The rule has never been absolute, but a strong preference. The HN Guidelines that appear as a bottom-of-the-page link on most HN pages

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

say, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

The welcome message that briefly appears as a top-of-the-page link to newly registered users

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

(but appears not to be mandatory to read for anyone) says, "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

By the way, the rest of the welcome message is a good reminder to everyone here about how to make Hacker News a better community.

I thought it was (barely) interesting to discuss why Italy, which is evidently full of smart industrialists, is not thriving better as a national economy. If a politics story doesn't have an angle like that related to the environment for forming new companies for hackers, I usually just ignore it, and I try to silently downvote purely partisan political comments in threads wherever I find them.