Apologies to My Readers.....

I have long resisted word verification for those who comment on my blog. I have now turned it on - I'm sorry. But, this morning I spent over an hour getting rid of spam - including Japanese - in caricature, no less - and Russian - in Cyrillic.

As you know, I do have moderation turned on. There are valid reasons for this. The first comment that set this off was on a post about the murder of the soldiers in Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq War - some one left the comment, "We salute soldiers who kill their officers" on the post. Unfortunately, the Mother of one of the soldiers was the first to see it. Comment moderation has been on ever since.

And, over the years, it has proven to be necessary. My recent idiocies have included:

-The mother of the soldier convicted of the murder of the soldiers above. According to her, her son is innocent and someone else did it, but we wanted it to be a Muslim --- and, he will soon walk free. FYI - his death penalty conviction is working it's way through the required appeals processes of the military system of justice.

-A leftie with a foul mouth called me names because I listed Scott Speicher's rank incorrectly - except I didn't - the idea of him increasing in rank while MIA was too deep for the fool. When I refused to have the argument on a tribute post, he, of course, had to yell about freedom of speech. Somehow, he could not understand that this is MY HOUSE!

-An ex-wife left a scathing attack on her ex-husband on a post about some of his accomplishments in Iraq. It was pretty mean and vile.

-Another ex-wife and her friends use a tribute post to attack the current widow and they come back regularly to do so.

-Someone wrote a long complaint about how someone is using MySpace in an unethical manner - geesh, report it to them, it's not my job to fix it.

-I had someone pretend to be a Chaplain and try to get a soldiers address and phone number from me... I didn't have the information, but if I had, it would have taken more proof than a yahoo email address to convince me he was who he said he was.

-I always have people writing 'I don't want this posted, but...' and then go off to very strange places.

-And, last but not least are the two page essays on the personal political views of Anonymous!!!

So, my friends, we now have moderation and word verification - I'm so sorry.... I hope you understand.