Adam Serwer

Phil Mudd is a counterterrorism veteran of both the FBI and the CIA. As such, he’s in a unique position to assess the claims of the administration and the Republican Party that mirandizing a terrorism suspect interferes with the gathering of intelligence or undermines public safety, and to judge whether gathering intelligence is somehow at […]

George W. Bush says he’d waterboard Khalid Sheik Mohammed again if he had to: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I’d do it again to save lives.” We have now both the former president and his vice president on record copping to an act […]

A number of people, including John Cole, Digby and Jesse Taylor have already commented on Powerline’s Scott Johnson engaging in an orgy of tribalism in response to the news that a Turkish-American, Furkan Dogan, was killed by Israeli troops during the raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza this week, but I wanted to add […]

Last week, there was a minor controversy over whether D.C.-based rapper Wale was refusing to perform at the D.C. Black Pride festival, an LGBT event. He said that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that he had no intention of not performing. At the festival, blogger CarlosinDC asked Wale a couple of questions about […]

I can’t tell if Josh Green is making a real point here or just trying to be cheeky: I’m sure someone has thought to point this out already, but Artur Davis‘s calamitous “post-racial” campaign to become Alabama governor was successful if viewed in a certain light. Davis got thumped, obviously, and he won’t be governor. […]

Supporters of Arizona’s draconian immigration law have relied largely on inflammatory rhetoric tying immigration to crime in order to make their case. The measures they take may be drastic, they say, but illegal immigration is causing a public-safety crisis and something had to be done. The empirical data belies this conclusion–not only has the undocumented […]

One of the more irritating conservative talking points during the 2008 election and beyond was the Republican complaint that black voters were only voting for Obama because he was black. In fact black voters were voting for Obama because he was a Democrat (Al Gore and John Kerry both got 90 percent of the black […]

Subbing for Dave Weigel, Aaron Blake gets Sen. Orrin Hatch‘s office to say that a new law proposed by Hatch that would criminalize lying about one’s military service would apply to Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, who lied about serving in Vietnam, but not Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who has a much longer history of embellishing […]

So, having read the ruling, like Shani I think the conservative majority on the Supreme Court had something of a point when they argued that remaining silent isn’t actually enough to show that you intend to remain silent. I’ll explain. In this case, the plaintiff, Van Chester Thompkins, was arrested for his involvement in a […]