Jonathan Weiler

On Tuesday, May 8, North Carolina's voters will decide the fate of Amendment One, an amendment to the state constitution that makes marriage between a man and a woman the only valid "domestic legal union" in the state. Its supporters insist that all the amendment does is ensure that North...

"Psychological projection" -- a psychological defense mechanism whereby one "projects" one's own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else.

Projection has become the Republican Party's signature mode of attack. On a host of issues, including the "war on women," Medicare, "class warfare" and more, the GOP's...

It's not so much the policy prescriptions in Tom Friedman's column today that are so irksome. Yes, there is the ongoing deficit fetishism, the necessary dues one pays to be a card carrying member of respectable elitedom. The real problem with today's column -- a call for re-thinking...

Olympia Snowe's surprising retirement announcement has set off yet another round of handwringing about the polarized state of our political system. And as predictable as the laments about why we can't find more common ground is the almost universal presumption in the mainstream media that both sides are equally responsible...

A particularly insidious linguistic habit in American political discourse is to label as "tough" any right wing position, no matter the context. For instance, you can work diligently to avoid serving your country during a time of war, but if you are a warmonger who advocates bombing other countries at...

Two weeks ago, Kobe Bryant passed former teammate Shaquille O'Neal for fifth place on the NBA's all-time scoring list. The milestone prompted lots of discussion about who is the greatest Laker of all time, with Kobe's place in franchise history being mooted alongside Magic, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Kareem and...

The long New York Times story on Sunday about opponents of government handouts living off of those handouts has generated plenty of discussion, including renewed attention to the fact that red states tend to be net recipients of government aid, while blue states tend to be net contributors....

On May 8, 2012, North Carolina voters will consider Amendment 1, a ballot proposition that would inscribe a ban on same-sex marriage in the North Carolina Constitution. The key clause of the amendment asserts that marriage "between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall...

It hasn't been a good week for Mitt Romney. He fell on his face during last week's debates in South Carolina and ended up losing that state's primaries. He has become the focus of even his own party's ire for his extraordinary wealth and privilege. He picked a particularly bad...

The very strong reaction to NY Times' public editor Arthur Brisbane's ill-considered question about whether the New York Times should act as a "truth vigliante" (yes, it does sound Onion-esque) was a welcome one, reflective of a changing journalistic landscape in which the gatekeeper...

A persistent GOP line of attack against President Obama is that he's inflicted an intolerable "regulatory burden" on American businesses. Mitt Romney, for instance, has been telling campaign crowds that the Obama administration has issued four times as much regulation as past presidents. This claim is false. According...

In his column in today's Washington Post, George Will made the following extraordinary -- if unwitting -- statement about potential GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney: "Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from 'data' ... Has conservatism come so far,...

Occupy Wall Street is a nascent phenomenon, whose future relevance to American politics, if any, is unknown. But it's already served as a useful window into the psychology of much of our gatekeeper media. In a better world, our leading media outlets would act as gadflies to the powerful. In...

I have no special insight into the Troy Davis case. I only know what has been repeated far and wide -- that there was no physical evidence tying Davis to the murder scene; that the murder weapon was never found; that Davis was convicted based more or less exclusively on...

Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece for Grantland argued that there was a faulty premise in popular discussions of the current NBA lockout. According to Gladwell, the faulty premise in discussions of the NBA lockout is that owners are losing money and, as businessmen, need to change the model because...

Last December, when Obama and the Democrats acceded to Republican demands to extend all of the Bush tax cuts for two years in exchange for other concessions, the president described the Republicans as engaging in "hostage-taking." President Obama said:

"I've said before that I felt that the middle...

The current high stakes political standoff over the debt ceiling and America's budget deficit is a fraud. At the end of 2010, President Obama and the Democrats caved in to GOP demands to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years. Had those cuts expired on schedule, the projected...

False premises and shoddy analysis were on full display on the New York Times' front screen overnight. Carl Hulse's article, "In Fiscal Fight, G.O.P. Distrust of Obama Runs Deep" is not news reporting or analysis so much as an abdication of both.

Here's the deck:

"Congressional Republicans seem...

We've said before that a general presumption exists whereby intact families are always better for kids than families of divorce. There are understandable reasons for this widespread view. Divorce often accompanies a range of challenges and problems, including a drop in living standards, the disruption of existing family rhythms and...

There's been lots of commentary about Chris Wallace's FOX news interview Sunday with Jon Stewart, particularly the back and forth about Stewart's shifting temperament during the interview and the way in which it was edited down for broadcast.

But I wanted to mention two points to highlight Wallace's...