Bavius: I was in the middle of responding to you, stopped for a phone call and by the time that I got back, your comment had been deleted. I can vouch that it was a civil comment asking why certain comments were deleted and others were not, and you gave a couple of examples.

My original response to you was to say that when it first started, the civil comments system seemed to be legitimate, but I have since noticed a trend where comments are removed on a partisan basis and am wondering whether human moderators have been added to the mix or  whether political hacks are swarming the boards and scamming the system. Certainly I have seen a lot of new names here in the past few weeks.

Other posters have been remarking on seeing the same trend.