Adam Serwer

Early in the Obama administration, conservatives seized on a report on the potential for terrorism conducted by “right-wing extremists” to argue that the administration was planning on criminalizing conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out that state surveillance powers are often subject to abuse, but what conservatives were really saying was that all that state […]

2012 GOP hopeful Herman Cain explains why gays are kosher for his cabinet but Muslims are haram: TP: Mr. Cain, you recently came under fire for your comments about the kind of people you would appoint to your cabinet. Would you be opposed to appointing an openly gay but qualified person to be in your […]

Conor Friedersdorf writes about sex scandals in general, in response to revelations about Rep. Anthony Weiner sending pictures to women online: Meanwhile, there is a significant cost to obsessing over these things. The opportunity cost, for the media, is covering lots of other matters that are actually of greater import to the public, whatever one […]

I have a post up at Greg‘s on the recent kerfluffle over DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz comparing GOP proposals that would make voting more difficult to Jim Crow: But while the analogy was inappropriate, Wasserman-Schultz was absolutely right that Republicans have used their new majorities in statehouses to erect institutional barriers to voting that are […]

Last week, al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn urged sympathizers in the U.S. to pick up a gun at a gun show and go nuts: America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a […]

Winning the war on war. The ends didn’t justify the means. Selective hatred of anonymous sourcing. Trainwreck.

Tim Murphy writes about the political influence of American Muslims in presidential elections: And in that sense, there seems to be some agreement: Beating up on Islam is good for television ratings, but there’s little evidence it’s a successful electoral strategy. Sharron Angle, who once warned [4] that the city of Dearborn, Michigan, was already […]

In 2006, then-Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage discovered that political appointees in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department had dismantled safeguards against politicized hiring and instead of hiring civil rights attorneys, had begun hiring attorneys based on their loyalty to the Republican Party. The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed […]

Last week Attorney General Eric Holder suggested that the sentencing guidelines making the crack-powder cocaine disparity less racist should be retroactive. There’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be–after all the Fair Sentencing Act was an acknowledgement that Congress made a mistake when it treated the drugs so differently. As Chris Cassidy pointed out in […]