Adam Serwer

Maybe you heard that the Obama administration has been engaged in a large, unaccountable, covert shadow war against terrorist groups using special forces and armed drones. Perhaps you’ve heard about its vastly expanded targeted killing program and the civilian casualties associated with it, or the administration’s embrace of broad surveillance powers the president once promised […]

Texas Governor Rick Perry hasn’t even officially entered the race yet, but per Ben Smith he appears to be the neocon candidate of choice just based on whom he’s taking advice from: Perry’s aides have been tight-lipped about the gathering, which National Review reported included former Rumsfeld aides Doug Feith, Daniel Fata, and William Luti, […]

Jeffrey Goldberg writes about how horrified Israel’s American Christian right supporters would be if they actually knew anything the country as it actually exists: I’ve met evangelical leaders who share an unpleasant tic with Israel’s critics on the far left: They all hold Israel to an impossible standard of moral and political behavior. To much […]

Igor Volsky posts a video from today’s Senate hearing on legislation repealing the Defense of Marriage Act in which Senator Al Franken dresses down Tom Minnery from Focus on the Family after the latter fudged the results of a study to suggest that same-sex families were detrimental to children: Not that this necessarily makes one […]

J.M. Berger notes that when terrorist plotters team up, they usually fail, but the social nature of Islamic extremism makes lone wolves hard to come by: Every single homegrown plot against the U.S. since September 11 that involved more than one person has failed, most often because law enforcement caught wind of it. Nevertheless, homegrown […]

I’ve written a lot about the detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act restricting the ability of the executive branch to try suspected terrorists in civilian court and mandating military detention even in the case of domestic arrests. In their letter to the president, a group of Republican committee chairs lets the cat out […]

Right-wing Israelis are protesting the arrest of two rabbis who supported the King’s Torah, a book that seeks to exempt nonbelievers from religious prohibitions against killing: Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King’s Torah – written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It justifies killing non-Jews, including those not […]

Matthew Yglesias deputizes Ta-Nehisi Coates as a member of the Republican Party: That makes perfect sense. But I do think it’s worth saying that the alternative being put on the table here is a conservative one, and the mere fact that the successful investor who doesn’t like high property tax rates is black doesn’t change […]

Andrew Sullivan literally groans at my liberal political correctness on the Marcus Bachmann gay jokes: Groan. Look: as Dan notes, some things just cannot be ignored. When a brutal homophobe sounds and looks like a parody of a big old queen, suppressing that fact becomes close to impossible. I stand by the Corky St Clair […]

Over at Greg‘s I take on Michele Bachmann‘s attack on the Pigford Settlement in light of the subsidies her own family farm has received. Dana Goldstein rebuts a story in the Daily Caller that implies Bachmann’s migraines might stop her from being an effective president. >Many famous, high-achieving people have been migraine sufferers, including Ulysses […]