We used to be more than politics, and still are. The election season crowded out other topics.

But even mundane mechanical questions like car design have a political dimension, and so do social and scientific questions.

It's something good, and all its own, isn't it?

Holy Cow, Red! You've got the Marshall commenting here!

Good observation by the way, and nice to see Marshall confirming it btw. I love the mix with the wider-ranging stuff on this site as well. Some fine minds and hearts, including yours.

Just a few distinctions:

On the one hand, there are discussions of politics: This includes discussions of topics primarily related to parties, elections, poll results, candidates, fundraising, Capitol Hill inside baseball, political horseraces and the highly partisan warfare and exchanges of daily talking that people like O'Reilly, Hannity and Olbermann trade in. I believe it is true that these kinds of discussions tend to predominate here during election seasons, but were not the original focus of TPM Cafe - although they were always part of the mix.

There are any number of well-known internet sites and "blogs" that deal with little beyond these kinds of politics and process questions, and endless partisan warfare. Sites like the Huffington Post seem very partial to these kinds of topics. It is similar to sports coverage in that the focus is on how one's own team is doing, what the other team is doing, and coming forth with rapid rhetorical responses to the other team's rhetorical forays on the designated topic of the day.

A second category of discussion and debate concerns the major and minor issues with which politics and politicians sometimes deal, such things as abortion, wars, macroeconomics, foreign policy, work and the environment. Sometimes these are treated as policy issues, that is, we might have discussions not simply of what is happening macroeconomically and how we should think about what is happening, but a discussion of various competing and specific policy proposals that have been made. The policy discussions might be very serious and high level, but it is also natural for discussion of these policy issues to lead into discussion of the process questions and ongoing partisan struggles discussed earlier, and vice versa. I think this second category best characterizes what Josh Marshall calls the "old norm" of TPM Cafe.

Now I may be wrong, but I don't believe the recent phenomenon of TPM Cafe being used as a general creative writing forum about any topic that strikes the writer's fancy, and as a sometime support group, was ever part of the old norm. This seems to be a rather new social networking development of the site. That's just an observation. Maybe fostering this kind of development was part of Josh's plan all along. Anyway, the tools enable people to make of the site what they want to make of it, and that's what has emerged.

Needs ignoring.

Redneck was obviously referring to Polotics or poloitization as a combination of Polo and Politics. It's a very timely comment considering Polotics was recently practiced in NYC by Prince Harry of the UK, whose grandmother, of course, is a noted dog-lover.

(BTW. Polo translated into Spanish is Poloit, so he was also attempting to reach out to the Latino community.)

;-)

Many of TPM's posters thought that by electing president Obama that politics as we know it had come to an end. Unfortunately this is not proving to be true and I imagine that the political content of the site will pick up accordingly. Certainly there is still political dynamite to be found here. Check out Phil Weiss's posts from Gaza.