BRITAIN TO VOTE – AT 12:48 P.M. ET:  We don't seem too aware of it here, but Britain votes in a major national election this week.  And, dreadful thought, there is a good chance that Labor will form the next government.  That will thrill Obama, and depress mature adults.  Labor's leader is the son of Marxists.  From AFP:   

Written off as a weird Westminster insider who only became Labour Party leader by knifing his brother, Ed Miliband is now seen as having more than a sporting chance of being Britain’s next prime minister.

Despite his awkward demeanour and frequent setbacks, the 45-year-old has retained an unerring self-confidence, which a growing number of people believe could propel him to the country’s top job.

“I’ve been underestimated at every turn,” he said in a fiery exchange with a fearsome interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, during a television grilling alongside Prime Minister David Cameron at the start of the campaign.

In sharp contrast to his often insipid performances against Cameron in parliament, Miliband has appeared energetic and enthused during recent campaign appearances, displaying an appetite for risk-taking.

He took part in a debate of opposition leaders, ignoring warnings he was on a hiding to nothing, and agreed to an interview with acid-tongued comedian Russell Brand, Britain’s voice of anti-politics.

Miliband said the kitchen-table interview would make the campaign “more interesting” and he could yet have the last laugh if he manages to win over some of Brand’s nine million Twitter followers.

But in a television appearance in which audience members criticized his party’s record on public finances and pro-business policies, Miliband was on the defensive and stumbled as he left the stage.

And...

His old-fashioned left-wing beliefs have also attracted criticism — the right-wing media branding him “Red Ed” — as has his record on banking deregulation while working at the Treasury in the years before the financial crash of 2008.

Perhaps most damaging, however, is the family rift that the fiercely ambitious Miliband created by taking on and beating his older brother David, a protege of former prime minister Tony Blair, for the Labour party leadership in 2010.

Ed said recently that the fraternal divisions are now “healing.”

His biographers Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre said it was seen by some “as an almost biblical act of fratricide.”

His brother left to work in the United States shortly after the defeat, but recently tweeted a picture of his postal vote with the hashtag “Ed4PM.”

COMMENT:  The voting is Thursday.  It will be a sad day if Labor wins.  Labor would be happy to back Obama's left-wing agenda in the international arena, and reinforce Obama's reluctance to confront the new Russian expansionism.  We really don't need this.

May 3, 2015