Adam Serwer

Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway write about the Obama administration’s failure to even attempt to acquire congressional authorization for military operations in Libya: Since the House of Representatives is out of session this week, Congress can’t approve the operation before the Friday deadline. But under the expedited procedures specified by the act, speedy congressional approval […]

The arrest of IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and possible rival to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on allegations of rape has made it cool to hate France again, particularly after the reaction of French elites to Strauss-Khan’s treatment. Though horrified by those alleged crimes, the French press and political elite on Monday seemed perhaps more scandalized […]

Rick Santorum thinks torture survivor John McCain doesn’t understand how torture works. “Who?” Melissa Harris-Perry on “the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.” Attacks on mosques rise following Osama bin Laden‘s death.

Princeton Professor Cornel West thinks that Obama is afraid of free black men: “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man […]

Yesterday’s AEI panel consisting mostly of former Bush administration officials supportive of torture provided an opportunity for torture defenders to reinforce their unsubstantiated claims about so-called enhanced interrogation playing a large role in locating Osama bin Laden. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen tried to have it both ways, arguing that waterboarding wasn’t torture but that […]

Robert Farley is appalled that Kentucky may soon offer Confederate license plates, in honor of those who betrayed their country so that white people might be able to own blacks as property. Farley points out that Kentuckians mostly fought for the Union, so it’s odd that symbols of the Lost Cause would have resonance. I […]

The Brennan Center issued a letter yesterday in response to the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Jeppesen case making one last-ditch appeal to the Obama administration to facilitate some kind of restitution for Bush-era lawbreaking: If the required referrals have not yet been made, we respectfully request that you now ask the relevant IGs […]

Jack Balkin on demagoguery. Judicial review under review. “[H]ow stupid is it for democratic Israel to adopt the methods of the Arab autocrats in responding to provocation?” How can there be any sin in sincere? Erik Prince, you’re no Indiana Jones.

Apparently author George R.R. Martin received some feedback from viewers of HBO’s Game of Thrones over a scene in which one of the Stark children’s direwolves (Lady, shown above) is killed by Ned Stark as punishment: I don’t know if any of those people are reading my Not A Blog. But in case they are, […]

Why is it, in our supposedly center-right country, conservatives seeking to dismantle the welfare state need to pretend they’re actually preserving it? I thought the American people were just a bunch of rugged individualists seeking to free themselves from the yoke of government assistance thrust on them by crypto-fascist liberals. Apparently it’s not that simple.