Adam Serwer

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is infamous among liberals for his views on race and gay rights, and for being someone GOP presidential hopefuls go to to shore up their social conservative bonafides. The New York Times, reporting on Fischer, shows the limits of faux objectivity: Perhaps most notably, Mr. Fischer trumpets the disputed […]

Tanya Somanader looks at the “Wigger Day” lawsuit: For homecoming in 2009, the student council at Red Wing High School in Red Wing, Minnesota decided to go with a “tropical theme” for the dance. Instead, 60 students at the “predominantly white school” attended homecoming dressed for “Wigger Wednesday,” wearing costumes that “from their perspective” looked […]

In his own mind.

The White House released its strategy for countering violent extremism today, and while the use of that particular phrase may provoke howls of “political correctness” from conservatives, the strategy identifies “al-Qa’ida and its affiliates and adherents represent the preeminent terrorist threat to our country.” The strategy also emphasizes the importance of local actors in resisting […]

Glenn Beck loses his cookies over the idea of a blatino Spider-Man, whom he says “looks just like President Obama.” Beck explains this geek redistributionism by playing a clip of a Michelle Obama quote from 2008(!) saying “Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change […]

Dahlia Lithwick conveys John Yoo’s insistence that torture lead to Osama bin Laden: Take a look at how we were able to kill al-Qaida’s leader this year. How did we get the intelligence for finding Bin Laden’s couriers and ultimately Bin Laden? It was a combination of interrogation methods, sometimes tough or harsh, you can […]

Marie Diamond flags Iowa Representative Steve King’s panic over the possibility that increased access to contraception could lead to the end of America: They’ve called it preventative medicine. Preventative medicine. Well if you applied that preventative medicine universally what you end up with is you’ve prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not […]

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is taking legal advice from Robert Bork, the failed conservative nominee to the Supreme Court who says things like this about the 1964 Civil Rights Act: The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn […]

The trial of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak began today. Mubarak is being tried in Egypt’s regular court system, despite the existence of an alternate, military court system set up by his 1981 emergency law. Unlike the thousands of protesters who have since been tried in the military system, Mubarak will be getting a fair […]