Adam Serwer

The folks at the National Security Network asked me to moderate this panel on The Obama Doctrine at Netroots Nation over the weekend featuring Gen. Paul Eaton (ret.), Former Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Larry Korb, and Center for American Progress’ nuclear-proliferation analyst Max Bergmann. We touched on everything from […]

Sure the Pentagon says it’ll take a couple of weeks to sort through the thousands of pages of documents released by Wikileaks, but the Washington Post already knows what the outcome will be: This is one of those moments where the illusion of the media as an impartial player really becomes clear. How people react […]

Affirmative action in the form of legacy admissions doesn’t make anyone angry. Dave Weigel on life in the gray zone. I don’t know that I buy Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan. Happy to see Sara Mayeux blogging at Ta-Nehisi‘s.

So now mainstream Republicans in Congress are latching on to the New Black Panther Party Case, with Senate Republicans pushing for a hearing and House Republicans pushing for a special prosecutor. All for a voter-intimidation case in which zero voters said they were intimidated. Meanwhile, during the Bush years the political leadership at the Civil […]

Via Monica Potts, Adam Liptak puts some numbers behind the idea that we are looking at an incredibly activist conservative court under Justice John Roberts: In its first five years, the Roberts court issued conservative decisions 58 percent of the time. And in the term ending a year ago, the rate rose to 65 percent, […]

There are a number of things about Senator Jim Webb‘s op-ed “The Myth of White Privilege” to dislike, starting with the fact that one of the awesome things about the existence of white privilege is that you can be part of a body like the U.S. Senate, which has a total number of zero elected […]

Around the time of the 2008 election, there was an irritating trend of questioning Barack Obama‘s racial authenticity by arguing that he’s not “really black” because he is not the descendant of African slaves brought to the United States during the Middle Passage. That mostly went away when he started winning an overwhelming share of […]

My apologies for being in Shirley Sherrod overdrive recently, but this piece from Jeffrey Lord nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. After reviewing the Screws case, Lord concludes that Sherrod lied about Sheriff Claude Screws lynching Bobby Hall because he and his colleagues simply beat him to death rather than using a […]

The remarkable thing about the WikiLeaks documents is that they reinforce what we already know about the war in Afghanistan — the lack of a credible partner, the links between Pakistani intelligence and the forces the U.S. is fighting, the difficulty in building the Afghan Army and police. Which means for all the complaints about […]

Will Saletan dismantles the remaining excuses for labeling the NAACP racist based on the Sherrod video. Straight from an institution with exactly zero black elected members, Sen. Jim Webb says white privilege is a “myth.” Joe Biden is very clean and articulate. I would have wanted to take a class on American manga in college, […]