Adam Serwer

Obama should not have given McCain any credit on torture. McCain flip-flopped on the issue and voted against a ban on waterboarding. –A. Serwer

This is obviously a pre-thought of line, and it’s working very well. McCain’s laundry list of credentials wasn’t as effective, but I think he drew a meaningful contrast over the issue of empathizing with the troops. Obama doesn’t seem to have a similar message, despite all the hype about “erratic” this afternoon, which is too […]

Obama needs to figure out how to do something other than agree with his opponent. –A. Serwer

McCain told his bear story, and set up his earmark hit against Senator Obama, blaming earmarks for the financial crisis. The candidates got into a back and forth over earmarks and government spending, but the fact is that this has nothing to do with the collapse on Wall Street. This is however, where McCain feels […]

Via Ben Smith and Bob Barnett, the debate format: The debate, he said, will be split into nine nine-minute segments. The first four minutes of each will be taken up with a question to each of the candidates; the remaining five minutes will take different forms, up to the moderator, Jim Lehrer’s discretion, and one […]

Via Glenn Greenwald, on National Review Online, Mark Krikorian posts a press release from the recently collapsed Washington Mutual touting the diversity of their staff and asks “Cause and Effect?” as if to say that the bank’s demise was caused by having an excessively diverse work force. Which raises a couple of questions. Is it […]

In one of my first pieces for TAP, I tried to explain the cultural and political forces between the arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate. The New York Times obliges with another example of the double standard set merely because of race. However forceful and passionate Mr. Obama […]

Charles Krauthammer does his best to make respectable the conservative argument that the Community Reinvestment Act, which encourages federally insured banks and thrifts to lend money to poor and minority communities, is responsible for the credit crisis. For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter‘s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use […]

One of the strangest things about the past two weeks is the complete absence of the president. I don’t solely mean in terms of him making his presence known during a crisis, I mean that in the midst of discussing the credit crisis, we all seem to be talking around him. It’s as if he […]

Many people think Jews are good with money. They think that even if they don’t actually think that Jews are greedy or evil, or even if they find this quality terribly impressive. Take Tommy Thompson who, while speaking to a group of Jewish activists last year, memorably said that “earning money is sort of part […]