"What All the Way shows is how LBJ wheedled and threatened his way to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, without which we might have had to wait another generation for significant black enfranchisement. This long and deep play covers the first year of LBJ's assumed presidency, and much of playwright Robert Schenkkan's attention is focused on black-white relationships."

"...[W]ith its lowered population, its dependence on oil and gas, its weak manufacturing sector, and its anemic GDP growth which the World Bank predicts will be close to zero for the first quarter of 2014...Russia is clearly a reduced state from the USSR of Cold War times....Putin, with his apparent ambition to recreate in some way or another the dimensions of the former Soviet Union, has suddenly emerged as a threat to the global world order."

"We are coming up on June 28, 2014, the 100th anniversary of the start of the outbreak of World War I....As this anniversary approaches, there is a new and vaguely similar feeling of uncertainty occasioned by the recent Russian land grab — as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden put it — of the Crimean Peninsula."

"However mishandled the U.S. and the EU initiatives toward the Ukraine were, we should now look upon Putin's recent actions — including and especially his abrogation of the 1994 Budapest Agreement, to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity — as something beyond the pale."

"How can one believe that the Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) who crossed over to the Crimea from Rostov-on-Don by boat and helicopter were a figment of the imagination, and that the thousands of uniformed soldiers, in camouflage gear but without insignia, were from a locally recruited militia of ethnic Russians?"

"Since when does the presence of one's own compatriots in a foreign country give one the justification to invade that country? Certainly not since 1945 and the creation of the United Nations."

"That the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, could, along with John Kerry, help sponsor the Geneva II Conference, which was held on the basis of a transition to regime change, and then refuse at the conference itself to even nudge the Syrian government delegates along this line, proves once again that Russia is less of a partner than an adversary."

"...[N]ow France, and again unlike Germany, has become an important, if not the most important security partner of the United States, leading the intervention in Libya; undertaking unilateral and appreciated actions in Mali and the Central African Republic; and standing at the ready for the bombing of Syria which Barack Obama succeeded in calling off."

"...[W]hen you use purple language and discuss opposition figures in a foreign country, using nicknames, as though they were pieces in your own devised chess game, naming which one should enter a new government, etc.; at a moment when a neighboring major power is accusing you of meddling in the affairs of said country, you are once again gaining the reputation of an overbearing superpower throwing its weight around."

"...[T]here is in this film something of the atmosphere of joylessness and excessive secrecy in this nunnery-cum-clinic for wayward girls that is not only very familiar to me but at the same time contrasts with a certain exuberance that also exists in the Irish psyche."