Tag: Review

As the reality that Kushner received his White House security clearance the same way he got into Harvard sinks in – “Daddy” pulled some very expensive strings – his popularity will not be rebounding anytime soon. Ambition. In Ward’s telling, Charlie Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father, dreamed of becoming America’s Jewish Joe Kennedy, Ivanka Trump fantasizes about being president and Donald Trump almost wishes Ivanka could have been his first lady. Unlike Jared, Josh comes across as possessing a light touch, talented and ready to defy his parents. Like Ivanka Trump, Kloss converted to Judaism. Trump and Kushner were having none of that. Bannon resisted, and noted that if Trump fired Comey the director would come to look like J Edgar Hoover, a legend. The Book of Genesis tells the story of Isaac and Rebekah’s sons, Esau and Jacob. Fathers can get things wrong. Josh and Kloss must be smirking.

Without the pioneers throughout the decades that she celebrates – Eleanor Rathbone campaigning for family allowances, Barbara Castle fighting for equal pay for women, and Harriet Harman and Tessa Jowell pushing for better childcare provision – there would have been much slower progress. As Reeves says, the book is a “biography of Parliament told by the women elected to it … an alternative history of Britain in the last one hundred years, told through the stories of political women”. In the 1960s, Shirley Williams and her female colleagues had their bottoms pinched by male MPs and so, in protest, wore stiletto heels which were dug into the feet of any offender – who would later be identified hobbling into the tearoom. Shirley Summerskill, a minister in a Harold Wilson government, had her hair stroked by a male MP who had stopped her in a Westminster corridor. She couldn’t report his behaviour to the Whips’ Office because the culprit was, in fact, the chief whip, Bob Mellish. Reeves discusses female MPs who have, in the past century, risked their political careers to take a principled stand: Rathbone, an independent, joined the Conservative Duchess of Atholl and Labour’s Ellen Wilkinson to oppose appeasement of fascism, and yet their contribution has been overlooked by history. The duchess resigned as an MP in November 1938 to force a byelection – and yet did not receive public support from Churchill, who didn’t want to take a political risk (she lost). The theme of sisterhood across the parties runs through the book and the century. Today, female MPs are subjected to a barrage of abuse. Women of Westminster shows how far female MPs have come, but how challenging their work remains.

Anne Washburn’s new play does something you rarely see in the theatre: it takes Donald Trump seriously rather than as a subject for easy satire. In her previous shows at the Almeida, Mr Burns and The Twilight Zone, Washburn has invoked American popular culture. Here she examines the politics of the moment and, while her three-hour play sprawls and goes a bit bonkers towards the end, it has the supreme virtue of addressing the topic that haunts so many Americans today. Washburn sets most of the action in a snowbound farmhouse in upstate New York. In conventional drama, you might expect one of the characters to be murdered. Instead we watch a group of privileged white liberals obsessively arguing about Trump at a pivotal moment in his presidency: the period just after ex-director of the FBI James Comey offered damning testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. In a parallel narrative strand, Washburn explores the alienation of a young Kenyan from a kindly Christian couple who adopted him as a child. Any temptation to treat the liberals as pillars of virtue is resisted: their lives seem messy and confused and they are prone to excess as when they debate whether Trump could be the antichrist. But one of the group, a lawyer, seizes on a key moment when Trump, in a Republican primary debate, claimed that White House delegates pleaded with him to cool his opposition to the Iraq war. The lawyer goes on to say that Trump “makes himself up out of thin air and nobody cares”.

The allegations of unlawful political contributions against three State Police commissioners, as well as their responses to the claims, were sent Thursday to Gov. State Police Commission Chairman Eulis Simien Jr. and commissioners Jared J. Caruso-Riecke and Chief Harold Pierite Sr. — who were all initially appointed by Edwards to the board — have denied any wrongdoing after they were accused last month of making political donations that violate the same rules they are tasked with investigating and reviewing for troopers. “The matter cannot be decided by this commission," Jason Hannaman, the executive director of the commission, said at the board meeting Thursday. "After those investigations are complete, the Governor will determine whether to take any further action," Sanford wrote in a statement Thursday. The donation details have since been updated in the Ethics Administration's online records, now noting that his brother Denis Riecke made the donation, not Riecke & Associates. Jimmy Simien, Eulis Simien's brother, wrote in a letter provided to the board: “I alone made the decisions without any input from Eulis, who was not involved in either the decisions, events, or the contributions.” Pierite is accused of making multiple donations totaling $120 to the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Political Action Committee throughout 2017. Pierite did not deny making those contributions, but argued that neither the state constitution nor the rules of the State Police Commission explicitly prohibit commissioners from making contributions to a political committee. However, the attorney also noted Pierite has since halted these automatic monthly donations to the PAC. Similar allegations three years ago led to three commissioners resigning, amid an investigation over thousands of dollars in political donations by them or their companies during their terms on the board. The State Police Commission on Thursday also dismissed a complaint over a political donation from the Louisiana Troopers Charities, in the form of an $800 check to the Acadiana Strong Political Action Committee.

David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Read more Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here. Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government. Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” Her aims are ambitious. Finally, “this book aims to be something else, too – an explanation of the nature of the past.” “History isn’t only a subject,” Lepore writes. Lepore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement American politics has always been robust, but technology and better methods of analysis have magnified the impact. She offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. This is a history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past. Lincoln did not say merely that we “can” save the country, but that we “shall”.

We make a potentially fatal mistake if we think that history is just repeating itself. He is right to register “widespread contemporary disgust with democratic politics”. Some of the sources that he identifies will be familiar to readers of the burgeoning literature on the malaise afflicting the more mature democracies. Short-termist politicians are inadequate to the task of tackling existential threats to humanity, such as climate change, because thinking about the end of the world “is too much for democracy to cope with”. The cold war – this is my suggestion, not his – advertised why liberal capitalist democracy was superior to totalitarian communism. For all its flaws, where democracy has enough time to put down roots it proves durable. Yet Runciman finds this not a reason to be cheerful, but another cause for concern. For all its manifest and manifold imperfections, democracy has a better record than any rival form of government at sustaining free, innovative, peaceful and prosperous societies. Donald Trump is not the end of democracy’s story. • How Democracy Ends by David Runciman is published by Profile (£14.99).

Long before the revolution, there were two Americas, implicitly at odds. In the US, all history is contemporary history and its rhetoric is integral to the American experiment. Behold, America tells a story of outrageous bombast braided with the most violent arguments about capitalism, democracy and race. The American dream was not to be found, for instance, on the lips of Woodrow Wilson, a great Democrat idealist. By the 1940s, the promises of the American dream were not what they were, if they ever had been. By the second world war, that faltering dream had shrunk to a vague, intermittent corrective within the national conversation whenever the forces of inequality and oligarchy seemed too oppressive to ordinary Americans. The dark history of 'America first' Read more For more than a decade, once the war was over, it seemed as if the visceral side of the American psyche had overwhelmed its softer, more humane and idealistic alter ego. A society made of words had not forgotten the power and consolations of language. Behold, America is an enthralling book, almost a primer for the ferocious dialectic of US politics, inspired by the events of 2015/16. • Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell is published by Bloomsbury (£20).

Heritage House Publishing, 352 pages In this age of short attention spans, it is easy to forget what a momentous day it was that unfolded on June 29, 2017 to give British Columbia its first NDP premier in 16 years. It was drama of the highest order. Yet it might soon have faded from memory had it not been for two legislative reporters with a ringside seat for every twist and turn. Rob Shaw of the Vancouver Sun and Richard Zussman, then of CBC, felt these historic happenings deserved a closer look. (Mr. Zussman is now with Global News, after being fired by the CBC for allegedly breaching its guidelines with his work on this book.) The result, produced in an astonishingly short time, is their book, A Matter of Confidence, and it’s a winner – a well-written, compelling and fast-paced narrative that does ample justice to the unprecedented circumstances that yielded such a seismic shift in B.C.’s political landscape. Thanks to a wealth of interviews with key participants, whose memories, and scars, were still fresh, the authors puncture the secrecy of the backrooms, allowing us to listen in on closed-door discussions by players from all three parties that went on before, during and after an election campaign, which ended with the upstart Greens holding the balance of power. I enjoyed discovering, too, that then-Liberal health minister Terry Lake lobbied heavily for a payroll tax to help cover his government’s promised elimination of health-care premiums. His view was nixed by Clark. premier.)

Whenever I finish a book like Russian Roulette, I ask myself the same question: why is anyone still debating whether there was collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump? Trump was a big advocate of Brexit, which was a body blow to the EU, and in the 2016 campaign he called Nato “obsolete”. Although the Russians failed at that moment to produce promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, the authors point out that “Trump’s senior advisers now had new reason to believe that Putin’s regime wanted Trump to win and was willing to act clandestinely to boost his chances. The Russians had offered to help, and Trump’s campaign had demonstrated a willingness to take what Moscow had to offer.” Almost any of these details would have been enough to torpedo any other presidential campaign, but Trump somehow managed to weather every single crisis. There were also more than 60,000 sentences published about Clinton and her emails – and less than 10,000 about Trump’s connections to Russia. An Obama official told Corn and Isikoff it wasn’t until two months after the election that “all the pieces came together for us”. As Corn and Isikoff explain, the editors decided to make the FBI’s failure to prove a connection the article’s theme, instead of the much more important fact of the investigation itself. What is new in Russian Roulette about the Times piece is how the ex-British spy Christopher Steele reacted to it. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House review – tell-all burns all Read more Before the Times piece appeared, Steele had been considering a trip to Washington to discuss his findings with members of Congress – and perhaps hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol. If Steele had gone public, could that have been enough to change the election?

‘My mum’s worried that I’m going to offend people and no one will ever go to my gigs again,” chuckles Paloma Faith, explaining why her tiptoe into political music on recent No 1 album, The Architect, isn’t overly reflected in her live show. There’s no place in the setlist for Politics of Hope, the narrative by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones from the album. Nor – despite Theresa May’s grand speech on Brexit hours earlier – does the singer make any reference whatsoever to the brassily anthemic Guilty (“I’m living in my worst fears / Begging you back through tears”), apparently about a remorseful leave voter. However, there is far more political content than we’d generally get from a mainstream pop star whose big-lunged retro soul ticks the same boxes as Adele and Amy Winehouse. Faith explains how the ostensibly breezy pop Kings and Queens was inspired by her black childhood sweetheart’s experiences of police racial stereotyping; she refreshingly employs a female rhythm section and peppers her cheery Carry On banter with fiendish little snatches of polemic (“We’re all being brainwashed to believe that we’re isolated, but we’re not”). There’s a more direct dollop of activism when she explains why she thinks the third global war has already started, and dedicates the first line of the song WW3 (“What kind of man gets a thrill from the life he’s taken?”) to Donald Trump. Faith, a half-Spanish, Hackney-born child of a one-parent family, couldn’t get away with rampaging on brandishing a copy of Socialist Worker. However, it’s to her credit that she can slip slivers of protest music into what is otherwise a big, staple – if occasionally kooky – arena show, with theatrical bells and whistles. The 36-year-old trained contemporary dancer and former burlesque performer makes a grand entrance through a trapdoor beneath what looks like a giant pile of ice. Then touring until 24 March.