Adam Serwer

James Fallows posts an edifying graph from The New York Times: Look, this is the whole strategy behind “starve the beast.” Run up huge deficits, then blame them on a Democrat and use them as an excuse to eviscerate the social safety net. Until the current administration, though, no one could argue that it was […]

My post at Greg’s today is about right-wing anti-Islam bloggers suddenly discovering the evil of collective blame: Pamela Geller, who along with Professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer has been active in opposing the construction of mosques in the U.S., wrote: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous […]

Notwithstanding the prayer gatherings, Texas Governor Rick Perry has staked out what can be described as a moderate position on the issue of same-sex marriage, saying it should be left up to the states. “Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the […]

Walid Shoebat, a “terrorism expert” with a dubious background who was paid by the U.S. government to train law enforcement in counterterrorism, is frequently cited in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged right-wing terrorist who is accused of killing more than 90 people in Oslo last week. Brevik cites Shoebat more than 15 […]

Scott Lemieux reviews “Hot Coffee,” a documentary that describes how corporate interests leveraged the 1994 Liebeck v McDonald‘s case into a successful movement to curtail civil suits: If tort tales were merely fodder for sitcoms and comedians, the distortions might be harmless. But these tales are often used (and sometimes created) for political purposes. A […]

If you want to see political vindication of the Republican decision to pursue a strategy of racial grievance, portraying Barack Obama as an un-American outsider with a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” you need only look at Pew’s latest analysis in the shift in partisan identification: Notably, the GOP gains have occurred only among white […]

Cornel West offers the New York Times a non-explanation for his complaint that Obama “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart.” It’s in no way an attempt to devalue white or Jewish brothers. It’s an objective fact. In his administration, he’s got a significant number of very smart […]

I don’t have any particular insight on the attacks on government buildings in Norway this morning, but just last week, Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney wrote a piece in the aftermath of a recently foiled terrorist plot that offered some speculation on how and why Norway became a target of Islamic extremists. UPDATE: The suspect […]

Bruce Bartlett* looks at Barack Obama and sees Richard Nixon: Thus Obama took office under roughly the same political and economic circumstances that Nixon did in 1968 except in a mirror opposite way. Instead of being forced to manage a slew of new liberal spending programs, as Nixon did, Obama had to cope with a […]

Nan Aron of the Alliance For Justice notes that officially, because judges are retiring faster than Obama is nominating them and the Senate is confirming them, the number of judicial vacancies is higher than it was at the beginning of the year. To make matters worse, there are 115 vacancies (114 at the beginning of […]