Tag Archives: civil

This GOP Candidate Questions Whether the Civil War Should Have Been Fought

by ManuelaRuth Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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The most important congressional primary on Tuesday wasn’t House Speaker Paul Ryan’s cakewalk in Wisconsin. It was in neighboring Minnesota’s 2nd District, where Republicans are scrambling to retain the seat held by retiring Rep. John Kline. Their new nominee: Jason Lewis, a talk radio host who founded an Ayn Rand social network and has a history of making inflammatory comments about slavery and women.

Republicans had fought hard to nominate someone other than Lewis in the swing district, which voted narrowly for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Kline backed Lewis’ Republican opponent, businesswoman Darlene Miller. But Lewis won the district GOP’s endorsement and cruised past Miller by nearly 20 points, setting up a November showdown with Democrat Angie Craig. The suburban Minneapolis district is a must-win for Democrats hoping to take back the House, a goal that would require flipping 30 seats currently held by Republicans. That’s a long shot right now. But it becomes a bit likelier when the GOP fields controversial candidates like Lewis in swing districts.

Lewis’ past comments have been a gold mine for critics. In his 2011 book, Power Divided Is Power Checked: The Argument for States’ Rights, he questioned the wisdom of the Civil War, arguing that it had been fought over states rights, not slavery, and changed the nation’s constitutional framework for the worse. In his book, he proposed a constitutional amendment that would help restore what he believed had been lost, by allowing any state to peaceably leave the Union. And in a 2011 interview, Lewis declined to say whether the Civil War should have been fought, suggesting, as he had in the book, that there were better alternatives to ending slavery that President Abraham Lincoln could have considered.

Lewis has also taken heat for comments he made about women on his radio show. Many of the old episodes have been taken down from his website, but in a segment after the 2012 election that was unearthed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Lewis went off on “ignorant” voters who he believed had sold their votes for free birth control. “You’ve got a vast majority of young single women who couldn’t explain to you what GDP means,” he said on his radio show in 2012. “You know what they care about? They care about abortion. They care about abortion and gay marriage. They care about The View. They are non-thinking.”

He added, “I never thought in my lifetime where you’d have so many single, or I should say, yeah, single women who would vote on the issue of somebody else buying their diaphragm. This is a country in crisis. Those women are ignorant in, I mean, the most generic way. I don’t mean that to be a pejorative. They are simply ignorant of the important issues in life. Somebody’s got to educate them.”

And in another 2012 segment, he said the “white population” of the United States was “committing cultural suicide” by not having more kids. “Other communities are having three, four, five, six kids—gee, guess what happens after a while, folks?”

Lewis has kept busy outside of the talk radio arena. Two years ago, he launched a new online community called Galt.io, which describes itself as “a members-only network of makers inspired by ‘Galt’s Gulch’ from Ayn Rand’s classic novel ‘Atlas Shrugged.'” Galt.io members earn “Galtcoins” for participating in the community and can “invest” them in different causes on the site, in order to promote various political agendas. According to the site, “Galt.io is part stock exchange, part social network and truly a society of people committed to changing the direction of our country.”

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This GOP Candidate Questions Whether the Civil War Should Have Been Fought

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Should We Allow Nonprofits to Endorse Candidates?

by TheodorBurrough Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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I work for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so I’m keenly aware that I’m not allowed to endorse candidates. That mean y’all will just have to guess who I’m voting for in November. I apologize for having to keep you in such suspense.

Until recently, though, I had no idea why non-profits weren’t allowed to endorse candidates. Then I began hearing about the “Johnson Amendment” from Donald Trump. Obviously someone put a bug in his ear, and he’s been repeating it like a mantra for weeks now. So what’s this all about?

The “Johnson Amendment,” as the 1954 law is often called, is a U.S. tax code rule preventing tax-exempt organizations, such as churches and educational institutions, from endorsing political candidates. At the time, then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson was running for re-election, and he and other members of Congress pushed the amendment to stop support for their political opponents’ campaigns, George Washington University law professor Robert Tuttle has explained. Many have also argued the amendment served to stop black churches from organizing to support the civil rights movement.

“All section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” the IRS explains of the rule on its website. “Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.”

There you go. So why has Trump suddenly decided this is a threat to democracy? You can probably guess: because conservative churches want to endorse Republican candidates and give them lots of money without losing their tax-exempt status. Jerry Falwell Jr. explains:

In recent years, religious liberty group the Alliance Defending Freedom has advocated for its repeal, arguing that the law is unconstitutional and lets the IRS “tell pastors what they can and cannot preach,” and “aims to censor your sermon.”…“This is something that could make a difference with Christian voters in the fall,” Falwell says. “It is almost as important for Christians as the appointment of Supreme Court justices.”

My first thought about this is that it would provide yet another avenue for big money in politics. I can imagine rich donors setting up, say, the Church of the Divine Supply Siders and then funneling millions of dollars in dark money through it. Fun!

On the other hand, in a world of Super PACs and Citizens United, why bother? They can already do this easily enough, just as churches can set up “action committees” that are legally separate and can endorse away.

I’d genuinely like to hear more about this. Within whatever framework of campaign finance law we happen to have, is there any special reason that nonprofits shouldn’t be able to endorse, organize, and spend money on behalf of a candidate? I have to admit that no really good reason comes to mind. Am I missing something?

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Should We Allow Nonprofits to Endorse Candidates?

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

by ChantePuig9156 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Thursday night, at least one sniper in Dallas opened fire near a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, killing five police officers and injuring seven others. The shooting marks the deadliest attack on law enforcement in the United States since 9/11. While there has been an outpouring of grief and anger on social media, some high-profile individuals—including a former congressman and a veteran policy adviser to Republican leaders—stirred threats of violence and impending “war” against the Black Lives Matter movement.

From former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, in a post that has since been deleted:

Twitter

More from Walsh:

From Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and radio show host:

From Frank Gaffney, president of the right-leaning Center for Security Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz:

The New York Post‘s front page declared “Civil War”—which quickly drew a fierce backlash.

On his radio show today, right-wing host Rush Limbaugh called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist group committing hate crimes”:

The full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks: “I found a story from March, I think, of 2015, in which President Obama welcomed two founders of Black Lives Matter to the White House and commemorated them and their efforts and praised them as being better organizers than he is. And… Black Lives Matter was just exactly who they are then as who they are today. They’re a terrorist group. They’re quickly becoming a terrorist group committing hate crimes.”

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

by ingutihre Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just before President Barack Obama announced his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, making her the first Latina justice, he said he wanted to choose someone with life experience that provided “a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” On Monday, she put that perspective to work in a fiery dissent in a case involving a potentially illegal police stop, excoriating her colleagues for misunderstanding the police harassment to which people of color are regularly subjected.

“Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language,” Sotomayor, the child of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in the Bronx, wrote to readers of her dissent, to which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also signed on. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”

The case being decided, Utah v. Strieff, has spanned a decade since an anonymous tip in 2006 about alleged drug activity in a South Salt Lake City residence led officer Douglas Fackrell to spend a week surveilling people entering and exiting the house. One day, after watching Edward Strieff visit the house, Fackrell followed him to a convenience store across the street and demanded to know what he’d been doing there. He also asked Strieff for his ID; after running a check on it, learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic violation, so he arrested him. During his search, Fackrell found meth and drug paraphernalia on Strieff, who was ultimately charged with illegal possession.

At trial, even the prosecutor conceded that Fackrell’s stop of Strieff was illegal, because he had no reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity to justify requesting his ID. But the state asked the judge to allow the drug evidence anyway, arguing that the outstanding arrest warrant merited the search. The trial court allowed the drug evidence to be introduced, and as a result Strieff pleaded guilty to lesser charges, but reserved his right to challenge the search in court. That was a smart move, as the Utah Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor and found that the drug evidence, tainted by the illegal stop, should never have been admitted into court.

But on Monday, the US Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision, overturned the Utah high court on the grounds that Fackrell’s conduct was a mistake, “negligent” behavior that shouldn’t lead to the exclusion of the drug evidence. “There is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. (The decision came on a day when the court was buzzing with erroneous rumors that Thomas was considering retiring.) The majority found Fackrell’s conduct mostly harmless and inconsequential, justified by the existence of the outstanding traffic warrant and hardly part of a larger pattern of misconduct.

Sotomayor disagreed vehemently, arguing that the majority, which included liberal Justice Stephen Breyer alongside the court’s conservatives, had stripped Strieff’s case of its context. “Respectfully,” she writes in her dissent, “nothing about this case is isolated.”

Sotomayor cited a list of sources that Black Lives Matter activists would cheer: Michelle Alexander and her book The New Jim Crow; Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me; and the Justice Department Civil Rights Division’s report on the problems with excessive warrants in Ferguson, Missouri, a city of 21,000 where 16,000 people (including non-residents) had outstanding warrants.

Her point was to show that outstanding warrants are so common, and so widely abused, that they should never be used to justify illegal stops by police. At the time of Strieff’s arrest, she noted, Salt Lake City had a backlog of 180,000 outstanding misdemeanor warrants, so many that it was at risk of getting in trouble with the Justice Department. She cited statistics showing law enforcement’s frequent use of warrants to stop all sorts of people for no good reason, writing, “Surely we would not allow officers to warrant-check random joggers, dog walkers, and lemonade vendors just to ensure they pose no threat to anyone else.”

Sotomayor argued that Fackrell stopped Strieff illegally as part of a drug investigation, knowing that the odds were decent that his target would have an outstanding warrant for something. The Fourth Amendment and decades of Supreme Court precedent, she said, should have caused the fruits of that illegal stop to been thrown out. She reminded her colleagues of the real-world consequences of such “good-faith mistakes,” as the majority called Fackrell’s actions, describing the indignities inflicted upon people arrested after these sorts of stops: body cavity searches, handcuffing, public humiliation, and a permanent arrest record, among others.

Monday was not the first time Sotomayor has reminded her colleagues about how the real word works. In oral arguments in a death penalty case last fall, she referred to her own jailed relatives to highlight racism in jury selection.

Sotomayor concluded with a reference to Eric Garner, the New York man who was choked to death by police who were harassing him on suspicion of selling single cigarettes. “We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,'” she wrote. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere… They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

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The Director of HBO’s "All the Way" Talks LBJ, MLK, and What They Can Teach Today’s Pols

by GitaBuckner Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s an age-old question: how to balance principle and compromise. In All the Way, the new HBO film based on the play by Robert Schenkkan and directed by Jay Roach (Game Change, Recount, Trumbo, Austin Powers), the star attraction is Bryan Cranston’s masterful portrayal of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the year after JFK’s assassination, as LBJ lied, wheedled, and bullied his way to passing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then won the presidential election of that year. Cranston’s transformation into a man brimming with brio and confidence and also profoundly burdened with anxiety, insecurity, and paranoia is one of the best cinematic depictions ever of an American president. (Move over, Daniel Day-Lewis). But the true beauty and power of the film is its engaging exploration of the inelegant (if not often ugly) nexus of politics and policy. In All the Way, Johnson is a pathological prevaricator who personally betrays his closest political allies (who happen to be southern Democrats and racists)—but it’s all for the greater good of ending segregation. And it works. But there’s a high political price: in the film’s telling, Johnson has doomed his party in the South. (Indeed, Richard Nixon would capture the White House four years later, partly due to his “Southern strategy” of exploiting white resentment and racism.) And, of course, on the other side of the ledger, Johnson’s conniving conduct sunk the nation deeper into the bloody tragedy of Vietnam—and the film notes how that mighty mistake overshadowed his significant accomplishments. Yet All the Way ultimately chronicles a moment when good was achieved—but by a greatly flawed man using dishonest means. That’s what makes the whole damn thing so fascinating.

I talked to Roach about how he turned Schenkkan’s much-acclaimed Broadway play into this gripping political morality tale, which premieres on the cable network on May 21.

Mother Jones: You’ve directed films about modern politics, as well as the Austin Powers movies. But more recently, you’ve gone back in time. You directed Trumbo and now All The Way. What drew you to the LBJ project?

Jay Roach: I saw Robert Schenkkan’s great play on Broadway, while Bryan and I were prepping for Trumbo. Steven Spielberg and HBO reached out to me to see if I wanted to direct the adaptation. I said yes immediately, then realized I was committing to back-to-back projects with Bryan without knowing if Trumbo was going to work out. Could have been awkward. Thank goodness, it wasn’t.

It’s always about story for me. I was drawn in by the incredible predicament LBJ finds himself in in November 1963. He’d wanted to be president his whole life, but after JFK’s assassination, LBJ becomes the “accidental president.” He knows he is perceived as the usurper. However, rather than just consolidate power to win the 1964 election, he chooses to pick up Kennedy’s agenda and immediately joins up with Dr. Martin Luther King and takes on one of the most controversial pieces of legislation he could have prioritized, the Civil Rights Act. In doing so, he lost the support of the South, which he thought he needed to get reelected. I think this proves how sincere he was about civil rights.

MJ: The film looks at politics at a time when segregation was legal and Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill were the obstructionists trying to block civil rights. What about this is relevant today?

JR: Because of the horrible history of Vietnam, most people forget how much was accomplished during LBJ’s term. He worked closely with Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders, and also with representatives and senators from both parties, to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That helped protect the rights of minorities and women, and it is still being used today to protect the rights of gay and transgender people. And then LBJ passed the Voting Rights act of 1965, re-enfranchising millions of Americans who had been frozen out of the democratic process. He also passed other crucial legislation that improved the quality of life for millions of Americans for generations: Medicare, Medicaid, and 60 separate pieces of legislation funding public education, including Head Start. He pushed through major funding bills for transportation, immigration reform, the environment, and the arts (which led to funding for PBS, NPR, and the American Film Institute).

It’s incredibly encouraging to remember that when we elect presidents and representatives who believe that government can work to improve the lives of citizens, we can actually accomplish much for Americans. In those early years, Johnson did put the country first—above party and above personal advancement—and he solved problems.

MJ: In the movie, Johnson is depicted as a man who could be full of confidence and simultaneously riddled with deep insecurity, paranoia, self-loathing, and anxiety. How did that affect his ability to be a leader? Did that make him a difficult character for Cranston to play?

JR: Johnson was an incredibly capable leader, but he was also deeply flawed. After JFK, he knew how he would be perceived—as the usurper from Texas, doomed to perpetual comparison to President Kennedy. And he was to some extent innately anxious, restless, insecure, even self-pitying. You can hear all that in the many phone calls recorded when he was in office. That was part of the attraction for Bryan in taking on this part. Complex characters are what every actor prefers. Directors, too. For both of us, this was an opportunity to tell a story that goes behind the history—to the psychology of the man, possibly even to the heart and soul of the man.

MJ: Johnson did whatever it took to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. He lied. He cut deals. He compromised. Are there any lessons here for President Barack Obama or other modern-day politicians?

JR: I can only hope the film becomes part of the conversation about what is needed for great leadership, what is required to solve problems for citizens and to raise us up as Americans. For LBJ and for Dr. King—and for the legislators from both sides that they worked with—compromise was not a dirty word. Those who remained inflexible— the segregationists—lost their battles. They were too dogmatic to keep up with history. I hope that for those people who continue to resist the full application of civil rights for every person in our country, this is a cautionary tale.

MJ: My teenage daughter saw the movie with me. Afterward, she asked, “Why does everyone today say John Kennedy was a great president and no one knows much about Johnson?” As you made this film, did you think that Johnson has been shortchanged in popular culture and public history? Might that because of Vietnam and because he essentially left the presidency under a cloud by withdrawing from the 1968 race?

JR: When we look back in time, it’s hard to see through the horrors of Vietnam, which were to some extent rightly pinned on LBJ, It’s tough to recognize and remember all of LBJ’s incredible accomplishments, all the hundreds of important pieces of legislation he was able to pass by working with both sides, throughout his administration. It didn’t help him, either, to be sandwiched between JFK and Nixon in the national timeline.

MJ: In All the Way, Cranston is physically transformed into LBJ. Was that necessary for the movie to succeed? You did not do the same with Anthony Mackie, who played Martin Luther King Jr. and who played him in what might be regarded as an understated fashion?

JR: I work to give every actor what he or she needs to fully interpret a historical character, to feel like the character when he or she walks out on the set. Bryan’s transformation worked for him, and it works beautifully for the story. But Anthony and I talked at great length, and we decided not to try to impersonate Dr. King. Instead, we wanted to channel the essence of the man, especially as he might have come across when he was hammering out political strategy in rooms with the other civil rights leaders. Dr. King is so iconic. We all know what a great speaker he was. And we present some of that, but we also learned, as we watched tapes of his interviews, that he was incredibly strong and calm and quietly powerful in rooms when he was out of the public eye and collaborating with others.

MJ: Bobby Kennedy is a looming presence in this movie, yet he does not appear as a character. What led you to keep him off-stage?

JR: In the play, Robert Schenkkan made the choice to keep Robert Kennedy off-stage to serve as a sort of exaggerated figure of fear for LBJ—a combination of real and imagined threat. (LBJ worried constantly that RFK would step in and run for president, eliminating Johnson’s ability to rise above being the “accidental president.” ) It was an expressionistic choice, but not a big reach. RFK remained attorney general after JFK’s assassination, but he was not that active in the civil rights fights. He was running for Senate, and LBJ helped him campaign, but that story wasn’t so relevant regarding the fight for civil rights.

MJ: You’ve now worked with Bryan Cranston on two projects. What can you tell us about him that fans of Breaking Bad and his films may not know?

JR: I’ve worked with Bryan in two very serious roles, but it turns out he’s an extremely funny man. Between takes while we were shooting All the Way, he would sometimes stay in character as LBJ. This was not for any “method acting” reasons, but so he could harass us all in hilariously aggressive ways, using LBJ’s larger than life “Texas Twists,” his Texas accent, and his pre-sexual-harassment-law political incorrectness. Throw in Bradley Whitford who plays the role of Sen. Hubert Humphrey doing a fantastic and fully inappropriate imitation of Bill Clinton, and Frank Langella who plays Sen. Richard Russell doing his Nixon, and you had a pretty funny Oval Office experience between takes. The Three Amigos of the presidency. They were walking around the set, talking about the pluses and minuses of secretly recording calls and conversations in the Oval Office.

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The Director of HBO’s "All the Way" Talks LBJ, MLK, and What They Can Teach Today’s Pols

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Review: "X-Men: Apocalypse" Is the Best Superhero Film of 2016

by DeclanSullivan Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Depending on your definition, there have been somewhere between 50 and 70 superhero films made in the United States since the first X-Men came out in 2000.

When X-Men: Apocalypse, the ninth entry in the franchise and the fourth helmed by Bryan Singer, is released on May 27, it will be the fourth major superhero film to debut just this year. It will also be the best. Better than Captain America: Civil War, which was itself better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. (Deadpool was sort of a different bird, and if you really were taken by its shtick then you might prefer it.)

That’s not to say Apocalypse is perfect. Like all these films, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. It is also a profoundly long 144 minutes. And like the bloated Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War, it is overstuffed with superheroes who less serve the story so much as are contractually obligated to appear within it. X-Men: First Class became a hit in 2011 just as Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence were becoming A-listers, and though their talent, along with that of James McAvoy, shines in the new film, the plot struggles with the obligation to share screen time between so many stars.

Do you want to know about the plot?

In Ancient Egypt, Oscar Isaac is a powerful mutant who is betrayed by some followers and ends up buried inside the ruins of a pyramid. Cut to 1983 and, following the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the younger versions of the X-Men are scattered across the globe doing things that are not really worth getting into. Oscar Isaac is woken up by some cult that knows about him based on hieroglyphics or something. (Don’t worry about them. They are never mentioned ever again. I’m pretty sure they die? It really doesn’t matter.) Isaac quickly begins assembling a small band of mutants to help him destroy the world. You see, Oscar Isaac was the very first mutant, and his power is basically that he can take over the body of another mutant and, voila, he’s got that mutant’s power. So for millions of years he has been jumping from mutant to mutant collecting powers (except for the last 6,000 years when he was asleep under that pyramid). He has many powers, but his favorite seems to be turning people into sand.

Oscar Isaac finds Storm (Alexandra Shipp), a mutant with a lightsaber whip (Olivia Munn), and some alcoholic with angel wings (Ben Hardy) and convinces them to help him kill everyone in the world so that he can…mutters incoherently.

Meanwhile, Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is the most-wanted fugitive in the world and is hiding in Poland with his wife and daughter, like you do. But then some bad shit happens to this tranquil trio involving…wood, and one thing leads to another.

You see where this is going? Oscar Isaac and his “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” are going to fight Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy and the X-Men. However, it takes a very long time for this fight to actually happen. For a superhero movie, this is not the most action-packed film! If you want straight wall-to-wall, mutant-on-mutant action, then it will disappoint. It’s not A Room With a View With a Staircase and a Pond but it’s not A Room With a View of Hell: Staircase of Satan: Pond of Death.

Watching it, however, does not disappoint. The people who made this movie seem to genuinely care about entertaining the audience in every scene. You may rightfully wonder why the scenes happen in the order that they do or why they focus on what they focus on, but they are enjoyable. The cast deserves credit for this. The screenwriters deserve credit, too. The producers deserve credit. Most of all, though, director Bryan Singer deserves credit.

My overriding thought walking out of the screening was: Bryan Singer is just a better director than the other people directing the current crop of superhero films. The Russo brothers of Captain America: Civil War and other various Marvel installments are great! Even Zack Snyder is a talented director whose main flaws come out mostly when he is allowed to have control over other aspects of a project. But Singer’s direction is more confident, more inventive, and more fun.

The X-Men movies don’t get the ink of other superhero movies, but they are the most valuable players of the genre. Aside from X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine—the former now the butt of a joke in Apocalypse; the latter the world has agreed to pretend never happened—the franchise has been remarkably consistent.

And while it isn’t entirely clear what’s next for the flagship series in the franchise, there are roughly 1,000 other films in the X-Men universe being developed, from standalone Wolverine, Deadpool, and Gambit films to Josh Boone’s New Mutants spin-off and a rumored Deadpool-esque R-rated X-Force.

Go see X-Men: Apocalypse because it is good and fun and, in a world with an unavoidable number of superhero films that are a total slog, that is fun and good.

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Review: "X-Men: Apocalypse" Is the Best Superhero Film of 2016

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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

by BennieBriscoe Posted on March 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Vladimir Putin announced today that he would begin withdrawing most of his forces from Syria. The move came as a complete surprise—sort of:

But U.S. officials also said that there had been evidence over the last several months that appeared to suggest that Moscow didn’t have plans for a long-term stay at the bases it used in Syria.

For instance, the Russian military didn’t appear to be rotating its equipment—tanks, aircraft and artillery—among bases throughout the country in a way that would be consistent with a military’s plans for a sustained presence. Equipment wasn’t being withdrawn for maintenance, for example, and Russian forces weren’t being rotated in and out, according to U.S. officials.

It’s unlikely that Putin ever really intended to stay for a long time in the first place. His goal wasn’t to help Assad win his civil war, but merely to prevent him from losing—just as there’s a reasonable case to be made that this is basically our goal too on the other side of the fight. It’s realpolitik at its nastiest and most cynical. And while the recently convened peace talks in Geneva provided Putin with a convenient pretext to get out, there was more to the timing than just that:

Russia is also facing deepening economic problems caused by the collapse in global oil prices, and the announcement may reflect Mr. Putin’s desire to declare victory and extricate his country from a costly military venture….There have been growing signs of differences between Russia and the Syrian government over the Geneva talks, which Moscow has pressed hard for, along with Washington. And for Mr. Assad, the prospect of Russia’s leaving him to fend for himself is sure to focus his mind on following its lead — advice that Russian officials have publicly offered him in recent days.

In the end, Putin managed to prop up Assad for a little while longer and reassert control over Russia’s only military base outside of its own territory. He also earned a place at the negotiating table and, perhaps, kept Iran’s influence over Syria at bay. In terms of pure military achievement, however, it was a modest affair. The maps below, from ISW, show what’s happened over the past six months. Syrian forces have made progress toward retaking Aleppo, which is significant but hardly tide turning. And that’s about it. What’s more, with Russian air support gone and Kurdish forces also advancing on Aleppo, it’s unclear if Assad can hold this ground in the long term. Stay tuned.

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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

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Killer Mike Just Slammed Hillary Clinton’s Record on Race

by MittieMadewell Posted on February 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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With one day to go before the South Carolina primary, Bernie Sanders’ surrogates unleashed some of their toughest attacks yet on Hillary Clinton.

During the Vermont senator’s appearance at a historically black university, a string of speakers, including rapper Killer Mike, slammed the former secretary of state as a latecomer to racial justice who was taking African American voters for granted ahead of the South’s first Democratic primary on Saturday.

On Friday, the rival Democratic candidates held events at two neighboring historically black colleges. As Clinton, introduced by Star Jones, spoke at a gym at South Carolina State University, Sanders backer Martese Johnson, told students at Bernie’s Claflin University rally about Clinton’s past.

“We have to understand that this genocide on black lives has been a thing for decades,” said Johnson, who made national headlines last fall after he was bloodied by police while trying to get into a Charlottesville bar. “And a candidate who’s actually speaking to people nearby today was helpful in approving these things to happen with mass incarceration.” (Johnson was referring to Clinton’s support as First Lady for President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill.)

Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner kept the hits coming, attacking the idea that that African-American voters are, as the Clinton campaign has suggested, an electoral firewall against the Vermont senator as the campaign careens toward Super Tuesday.

“I want to know how you feel about somebody calling you their ‘firewall’?” Turner asked. “You have to earn the black vote, you don’t own the black vote! We are the only ethnic group that people have already presupposed where we are going to be and that is wrong, you have to earn this thing.”

The toughest talk, though, came from Killer Mike, the Atlanta rapper, who came under fire last week for relating the story of a woman who said women shouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton just because she has a uterus. Sanders accused his friend’s critics of playing “gotcha politics.” Killer Mike never explained to the crowd at Claflin what it is he’d said to piss people off, but his first words on stage were an inside joke that alluded to the controversy: “Let me pull out the list of words I cannot say.”

Killer Mike said he wasn’t just personally grateful that Sanders hadn’t condemned his remarks; he believed Sanders’ decision not to demonstrated presidential leadership.

“Since he was a teenager and as a young adult he has fought for the rights of people who don’t look like him, who are not from where he’s from, who are not from his socio-economic background,” he said.

“And just last week, when given the opportunity to separate himself from a black guy who said something that other people didn’t like, he stood on his integrity and his convictions,” he said. Adding, “That means when you’re in office and a hard decision is gonna be made, you’re gonna think about the people you talked with as well.”

He didn’t reprise his “uterus” comments, but he had plenty to say about Clinton. The Democratic front-runner, or at least her supporters, had been rude to an African American who questioned her past statements on crime, he told students. Killer Mike contrasted that with an early moment in the campaign when Sanders handed his microphone to two Black Lives Matter activists at a rally in Seattle.

“That is a firm difference from turning around and staring at a little black girl and saying ‘shut up,’ I’ll talk to you later, you’re being rude’.” It was just as bad to allow “other people to say it to her,” he said.

The rapper also went on to praise Sanders’ work during the Civil Rights Movement. “If I can find a picture of you from 51 years ago chained to a black woman protesting segregation, and I know 51 years later you’re gonna close your arms…and listen to two black girls yell and scream—rightfully so.” (Sanders was arrested at a civil rights demonstration when he was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s*.)

“As opposed to someone who will tell you ‘later,’ when it comes to your children dying in the streets,” the rapper said. “I know the only person that I have the conscience to vote for is Bernard Sanders.”

Sanders thanked Killer Mike and the speakers who preceded him “for their calm and quiet introductions,” but not did not elaborate on their comments. Instead, he dove into a more casual version of his standard stump speech, hitting voting rights, police violence, student debt, and the corrupting influence of super-PACs. He kept a lighter tone with the mostly college-age crowd.

When his microphone briefly cut out, he quipped, “it’s my electrifying personality.”

The Vermont senator received a warm welcome from his audience, but it was an uncharacteristically small one for a candidate used to a rock-star reception on college campuses. Although his campaign had worked hard to organize at historic black colleges and universities and made previous trips to Orangeburg, one side of the bleachers was entirely empty and the other was a quarter full; there was plenty of space to move around on the floor. That may not bode well for Sanders’ chances on Saturday—the most recent polls put him about 20 points back.

But if a win feels like a long shot, Sanders’ aggressive event on Friday was meant to show their commitment to improving going forward. As Killer Mike put it, “the goddamn firewall has a crack in it.”

Correction: This piece originally misidentified the photo Killer Mike was referring to.

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Killer Mike Just Slammed Hillary Clinton’s Record on Race

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

by VetaMcgough294 Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial in the trial of William Porter, the first of six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Gray died in April from injuries suffered after Baltimore police left him unbuckled but shackled in the back of a police van during a ride to a booking station, sparking turbulent protests throughout the city.

Jurors said on Wednesday that they were deadlocked on all counts. Porter had pleaded not guilty to second-degree assault, involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. After deliberating for about a day, jurors had told the court that they were deadlocked; the judge instructed them to continue to try to reach a unanimous verdict. It didn’t happen.

Prosecutors argued that Porter criminally neglected his duties by failing to buckle Gray into a seat, or to get him medical attention when it was clear that he needed it. But Porter’s lawyers said it was the driver’s responsibility to make sure Gray was buckled in, and that Porter fulfilled his responsibility to Gray’s safety when he told his supervisor that Gray needed to go to the hospital.

City officials were again on edge as Baltimore awaited a verdict. Last April, Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake declared a weeklong curfew and called in the National Guard after riots broke out around the city. Rawlins-Blake issued a statement following the judge’s decision on Wednesday calling on protesters to show “respect for our neighborhoods” and saying that the city was “prepared to respond” to any unrest.

The Harford and Howard county school districts canceled all field trips to Baltimore this week in anticipation of possible protests. The CEO of Baltimore schools also sent a letter to parents Monday saying he was “very concerned” about how students might respond. The letter drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which said it was wrong to equate students’ desire to demonstrate with potential violence.

Judge Williams is expected to set a date for Porter’s new trial on Thursday. Trials for the other five officers charged in Gray’s death are also expected to begin soon.

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

by EmilioBrodzky Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Modern conservatives are oddly fond of pointing out that it was Democrats who were the party of racism and racists until half a century ago. There’s always an implied “Aha!” whenever a conservative mentions this, as though they think it’s some little-known quirk of history that Democrats try to keep hidden because it’s so embarrassing.

It’s not, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and Republicans were the face of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Because of this, the South became solidly Democratic and stayed that way until World War II. But in the 1940s, southerners gradually began defecting to the Republican Party, and then began defecting en masse during the fight over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But wait: the 1940s? If Southern whites began defecting to the GOP that early, racism couldn’t have been their motivation. Aha!

But it was. The Civil Rights movement didn’t spring out of nothing in 1964, after all. Eleanor Roosevelt was a tireless champion of civil rights, and famously resigned from the DAR when they refused to allow singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in 1939. FDR was far more constrained by his need for Southern votes in Congress—and it showed in most New Deal programs—but the WPA gave blacks a fair shake and Harold Ickes poured a lot of money into black schools and hospitals in the South. In 1941 FDR signed a nondiscrimination order for the national defense industry—the first of its kind—and he generally provided African-Americans with more visibility in his administration than they had ever enjoyed before. After decades of getting little back from Republicans despite their loyal support, this was enough to make blacks a key part of the New Deal Coalition and turn them into an increasingly solid voting bloc for the Democratic Party.

From a Southern white perspective, this made the Democratic Party a less welcoming home, and it continued to get less welcoming in the two decades that followed. Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948, and Hubert Humphrey famously delivered a stemwinding civil rights speech at the Democratic convention that year. LBJ was instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, while Republican Dwight Eisenhower was widely viewed—rightly or wrongly—as unsympathetic to civil rights during the 1950s.

In other words, Southern whites who wanted to keep Jim Crow intact had plenty of reasons to steadily desert the Democratic Party and join the GOP starting around World War II. By the early 60s they were primed and ready to begin a massive exodus from the increasingly black-friendly Democratic Party, and exit they did. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, refused to support the Civil Rights Act that year, and influential conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley were decidedly unfriendly toward black equality. This made the Republican Party more and more appealing to Southern white racists, and by 1968 Richard Nixon decided to explicitly reach out to them with a campaign based on states’ rights and “law and order.” Over the next two decades, the Democratic Party became ever less tolerant of racist sentiment and the exodus continued. By 1994, when Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich won a landslide victory in the midterm elections, the transition of the white South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican was basically complete.

This history is what makes the conservative habit of pointing out that Democrats were the original racists so peculiar. It’s true, but it makes the transformation of the party even more admirable. Losing the South was a huge electoral risk, but Democrats took that risk anyway. That made it far more meaningful and courageous than if there had been no price to pay.

Despite all this, conservatives still like to argue that the surge in Southern white support for the Republican Party was driven not by racism, but by other factors: economic growth; migration from other regions; and by the evolution of Democratic views on redistribution, free speech, abortion, and other issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find quantitative data that can settle this dispute.

But a couple of researchers recently found some: Gallup poll data starting in the late 50s that asks if you’d be willing to vote for a qualified presidential candidate who happened to be black. Respondents who answered no were coded (quite reasonably) as racially conservative. They then looked at differences between the Democratic Party ID of Southern whites who were and weren’t racially conservative. Here’s their conclusion:

We find that except for issues involving racial integration and discrimination, whites in the South and elsewhere have indistinguishable preferences on both domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s….We find no evidence that white Southerners who have negative views of women, Catholics or Jews differentially leave the Democratic party in 1963; the exodus is specific to those who are racially conservative. Finally, we find no role for Southern economic development in explaining dealignment.

The charts on the right show one specific data point: JFK’s televised civil rights speech of June 11, 1963. Among Southern whites, approval of JFK plummets right at that moment (top chart). And in the Gallup polls, racially conservative Southern whites leave the party in droves (bottom chart). This is not a steady decline. It’s a sharp, sudden exodus at a specific moment in time.

So: why did Democrats lose the white South? For the reason common sense and all the evidence suggests: because the party became too liberal on civil rights, and racist white Southerners didn’t like it. Southern white flight from the party began in the 1940s, took a sharp dive in the early 60s, and continued to decline for several decades after as Democrats became ever more committed to black equality. This might not be the only reason for Southern realignment, but it’s surely the most important by a long stretch.

For more on both this study and the Southern Strategy of the Nixon era, Wonkblog’s Max Ehrenfreund has you covered.

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

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