Thanks for acknowledging my point, agree with your observations.

The Hal paradox is explained when recognizing you very often use any issue you find to attack the Democratic Party.

If one trusts a government to tax us to a fairer income equality, with all the personal sensitive financial information, taxes and data that would be collected, and also support a government paid for cradle to grave single payer health care system, with all the personal medical data and information necessary to justify that care....one cannot go around agitating and spreading fear about emails or phone calls logs - kept by private corporations - being available to government courts and law enforcement.

Without objectively noting the positions are incompatible, incongruous and conflicting, and reveal a biased inclination to attack Democrats.

I don't see many comments that I'd consider ad hominems against you.

Ithink it's clear that you are pushing an agenda, trying to sell something, something you are passionate about. Whether it's blog entry or a news post, it's usually about your agenda. That's one kind of blogger, but another is more like a diarist, just sharing their thoughts on things.

You've therefore branded yourself with your advocacy. If commenters don't agree with brand/the advocacy, I don't see that as an ad hominem. They're not attacking you personally, they're attacking what you are pushing. They don't like what you're selling. The regulars do it all the time because you're doing it all the time.

Try writing on something else that's not political, that truly doesn't have anything to do with your agenda, and you'd likely see very friendly responses. Of course, again, if with that you.re going to write like an advocate for something, it's not to work out, i.e., some of the most famous nasty ad hominems are between a sports fan of one team vs. the sports fan of another.

Most people active in discussing here don't seem to be that interested in pushing an agenda. They might have one but they don't use the site to push it to others. They might say what they believe and who they voted for and express who they wish would lose an election and who they wish would win an election, but they are not trying to convince others to go along with them. It's more like when they analyze that someone else seems to offering up stuff detrimental to what they appear to want or like that they attack. That's when I see people here attack you on Hillary vs. Bernie, they think you should have come round to supporting Hillary and that would have helped with your own stated goals.  That's not an ad hominem either, that's constructive criticism. You disagree, you continue to push that doing it the Hillary way will not.help with your agenda.

I'm going on and on about this because it's something that interests me from way back from TPMCafe days. Early on, it really upset me when Josh Marshall was doing a series of entries on how he'd like to see the site develop,  he said he'd like to have be partly for "political activism". I knew from past group blogs, including one where I was a moderator, that introducing "political activism" is like throwing a bunch of lawyer advocates with their "talking points" into the mix, and that would constantly destroy the "civil conversation" he also said he wanted and which the initial small group of members was very successfully having. (BTW that ended up water over the damn with the great invasion of Obama fans in 2008 and the smaller set of Hillary fans.)

People don't think lawyer advocates and salespeople and their cohorts, political war room spinmeisters are honest, it's just that simple. I give you credit for really skillful rhetoric, you actually do an amazing job of keeping it civil. You "listen" to other points of view and seem to try to adjust your rhetoric to them to a point. But if people dislike the product, or don't see sense in it, they are still going to be throwing at you, and often. Also if all you want to do is brand yourself as selling one thing and even if they happen to agree with some of what you are selling, they may distrust all your arguments.