Adam Serwer

Barely half of Americans know what a Quran is according to a new survey from Pew. I wonder what percentage of those people think the president is a Muslim? Only about a quarter of Americans know that Indonesians are Muslim, even though Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, which I guess makes […]

David Cole on Gitmo. Aziz Poonawalla has a map of mosque controversies across the country. Dave Weigel on This American Life. John Cole is History’s Greatest Monster.

Julian Sanchez and Seth Schoen have some initial reactions to the news that the administration will be asking communications companies to design their systems so that it’s easier for the government to eavesdrop on them. The Obama administration is arguing that the current legal wiretapping regime needs to be “updated” (read: expanded) so that the […]

Anderson Cooper questions Renee Ellmers, who is running for office in North Carolina and has inexplicably decided to run an ad against her opponent attacking him over whether or not he supports an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. Ellmers’ argument is essentially that her opponent loves Muslims, and she hates them, which is why […]

Glenn Greenwald has expressed most of my feelings on the Justice Department’s response to the ACLU/CCR lawsuit seeking to enjoin the U.S. from killing extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki without trial. The state-secrets doctrine, though, is only one of the government’s arguments, so I’ll just try to summarize their case here. Standing: The government argues that […]

I’ll be helping Greg Sargent out at The Plum Line for a while. Here’s my first post on whether or not Gen. David Petraeus is “out of control” or whether his treatment by politicians and the media reflects the fact that Americans have more trust for the military as an institution than they do for […]

Apparently the folks at National Review are getting a little taste of what it’s like to be the subject of Tucker Carlson‘s fabulism. Following a series of “scoops” exposing the fact that liberals talk to each other over e-mail, like liberal policies, support liberal politicians, and shoehorned that into a large-scale conspiracy to elect Barack […]

I will be posting on the Obama administration’s filing in the Anwar al-Awlaki case asserting its authority to kill anyone, even an American citizen, suspected of terrorism, but for now I just want to point out who signed the brief: Who is Tony West? He’s the assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the […]

I just want to flag a couple of excerpts from Bob Woodward‘s book giving some inside information on Barack Obama‘s Afghanistan strategy review. On nation-building: Obama rejected the military’s request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. “I’m not doing 10 years,” he told Secretary of Defense Robert […]

A guy who thinks it was OK to purge all of the “crazy libs” out of the voting-rights section of the Justice Department thinks the Civil Rights Division and every civil-rights group in the country is racist.