[Phillyfanfrombirth]

I feel that I'm a pragmatic conservative... Certainly more refined, I think to my credit, than I was when I first got online in 2000.

I do a lot of political Op-eds for the local paper (though I've calmed that down in the past year or so)... and was even printed in Investor's Business Daily a couple years ago, which was pretty cool.

I think your views on "internet debate" are spot on... As a participant in those debates though, I think I did pretty well with anyone willing to go outside of the talking points. I think I mesh my background as a welder in a union shop as well as my self educated economics and financial markets background well, and can connect the dots that most folks can't fathom.

The key is to relate with those who are willing to relate, cut out the jargon/use layman terms, and effectively use analogies to explain your positions... and most important, anything you say can and will be held against you in the future... be consistent.

On our forum, the moderators have a lot of latitude to weed out anything that could be damaging to the forum or reflect poorly on the organization. So we try to keep political threads clean, maintaining direction, and free from personal attacks.

It doesn't take a liberal to see when a conservative is taking a cheap shot outside of the terms of service... personal attacks are dealt with regardless of ideological affiliation. Since the mods are anonymous (posters often know each other or have get togethers, so they're not as anonymous as most boards are where there is no physical interaction...), the posters rarely know anything about the moderator who is monitoring the forum. So those on the right complain... and those on the left complain... and you as a moderator act as a disinterested 3rd party.