Adam Serwer

I didn’t write about this last week because this part of Brandon Garrett‘s series on why the innocent get convicted deserved its own post. Garret notes that “All but two of the 40 DNA exonerees who falsely confessed were said to have confessed in detail.” The only way to accurately document who says what during […]

Last week the president issued a signing statement that indicated he would abide by the congressional ban on funds for transfers of Gitmo detainees to the U.S. for trial, even though he said it “undermines our Nation’s counterterrorism efforts and has the potential to harm our national security.” He also said he would refuse to […]

When Abraham Lincoln tried to “gentrify” D.C. Rising Democratic opposition to Obama‘s deficit plan. Putin‘s dark side. The war on contraception. Politics is supposed to be a clash of visions.

This afternoon, the Center for American Progress hosted an event with Tariq Ramadan, Matt Duss, Hussein Ibish, and Brian Katulis focusing on the future of democratic movements in the Middle East. Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was banned from the United States by the Bush administration for spurious reasons. Because of […]

So, because I know you’re not sick of Game of Thrones nerdtime, my piece on GoT as the liberal’s alternative to the Lord of The Rings‘ manichean universe (adapted from my blog post a few months ago) is up. The point is not that the books are actually liberal, since didactic art is boring, but […]

The Jewish Defense League, the terrorist group founded by extremist Meir Kahane, threatened Tupac Shakur and Eazy E before their deaths as part of an extortion scheme, according to recently released FBI files: “On September 11, 1996 [redacted] reported that JDL, and others yet unidentified have been extorting money from various rap music stars via […]

France’s veil ban went into effect this week, and there’s been a lot of discussion over whether a veil ban infringes on personal liberty or enhances it. As Samhita Mukhopadhyay notes, however, few of those have involved debates between actual Muslim women, so good for CNN for hosting this exchange between Mona Eltahawy and Hebah […]

Benjy Sarlin has an excellent piece explaining that, because Rep. Paul Ryan‘s budget proposal eliminates the Affordable Care Act and it’s ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, those Medicare vouchers are going to become fairly useless in short order: Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that millions of young and healthy Americans purchase […]

J. Christian Adams, the DoJ “whistle-blower” whose accusations of racial bias at the Justice Department were thoroughly discredited by the investigation done by the Office of Professional Responsibility, continues to inadvertently advertise how well the Civil Rights Division is now being run and how politicized the division was when he was chosen. In a piece […]

Daniel Fried, the special envoy for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, testified before a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on Gitmo “recidivism” this week. Here’s what he said in response to a question about the outcomes of detainee transfers. We have found that governments have put in a […]