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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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California’s Water Cuts Are Ending, But Don’t Hose Down Your Sidewalk Just Yet

by WillianLfr Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a major policy shift fueled by a wet winter, California officials announced Wednesday they will lift mandatory urban water restrictions starting in June.

The water cuts, which began last summer, required the state’s water districts to slash use by 25 percent, leading many Californians to replace lawns with drought-tolerant vegetation, take shorter showers, and change other water-related habits. The change doesn’t mean Californians are in the clear, however. Under the new policy, water districts can set their own conservation standards and are required to report monthly water use data to the state. And some water-saving restrictions will stick around: Residents can’t hose down driveways with drinkable water, and homeowners can’t punish those with brown lawns during a drought.

State officials said they may reinstitute the restrictions depending on weather and water use in the coming months. “We don’t know if we have a megadrought punctuated by an OK year,” State Water Resources Control Board chair Felicia Marcus told the Wall Street Journal. “This compromise allows us to keep our eyes wide open.”

The change is partly in response to the drought’s geographic variation. The snowpack in Northern California neared historic highs earlier this year, filing the state’s two largest reservoirs nearly to capacity. But with an unseasonably warm spring, the snow quickly melted to 33 percent of historic levels, according to the New York Times. Southern California is feeling the drought’s immediate effects more accutely: Many reservoirs in the south are at levels far below the historical average. According to the US Drought Monitor, large swaths of Central and Southern California remain in “exceptional drought”—the most extreme category.

A number of environmental organizations cautioned against Wednesday’s shift. With the dwindling snowpack, low reservoir levels in the south, and overpumping of groundwater, the policy “sends the wrong message,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. Rather than temporary water cuts, Gleick calls for permanent, long-term water use targets. “By making it possible for urban agencies to set their own conservation targets,” he says, “I’m afraid we’re going to see some water agencies doing a good job and others going to back to old wasteful practices.”

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White Nationalist Party Claims More of Its Members Are Now Trump Delegates

by Maryann3677 Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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On May 10, Los Angeles attorney William Johnson resigned as a delegate for Donald Trump to the Republican National Convention after Mother Jones reported that Johnson is the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign, which selected Johnson as one of its California delegates, blamed his inclusion on a “database error.” But white nationalist leaders, including one who has contributed to an online hate forum, are now claiming that other members of their movement have become delegates for Trump.

“Here is what they don’t know: we have more delegates!” the American Freedom Party wrote on its Facebook page last week, in response to the Mother Jones report.

Johnson said in an interview that he is not directly involved with the AFP’s Facebook page, but he confirmed that the page is run by Robert H. DePasquale, whose covert activism as a white supremacist is well documented. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, DePasquale is a web designer in New York City who has built sites for white supremacist groups and has pseudonymously posted more than 20,000 racist and anti-Semitic messages on Stormfront, a leading online hate forum. (The forum’s motto is “White Pride World Wide.”) DePasquale did not respond to requests for comment. The AFP’s Facebook post, captured by Mother Jones in this screen shot, was soon deleted:

The AFP has come to see the Trump campaign as its path to taking white nationalism into the mainstream. In recent months the group and a related super PAC have produced and funded pro-Trump robocalls, set up a “political harassment hotline” for Trump supporters, and promoted Trump on a talk radio show.

But movement leaders appear torn about how much to shout from atop the Trump bandwagon versus staying in the shadows. Johnson told Mother Jones that he knows of at least one other AFP member who has been selected by a state party to attend the GOP convention this July. Johnson declined to identify the person for fear of compromising the person’s involvement with the GOP, but he disclosed that he is an “honorary” delegate for Trump from an eastern state. So-called honorary delegates do not have voting power, but typically are selected by state parties to attend the convention, often as a perk in exchange for political donations.

At Johnson’s request, the AFP delegate for Trump agreed to be interviewed by Mother Jones, but later backed out. Johnson said there are additional white nationalist Trump delegates who have been in touch with movement leaders, though “I don’t actually know who they are. There are people who are surreptitious,” he said.

“Right now people are still a little bit afraid because they will have the same reaction that happened to me,” Johnson explained. “We just have to give it a few more months before people feel comfortable.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Led by Johnson since 2009, the American Freedom Party “exists to represent the political interests of White Americans” and aims to preserve “the customs and heritage of the European American people.” The AFP has never elected a candidate of its own to public office and is estimated to have only a few thousand members, but it is “arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok.

Johnson believes that Trump’s rise will motivate other white nationalists to express their views publicly. “You’ve got to realize that I’m out in the open and upfront, but a lot of people aren’t there yet,” he said. “Talk to me in eight months and more people will be out. Particularly if Donald Trump gets elected.”

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White Nationalist Party Claims More of Its Members Are Now Trump Delegates

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Oxfam: Poultry Industry Routinely Denies Workers Bathroom Breaks

by TawannaEAOK Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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The United States isn’t exactly a hotbed of trade unionism and worker power. But presumably, most people can take for granted access to the bathroom while on the job. Not so for people who staff the nation’s chicken slaughterhouses, according to a scathing new report from Oxfam America.

After a three-year project interviewing dozens of current and former workers across the country, Oxfam came to this stark conclusion:

Routinely, poultry workers say, they are denied breaks to use the bathroom. Supervisors mock their needs and ignore their requests; they threaten punishment or firing. Workers wait inordinately long times (an hour or more), then race to accomplish the task within a certain timeframe (e.g., ten minutes) or risk discipline.

How do they deal with this brutal state of affairs? “They urinate and defecate while standing on the line; they wear diapers to work; they restrict intake of liquids and fluids to dangerous degrees; they endure pain and discomfort while they worry about their health and job security,” the report adds.

Given that the industry produces what’s by far America’s favorite meat and employs more than 375,000 people, this might sound like a startling state of affairs that will inspire swift federal action. As the Oxfam report notes, “Denial of regular access to the bathroom is a clear violation of US workplace safety law.”

But Big Poultry’s bathroom trouble has been known for a while. For a 2013 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center surveyed Alabama poultry workers on the conditions they face. Findings included heightened levels of repetitive-motion injuries, routine cuts and gashes—and the lack of bathroom breaks. “Of the 266 workers answering questions about bathroom breaks, nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) said they are not allowed to take breaks when needed,” SPLC found. The group noted many of the same conditions flagged by Oxfam, including workers “stripping off their gear while running to the restroom,” on floors that are often “slippery with fat, blood, water, and other liquids.”

Also in 2013, SPLC attorney Tom Fritzsche delivered those findings in testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (part of the Organization of American States), noting (video here).

The Oxfam report, too, puts the speed of the modern industrial kill line—the maximum under US law IS 140 birds per minute—at the heart of the problem. “Supervisors deny requests to use the bathroom because they are under pressure to maintain the speed of the processing line, and to keep up production,” the report states. “Once a poultry plant roars to a start at the beginning of the day, it doesn’t stop until all the chickens are processed.”

To keep the line rolling and give workers breaks when they need them is possible, Oxfam found, but that requires resources: maintaining a “set of replacement workers (line assistants or floaters) who step in as needed.” Yet “in the course of hundreds of interviews, only a handful of workers reported that their bathroom needs are respected,” the report found. Interestingly, “These exceptions are primarily in plants that have unions, which offer important protections, inform workers of their rights, and ensure they have a voice on the job.”

For its part, the chicken industry says the claims made by Oxfam are exaggerated. “The health, safety and respect of our employees is very important, and we value their contributions in helping to produce our food,” the National Chicken Council claimed in an online statement. “We’re troubled by these claims but also question this group’s efforts to paint the whole industry with a broad brush based on a handful of anonymous claims. We believe such instances are extremely rare and that U.S. poultry companies work hard to prevent them.”

A number of companies are named in the report, including Perdue, the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company and the subject of my recent feature on the industry’s move away from reliance on antibiotics. “The anecdotes reported are not consistent with Perdue’s policies and practices,” the company states in a response to the Oxfam report. The company went on to describe its policy:

Regarding bathroom breaks, our associates receive two 30-minutes breaks during each eight-hour shift. They typically work 2 to 2½ hours, have a 30-minute break, work another 2 to 2½ hours and have another 30-minute break, then work the remainder of the shift. If an associate is unable to wait for the scheduled break and needs to use the restroom, they are to be given permission to leave the line as soon as someone can cover for them. If a department is short-staffed that day, there may be times it is difficult to provide immediate coverage.

Thus are the challenges of operating a kill line that requires workers to break down as many as 140 birds per minute. For years, the industry promoted a US Department of Agriculture proposal that would have allowed line speeds to go as high as 175 birds per minute. After a firestorm of criticism from worker-rights and food-safety groups, the USDA shelved that plan in 2014. But, Oxfam America’s Oliver Gottfried tells me, the USDA left the door open to allow it in the future—and Congressional Republicans have been itching ever since to make it so.

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Oxfam: Poultry Industry Routinely Denies Workers Bathroom Breaks

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Coral bleaching has swept 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef

by MinnieBCHogplu Posted on April 23, 2016

in hot water

Coral bleaching has swept 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef

By on Apr 23, 2016comments

Cross-posted from

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We knew coral bleaching was a serious issue in the Great Barrier Reef, but the scope of just how widespread it was has been unclear — until now.

Extensive aerial surveys and dives have revealed that 93 percent of the world’s largest reef has been devastated by coral bleaching. The culprit has been record-warm water driven by El Niño and climate change that has cooked the life out of corals.

The unprecedented destruction brought leading reef scientist Terry Hughes, who runs the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, to tears.

“We’ve never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it’s like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once,” Hughes said in a press release.

The Center conducted aerial surveys and dives at 911 sites spanning the full 1,430-mile length of the reef. They show the hardest hit areas are in the northern part of the reefs, which have also endured some of the hottest water temperatures for prolonged periods.

More than 80 percent of reefs surveyed there showed signs of severe bleaching. The southern end of the reef fared better, but overall the bleaching represents a massive blow to biodiversity at the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Great Barrier Reef also faces pressure from ocean acidification and fishing impacts, ramping up concerns over how to protect one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet.

Beyond its beauty, the Great Barrier Reef also has a huge economic benefit on the Australian economy. It generates $4.45 billion in tourism revenue annually and supports nearly 70,000 jobs, according to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

The damage caused by this round of bleaching will be felt for decades, but it’s not the only reef around the globe to feel the heat of climate change. 2015 marked the third global coral bleaching event ever recorded. This one been the longest of the three as hot ocean temperatures fueled by El Niño and climate change have caused reefs to suffer across every ocean basin.

While every basin has been hit, some reefs and coral species have survived through the event. That has scientists trying to quickly understand why the survivors made it through. That knowledge could be crucial to ensure reefs continue to survive as oceans temperatures continue their inexorable rise and water becomes more acidic due to climate change.

“We can’t afford to sit by and watch climate change drive all the world’s coral reefs to extinctions by the end of the century,” Julia Baum, a reef researcher at the University of Victoria, said.

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Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an even bigger pipeline out there

by Hannelore3091 Posted on April 5, 2016

Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an even bigger pipeline out there

By on 4 Apr 2016commentsShare

A major section of the original Keystone pipeline is out of commission after an oil spill near the pipeline was detected in South Dakota on April 2.

The spill, estimated at 187 gallons of crude oil, serves as a reminder of the risks that pipelines pose — and that with the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, we’ve likely avoided the potential for an even bigger, more disastrous spill.

Part of the original argument against Keystone XL was that eventually, the proposed pipeline was bound to spill. A 2013 Forbes article (which claimed that it was “crazy” to think Keystone XL wouldn’t leak) pointed out that as pipelines age, they are often not properly maintained, leading to a greater possibility of a leak occurring.

The recent oil spill was discovered, of course, by TransCanada’s state-of-the-art spill detection technology — oh, what’s that? My state-of-the-art Tweet detecting system’s “Bill McKibben” sensor just went off:

Apparently, a South Dakota landowner first noticed signs of a spill and informed TransCanada of the leak. As a result, TransCanada shut down the section of the pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla. (The section of Keystone that runs from Cushing to Texas is still in operation.)

TransCanada says that “no significant impact to the environment has been observed” from the April 2 spill. We hope it stays that way — and in the meantime, we’re glad that there’s one less huge pipeline out there to worry about. Spilled milk might not be worth crying over, but unspilled pipelines are definitely worth celebrating.

Correction: An earlier version of this article’s headline read “Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there.” In fact, the southern leg of the XL pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas is in operation. Grist regrets the error.

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Oh Wait—Donald Trump Decides He Has a Foreign Policy Team After All

by MargareHutchens Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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After finally telling us that he didn’t need a foreign policy team because he was his own team, Donald Trump made yet another U-turn today and announced his foreign policy team. It’s enough to make you dizzy. I’ll let Robert Costa introduce them:

Keith Kellogg…executive vice president at CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm…. Joseph Schmitz….Blackwater Worldwide…. George Papadopoulos…international energy center at the London Center of International Law Practice…. Walid Phares…National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington…. Carter Page…managing partner of Global Energy Capital and longtime energy industry executive.

This is quite a team. Kellogg was COO of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-04 under Paul Bremer, and we all know how that turned out. Schmitz is the son of noted Southern California crackpot John Schmitz—which I suppose I can’t hold against him—and served as inspector general of the Defense Department under George Bush. He resigned in 2005 following charges that he “slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines.”

Papadopoulos is on his second presidential campaign this year, having previously found a home with Ben Carson. Phares is well known to all Fox News viewers for his regular appearances there—and for his background during the 80s as a “high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.”

Page I don’t know much about. Apparently he’s the head of an investment fund “focused on energy investments worldwide,” and that’s good enough for Trump.

So….this is a helluva C-list crew Trump has assembled. A guy who worked for Paul Bremer; the son of John Schmitz; a former Ben Carson advisor; a Fox News talking head; and a guy who specializes in torts.

As for Trump’s actual foreign policy, apparently it’s the same as always: he’s super militaristic, but he doesn’t want to actually use the American military for much of anything. He’d like other countries to start taking care of Ukraine and NATO and the South China Sea—or, if they insist on America doing it, he’d like them to pay us for it. Apparently Trump’s ambition is to sit at the head of a vast American tribute empire.

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Oh Wait—Donald Trump Decides He Has a Foreign Policy Team After All

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Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

by EdytheGates Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are unauthorized immigrants “pouring across the southern border”? Since Donald Trump said it, there’s automatically a strong chance that it’s a lie, and sure enough, it is.

According to Pew Research, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and has been dropping ever since. Currently it stands at 5.6 million. As the chart on the right shows, net migration from Mexico has been negative every year since 2008. But maybe the ones that are here are disproportionately murderers and rapists, as Trump also says. Nope. The number of unauthorized immigrants in US prisons is relatively small, and the bulk of the available research suggests that they’re incarcerated at lower rates than US citizens. It’s just another lie.

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Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

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Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like it or not, Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat for the Republican presidential nomination.

The networks called the South Carolina primary for Trump shortly after polls closed on Saturday, with Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida locked in a battle for second place. Over the last week of the campaign, Trump’s opponents worked hard to spin anything less than an overwhelming victory as a disappointing showing for the billionaire real estate mogul, but make no mistake about it: Trump’s win is a big deal. He has now finished second, first, and first in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, three states that have very little in common. He has won the latter two by overwhelming pluralities. And he has history on his side: Only one candidate has ever lost South Carolina and won the nomination, and that candidate, Mitt Romney, finished in second in 2012. If his name were anything other than “Donald Trump,” the party’s leaders would be penciling him in for the final speaking spot at their convention in Cleveland.

Trump used South Carolina as a backdrop for some of his most overheated pronouncements. He promoted his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States while speaking aboard a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Charleston Harbor. He called Pope Francis “disgraceful” for questioning his proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border. And in his final event of the primary campaign on Friday night, he told the audience an apocryphal story about General John Pershing executing 49 Muslims with bullets coated in pig blood. His biggest argument against Cruz’s candidacy was that the senator was unnecessarily squeamish about torture. Shortly after polls opened on Saturday, Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama would likely have attended Antonin Scalia’s funeral if it had been held at a mosque. Opponents, notably former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, sought to cast Trump as boorish and unpresidential. They misunderstood the race.

Trump didn’t win in spite of being a boor, a bigot, and an analog internet troll; he won because he was proudly all those things. For all the diversions (who picks a fight with the pope, anyway?), he articulated a remarkably clear theory of politics: Other people are screwing you over, and I’m going to stop it. “He’s got balls,” Julia Coates, a longtime Trump fan, told me as we waited for the real estate magnate to take the stage in North Charleston. “He’s got big ones. And that’s what we need. I’m tired of all this shit going on.” It’s the kind of approach that plays poorly among the genteel Southerners who crowd into Low Country town halls in boat shoes and Nantucket red. But he recognized the electorate as something greater—and angrier. If you hadn’t voted in decades, Trump was your guy. If you felt betrayed by the people you had voted for, Trump was also your guy.

If Trump was a winner, then everyone else is (to use his term of choice) a loser—including Rubio, who finished third in Iowa and a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire. Now you can add the South to the list of regions that have been less than receptive to his pitch. It’s not because he didn’t make his message clear. Over the last week, he cast himself as the anti-Trump, a fresh-faced Cuban American who could lead the party into the future. He toured the state with rising star Rep. Trey Gowdy; the state’s African America senator, Tim Scott; and its Indian American governor, Nikki Haley, who joked that the quartet looked like a “Benetton commercial.” Rubio bet the house on the idea that South Carolina was ready for the future and mentioned the Republican front-runner only in passing during his speeches, and never by name. Trump stuck with the past; he went all-in on white identity politics and, like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush before him, came through unscathed—two divorces be damned.

In actual terms, the biggest loser was Bush, whose campaign is on life support after finishing far behind in a state that helped make his brother president 16 years ago. In a last-gasp effort at upping his numbers in South Carolina, he brought George W.—who was kept at arm’s length for most of the campaign—to North Charleston for a megarally where they chest-bumped backstage. And he blanketed the radio airwaves with an endorsement from the ex-president. Jeb pushed hard to position himself as a commander in chief in a state with one of the highest percentages of military families in the nation.

But even his supporters seemed to recognize the end was near. At a town hall in Summerville, in an open-air pavilion overlooking a golf course (Bush never tried too hard to shake the “country club” label), one questioner after another all but called him a wimp. As the event wrapped up, a voter told the younger Bush that he was a big fan of Dubya but questioned whether Jeb had the toughness for the job. “Can you be a sonofabitch?” he asked. Jeb didn’t say yes.

From here, the Republican field moves on to Nevada and then Super Tuesday, on March 1. Thanks to the efforts of a Southern bloc, that historic bellwether will be loaded up with states that look about as friendly to Trump as South Carolina did. (Not that he needs to drop his g’s to win votes—he cleaned up in New Hampshire, too.) There’s also a lot of time for him to screw it up, although short of lighting an American flag on fire in Times Square, it’s not clear what that would even look like. The more likely scenario is that his opponents and their backers might finally spend real money attacking him on the airways—just $9 million of the $215 million spent by conservative super-PACs this cycle has been on anti-Trump ads. But don’t let Trump’s army of Republican critics say South Carolina doesn’t matter. They’ve been saying for years and years that it does. And they’re absolutely right.

Link:

Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

by theacntnt1985-01 Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Less than two weeks after peace talks over the Syrian civil war abruptly ended, the International Syria Support Group—a body of about 20 countries and international organizations involved in the war, including the European Union and the United Nations—announced on Thursday that they had finally brokered the terms of a halt to the brutal war that has killed nearly half a million people. The “cessation of hostilities” between regime forces and rebel groups, if successful, would be the first general stop to the fighting in almost four years. It seemed to meet some of the Syrian opposition’s demands for humanitarian relief and a halt to Russian airstrikes against civilians and rebels. But none of this means the agreement is likely to succeed.

The International Syria Support Group group pledged its members would push “all parties to allow immediate and sustained humanitarian access to reach all people in need” and “take immediate steps to secure the full support of all parties to the conflict for a cessation of hostilities.” Those parties, however—the Syrian government and mainstream rebel groups—weren’t actually part of the negotiations. Thursday’s agreement merely sets the terms for how a cessation of hostilities would look, leaving the United States, Russia, Iran, and others to convince their allies on the ground to abide by the pact.

How exactly they’ll convince the regime and the opposition to play along hasn’t yet been decided; the declaration gives the ISSG a week to figure out the details of the agreement and implement them. “We will only be able to see whether this was a breakthrough in a few days,” admitted German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the announcement, which took place at a security conference in Munich. Secretary of State John Kerry also tempered expectations for the cessation agreement. “The real test is clearly whether or not all the parties honor those commitments and implement them in reality,” he said. “What I’ve said again and again is we cannot guarantee success in the outcome.”

The fact that the opposition’s High Negotiations Council, a body made up of dissident Syrian politicians and rebel leaders, is not taking part in the discussions in Munich means the agreement may not get crucial buy-in from armed groups on the battlefield. Such support is critical for political negotiations or agreements to hold.

The Washington Post reported that while rebels may accept the “ceasefire”—the United States and Russia are divided on whether to use the term—out of exhaustion and lack of options, they are still highly skeptical. “We no longer trust words. There have been too many recently, matched with opposite action on the ground from the Russians,” Issam Rayess, a spokesman for the rebels’ Southern Front coalition that fights near Damascus, told the Post‘s Liz Sly. “Within a week everything will have been destroyed,” one civilian told her. And no matter what the rebels decide, the agreement will also have no effect on jihadi groups like ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s homegrown affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The High Negotiations Council has adopted a wait-and-see approach. When the Geneva talks stopped earlier this month, the HNC said it would not return to the table until Russian airstrikes ended and humanitarian aid began flowing to starving and decimated areas of Syria. The United Nation’s Syria envoy hopes to restart the talks by February 25, and HNC spokesman Salim al-Muslat says the cessation of hostilities must actually take effect before the opposition returns to talks. “If we see action and implementation, we will see you very soon in Geneva,” he told reporters on Thursday.

But even if the fighting does stop for any significant length of time, the two sides are still no closer to agreeing on the most basic issue of the war: what to do with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The opposition and its backers will not accept any political solution that allows Assad to stay in office. But on the same day the cessation was announced, Assad told the French wire service AFP that he has no plans to give up any territory or power, instead reconfirming his intent to regain control of the entire country. “This is a goal we are seeking to achieve without any hesitation,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “It makes no sense for us to say that we will give up any part of Syria.” As Middle East analyst Brooklyn Middleton noted on Twitter, Assad’s statement means the cessation of hostilities will mostly be an illusion of progress rather than an actual achievement.

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

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