Earlier this week I wrote a diary called "MyDD has officially gone to hell" in which I lamented what has happened to the conversations on this site.  I said in that diary that it is no longer possible to make civil political arguments without being personally insulted and troll-rated. And I said that it was getting worse.

That was Wednesday.  Well, it's worse now than it was on Wednesday.

Before approximately one month or so ago, in five years of posting on DK, this site, and Open Left, I had literally hundreds of up-ratings and had never received a single troll rating on any of the three sites.  Now I have received so many troll ratings that I have lost my Trusted User status.

I haven't changed.  I still make a strong effort to write and communicate civilly.  I'm not perfect at it, and some people are better at it than I am, but I'm pretty damned good at staying calm and rational.  I know I am not earning most of the frequent troll ratings I am getting.

The most irritating thing about losing my long-held TU status is that I no longer can see who zero-rated my posts.  I have a problem with that.

Check out Jonathan's front-page post this afternoon on "birdgate."  The troll ratings on that diary are absolutely ridiculous, not just as applied to me, but to a lot of other posters.  Dissent is not allowed.

Please, mods, please--either get serious about policing this site or just disable comments.  It's open war out there, and for sure this is hurting both candidates.

I'm not sure if someone else has blogged about this, but ever since the State of the Union address, almost every Republican I've seen on C-SPAN has used the term "Democrat" Party and "Democrat" majority.  I was willing to overlook it as a slip of the tongue for a while, but the dropping of the "-ic" from the adjectivial form of the proper noun "Democrat" is so ubiquitous among Republican talking heads that I can ignore it no longer.  Have Frank Luntz and his band of Newspeak propogandists come up with this latest linguistic assault on public discourse?  Hearing the phrases "Democrat Party" and "Democrat Majority" sure does grate on my ears.  Do the focus groups feel the same way?  Is this the first salvo of the future Republican revolution?  Have we tested the "Republic Party" with our focus groups?  Will someone please put an end to this madness?