We have so many insightful and powerful diaries written here at Daily Kos. Our diaries inform, inflame, impassion, and even entertain. We Kossacks have strong voices and an even stronger will to be the change we wish to see in this country.
One of the richest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, areas of thought come in the form of comments attached to these diaries.
Here at Top Comments we strive to recognize and promote the talent of this community by highlighting outstanding comments found throughout the day by the diarist, and through nominations at made at TopComments at gmail dot com by your fellow Kossacks.
These nominations are subjective, and certainly not complete (as no one can read the complete site on a daily basis!). But we hope they will serve to shine a light where deserved, and to give the reader a good starting point in finding conversation on the site.
Please come in and make yourself at home! Join us beneath the fold...
As I get older less young, I find I feel the heat more. I don't understand why some people want to retire to the far south or southwest: dry or wet, I'm just not fond of heat. So when the forecast is for temperatures up in the triple digits, as is the case for tomorrow, and it'll be almost that bad on Saturday, I shudder more than a little bit. And knowing that I'm going to be trying to sleep without air conditioning for a couple of days this weekend during this heat wave is something I'm contemplating with a great deal of disfavor. It's almost enough to get me to stay home.
I will have a fan or two with me. I'm a fan of fans, when air conditioning is unavailable and the temperature is the least bit elevated. But given my druthers, I'll take a reasonable level of added coolness and removed humidity. I know I'm lucky to have them available, and I do appreciate this fact. A lot. My brain has an appalling tendency to function at reduced capacity when I'm overheated, and I find that's not at all useful in daily life.
I hope you're all finding a way to keep cool during the current heat wave, if it's afflicting affecting your part of the country. Pay attention to the local heat warnings and air quality warnings; they're serious when they warn of problems. And stay indoors and cool if at all possible. I remember going to the movie theater for just that purpose when I was a kid, before air conditioning was common. Not that I go to movies these days, but if my AC was out, I'd definitely consider it...
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We had some action today in the Top Comments mailbox, with a quartet of submissions arriving by the 9:30pm Eastern Time deadline. A fifth one arrived just after that. (The sixth email was, alas, a rare piece of spam that slipped through the gmail filters. Tsk.) The address of our mailbox for top comments submissions remains:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can send great comments to our address. Be sure to include the direct link to a comment—the URL—which is available from that comment's date/time; we need that to find your choice. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. If you send a writeup with the link, we are able to include that, too, though we reserve the right to edit.
From Progressive Witness:
From Hunter's diary last night about last year's cancelled Tea Party convention in Las Vegas failing to pay its $600,000 bill with the Venetian Casino Resort comes a hint from Misterpuff of how such a debt might have been handled in older days....
From expatjourno:
In Mark Sumner's diary that made the front page late last night, America Held Hostage: Day 216, TruthMerchant wrote the definitive deflating of the debt-ceiling "crisis" that Obama is using as a pretext for ramming through Simpson-Bowles cuts to social programs.
From belinda ridgewood:
In Crashing Vor's diary about [(http://www.dailykos.com/...! Chinese knockoffs of entire Apple stores], JaxDem becomes suspicious of a recent purchase.
From Fed Up Fed:
The person who wrote this comment, Upie, must have been lurking, saving it up, since registering in May. Four months of waiting paid off.
From Liz Dexic:
In a diary about the latest Wisconsin Republican chicanery, Seneca Doane channels a newly recognized energy source.
From sardonyx (your is it really Thursday diarist):
In MinistryOfTruth's diary I have wrecked my life, and it's 100% my fault, Anton Bursch writes it isnt called being a starving writer for nothing, and JekyllnHyde starts an interesting thread on thinking about working for political campaigns, which includes good suggestions from others, including Kitsap River.
It's the first time I've seen this graphic being posted by xxdr zombiexx, so it's my first chance to nominate it. It indeed "explains everything that matters in one sentence."
RedBlueNoMore writes about teaching and the battle for public education then and now.
TomP points out that John Boehner has a decision to make.
Please add your own comment finds below!
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A reminder: We still hope that sometime in August top mojo will return once we figure out how to strongarm convince Comment Search to give us exactly what we need in a form that we can use. Which is more difficult and requires more hand-editing than it should be (or used to be).