As always, I want to offer special thanks for our weekend contributors: Mike Appleton, Larry Rafferty, Darren Smith, Kimberly Dienes, and Cara Gallagher. I particularly want to thank Darren who has continued to help manage the blog and help out folks who encounter posting problems.
I also want to thank our regular commentators and readers. We try to keep this blog as an open forum with as little interference or monitoring of the comments as possible. Given our free speech orientation, we try not to delete comments and, for that reason, we are deeply appreciative of how most people avoid personal or offensive comments in debating these issues. The success of this blog is due to the fact that we offer something more than the all-too-common troll-driven, angry, and insulting commentary of the Internet. Thank you for voluntarily assuming restraint over the tenor and content of your comments.
So here is our current profile:
In the last full month, our ten biggest international sources for readers (after the United States) have been:
Canada
United Kingdom
Australia
Germany
India
China
New Zealand
France
Mexico
Philippines
Welcome to all of our new readers from those countries. I have always found our foreign commentators particularly valuable in giving us an insight from beyond our borders — and domestic media coverage.
The top ten posted in terms of readership in the last 30 days:
1. Was The Meeting Between Donald Trump Jr. and The Russian Lawyer Really “Treason” or The “Smoking Gun” of Collusion?
The most frequent commentators in the last 1000 comments were:
Louise Hudson
Paul Schulte
Michael Aarethun
Allan
Olly
DesparatelySeekingSusan
tnash80hotmailcom
Thank you to all of our regular commentators. We remain an extraordinarily broad and diverse body of commenters from different parts of the world and different political and social backgrounds. Thanks again.
We had a sharp increase in followers on Twitter with roughly 31,000 followers on Twitter. While not exactly super-sized (or Trump sized), it actually puts us near the top of legal commentator twitter accounts.
Thanks again to those who try to keep our discussions passionate but civil. We obviously have relapses into personal attacks, particularly during these heated political times. However, I am impressed how most people are able to transcend disagreements to avoid making our differences personal or offensive. There remains a core of people in this country that want to speak objectively about the problems in our country — both legal and political. Some have found their way to this blog and I hope more will join them. We hope that this forum can remain a pluralistic and open forum for mature people to engage in mature discussions. Such discussions have never been more important.
Thanks again everyone and congratulations on the latest milestone.