Adam Serwer

The trial of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak began today. Mubarak is being tried in Egypt’s regular court system, despite the existence of an alternate, military court system set up by his 1981 emergency law. Unlike the thousands of protesters who have since been tried in the military system, Mubarak will be getting a fair […]

Ben Smith posts an e-mail from a “senior Democrat” who says liberals have long been fighting an uphill battle ideologically: We didn’t lose this fight, Barack Obama was in law school when this fight was lost. The role of Democrats should not be to convince people that government is great, it should be to help […]

Count me among those who are pretty happy to see Marvel introduce a Blatino Spider-Man: The creation of Miles Morales, a teenager with an African-American father and Hispanic mother, has been personal for his creators. Axel Alonso, Marvel’s editor in chief, is of mixed cultures (his father is Mexican, his mother is British), and Bendis […]

I talked to a bunch of economists and political scientists who say that Obama’s got a tough road to re-election, and he’s likely to lose if the economy doesn’t show some serious signs of improvement: Grim forecasts aside, Obama has two important advantages: He retains levels of base approval higher than presidents facing bad economies […]

Okay, so the express rationale behind the feds suing to block Alabama’s immigration law is that states aren’t allowed to set their own immigration policies. But Alabama’s law, which, like Arizona’s, demands that police check the immigration status of anyone they stop and requires schools to verify the status of students and their parents as […]

Josh Gerstein reports that the Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a suit filed by the Council on American Islamic Relations and the ACLU of Southern California charging that the FBI violated the rights of members of the Muslim community when it used an informant to infiltrate California mosques. The informant, Craig Monteilh, acquired […]

Gallup has a new poll out that sheds some light on American religious views on violence, some of which might be startling. Muslims are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by “an individual person or a small group of persons.” Seventy-eight percent […]

In 2007, the Bush-era Justice Department took action against a black man named Ike Brown in Noxubee County, Mississippi, saying that he had tried to discriminate against white voters in the local Democratic Primary. This became a key exhibit in the right’s accusation, during the uproar over the New Black Panther Case, that the Civil […]

I mostly enjoyed this column by Roger Cohen about his upbringing as a Jew in South Africa, except for this: Hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist. Thanks to my colleague Andrea Elliott, we now know the story of the orchestration of the […]