I am getting spammed to death if I allow public comments. The fix would be to be able to moderate public comments while letting registered comments post automatically.Also the ability to moderate individuals specifically would be nice

Have you enabled any of the anti-spam solutions that K2 integrates?

I have enabled recaptcha- I had 187 spam comments on one article just recently so they are easily getting past that

ReCAPTCHA will just ensure that the commenter is a human and not a robot. It does not perform any kind of check to the actual content of the comment. I suggest to enable Akismet also.

I was under the illusion that akismet was for wordpress.Do I need a plugin? I got a key but I looked for a plugin to enable and there was none

Akismet is a service and a plugin as well.
The settings for Akismet are located in K2's settings.