John Atcheson
John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, and he has just completed a book on the 2016 elections titled, WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back On Track, available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @john_atcheson
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, September 19, 2017 Still Getting It Wrong: How Media Pundits Keep Steering Democrats into the Shoals In his Monday column at the New York Times , Paul Krugman said: These days, America starts from a baseline of extreme tribalism: 47 or 48 percent of the electorate will vote for any Republican, no matter how terrible, and against any Democrat, no matter how good. This means, in turn, that small... Read more |
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Views Sunday, September 17, 2017 This Is How Change Happens Remember back in the primaries when Hillary Clinton, backed up by a chorus of elite media surrogates, told us how Sanders' proposal for universal health care was pie in the sky? Remember when Paul Krugman wrote a column called "How Change Happens" in which he called Sanders' proposals "happy dreams... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 12, 2017 What Really Happened... And Why It Could Happen Again Hillary Clinton’s new book, entitled What Happened , has been raising quite a brouhaha among Democrats. The general consensus is that most wish she’d just go away, with many saying she’s sapping energy and attention at a time when the party should be forging unity and looking forward. Actually, the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 07, 2017 Democrats Need a Strategy and a Viable Candidate, Not More Excuses Here we go again. Leaked excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming book calls Sanders’ ideas unrealistic and blames him for her loss to Trump. It probably didn’t help that a recent Newsweek article entitled “Bernie Sanders Voters Helped Trump Win and Here’s the Proof” revealed that enough Sanders... Read more |
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Views Monday, September 04, 2017 Harvey, Hell, and High Water Katrina, Sandy, Harvey. Three record-breaking storms in a dozen years. Harvey is a 1,000 year storm, Sandy had the largest diameter of any hurricane on record to strike the US, and Katrina had the largest storm surge ever recorded. Meanwhile, the fire map for California covers the entire state, and... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 24, 2017 The Long Game For Progressives Conservatives navigate using a polestar; Democrats steer by their hood ornament. As a result, conservatives set the agenda, while Democrats respond to it. Worse, conservatives shape polls, and Democrats are shaped by polls. Conservatives have been strategic. Democrats have—at best—been tactical... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 17, 2017 The Road Back from the Brink These are perilous times. At a time when the window of opportunity to avoid the worst—and increasingly, the irrevocable—consequences of climate change is closing, we have an anti-science president and Congress that is already doing its best to usher us into the new Dark Ages. At a time when the... Read more |
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Views Sunday, August 13, 2017 Why Trump Won: Pundits and Press Still Missing the Big Picture CNN’s Fareek Zakaria’s recent explanation for why Trump won has been getting a lot of play. It’s similar to explanations most of the other pundits have been pushing for some time now, and it sets up the Democrats in general and progressives in particular for more loses in the future. The... Read more |
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Views Monday, August 07, 2017 The Great Leap Backwards: Trump's Blueprint To Make America Not Great The Trump administration is doubling down on oil, gas, and coal at a time when the rest of the world is committing to getting off the stuff and investing in renewable energy. Renewable energy, by the way, is the cheapest new source of energy, the cleanest source, and it creates more jobs here at... Read more |
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Views Sunday, July 30, 2017 When Reality Exceeds Satire About 30 years ago, I tried to write a Swiftian satire. Nothing heavy, my target was designer jeans, which had become popular even though they used cheaper, thinner material than old-fashioned Levis, but charged more than 3 or 4 times their price. Did I say popular? Stores couldn’t keep them in... Read more |