What is best Commenting setup?

Hi,
Have just launched my blog over a week ago and am starting to get traffic and readers. But no comments, yet. It’s basically a political blog so comments are certainly expected and welcome. I’m wondering if it’s too hard or not working right. I did enter a test comment from another email and test registration and it seems to have appeared correctly for approval, etc.

Am using WordPress’ native commenting feature set to:

“Users must be registered and logged in to comment” and “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” under the Discussion settings. All other Discussion setting are pretty much default.

My questions are:

1. Are my settings too stringent? Should I go to the name/email only requirement or none at all?
2. Or should I go to Disqus or IntenseDebate plugin?

I’ve also got Askimet fully up and running so I’m not too worried about going to less or no requirements as far as spam goes.

What is the consensus out there?

Thanks.