David Atkins

Last weekend at Netroots Nation I was witness to the much-discussed shutdown of the presidential forum by activists associated with BlackLivesMatter. It was a surreal thing to watch play out in real time, and opinions among pundits and netroots veterans are still markedly divided in many ways. While various levels of discontent continue to swirl […]

After the latest mass shooting by an anti-tax, anti-government, anti-feminist arch-conservative in Lafayette, LA, the reactions from Republican politicians were as predictable as they were empty and stale. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal had the usual reaction: Gov. @BobbyJindal: The most important thing people can do now is to pray. Watch CNNgo: http://t.co/HAhU3MmiMf. — CNN Breaking […]

The ugliness in Europe over Greece and the Euro is reaching a breaking point. As Paul Krugman points out, Germany and the troika are making demands that seem to make Grexit the most attractive of a series of increasingly horrible proposals. One of the biggest issues at play is about sovreignty–not just Greek sovereignty, but […]

The always excellent Greg Sargent makes a great point this morning at the Plum Line: Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for the quandary Donald Trump is putting them in. Just as Southern conservatives could have saved themselves from looking like racist neanderthals desperate to keep a symbol of hate and slavery flying […]

This little bit of whining from Lindsey Graham deserves a chuckle or two: In a Fox News interview on Friday, Graham blasted the right-leaning network’s “dumb” rules, which will limit the participants to 10 candidates polling the best in an average of the five most recent national polls. “I think that this is a dumb […]

There’s a new Reuters-Ipsos poll out today showing a statistical tie between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush: GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Donald Trump are locked in a virtual tie for the 2016 Republican nomination, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released Saturday. It found that 16.1 percent of self-identified Republicans back Bush, the former […]

This weekend brings appalling news that a failure in the background check process led Columbia shooter Dylann Roof to make a gun purchase that should have been prevented and flagged as illegal: Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine people at a church in South Carolina three weeks ago, was able to purchase the […]

Those of you who know me at all before I started doing weekends here at Washington Monthly probably recognized me from the years I spent at Digby’s Hullabaloo, or perhaps as “thereisnospoon” at Daily Kos. What you may not know is that I also served as chairman of a Democratic central committee in one of […]

Those of us who are obsessed with politics often fall prey to paying too much attention to what politicians do, and too little attention to what is happening around us culturally. In terms of the Confederate flag debate, that means paying a lot of attention to what Southern governors like Nikki Haley say and do, […]

As Bernie Sanders gains momentum among the Democratic primary electorate, there have been a number of commentators claiming his candidacy constitutes a tea party of left, weakening Hillary Clinton’s appeal to progressives and damaging her general election prospects. It’s an easy conventional wisdom argument to make, especially for the Third Way centrist types who make […]