Starting today, any registered reader of Capitol Hill Blue can start and maintain a blog on our web site.

That's right. Blue's readers are now our bloggers. We want to widen the debate on politics in this country and feel that opening up our site to bloggers from all political persuasions and beliefs is a way to do so.

Unlike so many political web sites, Capitol Hill Blue is not beholden to any political party, philosophy or belief. We're non-partisan. Always have been, always will be. That's why we welcome bloggers who are Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, right-wing, left-wing or chicken-wing.

This is your chance to participate in the public debate as we head into what may well be one of the most important elections in history. The most recent blogs will be featured on our home page with a link to all blog listings by each reader.

To have a blog, all you need to do is be a registered member of the Capitol Hill Blue community. Not registered yet? Just do so where you see the "login" at the top of the right-hand column. Registered users can then login at the top of the right hand column. Once logged in you will see two menu items:

• My blog, and;
• Create content

Click on "create content" and you will see a screen with a link that says "blog entry." Click on that and you can start blogging. Put in a headline and the content and then click "preview" to check it out. Then click on "submit" and you are an official Capitol Hill Blue blogger. If you click on "My blog" you will see a link that allows you to create a new post there as well.

Some ground rules:

• Please limit your blogs to politics. CHB is a political site.
• Cite your sources with links. That helps bolster your arguments.
• Don't use the blog to attack other members of the CHB community. All perspectives are welcome here and should be treated with respect.
• Please avoid expressions of hate, intolerance, racism, anti-Semitic remarks or encouragement of violence.
• If quoting from another web site, news service or blog, please respect their copyright and use no more than 100 words with a link to their site.
• Please avoid posting long, convoluted urls which can screw up our page formatting. Create links using the "a href" tags or you can use the WYSIWYG editor by clicking on the "enable rich text" link just below the "body" box on the text entry page.

We see the addition of citizen bloggers as an expansion of our coverage of politics in America. Our columnists (Hal Brown, Phil Hoskins and Rob Kezelis) will continue to be featured in our left hand column of the home page and readers are still encouraged to join and participate in the wide range of topics (including non political ones) in Reader Rant, our popular discussion board.

Please understand that user blogs are a service that we hope can be used to expand political debate. Blogs are not to be used to promote commercial enterprises or non-political web sites or activities. We don't care what stunt Britney Spears has pulled lately. We reserve the right to remove any blog and user's blogging rights for posts that violate our ground rules or which expose this site to legal risk.

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