David Atkins

I usually write analytical pieces for my weekend stints here at the Political Animal, but this one time I’d like to share a personal story of racism in America from my experiences of the past few days. Conservatives like to pretend that racism is dead in America, but that’s largely because in conservative areas racism […]

In an otherwise well-argued piece about the demographic and ideological difficulties faced by the Conservative Party in Britain, Washington Post columnist Dan Balz reiterated the following bit of false conventional Village wisdom: The other obstacle turned out to be the economic problems and big budget deficits Cameron inherited from the last Labor government. Those realities […]

Among the numerous outrages of the proposed Republican budgets including privatizing Medicare and Social Security and slashing food stamps, comes this more minor but still appalling development: The House and Senate Republican budget plan announced this week would continue hits on government workers, as expected, with cuts that could lighten their wallets by up to […]

When the Federal Elections Commission chair says that her department is “worse than dysfunctional,” that there will not be any enforcement of the rules, and other commissioners say that no one obeys the few rules that are left, it seems that should raise more than a few alarm bells, no? The chairwoman of the Federal […]

Shortly after the indictments dropped against the police officers allegedly responsible for killing Freddie Gray, a number of conservative blowhards from Sean Hannity to Alan Dershowitz have shared their outrage of the supposed injustice of it all. But the most hilarious case involves Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke who compared it to the Duke Lacrosse […]

While I am a reliable and often radical progressive in most respects, I must admit that there are some shibboleths of the left that make me scratch my head. The most important of these is the insistence that we can somehow go back to the economy of the 1960s but without all the prejudice (we […]

As with so much else in modern America, the experience of Ferguson and Baltimore has turned police brutality into a partisan issue. With a few rare exceptions, Democrats and progressives tend to fall on the side of the victims of discriminatory and violent behavior by police, while conservatives tend to go to bat for the […]

Story #1: Originally slated to cost $233 billion, the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program could end up being costing more than $1.5 trillion. Which might not be so bad if the super-sophisticated next-generation jet fighter lives up to its hype. A recent report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation paints […]

Joel Kotkin over the The Daily Beast has scribbled out the millionth version of the “California is Dying” article–a genre of conservative wishful thinking that turns out to be hilariously wrong every time it is written. For years the story was that California would become the next Greece: hopelessly in debt, unable to pay its […]

There’s a been a minor maelstrom over the Tea Party leader and conservative video blogger who speculated that he might vote for Hillary Clinton because the Affordable Care Act allows him to retire at 50, as opposed to keeping on working until he gets Medicare: The man himself has (for now) walked it back saying […]