David Atkins

If there was a shred of remotely reasonable rationale for doubting climate change, it was the apparent stalling of the record heat increases over the last decade. With 2013 undeniably the hottest year on record, even that shred of doubt has been eliminated. A report from the Climate Council of Australia confirms the obvious: A […]

Republican legislatures in state after state, from Tennessee to Wyoming, are rejecting the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act for no other reason than pure spite against poor people: On Friday, the Wyoming Senate shot down Gov. Matt Mead’s expansion plan, and a House committee then pulled its bill. The double whammy effectively killed […]

Remember when Sam Brownback promised that his storied pay-for-themselves tax cuts wouldn’t force cuts to education? Some of us do. His vaunted tax cuts were supposed to be a test of whether the Laffer Curve’s inflection point was lower than Kansas’ tax rate. It turns out, of course, that it wasn’t. Now, rather than repeal […]

The newly re-energized Obama Administration is making another bold executive move, this time to protect the Arctic: The Obama administration will propose setting aside more than 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, the White House announced Sunday, halting any chance of oil exploration for now in the refuge’s much-fought-over coastal […]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s snub of President Obama at John Boehner’s invitation is all the rage in Washington these days–and not in a good way. Even Fox News commentators lambasted both Republicans and Netanyahu not only for the transparent campaign ploy for his re-election, but also for breaking the protocols of Washington decorum. Politico […]

This week we saw that almost half of the United States Senate doesn’t believe in man-made climate change. Not surprisingly, every single Senator who voted against the amendment affirming that humans are primarily responsible for climate change is a Republican. Only a handful of Republican Senators voted alongside their Democratic colleagues on behalf of basic […]

One of the reasons it’s difficult for liberals to easily and effectively win arguments about economics with conservatives is that conservatives have a very simple mantra: let the natural forces of the market do their work. Government is seen as an interloper and distorter of Darwinian forces that would otherwise ultimately let all goods and […]

Greg Sargent has a good recap detailing a variety of public opinion work showing that while President Obama’s State of the Union proposals are quite popular, much of the public isn’t necessarily sold on how we should do it: However, as Gallup also notes: “far fewer Americans expressed the relevant combination of views to be […]

Mike Huckabee sounds like quite the Ayatollah wannabe: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said during an appearance Thursday on a Christian television show that he’s thinking about running for President to help the nation know where laws come from: God. “We cannot survive as a republic if we do not become, once again, a […]

Paul Blumenthal has a compelling piece today at Huffington Post about the flight of financial sector money away from the Democratic Party potentially enabling a greater degree of Democratic economic populism: In the last two elections, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Democratic Party committees and candidates saw their share of contributions […]