Adam Serwer

Ben Wittes responds to my post on the implicit limits of the original AUMF: Serwer here cuts to the real crux of the issue–and while this point is present in both the Times editorial and in Daphne Eviatar’s piece, Serwer’s presentation of it crystalized for me the following thought: If one sees the lack of […]

A number of people have tried to make the argument that Dr. Cornel West‘s larger critique outside of his attacks on Obama‘s racial identity were valid. I think this is sort of silly–it’s not like you somehow get a pass on birtherism if they argue the president hasn’t done enough to address unemployment. But more […]

The last couple of days I’ve been writing on the politics of Goodwin Liu‘s nomination to the federal bench over at Greg‘s place, which just failed in the face of a Republican filibuster. The reasons for blocking him are two-fold: As a young, smart and unabashedly liberal lawyer he’s a likely candidate for future vacancies […]

There’s a really interesting discussion going on over on my post on Dr. Cornel West‘s attacks on Barack Obama, but I thought this in particular from commenter Jack Smith about the larger conversation surrounding black authenticity was worth reposting: For mixed people, blackness is not accepted as a fact of existence but something negotiable, a […]

State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh, a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies and a leading expert in international law, took to the Opinio Juris blog to defend the legality of the killing of Osama bin Laden: Given bin Laden’s unquestioned leadership position within al Qaeda and his clear continuing operational role, there […]

The New York Times reports on something that should really be obvious by now–private prisons don’t save money: “There’s a perception that the private sector is always going to do it more efficiently and less costly,” said Russ Van Vleet, a former co-director of the University of Utah Criminal Justice Center. “But there really isn’t […]

America’s Tomorrow. Imperial secrecy. A narcissist clique. Birtherism is finally just a punchline.

Ben Wittes dings The New York Times editorial page for characterizing Rep. Buck McKeon‘s proposal for a new authorization to use military force against al Qaeda and associated forces as making ” the war on terror a permanent and limitless aspect of life on earth.” Notice how this passage injects a temporal and geographic element […]

Reading Isabel Wilkerson‘s the Warmth of Other Suns, her epic history of the Great Migration, I was struck by the section on how social scientists viewed Southern migrants: “With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.” “The inarticulate and […]

The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a really brief report that debunks conspiracy theories regarding the supposed threat of Sharia law to the American Constitution. They do so by dealing with specific cases cited by the Sharia panic crew in order to justify their belief that Muslims are secretly trying to impose Taliban-style Islamic […]