Adam Serwer

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Matthew Yglesias on Magneto: Given where I’m from, you don’t really have to sell me on this one. I started in on comic books, just about the time shortly after Magneto joined the X-Men, though I’ve never read the books where this actually happened. (What back issues should I be digging […]

It’s hard to compete with former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh moving to the Chamber of Commerce, but former Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons Harley G. Lappin going to work for the Corrections Corporation of America is up there. James Ridgeway reports: Taking advantage of two concurrent 30-year trends–toward mass incarceration and toward privatization […]

House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has announced more Muslim radicalization hearings for next week on “The Threat of Muslim-American Radicalization in U.S. Prisons.” These hearings at least have a more specific focus than his last attempt at examining the subject, but he’s still barking up the wrong tree, since there isn’t a lot of […]

Yesterday was a bad day for government secrecy. As Marcy Wheeler first reported, the prosecution of whistle-blower Thomas Drake over his leaking information about waste and lack of privacy safeguards in the NSA’s surveillance programs fell apart, with Drake agreeing to a plea deal that leaves him guilty of only the misdemeanor charge of “exceeding […]

The prosecution of NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake appears to be faltering. Anthony Weiner‘s constituents appear to want him to stay in office. Leon Panetta is all about the black ops. Rep. Peter King wants more Muslim hearings.

Pew’s chart on how Americans want to cut the deficit, from that poll I mentioned earlier: I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this yet, but most of the proposals that have the most support–taxing the wealthy, winding down military commitments overseas, and raising the contribution cap on Social Security are all things liberals support. Americans’ well […]

J. Christian Adams, the former DoJ lawyer conservatives embraced as a “whistle-blower” after he put forth a number of now-discredited claims about the Justice Department’s handling of the New Black Panther case, has a beef: Roger Simon notes that Greg Sergant’s attack on Andrew Breitbart misses the mark, especially given the New York Times’ checkered […]

I agree with Joshua Green that race will play a role in the next presidential election, but the premise of his column, that Washington is “ignoring” immigration, is really off the mark: As the country still struggles to emerge from recession, the poll indicates, rather ominously, that ideas about how best to do so break […]

If you think the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Plata v. Schwarzenegger implied a court that was growing “soft on crime,” today’s ruling in Sykes v. United States should persuade you otherwise. The decision focused on whether or not Marcus Sykes committed a “violent felony” under Indiana law when he fled from the police, in […]

That’s the premise of my argument over at Greg’s place this morning, that using the conservative media as a barometer for what the actual Republican primary electorate really thinks may give a distorted sense of what those voters actually want: The Republican base has shown itself to be more practical than expected in the past. […]