As has been widely reported, earlier this week New York Republican Congressman Peter King called for the prosecution of Glenn Greenwald, in response to Greenwald's role in bringing to light the sensational charges by former NSA employee Edward Snowden about pervasive government surveillance programs. King insisted on Fox News that...

The all-too-frequent failure of political media to report accurately and with appropriate context is an ongoing disaster for our country. Among the adverse consequences of this failure is that political media aid and abet Republican extremism by softening its razor sharp edges and by bending over backwards to lend it...

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh lamented that if only Tim Tebow were gay (as opposed to avowed in his faith), he would be able to land a job with an NFL franchise, a dig, of course, at the media attention that Jason Collins has received (though later Limbaugh said that even being...

There has been lots of justified criticism of President Obama's budget proposal last week, which includes cuts to Social Security benefits by introducing chained CPI, a measure of inflation that results in slower increases in cost of living benefits for various government programs, including Social Security. The administration and its...

By now, millions of people have seen the video tape compilation of Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice shoving his players and hurling balls and verbal abuse (including homophobic slurs) at them during practices from 2010-2012. That tape, originally presented to Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti in November, resulted in...

Of all the ridiculousness currently pervading D.C. political coverage, nothing is more mind numbing than the attempts to evaluate Obama's "charm offensive." Though the politicos and CNNs of the world prattle on as if there is something in Obama's behavior, tone of voice or whatever that might "break the fever"...

Alan Dershowitz is at the center of a controversy at Brooklyn College about a panel discussion Thursday featuring two supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli occupation -- the Palestinian activist and scholar Omar Barghouti and the American philosopher, Judith Butler.

Dershowitz has written...

The polarization that has characterized American politics over the past two decades has been driven primarily by a sorting process. As examined in detail in the book I co-wrote with Marc Hetherington, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into the Democratic or Republican...

Big-time sports in the United States has long been propelled by the myth-making of those who cover the enterprise. Sports media have been lionizing extraordinary athletic virtue since sports became a profit-making venture in this country in the latter half of the 19th century. But the last generation or so...

A range of critics has emerged to challenge the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be President Obama's next Secretary of Defense. Their attacks have mostly centered on Hagel's supposedly "fringe" ideas about Iran -- he has voiced support for negotiating with that country -- and for his alleged hostility toward...

30,000 Americans die by guns each year. Of course, people die in other ways, too. But that's no reason not to focus on one particularly significant source of preventable death in America. The number of people killed on 9/11 is dwarfed *every* year by flu fatalities....

Speaker Boehner's angry response to the White House's opening gambit in the budget negotiations related to the so-called fiscal cliff provides a useful opportunity to remind folks that the GOP should have zero credibility on deficit reduction. Boehner claims that the Democrats proposal is not serious and is a bad-faith...

It has been the stuff of legend for years now -- an interview that canonized GOP political consultant Lee Atwater gave while he was working in the Reagan White House in 1981. In that sit-down, Atwater explained how the Republican Party had so successfully executed the "Southern Strategy" of convincing...

Last year, when talk of our presumptively unsustainable deficits was on nearly everyone's lips, it was more or less a given that we had to reduce federal outgo relative to inflow. Of course, substantial disagreement existed between Democrats and Republicans on how to achieve that reduction. But at the time...

Among the most egregious ways in which the media's insistence on false equivalency between the two political parties manifests itself is in voting itself. There is simply no Democratic equivalent of the varied and repeated and Republican attempts to suppress likely Democratic voters, especially minorities. McCain campaign adviser

So says Rick Perlstein, the great historian of modern conservatism. In a recent essay, Perlstein traces the origins of modern movement conservatism to the direct mail and grass roots work of such right-wing icons as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, who cracked the code of how to reach...

In June of 2011, during a Republican debate, Mitt Romney was asked how he would deal with disaster relief. This was in the immediate aftermath of the tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, killing at least 124 people. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was running out of money...

The final frantic weeks of a Presidential election turn politics into something like the fortnight leading up to the Super Bowl, with breathless 24/7 analysis picking over the most excruciating minutiae, swelling TV audiences and ratings and a sense that every American has some stake in the outcome.

Of...

There has been a steadily growing drumbeat in recent weeks about the looming "fiscal cliff." Unless Congress and the President agree otherwise, automatic spending cuts and tax increases -- agreed upon during the 2011 deficit standoff -- are supposed to take effect in January. Major media outlets and politicians have...

For anyone who's been paying attention, it's long been obvious that Paul Ryan is a political fraud. Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait have been on the case longer than most, noting since Ryan's initial emergence as the Republicans' go-to guy on all things budgetary that his numbers don't...