. Gonzales? Gone. Rumsfeld? Gone." Said Neophile: "Now he can spend some quality time forgetting the circumstances of important decisions he makes about his family." Added searchbeam: "My first computer--a Commodore--had better memory than this bozo! To think that this guy was a Texas Supreme Court Judge makes you wonder about the quality of justice those poor souls in Texas were getting." Did the cashiered Attorney General have any defenders? Well, there was MajJohn, who accused the Democrats of conducting a bigoted witch hunt: "The Democrats can't stand a minority that's not one of their own."

Another prop-happy post concerned the site itself, right after we shed our identity as Netscape. "Propeller Lives!" was posted on September 19, 2007, and rang up 302 props and 197 comments. Searchbeam immediately urged the community to pitch in and give the new site some love: "The more the traffic to your site, the more advertising dollars, and therefore an assured existence! It is a tough world, and for us to exist as a vibrant, productive community, we must be able to pull more traffic to Propeller." Very true. Silverghost, meanwhile, thought the new site might be a spammy wolf in sheep's clothing: "Maybe I'm too infrequently involved, but I didn't have a clue & thought I was being scammed. Took me awhile to trust this change as valid." But ind06, after venting over some of the new site's defects (crappy share feature, sink option), at least knew exactly where to assign the blame: "Oh, and these problems are all George Bush's fault."

Other biggies included the cheery "You are Destroying America. Yes, You," posted on July 18, 2007, with 292 props and 516 comments. And on a slightly more salacious front, there was "Report: Governor Linked To Prostitution Ring," posted on March 10, 2008, with 261 props and 513 comments. "Politics as usual," said BronxBomber, alluding to Elliott Spitzer's serial dalliance with precisely the sort of hookers he was supposed to be driving out of business. "Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," added bobo-in-texas. What followed was a little parry-and-thrust action (sorry), beginning with a comment from Lincoln85: "Bronx, are you still worried about Bush listening to you and your mother's phone calls?" Replied BronxBomber: "I'm not worried about Bush, but please tell your wife to stop calling me." To which cowboygrandpa added: "Yeah, especially trying to call collect like that."

VIEW MASTERS

And what about the stories with the greatest number of page views? The champion here was "Mystery Surrounds Leavenworth, Kansas Underground City," posted on August 19, 2008, with 38 props, 71 comments, and 359,845 page views. One member, dirtylitlesamuel, assumed that the Kansans had unearthed a kind of subterranean Reeperbahn: "When the push came to 'clean up the town,' all the vice moved underground: the drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Leavenworth was a wild cowtown, and people hated the drovers for all the vice they brought. However, they liked the money." Another member, telernc, speculated that the tunnels were connected to the nearby (and notorious) prison: "I have a friend who grew up in a house near the prison. She has told me stories about these underground paths. In fact her father was a high-ranking military man in charge of running the prison, and she says she had a tunnel under her house to the prison." But Propeller being a hotbed of unexpected expertise, this theory was promptly demolished by KUBasketballnut: "Your friend is wrong. I worked at the federal penitentiary for twenty-five years, and at the state penitentiary before and after I worked at the federal. Both facilities have tunnels inside for utilities such as electricity and steam, but they are not accessible from the outside, and are definitely not accessible from the inside to the outside."

Perhaps, then, the theory about the underground rumpus room is correct. In any case, many of our stories with the highest number of page views seemed to have a definite theme of mild raunch. (Strange how these things work.) There was "Sex session at work gets municipal employees suspended," posted on August 13, 2008, with 13 props, 37 comments, and 298,384 page views. One member, bratto14, argued that the absent-minded exhibitionists had done nothing wrong: "As long as they are single, leave them alone. Try not to be so judgmental of other people--we have ALL made mistakes." LDN felt otherwise: "Mistakes are forgetting to pay a bill or losing your car keys. This was just plain rude and inconsiderate. As others have said, some things should be done in private."

There was also "Chicago dive bar scores hit with nude Sarah Palin portrait," posted on October 13, 2008, with 89 props, 156 comments, and 293,638 page views. "As they say," noted jovial, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Replied massto: "Just look at where it's coming from. Chicago is not a great place, and the idiots that go into this bar have to have their heads examined." To which Teech responded: "I'm heading to the airport right now. Chicago, here I come!" And on a (somewhat) related note, let's not forget "German Sunbathers Complain About Polish Voyeurs At Nudist Beach," posted on July 29, 2008, with 20 props, 17 comments, and a disproportionate 272,193 page views. One member, zygoter, had little patience for the Mitteleuropean whiners: "If the Poles don't like it they shouldn't look, and if the Germans don't like it they should put some clothes on! They should be glad I'm not there, I would use a 600mm lens and post the pictures on the Internet!" In one of my rare comment-thread interventions, I mused: "A nudist without a voyeur is like--what? A day without sunshine? Macaroni without cheese? There's a word for this: symbiosis." Replied pderoo1: "Beanies without weenies?" And the conversation, like all conversations, came to an end.

I am happy to announce that Propeller can now speak Twitter! Twitter is a wildly popular micro-blogging platform that allows for broadcasting short (140 characters at maximum) messages to everyone in your Twitter network. Its popularity has risen sharply of late with exposure on major TV networks such as CNN, as well as with celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey. Much like our integration of the Facebook Connect platform announced a few weeks back, our Twitter features are designed to encourage new member signups by allowing accounts to be created using Twitter usernames and passwords, and to facilitate sharing of great content with your Propeller and Twitter networks. Let's take a look:

Sign in via Twitter



Clicking "Sign in with Twitter" redirects you to the Twitter web site, where you are asked to verify that you do indeed authorize Propeller to access and update your data on Twitter. The authentication protocol that allows this is called OAuth, which allows users to approve an application (in this case Propeller) to act on their behalf without sharing their password.The verification screen looks like this:



If you click "Allow", Propeller will then ask you to associate your Propeller account with this Twitter account. If you are new to Propeller, you can use this Twitter information to help you create a new Propeller account. The link (or create) screen looks like this:



And that's it! It should only take a minute to do this. Once you have connected your Twitter account to your Propeller account, you can take advantage of two great new Twitter-related features:

1. Submit story via Twitter

You can submit a story to Propeller simply by sending a direct message ("DM") to the official Propeller twitter feed, @PropellerDotCom. Your direct message should just include the URL you would like to submit to Propeller. Here's an example of a direct message that leads to a story submission:



Make sure to add @PropellerDotCom to the list of feeds that you are following, and please be patient, it can take up to an hour for your direct message to be transformed into a story post. The above direct message created a story submission looking like this:



2. Share story to Twitter

You can "Tweet" a Propeller story by using the Share Story feature on a Propeller story page. If you have associated your Twitter account with your Propeller account, you will see the following share window after clicking "Share Story":



Make sure that the "Tweet on Twitter" checkbox is checked, and click "Share It!" Clicking "Share It" will add a link to your Twitter feed that looks like this:



We are excited to invite the Twitter community to check out Propeller, as well as to offer these great authentication and sharing tools to existing Propeller members. Let us know if these features don't work for you.

Happy Twittering-
Tom (member tdrapeau)

HERE COMES THE JUDGE

Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court inspired several lively conversations this week at Propeller. "Obama Picks Sotomayor for Supreme Court!" racked up 79 props, 3 drops, and 147 comments, including a thumbs up from deathray: "Well, as the Republicans like to say, the president should get the judges he wants. I think Sotomayor is a good choice." There was a similar reaction from sinophil49: "That Sotomayor is a competent Latina judge should be a point of pride for all Americans. If approved, it would truly be a historical event in our Republic's gloried history."

Meanwhile, tanglang expressed some discomfort with what he saw as the nominee's judicial activisim: "She said that appeals courts are where policy is made." Replied Beau7890: "She was describing the difference between appellate and district court. She wasn't advocating making policy. Regardless, appeals courts are where policy is made, whether you like it or not." Endoscopy raised the prospect of Republicans blocking Sotomayor's confirmation, and suggested that such tactics came straight out of the Democratic bag of tricks: "The Democrats... are proud of 'Borking' people." This elicited a quick shot across the bow from Desdamona, who expressed relief that the Robert Bork had been barred from the highest court in the land: "The guy was a nut and I am exceedingly proud of the Senate for preventing his elevation to such an honored position."

A related story, "Rush Limbaugh Slams Judge Sotomayor: 'Racist' and a 'Hack'," racked up 72 props, 6 drops, and 131 comments. Charlson suggested that Limbaugh had no standing (to put it mildly) to criticize the nominee: "The racist, homophobic drug addict has no credibility when it comes to racism and hackism." Bkumm still had some doubts about Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comments: "I would not go so far as to call her a racist, but it is troubling that she would say something like that. There is no evidence that a person who has 'been there' and 'done that' is going to uphold the rule of law better than someone who has not." Yet he still felt that Obama had made a good pick. So did kobzikov, who actually applauded Sotomayor's admission that a judge's background and experience would inevitably factor into his or her decisions: "There are many theories of justice and not all of them would insist on justice being blind. And if we think that justice should serve the society as a whole and not only those who are well-connected and with the means to hire the best attorneys, then I'm not sure a blind servant is preferable to the one who can see."

STRAIGHT OUTTA GITMO

With the president dithering over his promised closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the Propeller community chimed in on both sides of the issue. "Guantanamo Bay Detainee Site Should Be Open or Closed: What Do You Want?" generated 125 props, 7 drops, and 257 comments. Pecossam thought we were worrying far too much about the rights of the prisoners: "There is no place for 'touchy-feely' when one is engaged in war; not if one wishes to defeat the enemy. As General William Tecumseh Sherman (the Union officer who marched on and burned Atlanta, GA) said, 'War Is Hell.'" And where would the detainees be housed, should the Gitmo facility be shuttered? One member, donald51, proposed a solution: "Keith Obermann interviewed a city councilmen with a totally vacant 300+ bed, high-security prison in Wyoming or Utah, which is empty and volunteering to take the detainees!" But even in that case, Klarissa saw some potential problems: "We would have to set up special kitchens and special religious accommodations wherever these prisoners are sent. Let's be smart for a change and keep them where they are."

There was agreement from prophyporcrites: "If we give them trials here, we open up a Pandora's Box that was better left closed. Heck, how many murderers, child molesters, and others get off on a simple technicality? Is it really that farfetched to think the same may happen to these people?" Replied gamahuche: "So fear of Pandora should guide US 'justice'? Tell that to the judge! The earthly one and the one upstairs if you believe in that one." Commodore1 suggested that there was some NIMBY-style hypocrisy at work: "For those of you who want Gitmo closed, I'm sure you're willing to have them detained in your state. Right?" To which jordan11 replied: "I don't have a problem with it. We already have 'terrorists' imprisoned in this country, and I've heard no one complain in the states they're incarcerated in. Stop being such a whiny baby. You don't trust our prison system? Then stay under your bed."

AND DON'T OVERLOOK....

On a less partisan note, there was "Couple On the Run after 'Stealing' $6 Million Credited to Their Bank Account in Error," with 75 props and 12 comments, most of them fairly cynical. Said rj3sp: "I doubt that the bank would be held at fault if they inadvertently depleted someone's bank account. Of course, that never happens." And EastwoodCarter seemed confident that the bank would recoup its losses, one way or another: "Just charge every savings account a small inactivity fee. Problem solved." Added ppt4706: "Actually, that money is the amount that I have been charged in overdraft fees through the years, so give it back!"

Elsewhere, Propeller members sounded off on waterboarding and pistol play in our national parks. And this YouTube video of Bob Dylan singing "Forever Young" rang up 131 props and 21 comments. There was a small debate over who did the best version of the Dylan chestnut, with chevydog opting for the composer's ex-main squeeze : "The Joan Baez version is among my favorites." Added Ciera-Marie: "I prefer Bob Dylan's or Joan B's versions over Rod Stewart's any day. God, I do not like Rod Stewart at all. Not here, there or anywhere." To which JoseMadre replied: "I think Rod's voice is an acquired taste." It's a terrible temptation at this point to post the "Hot Legs" video, but we'll stick with Bob Dylan after all.