Adam Serwer

Tim Lee makes a great point about selective moralizing about violations of immigration law: The same point applies to immigration law. Obviously, we ought to enact sane immigration laws that make it easy for people like Jose Vargas to get a green card. But given that we haven’t done that, it’s a good thing—both for […]

I was kind of shocked to see Matthew Yglesias write yesterday, in response to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas outing himself as an undocumented immigrant, that “undocumented people could in principle force their way onto the agenda if there was enough will and organization.” The larger context of Vargas’ piece was that potential […]

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jose Antonio Vargas‘ moving story revealing his status as an undocumented immigrant has provoked a lot of debate about American immigration policy. Vargas was brought to the United States from the Philippines when he was twelve, and only discovered he wasn’t a citizen when he went for a driver’s license. The […]

So apparently the new hotness in Republican circles is accusing the president of having created a “stealth DREAM Act” in the form of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that suggests immigration authorities focus on deporting criminals instead of pregnant moms or college students. This is from the Daily Caller on Friday: “The factors are […]

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still attempting to exploit the arrest of two suspected terrorists in Kentucky to push for the use of the military commissions system to try Muslim terror suspects apprehended in the United States. In a Washington Post op-ed, McConnell offers an argument that takes Attorney General Eric Holder‘s remarks about […]

Pivoting off a paper by Patrick Johnston and Anoop Sarbahi, Erica Chenoweth tries to provide a clear answer to the question of whether or not the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan has measurably reduced the ability of terrorists to execute attacks: Using WITS data on terrorist attacks, they basically find that drone […]

The past few days, I’ve been writing at Greg‘s place about the validity of Jon Stewart’s criticisms of Fox News. The fact-checking website Politfact weighed in yesterday, citing a series of public-knowledge surveys showing that on questions of basic knowledge, Fox News viewers scored well within the average. Politfact thus ruled Stewart’s contention that Fox […]

Jeff Spross offers the best defense of Game of Thrones‘ Ned Stark that I’ve seen, arguing that his adherence to principle is based not on stupidity, but on the recognition that treachery offers no more guarantee of success: Honor begins with the understanding of all this. Ned’s moral lines emerge out of ideology and principle, […]

Dahlia Lithwick concisely explains something I was trying to get at in my post on Wal-Mart v. Dukes yesterday: Scalia concludes that (even in advance of a lawsuit) the women could not show that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” That’s partly because “Wal-Mart’s announced policy forbid sex discrimination” and partly because he […]

Stephanie Mencimer writes that Tea Party activist Mark Meckler is convinced that Playwright David Mamet became a conservative because of the Tea Party Movement: But Meckler also found evidence of the tea party’s influence in Mamet’s new book, which the tea party leader had been reading on the airplane en route to DC for the […]