And raise you a "Bin Laden's terrorist network is all your fault."

I kid you not.

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.

It's no longer possible to politely express an opinion without getting troll-rated and personally insulted.

Discourse has been worsening for the last month or so but it has really gone off the rails in the last week.  Site admins, you are losing your site.  Conversation is not functional, and I'm quite certain is doing more harm than good if the goal is to elect Democratic candidates.

There are still some good diaries getting posted, of course, especially by the front-pagers although not just by them.  But you folks need to either police the site much more vigorously or just cut the comments function off.

This ain't working.

I went to a top ten law school and went straight to Skadden Arps, the largest law firm in the world, when I graduated.  I have two graduate degrees.  I'm an anti-Vietnam McGovernite from way back and while I often have to wear a suit to work, my sentiments are firmly with the DFHs.

I've got a venti latte in my hand right now.  And it's good.

In a softball interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Barack Obama twice repeated his earlier threats to attack Al Qaeda inside Pakistan on receipt of actionable intelligence with or without Pakistan's permission, exhibiting little concern over worries that his earlier remarks to the same effect may have contributed to a part of the recent instability in Pakistan.  Regardless of the arguable wisdom of the underlying policy, Obama's statements raise the question of why he continues to so publicly declare an intention that might best be communicated privately by diplomatic channels.

Obama's bellicose remarks came only days after he declarad his intention to "return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan."

On Thursday, in response to charges that Obama had inflated his resume by claiming he was a Professor at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School, UC Law issued the following press release:

The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer." From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that's been naive and it's people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world.

Realistic?

The WaPo's "Fact Checker," Michael Dobbs, knows that Hillary Clinton was safe as a bug in a rug when she went to Bosnia in 1996.  He knows, you see, because he was in Bosnia in 1996 himself, and he was never in any danger!

Missing in Dobbs' account, in the infamous CBS footage, in all the gotcha hooey after this crap--and even from the sometimes-sloppy Clinton Press Office--is any explanation at all of why Clinton's account couldn't be explained, not by her landing at the main U.S. HQ in Tuzla, but by her side-trip to two other more forward bases in Bosnia.  Because the First Lady did, in fact, visit two other bases where the CBS newscameras were not rolling.

And I don't think Sinbad was there, either.