Adam Serwer

WaPo Obudsman Patrick Pexton defends Jennifer Rubin: But when an attack happens elsewhere, whether Oslo, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, Mumbai or London, U.S. pundits and politicians climb on their electronic soapboxes and denounce the act as one more evil deed by the enemy we most love to hate, be it militant Muslims, or in Oslo’s case, […]

Here’s another (less well known) popular interpretation of the McDonald’s Coffee Case, which involves Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim poking fun at the racial caricature of Super-Friends’ Apache Chief: This is actually a really funny episode, whose major target is the well-intentioned but patronizing attempt to diversify the Super-Friends lineup, but it’s another reminder of how […]

One of the reasons I’ve argued that the Shariah-panic crowd is not responsible for the massacre in Norway is that, despite their vitriol, their justifications largely center on arguments for curtailing Muslim rights, not for slaughtering people wholesale. That’s noxious, but it’s very different from religious extremists concocting religious justifications for terrorism, or even anti-choice […]

The New York Times profile of the Shariah-panic industry’s favorite lawyer, David Yerushalmi, is a stellar example of how newspapers aggregate other people’s reporting without giving them credit. I frankly don’t know if this is the fault of the piece’s editors or of the reporter, Andrea Elliott, but Yerushalmi’s role in crafting anti-Muslim legislation was […]

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a sobering analysis of al-Qaeda’s strategy for exploiting popular discontent in the wake of the Arab Spring: We haven’t seen Islamic law implemented or a caliphate established, of course, but al Qaeda probably sees a more fertile recruiting environment. The Arab Spring is not just about the desire for democracy. It is […]

Matthew Yglesias writes about something I thought about often during the health-care debate: Something interesting is that it was during the Roosevelt era that African-Americans in started voting Democratic in large numbers. So even though the Democratic civil rights agenda of the era was puny and the welfare state was deliberately exclusionary of black interests, […]

I talk debt ceiling, Obama’s poor negotiation skills, and gay rights with Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward: One thing I forgot to mention: Shariah panic seems fringy, and if it really were just Herman Cain, it might not be a problem worth worrying about. But the Homeland Security Committee chairman is at least a partial believer.

Chris Simms ponders the relationship between Batman and Superman, the “World’s Finest Friendship.” Stories where Batman rails against Superman for being able to fly above it all and have bullets bounce of his chest while sitting in his billion-dollar stealth jet, nestled snugly in his kevlar armor, both of which were prepared for the evening […]

The debt ceiling is dominating national media coverage right now, but the arrest of Private Naser Jason Abdo on suspicion of planning a second attack on Fort Hood is going to become focus in the next few weeks. In the aftermath of Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage that killed 13 people in 2009, Republicans argued that […]

Eli Lake writes that the Republican foreign-policy consensus has collapsed, but I’m actually not so sure it has. As the last paragraph of his piece suggests, it’s merely shifted from the ideological clarity of neoconservatism to a far more … flexible principle: And so, it’s hard to know for sure how Perry or anyone else […]