John Atcheson
John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, and a book on our fractured political landscape entitled, WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back On Track, both available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @john_atcheson
Articles by this author
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Views Wednesday, April 24, 2019 Just How Many Times Are Establishment Democrats Willing to Make the Same Mistakes? The Confederacy of Dunces is at it again. Having failed to learn the lessons of 2016, and hell bent on ignoring the lessons from 2018, they’re doubling down on the same strategy that put Trump in office. And the confederacy runs broad and deep. It includes most of the mainstream media, the... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 15, 2019 Why the US Elected a Despot, and Why It's Poised To Do It Again There’s an emerging conventional wisdom that says the way for Democrats to win in 2020 is to move to the center and pick up some of those centrist votes. This is the perspective being pushed by the neoliberal establishment, the mainstream media, and the bulk of the paid political pundits. There are... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 05, 2019 Hyperbole and Outrage as Substitutes for Thought, Facts, Accuracy and Truth These days you can’t pick up a paper or tune into the news without hearing someone expressing their outrage about something or other and usually it is about as newsworthy as the sun rising in the East. The reason it gets reported is the outrage itself, not the topic. Trump is a master at faux... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 12, 2019 Nobody Likes Trump, But He Could Still Beat a Centrist Democrat in 2020 One of the most stunning numbers in politics is the fact that some 40 percent of those polled still approve of Trump. Pundits, politicians and the media seem to walk around in a state of disbelief that this buffoon retains any support at all. In reality, it’s no mystery. Look, nobody actually likes... Read more |
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Views Sunday, February 24, 2019 "Realists" Are Courting Global Devastation In a recent confrontation with representatives of the Sunrise Movement , Senator Diane Feinstein referred to herself as a “realist” when challenged to support the Green New Deal. She’s not alone. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi referred to the GND as a dream, and nearly every article about it... Read more |
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Views Saturday, February 16, 2019 The Real Danger to the Green New Deal—and the Planet—Comes From Neoliberal Democrats Predictably, Trump came out against the Green New Deal with a bombastic – and ill-informed – rant in a campaign style rally in El Paso. Here’s what he had to say: "I really don't like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane rights, of 'let's hop a train to California,' of... Read more |
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Views Sunday, February 03, 2019 Dear Democrats, Stop Substituting the So-Called "Possible" for What's Morally Necessary In a recent column in the New York Times , David Leonhardt cites a Kaiser survey on Medicare for all, and concludes that supporting it would be an "unforced error" for Democrats. Sherrod Brown, a genuine progressive, made the same observation . Richard Eskow, writing in Common Dreams last week... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 22, 2019 AOC’S 70 Percent Solution Shows US the Progressive Majority Has Been There All Along On several occasions, now, progressive candidates have endorsed the idea that we should tax the rich more, in contrast to the Republicans who have been on a decades long mission to reduce taxes on the rich and corporations. Usually, pundits have reacted as if the progressives had lost their mind to... Read more |
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Views Saturday, January 12, 2019 Why 'Fact-Checking' Gives Liars a Free Pass Look, let’s face it, the press has been enabling Trump in particular and the conservatives in general by the way it has been addressing the blatant lying, deception, misdirection, and other forms of lying. The fact that the controlling party in our country consistently lies to the American people,... Read more |
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Views Sunday, January 06, 2019 With Self-Inflicted Pay-Go Rule, Democratic Victory in 2020 Just Got Harder The day after I wrote this , "… Pelosi, Schumer and Hoyer are doing everything in their power to keep the progressive insurgency in check, and keep their neoliberal/corporate money machine in power," Nancy Pelosi and the neoliberals in Congress committed political harikari and gutted the entire... Read more |