David Atkins

Yet another report has surfaced showing that while employment is picking up, wages remain stubbornly stagnant: Employers in the United States are hiring at a brisk pace. Unemployment has sunk to a nearly healthy rate. Jobs are being filled across a range of industries.Yet the September jobs report released Friday contained a puzzling fact: Paychecks […]

As the media second-guesses American and world leadership at their supposed failure to predict the dramatic rise to power of ISIS, it’s worth remembering just how far we’ve come in the last ten years. It has mostly disappeared down the rabbit hole of history, but President Bush was allegedly unaware of the sectarian split between […]

A couple of new CNN polls showing Democratic incumbents Kay Hagan and Mary Landrieu holding onto narrow Senate leads are the top news among election horse race watchers. The key question is how these Democrats are surviving, even in the South, even with all the headwinds stacked against them. The election model forecasters continue to […]

Ed Kilgore has been writing lately about the Mitt boomlet and the possibility that the GOP could see yet another clown car field of presidential candidates in 2016. Republican leaders obviously hope otherwise. But they’re still married to their wackiest base groups, including most prominently the so-called religious right. And that group just made their […]

It’s almost as if legalization were a no brainer: If a pair of new government forecasts prove true, Washington and Colorado would see more than $800 million in extra revenue over the next few years thanks to marijuana sales. At the least. The estimates, both released in recent days, differ greatly in what they predict […]

I’ve written here before about the growing chorus of concerned pundits that the Millennial generation might not be as progressive as previously assumed. There are two main arguments that attempt to puncture the view of the progressive Millennial: 1) that the experience of a poor economy under a Democratic president will push them to the […]

By the numbers, the left should win most elections. For all the vaunted talk about how many people call themselves “conservatives” versus “liberals”, the fact is that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans, and the mainstream Democratic stance on almost every issue is more popular than the mainstream Republican one. There is, of course, […]

Last night at around 9pm as my wife, my brother and I were in our apartment watching a movie, a large man was prowling around our patio in the dark. We first heard him when he tried to open our sliding glass door. I quickly threw on my shoes, opened the front door and stepped […]

The political landscape is replete with hope that the GOP will find a way to reinvent itself as a more inclusive and more reality-based organization in the future. The Washington Post carried another such piece today. All it’s a question of, say the optimists, is a few tweaks, some rebranding and a minor dose of […]

Remember how the conservative “answer” to rising healthcare costs was supposed to focus on tort reform? About that: Tortt reform,” which is usually billed as the answer to “frivolous malpractice lawsuits,” has been a central plank in the Republican program for healthcare reform for decades. The notion has lived on despite copious evidence that that […]