Adam Serwer

I’m obviously not an expert on the debate occurring over the debt ceiling, but I know enough to know that raising the debt ceiling has nothing to do with cutting spending. During last night’s speech, House Speaker John Boehner repeated a whopper that is becoming a standard part of Republican talking points on the issue: […]

Alyssa Rosenberg argues that Captain America: The First Avenger lacks any acknowledgement of Armed Forces segregation because The Avengers is about “institutional optimism.” I’m not buying it. Not just because these kinds of issues have been ably handled in the comics, but the most recent Avengers storylines have been conflicts about institutional corruption, from Civil […]

Goodwin Liu, whose nomination to the federal bench was blocked by Senate Republicans, has been nominated by California Governor Jerry Brown to the Supreme Court of California. So what does that mean for Liu fans hoping to see him elevated to the Supreme Court? Well, experience on a state supreme court is probably better than […]

President Obama’s speech to the National Council of La Raza yesterday began, oddly enough on the deficit, but later he went on to defend his position on not instituting a formal policy of “deferred action” for undocumented immigrants who might be eligible for the DREAM Act should it pass: THE PRESIDENT: Believe me — believe […]

Keith Humphreys writes about how the legalization of marijuana might impact Americans’ cultural relationship with the drug: For millions of Americans, the word “marijuana” is hard-wired to the part of their brain that divides the human population into those who went to Woodstock and those who went to Viet Nam. The peculiar result is a […]

Roger Cohen tries to compare alleged Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik to Jared Lee Loughner: On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly murderous psychotic loner: the 32-year-old mama’s boy with no contact with his father, obsessed by video […]

Hitler!* *Okay, technically by himself, but whatever.

In the vein of what Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to as a “convenient suspension of disbelief” in X-Men First Class, Captain America: First Avenger dutifully ignores the civil-rights struggles of the 1940s. Well, not exactly — where X-Men simply didn’t mention the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, Captain America: First Avenger pretends segregation didn’t exist in […]

In case you’re wondering who Pam Geller, one of the anti-Muslim bloggers cited in the manifesto of alleged Oslo shooter Anders Behring Breivik, sees as responsible for the shootings: This whole exercise is ridiculous. Anders Behring Breivik is responsible for his actions. If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists. If anything incited […]

James Fallows posts an edifying graph from The New York Times: Look, this is the whole strategy behind “starve the beast.” Run up huge deficits, then blame them on a Democrat and use them as an excuse to eviscerate the social safety net. Until the current administration, though, no one could argue that it was […]