Adam Serwer

Bruce Bartlett* looks at Barack Obama and sees Richard Nixon: Thus Obama took office under roughly the same political and economic circumstances that Nixon did in 1968 except in a mirror opposite way. Instead of being forced to manage a slew of new liberal spending programs, as Nixon did, Obama had to cope with a […]

Nan Aron of the Alliance For Justice notes that officially, because judges are retiring faster than Obama is nominating them and the Senate is confirming them, the number of judicial vacancies is higher than it was at the beginning of the year. To make matters worse, there are 115 vacancies (114 at the beginning of […]

Yet more evidence of a sinister Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy afoot: The blinding waves of brown particles, the most recent of which hit Phoenix on Monday, are caused by thunderstorms that emit gusts of wind, roiling the desert landscape. Use of the term “haboob,” which is what such storms have long been called in the Middle […]

Sherrilyn Ifill has an interesting piece up on the Equal Justice Initiative’s new report on the death penalty in Alabama. Unlike other states, Alabama has a policy of judicial override which allows judges to impose the death penalty in cases where the jury has decided on a sentence of life in prison. Delaware and Florida […]

Jacob Silverman, observing that the American superhero genre is largely is highly informed by Jewish history, argues that the problem with today’s superhero blockbusters is that they’ve gotten away from their Heeb roots: Perhaps because their creators were forced to reckon with their sense of identity (Stan Lee and many of his peers anglicized their […]

So Campus Progress has a well done infographic contrasting the deportation numbers in a given month with president Obama’s rhetoric on immigration policy. The administration has said it is focused on deporting undocumented immigrants who are a threat to public safety, but in practice there are far more non-criminal removals than criminal ones: Sandra Khalifa […]

Spencer Ackerman makes an observation that can’t be repeated enough: So I asked Karen Greenberg, director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security to help me out here. According to Karen, if you count dismissals by either the judge or the government, the conviction rate in terrorism cases is 87 percent. If you don’t, the […]

Pew has a fascinating and grim new poll out on how Muslims and Westerners view each other. The poll concludes that “Muslim and Western publics continue to see relations between them as generally bad, with both sides holding negative stereotypes of the other.” Anti-Semitism is also prevalent, as citizens of Muslim countries have particularly negative […]

When then-candidate Rick Scott and the police unions were butting heads over Scott’s plans to reduce prison costs, I pointed out that neither side was particularly sympathetic. The police unions were accusing Scott of wanting to release dangerous criminals and Scott was arguing that forcing inmates to grow their own food was going to save […]

Midway through the Anthony Weiner scandal, folks on the Islamophobic right decided that a Democratic Congressman sending pictures of his penis wasn’t humiliating enough and concluded that Weiner was part of an Islamist plot to take over America, because his wife Huma Abedin is a Muslim. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps worried that their […]