Adam Serwer

New York Gov. David Paterson has terrible approval ratings, he is mired in a domestic violence and cover-up scandal involving one of his aides, and he’s just generally considered a failure as a governor. But for civil libertarians concerned about criminal justice issues, he’s really come through. Today he will be signing a bill prohibiting […]

The decision to drop two defendants from the New Black Panther case and focus solely against the individual who held the baton has been presented as proof positive that the Obama administration is racist. Rush Limbaugh claims that Eric Holder and Barack Obama “continue to protect and represent” the New Black Panther Party and that […]

Jay Bybee, the former Bush-era head of the Office of Legal Counsel who helped craft the legal justifications for torture, admitted that some interrogators went beyond the guidelines laid out in the torture memos, reports Jason Leopold: Bybee, whose responses to questions appears to be an attempt to absolve himself of culpability, told House Judiciary […]

So today Politico published a piece about how the White House is really disdainful of liberal bloggers for not celebrating the administration’s successes or being understanding enough about the political circumstances that led to their losses. The piece quotes exactly one “top Obama adviser” anonymously who supports this claim. Ironically, most of the advisers quoted […]

Yesterday I attended an event on domestic radicalization at the Center for American Progress which was co-hosted by the National Security Network that featured administration officials, a leader from a Muslim organization, a former NYPD commissioner and LAPD chief, and an academic who has studied domestic radicalization. It was the first such event I’d attended […]

Juan Williams calmly rebuts Megyn Kelly‘s insistence that the New Black Panther Case reflects a policy of not pursuing cases with white victims and black defendants, even pointing out that the likely motivation for this entire scandal is payback for the politicized hiring and enforcement scandal at the DoJ under Bush. I think what’s most […]

I’m generally skeptical of old school racial pageantry, and I think there are far more pressing issues for the NAACP to be dealing with at a time when the unemployment rate in the black community is more than 15%. So when I heard about the NAACP passing a resolution calling on the Tea Party to […]

Race is a really bad way to identify candidates who will look out for your interests. Tea Partiers find a way to justify the NAACP’s resolution condemning them for racism. Conservatives accidentally make the case for stimulus. The top 10 countries with the highest incarceration rates. Guess who’s on top?

Via Elise Foley comes another myth-busting graph from the pro-immigration group America’s Voice Online, which shows that crime has gone up drastically in Maricopa County while dropping in the rest of Arizona despite (because of?) the draconian anti-immigrant policies of its conservative celebrity sheriff, Joe Arpaio: Jack Harris, the police chief in Phoenix, where crime […]

Dave Weigel on Megyn Kelly‘s trumpeting of the New Black Panther Party case as evidence the Justice Department under Obama is racist: So why obsess over the Panthers? Is it turnabout for the way that liberals elevate the craziest tea party activists, or the way they call them racist? Because it’s obviously not a search […]