Introduction: a home for open comments on politics

This is a minimal blog, intended to continue a series of open threads of political commentary which used to follow Ron Gunzburger's Politics1.com blog. But feel free to join in, whatever your opinions, regardless of whether you've ever heard of or visited Politics1.

However, apart from the time that I spent reading or posting comments on that blog, there's no connection with Ron Gunzburger or Politics1.

At least for the moment, I will not attempt to follow Ron Gunzburger's former practice of reporting political news as it happens. This is already being done thoroughly at a slightly-older offshoot, Political Dog 101 at http://politicaldog101.com/ Politics2 is mainly intended to provide a continued open thread for comments arranged by time more than topic.

However, apart from periodically starting new open threads, I may open a special thread from time to time for a current topic such as an extended Congressional debate or an interesting election outside the U.S.

Please observe all the customary conventions and courtesies. There was a great diversity of opinion on Politics1's comments, as you can see from reading any of its archived comments before May 2010. It's certainly not my intention to reduce that diversity: a narrow range of views would reduce the great attraction of seeing political analyses, reports, statistics and predictions from so many viewpoints and places.

But I may limit, block or delete comments that are irrelevant, tedious or abusive. As for statistics, tables and lists, while a couple of roll-calls or a single statistic arranged either state-by-state or year-by-year can be very helpful, this format is poorly-suited for 50-state-by-220-year tables, or a sequence of long tables submitted column by column.