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Comment no 6 - Swami - it will be interesting, won’t it. I couldn’t believe it when he actually brought up Congress. Bush is totally out-of-control!

I realized some time back that if I didn’t exercise editorial control of the comments threads I’d have to eliminate comments or stop blogging.

People get banned here for several reasons:

One, at least 80 percent of the comments righties leave here are juvenile personal insults of me or another commenter. That’s a banning offense. I rarely give commenters a second chance. Same thing with comments that are obvious flame bait or intended to cause thread disruption.

Two, I refuse to allow this blog to be a conduit of rightie propaganda. So if someone leaves misinformation, rightie talking points, and similar lies, and I don’t have time to correct the lies, I delete the post. Repeated attempts to leave such junk here results in a ban.

Sometimes if I do engage in discussion with a rightie, after a time he’ll just keep repeating the same arguments that I’ve already answered, which annoys the hell out of me. Banned.

Also, often righties come here from a right-wing site that links to one of my posts. But because the original right-wing site lied about what I wrote, they’ll come over here to argue about what they’ve been told I said without having read what I actually did write. If they refuse to accept correction and continue to argue with me about something I didn’t even say, they are outta here. You’d be amazed how often this happens, btw.

I have one rule that sometimes gets lefties banned — comments that promote the notion that the World Trade Center towers collapsed from controlled detonation instead of as a result of catastrophic structural failure resulting from terrorist attacks, or that link to sites promoting such nonsese, will be deleted, and repeated attempts to post such stuff here will get the poster banned. I don’t like to do it, but I was an eyewitness to the collapse of the towers and the controlled detonation thing pushes my buttons.

Finally, commenters who are eating too much of my time and energy get banned for any reason. If it’s between them and me posting on this blog, I choose me.

A lot of rightie bloggers complain, but you’d be amazed at how many rightie sites either don’t permit comments at all, or who permit only registered commenters to post — and registration has long been closed. Little Green Footballs is an example of the latter, not that I’d want to comment there. So let ‘em complain, I say.

I have one small question for our host. Tom does not seem to like you which is OK as he and his guests really turned on me. Tom’s complaint with me is that Angrybear allegedly blocked his comments at one point, which I said was not true. Tom is now saying he never said that but never mind all of that. His excuse for going after me is that you folks blocked his comments. Not sure why (although I can imagine). What is the deal with Tom these days?

Now, I need to read your contribution to this important debate. Thanks for letting me vent.