Adam Serwer

On the heels of the Wall Street Journal article asserting Obama would leave the Bush intelligence team basically in place and the Washington Post article contradicting it, we now have a third perspective on how an Obama Administration might deal with things like “enhanced interrogation”: With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be […]

Yesterday there was a report in the Wall Street Journal asserting that “President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies,” something which could lead to “tension within the Democratic Party.” The article quotes former intelligence official Roger Cressey saying that Obama would take a “very centrist approach to these issues,” […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Perhaps this is where I break with my fellow lefties, I don’t know. But I don’t think people really do things — en mass and maybe even individually — that isn’t in their interest. I don’t believe whites began supporting Civil Rights in the 60s strictly out of an attack of moral conscience […]

I agree with Dana that classism is “ugly” I just see little evidence that it prevents white people from getting jobs. Dana notes that “A person’s class identity is often revealed by their accent, the particular high school or college they graduated from, and their ability to make appropriate cultural references.” Most of the class […]

There’s been a lot of discussion about Lieberman‘s behavior during the election, from suggesting Obama might be a Marxist to accusing him of “not putting country first,” to other assorted incidents in which Lieberman embarrassed himself while shilling for John McCain. But none of those are reasons why Lieberman should lose his chairmanship of the […]

Some people on the right are already having fits over Russian President Medvedev‘s decision to place missiles along the Polish border, after a hostile speech in which he said: “Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egotistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community.” This was a not so veiled […]

Obama‘s secret service name, “Renegade,” is more evidence of his connection to the scurrilous world of Hip-hop. Sure, he may say he wants brothers to pull up their pants, but is that what’s really going on? Consider the lyrics of Jay-Z and Eminem‘s 2001 hit collaboration Renegade:  By the bodega, iron under my coat, feelin […]

You wouldn’t need C-3PO to give you the odds on whether or not Bill Kristol‘s first post-election column would argue that America is a “center-right” country. That he was spooked that getting a puppy would make Obama more “empathetic” after polls showing that most people think that Obama understands their problems is just indicative of […]

People always want to find really simple explanations for things, and often this takes the place of pinpointing one pop-culture phenomenon and attributing massive influence to it. So we have people speculating whether the Cosby Show helped Obama get elected. Why stop there? Why not Jimmy Smitts on The West Wing? Or Dennis Haysbert on […]