Adam Serwer

My post at Greg’s today is about right-wing anti-Islam bloggers suddenly discovering the evil of collective blame: Pamela Geller, who along with Professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer has been active in opposing the construction of mosques in the U.S., wrote: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous […]

Pam Geller is pleading for understanding in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Oslo, allegedly perpetrated by a right-wing anti-Muslim extremist named Anders Behring Breivik. Geller, alongside other American anti-Islam bloggers such as Robert Spencer, is favorably quoted in Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto. Libelblogger Charles Johnson is claiming that the Norway shooter is a […]

Notwithstanding the prayer gatherings, Texas Governor Rick Perry has staked out what can be described as a moderate position on the issue of same-sex marriage, saying it should be left up to the states. “Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the […]

Walid Shoebat, a “terrorism expert” with a dubious background who was paid by the U.S. government to train law enforcement in counterterrorism, is frequently cited in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged right-wing terrorist who is accused of killing more than 90 people in Oslo last week. Brevik cites Shoebat more than 15 […]

Scott Lemieux reviews “Hot Coffee,” a documentary that describes how corporate interests leveraged the 1994 Liebeck v McDonald‘s case into a successful movement to curtail civil suits: If tort tales were merely fodder for sitcoms and comedians, the distortions might be harmless. But these tales are often used (and sometimes created) for political purposes. A […]

Walter Russell Mead has a really silly post today on the results of Newsweek‘s rankings of the top public schools in the country: The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: The very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states. Three of the nation’s ten best public high […]

President Barack Obama said today he had ruled out the idea of using the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling: Mr. Obama for the first time addressed — and ruled out — the idea that the Constitution empowers a president to increase the debt limit to prevent default and, as he put it, “basically […]

If you want to see political vindication of the Republican decision to pursue a strategy of racial grievance, portraying Barack Obama as an un-American outsider with a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” you need only look at Pew’s latest analysis in the shift in partisan identification: Notably, the GOP gains have occurred only among white […]

Cornel West offers the New York Times a non-explanation for his complaint that Obama “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart.” It’s in no way an attempt to devalue white or Jewish brothers. It’s an objective fact. In his administration, he’s got a significant number of very smart […]

I don’t have any particular insight on the attacks on government buildings in Norway this morning, but just last week, Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney wrote a piece in the aftermath of a recently foiled terrorist plot that offered some speculation on how and why Norway became a target of Islamic extremists. UPDATE: The suspect […]