David Atkins

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of the stream it’s hard to know just how fast the current is flowing. That’s as true of the flow of history as it is the flow of water. Journalism and punditry have been undergoing such an overwhelming number of changes since the days of Hearst’s yellow tabloids that […]

Since my last post on the GOP presidential race two weeks ago, my longstanding prediction that the Republican establishment would lose the election continues to be panning out as we head into a holiday season in which poll numbers traditionally fail to shift. The biggest change in the past few weeks is that Ben Carson’s […]

If you haven’t seen tonight’s address from President Obama yet, it’s worth watching. He explains the Administration’s strategy to defeat ISIS, the need for effective gun control as a matter of national security, and calls out Republicans for their Islamophobia.

With news of Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the Republican Party presidential primary and the disturbing victory of France’s far-right party in today’s local elections, it’s time to admit that fascism has been rising in a slow crescendo both here and overseas among a significant and growing minority of the population. It’s no surprise. Combine […]

Despite the overwhelming news focus of late on guns and terrorism in the wake of the terrorism in Paris, at Planned Parenthood and in San Bernardino, the fact remains that the greatest threat to the human race isn’t the backwards actions of misogynist religious conservatives, but climate change. Sadly, the blood and barbarism of medieval […]

Pro-gun advocates like to say that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” The policy upshot of that philosophy is to deny the agency of the gun itself in gun violence, while deflecting responsibility for gun killings to the individual perpetrator and to a myriad of other social factors from religion to mental illness. We can […]

At least since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, politicians and intelligence professionals have been focused on stopping the sort of spectacular catastrophic attacks that Al Qaeda has made its trademark. That’s for a good reason: catastrophic attacks not only kill in great numbers, but they also have the potential to cause serious economic and psychological […]

Back in October I wrote that the the activist left spends far too much of its time and energy on protest, petition and visibility campaigns and far too little on nuts-and-bolts electoral organizing. I provided our failure to enact commonsense gun control as an object lesson: the public broadly supports gun control, but the NRA […]

The fact that Republicans in the Senate have just voted to deny healthcare to women by defunding Planned Parenthood while allowing individuals on the terrorist watch list to continue to buy guns should give us pause. In particular it should cause us to evaluate the conventions by which we analyze what sort of political statements […]

As we close out another weekend, I figured I would share what I believe to be the most glorious piece of film music never actually used (so far as I know) in a film: Blackheart by Two Steps from Hell. Enjoy and talk amongst yourselves!