Tony Blair has overestimated his remaining support and is now slowly losing a power struggle with his planned successor as prime minister, Britain’s chancellor Gordon Brown. Yesterday the two held two confrontational meetings but the sniping still reached a fever pitch on both sides in a spectacle that terrified the new Labour faithful. Martin Kettle sees it as a destructive event for the party:

“Brown is taking a fantastic risk in mounting this coup. If it fails, like the forerunner attempt in May did, he will have caused mayhem in the Labour party with no reward. If he overcomes his caution and sees it through this time, though, he could be winning a pyrrhic victory. And by ousting his one-time ally, he may achieve something that until now seemed wholly impossible – stirring up sympathy for Blair.”

Calling it all a “coup” is an illustration of the extreme tactics Blair will employ, as he still dreams of a sendoff of grandiose visits before retirement. As the Guardian reported:
“An internal Downing Street memo detailing the strategy for handling Tony Blair’s departure from office was leaked yesterday.
Titled “Reconnecting with the public – a new relationship with the media” and published in the Daily Mirror, the document apparently suggested a number of headline-grabbing events, including appearances on Songs of Praise, Blue Peter and the Chris Evans show on BBC Radio 2.
Visits to 20 of the most striking new buildings since 1997 was another goal.”
The prime minister is not only unsympathetic but also deeply unpopular in Britain. No groundswell of support will rise for the instigator of the war in Iraq, the increaser of university fees, the introducer of 28-day detention without charge (shortened from 90 days as Blair wanted), the politician who wants unprecedented ID cards for all British subjects, the PM that couldn’t help but undermine Brown politically with changes in planned dates of departure and conflicting announcements about how long he planned to stay.
Blair will leave office with great credit for reviving British public services, at least to some extent, and a few other accomplishments including a strong economy. But Brown had much to do with many of the successes. Now Blair is undermining his legacy by trying to hold on as long as possible out of contempt for Gordon Brown. His speech today was seen as a move toward the door, but what does within a year really mean? As the (London) Times Online reports:

“Tony Blair finally confirmed today that he will leave Downing Street within the next 12 months, earning himself a breathing space in the face of calls from his own party to hand over power sooner rather than later.
The Prime Minister made his announcement at a school in St John’s Wood, north-west London, the day after eight members of the Government resigned in a coordinated protest at his refusal to name the date for his departure.”

But can Brown pull Labour back together and beat David Cameron and the conservative party? Peter Wilby is doubtful:

“What happened to the Tories in 1997 could easily happen to Labour in 2009 or 2010. Because Brown will be a better premier than John Major, and because there will be no policy divide as deep as Europe, there won’t probably won’t be a landslide. But Brown, I think, will still lose.”
Tony Blair should resist the temptation to continue releasing the hounds (like his junior Blairite MPs and Peter Mandelson) on Brown and instead step aside immediately.
[photo: Reuters]

When the presidential candidate on the left of the political divide is named president by a court, it conjures bad memories for many Americans. So what about when such a court ruling sends a right-wing president into power in Mexico? From the Guardian:
“Mexico’s highest electoral court has confirmed that the conservative governing party candidate, Felipe Calderón, has won the country’s disputed presidential poll, throwing out the argument made by his leftist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador that the election was so unfair it should be annulled. An emotional crowd in the capital’s great Zócalo plaza – the headquarters of Mr López Obrador’s protest movement – greeted the ruling with anger, defiance and some heartfelt sobs.”
The court did agree that there were flaws in the election:
“The complaints included President Fox’s use of the state apparatus to favour the governing party candidate during the campaign, as well as negative advertising that compared the leftist candidate to Venezuela’s controversial President Hugo Chávez. The magistrates identified some of these as problematic but did not consider them serious enough to question the legality of the election”
So the court decided in favor of Calderon (by a 7-0 vote as compared to the 5-4 split in Bush v. Gore) and the innauguartion is set for December 1. But Obrador doesn’t see it that way:
“The former mayor of Mexico City did not give any immediate public reaction, although in recent days he has made it clear that this is far from the end of the story. In speeches foreseeing the adverse ruling, he has begun to transform his claims of fraud into an active challenge to the legitimacy of the country’s institutional order.”
Is Obrador right to continue challenging? It’s not clear, but an American on the left after seeing the 2000 and 2004 elections could be forgiven for thinking that he might have a point.
[photo: AP]

NPR reporter Lourdes Garcia-Navarro offered a report about Mexico that spoke of a “poisonous atmosphere in Mexico right now” as uncertainty looms over the presidential election between Calderon and Obrador. Garcia-Navarro says Obrador is “prepared to take this all the way,” mourns lame duck Vicente Fox’s last state of the union speech (blocked by protests), and reveals her bias by falsely claiming that Calderon’s PAN has a “majority” in the incoming Mexican congress. Garcia-Navarro has had a “very long, hot summer,” and it’s time for NPR to send in a better reporter as the story continues with, as she says, “one can predict, with almost certainty, a very difficult opposition.” For now, here is the reality as reported by the BBC:
“Mexico’s ruling National Action Party (PAN) has become the largest party in Congress for the first time.
But the final results of the 2 July elections, released on Wednesday, saw the party fall short of the outright majority required to govern alone.
The PRD came in second place, ahead of the Institutional Revolutionary Party which governed for more than 70 years.
The PAN and the PRD are involved in a dispute over the outcome of the vote for president held at the same time.
The left-wing candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has challenged the initial result, which found that conservative Felipe Calderon – of the PAN – had won by a margin of less than one percentage point.
The Federal Electoral Tribunal has until the end of August to rule on the legal challenges and until 6 September to name a president-elect.“
[photo: NPR.org]

I used to like Slate when it was owned by Microsoft before it was bought by the Washington Post and became a dumping ground for noted “gin soaked popinjay” Christopher Hitchens. Well here’s a note I found in a USA Today article about unofficial iPod tours:
“Slate.com posts art critic Lee Siegel’s downloadable tour of what he considers the most overrated and underrated paintings in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
Is Siegel any better at properly critiquing other people’s work than at characterizing his own? Let’s take a look at what Siegel wrote in the comment section of his own blog using a deceptive alias–via Daily Kos:
“Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.”
Blogger Scott Lemieux offers this about the laughable dismissal of Siegal from his blog at tnr.com (the New Republic online):
“Really, Siegel’s blog was a national treasure–that level of onanism doesn’t come along every day. Now, the question is who will replace him: Ben Domenech? John Lott? Ann Coulter?”
Good question. Well it looks like they are going to try to bore us sheep for a while with something called “Open University.” This is from the site:
“To the best of our knowledge, this blog is unlike any other out there. It’s dedicated to thinking about not just the news of the day but also the news from the academy: Controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion.”
Well it looks like they want to launch an online center for stoking controversey over Middle Eastern studies at Columbia and screwing Juan Cole’s career. Or something like that. Those Slate readers walking around the MoMA might be Hitchens fans who might anyway enjoy a dishonest, arrogant mouthpiece for power guiding them–anyway back to the “popinjay” bit–the man who used that term was George Galloway, MP for Benthal Green and Bow in East London. Mr. Galloway recently wrote in the Guardian‘s blog about the war in Lebanon:
“Practically the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush – and we all know his definition of the words ‘mission accomplished’. Reports that the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel’s response to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.” How did this “time of our choosing” phrase become popular? I think George W. Bush used it to code “we’re going to Iraq” as a matter of when not if. Another language change, picked up by some media, is the recent repetition of “Democrat Party” instead of Democratic Party. This tactic is just a sad exhibition of typical Republican disrespect and arrogance (perhaps they have convinced themselves that this is a clever if Orwellian re-branding, but it just sounds unsophisticated to me). But an even more interesting media talking point is the strange overuse of the term “embolden.” It seems to me that the old horror story about “emboldening the terrorists if we leave Iraq” has been meta-projected by many media talkers and touts onto all sorts of non-Iraq-related matters. This passage appears near the start of a NY Sun article:
“Iran’s mullahs, emboldened by Turtle Bay’s waffling on the Lebanon crisis, are moving quickly to consolidate their gains and solidify their seat in the no longer exclusive nuclear club.” It can’t go over well when a club loses that clubby feel. But wait, there’s more. Here’s the title of the article:
“U.N. Actions Embolden Hezbollah”
So let’s just say that there appears to be a lot of embolde
ning happening on the Middle East scene. It seems that the idea that the enemy (or whoever) can be “emboldened” seems to imply an enormous amount of potential control, giving the ones who shouldn’t be doing the emboldening ability to affect the will and determination of the antagonists. Perhaps these antagonists need to be given more credit for being autonomous and not exclusively reactive in their motivations. What of other uses of this strange verb, not passive but actually active–but in a strange way. The Peublo Chieftain uses the term in an article about the arrest of fugitive Warren Jeffs: “Jeffs’ arrest should embolden law-enforcement officials in the southwest to further crack the iron-fist hold that Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints leaders have on their communities.”
So it seems to be all over the place, and I don’t really understand how such a strange concept as “embolden” is conducive to reason.
[photo: webshots.com]

Saints Peter and Paul Church looms above Washington Square Park in San Francisco’s North Beach Neighborhood, where Jessica and I went for a walk Saturday.
[photo: Daniel J. McKeown]

The New Republic has finally found a reason to admit that giving bizarre creep Lee Siegel a weblog on its site was a mistake. This “apology“ is actually a “regret” below the headline, so I wonder how sorry Mr. Foer is really, but then, it must be hard to deal with image issues and circulation issues at the same time at a neocon magazine these days:

‘An Apology to Our Readers

After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel’s articles and blog under the username “sprezzatura” were produced with Siegel’s participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel’s blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine.

Franklin Foer
Editor, The New Republic’

Mountain Lake Park in San Francisco is a hangout for a very wide variety of fascinating birds through the seasons. I shot a few flying low near sunset time with Jessica’s camera.
[photo: Daniel J. McKeown]

Tony Blair, for all his high sanctinomy and pious posturing, is a lousy right-wing war-monger and now Jimmy Carter is calling him out on it. From the Sunday Telegraph:
‘Tony Blair’s lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.
“I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behaviour,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
Asked why he thinks Mr Blair has behaved in the way that he has with President Bush’s belligerent regime, Mr Carter said he could only put it down to timidity. Yet he confessed that he remains baffled by the apparent contrast between Mr Blair’s private remarks and his public utterances.
“I really believe the reports of former leaders who were present in conversations between Blair and Bush that Blair has expressed private opinions contrary to some of the public policies that he has adopted in subservience.”‘

As George W. Bush toured New Orleans, he must have felt much the way he did at the Republican convention in 2004–like a vulture arriving on the scene of a disaster. On a day that Donald Rumsfeld barks up more nonsense about “fascists” and dares to say to others that “it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons,” Bush tours the city where “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Mediocore piano player Condi Rice said something similar and also false about airplanes and tall buildings.
Rumsfeld’s typically inept misuse of history would be merely laughable if he had been fired already, but as it is he is still in the Pentagon. He has a stake in pushing his distortions–for he must know that history will record, among other things, that Rumsfeld lost a war in Iraq.
[photo: AP via Yahoo]

(Record review: Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam [the avocado album], 2006.)

Along with Neil Young’s new album, Living with War, Pearl Jam is the most exciting new rock album of the year. (Ten years ago, Pearl Jam was Young’s backing band for Mirror Ball, and both have done well since.) Although the lyrics are typically more oblique than on Young’s album, some of Pearl Jam is dedicated to political protest—“World Wide Suicide” is pretty straightforward:

“It’s a shame to awake in a world of pain
What does it mean when a war has taken over
It’s the same everyday in a hell manmade
What can be saved, and who will be left to hold her?
The whole world–world over
It’s a worldwide suicide!”

Some of the songs tend more toward the longing and impassioned expression of Pearl Jam’s long-established style. The songwriting is outstanding and distinctive, and Mike McCreedy and Stone Gossard along with Eddie Vedder still provide the heavy, rocking rhythm guitars that are expected. The rhythm section is well established now that the long tenure of Matt Cameron on drums (after serial replacement drummers earlier in the band’s history) has given bassist Jeff Ament a consistent partner to work with.

Pearl Jam’s frequent touring and musical talent can be heard in the album as the loose feel is held together by tight rhythms and skillful playing. Eddie Vedder now sounds more like Tom Waits than the Eddie Vedder on the band’s first album, Ten. Pearl Jam might be the best rock band in the world all over again.

Many of the songs mix Pearl Jam’s claustrophobic emotional style and anxieties about the war. “Army Reserve” is one example, and it uses a distinct change from verse to chorus, going from a fast tempo and interweaving guitars to a sluggish chorus featuring rueful harmonies.

Most of the songs on Pearl Jam are heavy rockers, delivering big riffs and screaming choruses most of the way through a coherent, well-flowing album. “Gone” is a bit different, with a rocking chorus but very slow, brooding verses, featuring these lyrics that seem to be about suicide, a noted Seattle problem:

“No more upset mornings/No more trying evenings/This American dream/I am disbelieving
When the gas in my tank/Feels like money in the bank/Gonna blow it all this time/Take me one last ride
For the lights of this city/They only look good when I’m speeding/Gonna leave ’em all behind me/Cause this time
I’m gone”

Just because it was the right thing to do, Vedder also does one of his rhythm vocal outbursts at the end of “Come Back,” mixing yelling the song title and the classic “Hoo-ooo-ooo-ooo/hoo-oo-oo-ooo!”