Adam Serwer

Spencer Ackerman and Gregg Carlstrom both have interesting thoughts on this Mark Perry piece, which includes a “Red Team” group of intelligence officers in CENTCOM engaging in a strategic exercise in which they make pretty clear distinctions between groups like Hamas and Hezbollah on the one hand, and al-Qaeda on the other: Among its other […]

I know I’m in the minority here, but Elena Kagan‘s confirmation hearing has been the most substantive and interesting since the Clinton administration. The last three confirmation hearings have been marred by disingenuousness — whether it was John Roberts with his facile “balls and strikes” metaphor, Samuel Alito playing up his empathy for immigrants, or […]

Conservatives have been trashing the so-called “empathy standard” for a while now, but mostly because President Obama said he wanted a judge with the ability to “empathize” with individual people whom would be affected by their rulings. I’ve written before that conservatives aren’t so much opposed to empathy as much as they’re opposed with who […]

Wonder Woman gets a new uniform. Need to overturn a legal precedent? Sprinkle some Brown on it. The Last Airbender is going to suck. The Haqqanis and al-Qaeda. Tom Periello wants to be re-elected. The ACLU announces its plans to challenge the no-fly list. Day three is over.

When journalistic conventions of evenhandedness get involved. Glenn Greenwald points to a study from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard showing that news outlets referred to waterboarding as “torture” in stories in which other countries used the technique but not in stories when the U.S. government used it (jpeg of chart borrowed from Kevin Drum): […]

My old colleague at the Columbia School of Journalism, Adam Weinstein, has a great piece up at Mother Jones looking at the military witnesses the GOP has called to the Kagan hearings. A taste: There’s also Flagg Youngblood, a Yale grad who has complained on the talk-show circuit about the unjust hardship of attending ROTC […]

Yesterday I went on The Ed Show, which is being guest hosted this week by The Nation‘s Chris Hayes (who is doing a really incredible job) opposite the terribly smart Reihan Salam of National Review, discussing financial reform and Social Security. I’m assuming at some point this week they’ll call Tim Fernholz on to discuss […]

An independent review panel put together by the Cambridge police to examine the incident last year in which Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his own home for disorderly conduct by Sgt. James Crowley is complete: The situation at Gates’ home quickly escalated when it shouldn’t have, according to the review put […]

The conventional wisdom is that the Elena Kagan hearings are a bit of a snoozefest. People complain that the process is useless because nominees refuse to disclose how they might rule on particular cases. In fact, in terms of divining Kagan’s legal philosophy, the hearings have been quite instructive. Kagan has been rather forthcoming about […]

Mike Konczal writes, contrary to what I said earlier this week, that there’s “one last battle to be fought” on guns: A friend on the hill forwarded me the following. Supported by the NRA, Rep John Boccieri (D-OH) is pushing to allow firearms to be exempt from bankruptcy: “In those states that allow a debtor […]