Paul, generally I like the clean and professional look. For a political blog that’s just fine.
Anyway I was wondering who the targeted audience of your site is. The order of the widgets suggests that you are awaiting mostly subscribers who will log into your blog when visiting the site.
If this isn’t the case I would reorganize the widgets. What should come first are widgets useful to the broadest audience of your blog like “Recent Posts” and “Search”. “User Menu” – although very conveniently placed for your own purposes – should go to the very bottom. In case you do not expect visitors to log into your blog, I would suggest to go without the “User Menu” widget at all.
The foto of you is nice but without an link to the “About” section pretty much meaningless – especially for a political blog. In terms of significance I would place the foto at least in the rightmost column.
Remember in case someone is using a resolution of 800×600 (probably with a PDA), she will only see your first widget columns. Therefore widgets like “Search” and other important stuff should be placed there.
I am using Firefox with a resolution of 1280×1024 and for my taste the text is to dense. It’s kind of hard to read and a bit distracting to see such a huge amount of text. I would suggest to have it 1 or 2 points bigger – at least for the main content.
