Adam Serwer

In his homophobic speech to a group of conservative Brooklyn rabbis he’s since apologized for, Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino said, “We must stop pandering to the pornographers and the perverts who seek to target our children and destroy their lives.” In response, Justin Elliot writes, New York news outlets have taken the liberty of […]

No, immigration doesn’t harm the environment. No, immigration doesn’t hurt employment. The story behind Medal of Honor. Frickin’ lasers. Kosher cookies make you Jewish.

Last week Attorney General Eric Holder gave a good speech outlining the administration’s approach to the problem of prisoner re-entry, taking the correct view that a high incarceration and recidivism rate has consequences for society, not just the individual incarcerated. Those who commit crimes aren’t the only ones who lose. In this country, 1 in […]

During the question and answer session following the Brennan Center’s 2010 election briefing on potential voting problems, someone — I didn’t hear who because I was sitting in the back — asked the panelists whether they were paying attention to voter-intimidation problems like the New Black Panther Case in Philadelphia. The panelists responded to the […]

The Brennan Center for Justice held a briefing today at the Press Club identifying what they see as the three main problems they’re expecting with regards to voter disenfranchisement this year: Voter Registration: According to a Harvard/MIT study, three million voters in 2008 were disenfranchised by voter registration problems. There’s also been what panelists described […]

For a few weeks now, conservative commentators have been attacking the Civil Rights Division for supposedly not vigorously enforcing the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE) of 2009, suggesting that because military voters tend to vote Republican, liberal partisans in the division wouldn’t be interested in securing their voting rights. It’s not surprising that […]

This ad attacking Kentucky Republican Senate Candidate Rand Paul for not being a drug warrior is the sort of thing one really hates seeing from the left: The ad features Paul saying, “Things that are nonviolent shouldn’t be against the law,” and cites an AP article in which Paul says drugs aren’t a “pressing issue” […]

Spencer Ackerman writes about the latest issue of al-Qaeda’s magazine. This is pretty outrageous. We’ve always been a center-right nation, even when FDR was winning landslides. Could foreign spending on American elections be legal? Obama really hasn’t touched gun control. The Mean Girls of Morehouse.

Gene Healy has another good column up giving some pretty good reasons to be paranoid about government abuses — namely things like the Guatemalan syphilis experiment — but this conclusion is kind of silly: Listen, I’m a patriotic, nonparanoid American. I don’t lose much sleep worrying that today’s feds are irradiating people and giving them […]

Marcy Wheeler points to an article from Al-Arabiya’s Muna Shikaki, who reports that Osama bin Laden‘s former cook, Ibrahim al-Qosi, who was the fourth person convicted by military commission in the system’s history, has been moved into isolation in defiance of an alleged plea deal and the judge’s recommendations. The Pentagon argues that because al-Qosi […]