Adam Serwer

Michael Isikoff at Newsweek reports that the Obama people are considering a 9/11 style torture commission, in lieu of any actual prosecutions: Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But […]

Pastor Amos Brown of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco is also president of the local branch of the NAACP. Tonight he’s holding an NAACP fundraiser, only many other ministers won’t be attending. They are angry at Pastor Amos over his opposition to Prop 8: Rochelle Metcalfe, a former writer for a local African […]

Glenn Greenwald unloads on Obama for potentially considering John Brennan for Director of the CIA or National Intelligence: To appoint someone as CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence who was one of George Tenet‘s closest aides when The Dark Side of the last eight years was conceived and implemented, and who, to this day, […]

Brief evaluations of possible Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s record have shown him to be pro-civil liberties, anti-torture and anti-extraordinary rendition. Conservatives have brought up two fairly lame objections: The first faults Holder for the pardoning of Marc Rich, as though it was his decision, while the second is the claim that, because Holder previously […]

Some conservatives had a really hard time watching John McCain lose. That’s okay. Liberals, after losing two elections to George W. Bush, can relate. But some people are having a harder time coping than others. For example, before the election, Bill O’Reilly was clinging desperately to the faint hope that every poll showing Obama ahead […]

Michael Kinsley needs to retain his reputation has a witty contrarian, so today he has a column arguing that we should all stop being so uptight about whether or not Obama is smoking and just let him have a toke. In fact, Kinsley assumes that Obama is smoking mad jacks anyway: Now, I have been […]

From National Review, Shelby Steele can’t let it go: Everywhere I went on my book tour, young people would come up. “We’re beyond your generation,” they would tell me. “We grew up differently than you did.” No, I tell them, you didn’t. You did not. You are now obsessed with race. Race is the only […]

Mike Huckabee on The View, offers his reasons why gays haven’t crossed “the civil rights threshold.” HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked […]

Al Qaeda plays a little identity politics: In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama‘s victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect, along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, “house negroes.” Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term “abeed al-beit,” which literally translates as “house slaves.” But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that […]

Whatever one makes of conflicting media reports regarding the Obama Administration’s likely position on torture, if Michael Isikoff is correct in reporting that Eric Holder will be the new Attorney General it’s probably a good sign that Obama really does intend to abandon the Bush torture policy. Via Spencer Ackerman, Mark Halperin provides a release […]