Adam Serwer

Dana Milbank has a nice column on Paul Oetken pointing out that “The remarkable thing about what happened on the Senate floor Monday night was that it was utterly unremarkable.” Oetken is the first openly gay judge to be confirmed to the bench. Eighteen years ago the first openly gay nominee to a Senate-confirmed position, […]

NPR has another story that underscores the urgency of the government investigating the charlatans posing as “terrorism experts” who are indoctrinating law enforcement with Islamophobic paranoia. After a “training session” in which a local Columbus, Omar al-Omari, was identified as someone with ties to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and even al-Qaida,” because he […]

Herman Cain has been unironically arguing that “[o]ur Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” in support of discriminating against American Muslims, but Nick Sementelli points out that he wasn’t always such a fan of the concept, at least not in 2006: Too many Americans are guided and implicitly threatened by the misinterpretations of […]

I’m not a Harry Potter fan myself, but I did see the last movie this weekend and I was struck by how much J.K. Rowling‘s Goblins appear to be modeled after anti-Semitic stereotypes. Aside from being small, miserly, and gifted with large schnozes, Goblins, like medieval Jews, appear to have been forced into a caste […]

Dan Savage defends the ill-advised nature of his mocking of Marcus Bachmann: Gay people who point out how fruity Bachmann is aren’t saying there’s something wrong with being fruity, or gay, or with guys who look, speak, walk, or dance the way Bachmann does. A lot of us look, speak, walk, and dance that way. […]

Matthew Yglesias on Pamela Johnson, who owns a storefront in D.C.’s Northeast H Street corridor and is upset about the streetcar being built: The question is why, exactly, is she upset? According to the article she’s upset because her property tax bill has tripled, which is putting her at risk of losing the building she […]

My latest at Greg‘s place is on Herman Cain‘s insistence that the First Amendment doesn’t protect Muslims: The most pathetic part of Cain’s argument however, is his insistence that “the people in the community know best.” Most people in Tennessee support or are indifferent to the mosque, only 28 percent of those polled last year […]

The New York Times is the latest paper to take a look at Washington, D.C.’s internal divisions, but it stays in the shallow end of the pool: Some of these poorer residents saw revitalization as code for efforts to drive them out, and the building of dog parks and bike and streetcar lanes as efforts […]

Over at Greg‘s today I discuss how Herman Cain, in the grand tradition of Republican politicians jumping into local zoning disputes when Muslims are involved, has declared his opposition to a mosque in Murfreesboro Tennessee, saying the building was “an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion.” A little background: The proposed mosque […]

Alyssa Rosenberg responds to people mocking Marcus Bachmann‘s lisp and implying that he’s gay: One of the funnier inversions of this trope I’ve seen was in Friends With Money where everyone assumed Frances McDormand’s husband was gay even though he wasn’t. Turning stereotypes back on the people who hold them is almost universally funny than […]