What’s going on?

I suppose I should have let you guys know what’s going on with Mostly Political.

Basically, it all came down to time commitment. I’ve been juggling a few different projects, and am starting a full-time job tomorrow, so I’ve kind of been neglecting MP for a while.

Starting today, Mostly Political is on an indefinite hiatus. Very soon, the MostlyPolitical.com URL will redirect to my personal blog. There are a few reasons for this:

First, I still occasionally write about politics. And I need an outlet for those times when I just have to say something. While MP has a few hundred followers, my personal blog has a larger following. And if I’m not going to write about politics regularly, I don’t want to keep operating a blog that’s fairly stagnant.

Secondly, Mostly Political never really “took off” in the way I thought it would. At its height, it had amassed several hundred followers, and had about 1500 unique pageviews per week. But for some reason, I could never really get much interaction with followers and readers. The goal of MP was always to be a conversation about politics. I wanted readers to submit guest posts, comment, speak up with their opinions, and just interact with the content. That never happened in a significant way. I’m not sure why. MP had a healthy following and great page view numbers for its age, but the audience just wasn’t engaged.

So I’ve been focused on other things lately, and MP has just been gathering dust. I might bring Mostly Political back at some point in the future, but for now, it’s going to folded into the /tagged/politics section of my personal blog. You’ll find a lot of the same content and commentary there. That blog is very random — featuring random graphics, gifs, life updates, literary quotes, tech news, and more. Politics won’t be the focus there, but if you’d like to join me, I’d love to have you. If don’t want to follow me there, you can keep up with me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and slew of other places.

It’s been fun, but I’m officially shutting down this project as of today.

-Jesse

22 July 2012   Comments    Permalink
WSJ: Obama spending binge never happened ⇢

Market Watch’s Rex Nutting examines the facts and concludes, “of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.” The actual record under President Obama “doesn’t show a reckless increase in spending. Far from it.” Take a look at Nutting’s breakdown of spending over the last four years, which says that, under President Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower was President:

Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:

  • In the 2009 fiscal year—the last of George W. Bush’s presidency—federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

  • In fiscal 2010—the first budget under Obama—spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.

  • In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

  • In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

  • Finally in fiscal 2013—the final budget of Obama’s term—spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.

Most importantly, the President has a balanced plan that would cut deficits by over $4 trillion over the next decade, including the spending cuts he has already signed into law that will bring discretionary spending to its lowest levels as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower Administration.

24 May 2012   Comments    Permalink
An Obama Spending Spree? Hardly TPM’s Sahil Kapur looks at the numbers behind a recurrent theme of recent budget debates: A dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years. But the numbers tell a different story. The fact that the national debt has risen from $10.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion under Obama’s watch makes for easy partisan attacks. But the vast bulk of the increase was caused by a combination of revenue losses due to the 2008-09 economic downturn as well as Bush-era tax cuts and automatic increases in safety-net spending that were already written into law. Obama’s policies, including the much-criticized stimulus package, have caused the slowest increase in federal spending of any president in almost 60 nears, according to data compiled by the financial news service MarketWatch. (Read the full story)

An Obama Spending Spree? Hardly

TPM’s Sahil Kapur looks at the numbers behind a recurrent theme of recent budget debates:

A dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years.

But the numbers tell a different story.

The fact that the national debt has risen from $10.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion under Obama’s watch makes for easy partisan attacks. But the vast bulk of the increase was caused by a combination of revenue losses due to the 2008-09 economic downturn as well as Bush-era tax cuts and automatic increases in safety-net spending that were already written into law.

Obama’s policies, including the much-criticized stimulus package, have caused the slowest increase in federal spending of any president in almost 60 nears, according to data compiled by the financial news service MarketWatch.

(Read the full story)

23 May 2012   Comments    Permalink

Moving Forward

*see what I did there?

Hey guys!

I know a lot has happened over the last few weeks while MP has been on hiatus. Sorry I haven’t been around to cover it all for you. 

A few updates:

  1. We have a brand new design. It’s clean, minimalist, and totally responsive. If you don’t know what that means, it simply means that the design works well on a variety of devices and screen sizes — seriously, go look at our website on your phone. It look fantastic! Except for the big banner ad at the top. Which brings me to number two…
  2. I’ve been experimenting with ads on this website for a while without much luck. Over the last year, I’ve made about $32. I’m going to be pushing more and more content to the website itself via “Read Mores” and heavy use of social media. Right now, the majority of you read through the Tumblr dashboard, which is great. But I’d like to get a little more involvement on the site itself. Revenue isn’t my goal here, and if the ads become too distracting (or simply ineffective) after a month or two, I’ll remove them. Like I said before, the top ad is already killing our beautiful new mobile design because Adsense doesn’t yet support responsive designs.
  3. Sometime in the next few days, I’ll set up a commenting system. I’ve used both Facebook comments and Disqus before. I don’t really have a preference. Do you?
  4. Mostly Political will officially resume a regular posting schedule Monday morning. I’ll most likely reblog posts between now and then, but there won’t be any original content. 
  5. On a personal note, I’d like to thank you all for your patience with me. It’s been a hectic month with classes, finals, graduation, etc. I needed to focus on other things, so I took a little time away from the blog.

See you soon!

23 May 2012   Comments    Permalink
No. The American people don’t want to vote for a loser. They don’t want to vote for someone that hasn’t been successful. I think Mitt Romney has an opportunity to show the American people that they, too, can succeed.

-

John Boehner on Mitt Romney. Yeah John, every American sure can succeed when they’re raised in a ridiculously rich household. Some serious bootstraps self-made man stuff right there.

(via stfuconservatives)

Heh. I think the Speaker may have just supported President Obama. He is the one who truly became a success of his own accord. Governor Romney inherited his money. The President doesn’t come from a wealthy family. If the American people want to see how to make yourself successful, why would they model their aspirations on someone who was born rich and had his way of life handed to him over a man from a single-parent home who worked his way through college, became a best-selling author, Senator, and the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land. 

But, you know, Romney has more money. So he’s obviously more successful. 

29 April 2012   Comments    Permalink

Republican math:

Affordable: $1 TRILLION per year in tax cuts for the rich

Unaffordable: $6 BILLION per year to help millions of students

25 April 2012   Comments    Permalink

Ron Paul - the winner of the Iowa primary*

via Wikipedia:

Of the 620 bills that Paul had sponsored through December 2011, over a period of more than 22 years in Congress, only one had been signed into law – a lifetime success rate of less than 0.3%. The sole measure authored by Paul that was ultimately enacted allowed for a federal customhouse to be sold to a local historic preservation society (H.R. 2121 in 2009).

*for now. Until the Iowa GOP decides someone else wins. Which they tend to do quite often — Paul is the third person to be named winner of that particular primary. And with such a successful record in the House, it’s easy to see why!

24 April 2012   Comments    Permalink
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Mostly Political exists to inform, explain, and facilitate discussion about political issues. Talking heads on television too often over-complicate important issues, making it difficult for everyday people to understand how the decisions made in Washington can fundamentally affect their lives. Mostly Political is designed to explain politics in understandable ways through commentary, political cartoons, and informative videos.

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