George Bush is about to lose his last solid international ally.

Tony Blair has suffered a poor night in England’s local elections as Labour made losses of more than 200 seats.

A “poor night” is an understatement. These elections became a referendum on Blair. After losing 200 seats, where Blair was standing just became a smoking crater.

But it was the effect on Tony Blair that is likely to have the biggest implications, with suggestions he was set to face demands to announce a timetable for his early departure from Downing Street.

From The New Statesmen

By the time you read these words, Tony Blair will be gone. His ageing and exhausted form may still occupy Downing Street, but the reality, recognised by allies and foes alike, is that he no longer has authority over his government or party.

Dubya and the neocons are no doubt getting a bit twitchy over this.

[tags]tony blair[/tags]

1 Comment »

Wood from Wales asks in the comments why hasn’t Polizeros mentioned Steven Colberts’s recent amazing and gutsy lampooning of Bush as Bush sat there and scowled.

In part it was because lots of other blogs did, and also because things were so frenzied building for the May 1 immigration rights march that several topics for blog posts just slipped away.

It was a watershed moment though, and reminds me of an incident during the Watergate days when Nixon was finally weakening. For months, no one criticized Nixon in the mainstream media. Then, one day, Johnny Carson, who then had a hugely popular late night talk show on TV, made a tiny, mild anti-Nixon joke. The audience laughed.

The next night he let Nxon have it both barrels. I thought at the time, ok, Nixon has lost the heartland, as Johnny Carson and his gagwriters made a point of reading midwest newspapers daily to see what folks there were thinking. For Carson to make a joke like that meant something had shifted in the American psyche. From then on, it was seriously downhill for Tricky Dick.

This is not to say that Johnny Carson had the power, and neither does Steven Colbert, but rather than the times had changed enough that such public mocking finally became possible.

1 Comment »

From Craig Murray comes this fascinating explanation of today’s vote in London. Activists are using the Net to instruct voters specifically who to vote for in their area in hopes of defeating the Labour candidate. If enough Labour incumbents  lose, then under fairly arcane rules, rebels in the party and elsewhere may be able to force the walking political corpse that is Tony Blair out of power.

Anti-New Labour tactical voting by former Labour voters, and supporters of all other parties, looks set to deliver a local election result in London that will contribute significantly to sweeping Tony Blair out of 10 Downing Street.

Simply by typing in their postcode on the website, Londoners can find out which party stands the best chance of beating New Labour in their council ward. The interactive website will be a centre for vote-swapping between supporters of different parties in different boroughs, so that the power of tactical voting to create change can be exploited to the full.

London Strategic Voter spokesman Richard Wilson: “May 4th is a referendum on whether the voters want Tony Blair to stay or to go now. We want him to go.”

BlairWatch will have breaking news on the election as it happens.

No Comments »

Bolivian president seizes gas industry

Bolivian President Evo Morales seized control of the country’s natural gas industry Monday, sending soldiers to occupy fields that he contends private companies have plundered for years.

Morales said that unless foreign energy firms agreed to give Bolivia’s state oil company oversight of production and a majority of their revenue generated in Bolivia, the government would evict them from the fields.

A good start on solving the growing oil crisis here in the U.S. would be nationalizing the oil companies, then selling the gas and oil at only enough to make a modest profit and for energy research. Yes, centralized planning can accomplish what private enterprise refuses to do, provide energy at a reasonable price for all, not just making a tiny few even wealthier.

True, the U.S. energy problem is not solely due to a greedy few. But eliminating their plunder is crucial to the process of reform.

6 Comments »

Dan Fante’s father was John Fante, renowned novelist about L.A. in the 30’s. Charles Bukowski considered him a major influence. Dan is a novelist and poet.

From an interview with Dan.

Dan Fante is the goddamn man. Son of the legend that is John Fante, he’s a reformed boozing drug-addicted suicidal degenerate given - these days - to turning out the kind of hardboiled no bullshit prose familiar to fans of Charles Bukowski.

The L.A. Times ran a major piece last Sunday on Dan and his father titled Where father ends and son begins.

Many consider Dan’s father the best novelist Los Angeles has ever produced. In spare, gleaming prose, John painted a city that was nasty and harsh, but also shot through with magic—part land mine, part gold mine. “Los Angeles, give me some of you!” John wrote in the 1930s, while starving in a downtown flophouse.

Yet John Fante’s novels barely sold and were critically panned. He ended up writing shlock scripts for Hollywood, living in Malibu, making big money, but loathing it. He eventually drank himself to death. On the outside John Fante had it all, on the inside he was being eaten alive. Dan did not grow up easy.

Rock bottom was a rented house in Laurel Canyon. Drunk, Dan used his gun to blow holes in a mirrored wall. Afterward he was forced to see in the shot-up shards what he’d become. “When I had the gun in my mouth with the hammer back—it was a pretty good indication I’d had enough fun,” he says. “I got sober and began going to meetings.”

I’ve known Dan since before he started writing, and then, sixteen years ago when he said I’m going to sit down and write for an hour a day and see what happens. That was six books ago. I watched as his books were ignored in the U.S. but started to get a following in Europe. Then the buzz started here. Today, he has two new books being released and with this big L.A. Times piece, it appears his rocket has ignited. And this is a fine thing to behold indeed.

(If you live in L.A, Dan will be doing a reading this Sunday 7 pm at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont, between Hollywood and Franklin.)

[tags]Dan Fante,John Fante[/tags]

1 Comment »