Adam Serwer

Today we were treated to the truly surreal spectacle of the media reporting that John McCain would suspend his campaign to work on the bailout bill, but only after he made his high-profile appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative conference. And yet, despite McCain’s claim that the economic crisis was so urgent that it required […]

It’s important to understand that the real target of the students at George Fox University who hung Barack Obama in effigy is not actually Obama, but the black students who attend school there. A sign was hung around the effigy reading “Act Six reject,” a reference to the school’s scholarship program for minority students. The […]

This post has been edited from its original version. John McCain‘s latest effort to ensure that the campaign becomes a narrative of his personal heroism, rather than a referendum on the issues, is to “suspend” campaigning and postpone Friday’s debate ostensibly to deal with the economic crisis. This is like a student caught cheating who […]

This is a very serious Rush Limbaugh post. This is not a post where I’m going to mention his incredible girth, or the odd circumstances in which he was caught coming home from one of the world’s most infamous sex tourism destinations with an illegal viagra prescription. I’m not going to talk about his being […]

At an event last night, Karl Rove had this to say about Sarah Palin: A Toronto businessman asked him if he thought Sarah Palin would make a good President. “I don’t know,” said Rove. Noted. –A. Serwer

According to CNN, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to Troy Davis two hours before he was scheduled to be executed. A petition to the SCOTUS for a new trial for Davis is pending. Just to reiterate, Davis was convicted of killing Georgia Police Officer Mark MacPhail. Since Davis’ original trial, seven of […]

I have mad respect for Prometheus 6, who Liza Sabater accurately described as “the godfather of the black blogosphere,” and who threw me one of my first links back when I was a rookie blogger. P6 didn’t like my recent piece on Obama‘s fatherhood agenda because: The American Prospect is the DLC organ that has […]

This post has been edited for clarity. John McCain has made a really big deal about Obama‘s associations with Fannie Mae, accusing Obama of being “square in the middle” of Washington’s “culture of lobbying and influence peddling.” Of course, with 83 lobbyists on his campaign with ties to the finance industry running his campaign, no […]

This post has been edited from its original version. Republican 527s are running racist ads in Michigan, with the intent of exploiting racial anxiety to the benefit of John McCain. One links Senator Barack Obama to the former mayor of Detroit, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, an African-American whose political career unraveled in scandal. The other features […]

Speaking with WIRED, comics writer Ed Brubaker ruminates on the political identity of Captain America. I think what makes Captain America work in the modern age isn’t so much him reflecting where America’s at, but in showing where it should be. In my series, I’ve had Cap quote Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine and Dwight Eisenhower, […]