Polls still do not indicate that the Conservatives will earn a clear majority of seats in Parliament later this week. The assumption has been that, in such a situation, Tory leader David Cameron would seek a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in return for a pledge of support for proportional representation--what the Lib Dems consider "reform".

But now it appears that Cameron may be willing to form a minority government, much as Stephen Harper's Conservatives have done--with considerable success--in Canada. They key is that the other parties, though they may have the votes to bring down the Government in such a situation, will be afraid to do so. The public, after all, will not be eager for another election any time soon.

The media and "progressives" are sure that Arizona's new law on immigration will lead to a backlash among Hispanic voters. Perhaps. But almost everyone seems to agree that the problem's origins lie in the failure of the federal government to act. An editorial in the Arizona Republic blames Arizona officials of both parties, but lays primary blame on Washington, DC. It points out that Homeland Security's Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor, was supposed to be setting up an immigration bill for this year.

Karlyn Bowman has covered demographics and public opinion surveys for many years, and with sage insight. She shows at Forbes.com that public opinion is not as hostile to immigrants in general or to Mexicans in particular as one might think. Public opinion is hostile to failure in Washington, DC to address the question of border security.

The decision of the Obama Administration to duck the issue now and to hope it works for Democrats politically in the fall, therefore, could be a mistake in every sense.

UPDATE: George Will justifiably chastises Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles for his over-the-top rhetoric.

The most probable outcome in Britain's election Thursday is a narrow Tory lead. With what is being called (as in the U.S.) the "progressive" vote split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives stand to prevail, but not with much of a mandate.

The vultures already are circling Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Some of his own supporters are speculating on the party leadership battle that will follow a widely anticipated Labour's defeat. It could well be that Labour will come in third in popular votes while still winning more seats than the ill-prepared and underfunded Liberal Democrats.

The flooding in Nashville remains a major disaster and much worse than most Americans--preoccupied by the Gulf oil spill and the terrorist attempt in Times Square--realize. The federal government has been slow to mobilize and, reports Discovery senior fellow Yuri Mamchur. But local people are exceedingly energetic.

The flooding of the Cumberland River continues, thanks to upriver creeks that are feeding it, and significant lowering of the water levels is yet days away. Greatly damaged are many landmarks such as the Grand Old Opry and the Opryland Hotel, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center (built for $126 million in 2006), the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, LP Field (home of the NFL's Tennessee Titans and the Tennessee State teams), St. George's Episcopal Church and many office buildings, stores and restaurants.

Whole buildings floated down the river and across freeways at the height of the 48 hour storm that began early last Saturday. Golf Club clubhouses were among them, as was at least one school whose dramatic destruction was chronicled on TV.

Some 29 people have died, some in drownings when their cars were swamped. Others died in a tornado that accompanied the rain. Nashville's stellar hospitals--many with helipads for emergency airlifts--have been relatively unscathed. But food ran out at a number of fast food restaurants and some supermarkets. Many people store food in freezers in basements and even houses on hills were partially flooded, in many cases. One MacDonalds owner shut off his lights and announced to shouting, horn honking people outside, "I'm out of food. There's nothing left!"

Most major freeways were flooded, but, except for I-24, most are now reopened. The I-24 has serious damage as road surfaces crumbled.

No one has calculated the costs yet. This is the beginning of one of the busiest tourist seasons for Nashville, and, while Grand Old Opry and other programs will find temporary replacement venues, the outlook short term is not good. But Tennesseans are pretty resilient people. As Yuri says, they are very energetic right now.

People tend to follow news piecemeal--the story about spending in the state capital, the story from City Hall and the County Courthouse, the federal government, Greece (riotously right now), Portugal, Spain, Italy, the U.K. (get set for the post-election wake-up call); not to mention confirmed basket cases like Venezuela and Argentina.

But in various ways, all are part of a trend. All are facing a giant hangover from years of deficit spending, and worse, unsupportable spending commitments for the future. Much of it has to do with public pensions.

Andrew Biggs covers some of the problem in a very useful American Enterprise Institute papers, "The Market Value of Public-Sector Pension Deficits." it's only part of the picture, but a key one.

Says Bigg, an AEI resident scholar, "State pension funds ar underfunded by over $3 trillion; this is more than six times the $438 billion in underfunding the plans themselves report."

The British election is so Americanized this year that Conservative David Cameron is borrowing from the political playbook of Bill Clinton (circa 1992) by campaigning right through the night before the Thursday election, while, for example, the more traditional candidate, Labour's Gordon Brown, went home to Scotland Wednesday to rest up and await the verdict of the voters. Tediously, all the candidates have tried to wrap themselves in Barack Obama's imagery, doing look-alike campaign posters (Lib Dem's Nick Clegg) and a retread slogan of Hope and Change (Cameron).

Thing is, as the Brits will find out, Hope and Change is a superficial feeling, not a program.It's not even a noble sentiment, like, say, "Land of hope and glory, mother of the free."

Latest polls put Labour a bit back up above the Liberal Democrats, with Conservatives still ahead by about seven points. That seven points would be a near-landslide in the U.S., but not necessarily in the U.K.

Memo to the State Department Consular Office in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq:

You have in your Kurdish neighborhood of Northern Iraq an Iranian student dissident of prominence who is a "Green" refugee deserving of an entry visa to the United States. Ali Shamsei has been imprisoned and tortured in Teheran and faces death when he returns. The mullah regime has labeled him an "Enemy of the People." The Iraqi government, nonetheless, plans to return him soon. He should be allowed into the U.S. instead.

The 30 year old Shamsei has skills in computers and financial management and is fluent in English. He can succeed here and remain of assistance to former colleagues in Iran.

The Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C., under former Reagan aide Morton Blackwell, is considering him for an international internship. Here in Seattle, Discovery Institute is prepared to welcome him for a speaking engagement--people need to know first hand about conditions under the Almadinejad regime.

2:38 Pacific Daylight Time; 10:38 in London.

The polls closed at 10, the exit polls of the SKY/ITV/BBC show a hung parliament, the Tories with 305 seats (19 below a majority), Labour with 255, Liberal Democrats with a surprisingly weak 61, the rest to minor parties. All of that will be adjusted as actual votes are counted. The Conservative Party strategists are saying that the final numbers will be better than the exit polls suggest--for the Liberal Democrats, but also for them.

An amazing thing for an American is that the election campaign of only four weeks is concluded today (Thursday), and only one hour after the polls close the first complete results will come in. Within another few hours is will all be done.

It helps, of course, that there is only one race (for member of Parliament) on the ballot, of course.

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David Cameron has borrowed many public relations ideas from Barack Obama and had one of Obama's 2008 advisors, Anita Dunn, help him with TV debate preparation. but the conservative (and Conservative) London Telegraph is warning Cameron against emulating Obama.

A sudden decision by the head of the Federal Communications Commission to accept Net Neutrality rules flies in the face of the economic arguments--and the fairness arguments--against such a departure. Hance Haney made the case earlier this week in the Seattle Times.

"An open Internet where broadband providers do not block access to websites or discriminate between content or applications isn't a vision," he writes. "It's a description of the unregulated Internet we already enjoy today. Those in Washington, D.C., who want to change it could stymie it instead and damage the economy." He was speaking of the FCC.

Read it all here.

The New York Times is cool on Israel, that's for sure, so it is not surprising that the nation's leading metro daily would run an article, as it did today, suggesting that ordinary Jewish Americans hold less enthusiastic views toward Israel than do the leaders of national Jewish organizations.

There is no awareness in the article that Israel is being pressured by the Obama Administration on one issue after another and that Israelis at all levels of society increasingly and justifiably fear for their safety. Almost across the political spectrum they are disillusioned with Barack Obama. Roughly 90 percent reportedly disapprove of him. These details are not well covered in the U.S. media, however.

On the other hand, it is not clear that the top Jewish organizations in America have done enough to make such matters known. They are running full page ads in the Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications in support of Israel, but these ads (the ones I have seen) don't criticize Mr. Obama directly.

It may be that Jewish leaders in this country are hesitant to get too far out in front of their constituents, 55 percent of whom still support Mr. Obama. What will it take for these leaders to explain the reality more boldly? When will the leaders lead?

To find out how much the United States depends for its own security and economic well being on Israel, citizens of all backgrounds could start by reading George Gilder's, The Israel Test.

It makes me think of a 1960s ad campaign in New York that followed the theme, "You don't have to be Jewish to Love Levy's Bread."

You don't have to be Jewish to figure out why Israel is both important and truly threatened right now.

But it wouldn't hurt.

In the final days of the British election just completed the Conservative candidate for Prime Minister, David Cameron, finally began to speak out in a gingerly way about the need to limit the reach and intrusive power of the bureaucrat-dominated European Union.

Perhaps that is because he knew full well that there were a number of swing constituencies, especially in the Southwest of England, where Conservative chances of unseating Liberal Democrat incumbents hinged directly on the subject of UK relations with the EU. Cameron's comments helped, it would seem, in several (Truro & Falmouth, for example), but were too weak to matter in others.

The UK independence Party (UKIP), whose party chairman is Lord Malcom Pearson of Rannoch, saw its number of votes rise 50 percent over previous elections, making it the fourth largest party in the country. UKIP still has not elected a Member House of Commons. But what it did accomplish was the attraction of enough votes in the Southeast to make the potential difference between a Conservative defeat and a Conservative victory in about seven constituencies. And those seats, had they joined a couple of others in the Southeast that moved to the Tories anyhow, might have made the difference now between a hung parliament and a narrow Conservative majority.

For example, in Plymouth-Moor View the winning Labour candidate got 37 percent of the vote, the Conservative 33 percent, Labour 17 percent and the UKIP 7.7 percent. Had the UKIP votes gone, hypothetically, to the Tories, the Conservative margin would have been 40.7 percent. They'd have the seat now.

Produce from Oxbow Farm, Carnation, WA

America is full of small "farms" that have been purchased for summer homes or retirement abodes, or just a nice ex-urban address some miles outside the range of urban sprawl. People who acquire such places soon find that it is impossible to farm them in any conventional way, however. They cannot earn enough money. Their counterparts were sold long ago to conglomerates or housing developments. Most nominal small farm land lays fallow as a result--pastoral landscape with no pastoral animals, truck gardens with no large gardens, and, for that matter, no trucks. Good people wind up wasting good land.

It takes workers to maintain farm animals, even the cattle or sheep or horses that might seem to require little care. Orchards need frequent pruning. When vegetables ripen, many hands must work long hours over a few days to harvest them.

Michael Medved's recent lecture "The Five Big Lies About American Business" at Discovery Institute was covered by his website pros in an especially succinct and entertaining way.

He called Angela Merkel of Germany to ask her to bail out the Greeks--and demand cost-cutting by the Greeks in return. Now he's on the phone to Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain about the big spending problems in that socialist-run country.

He's right to do so, of course, since we in America are on the hook for all these interventions, if only indirectly. The developed nations have spent too much for too long.

But, then, how about a little trip to the woodshed for the US of A? Our debt is right up there with the best (worst) of them.

Maybe our President also should call the governors of a number of our freewheeling states, starting with Mr. Schwarzenegger.

How about a public lecture to Congress on the ways that public "servant" salaries have outpaced the private sector for years, as have public servants' health plans and, especially, public servant pensions? Cut those back to where they were only a few years ago and much of our immediate budget problems are solved.

Call it fulfillment of Candidate Obama's "transparency" pledge.

There are so many "wets" around--the name Margaret Thatcher gave Conservatives who talk about conservative principles but are hesitant to put them into practice once they achieve office--that it is exciting when a true "conviction politician" (another Thatcher term) emerges.

One has emerged in New Jersey, of all places. Moreover, he defies the standard expectations of politicians since John F. Kennedy that newcomers, at least, should be svelte, blow-dried anchorman-look-alikes. Gov. Christie is, well, not that.

What he is doing, with little media support and large public support, is trimming the fat in Trenton and trying hard to re-ignite the dynamism of New Jersey. Here is his takedown of a liberal reporter who asked if he didn't think his "confrontational" position on spending would damage his cause:

David Cameron had to get elected in a Britain, a nation more addicted to welfare statism than is the U.S., and then, in order to form a Government at all, he had to form a coalition with a left of center party, the Liberal Democrats. So it probably would be too much to expect him to proceed with what is needed to revive the sagging, heavily indebted British economy: a Reaganesque agenda of spending cuts, tax cuts directed at growing the economy, and regulatory reduction.

Cameron does seem to have a mandate to make some cuts and is using it. But he not only lacks a mandate to cut marginal tax rates and capital gains takes--changes that would provide a stimulus to investment and new jobs--but he also is moving instead to raise capital gains taxes.

Technically, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg have five years to rebuild the economy, but it will be slow going and more painful than necessary. It's a bit like having two doctors, one who says, cut out the cancer and another says, don't cut out the cancer, and agreeing to compromise by cutting out half the cancer.

A "Conservative-Liberal Democrat" government is a political oxymoron.

The "back story", as they say, about the Greek riots and the supposedly harsh cutbacks Greeks are bearing in order to win European Union and IMF (including U.S.) bailouts is not the sort of thing as to make one overly sympathetic.

Greece really is an advanced case of the statism that threatens Spain and Portugal, but also the U.K, and, yes, the U.S. down the road. Public employees are numerous--more numerous than France!--and given lavish pay programs that include 14 months of pay for 12 months of work. Government workers with an extra month's pay each Christmas and Easter. So do government workers for their retirement pensions. Some can retire as early as their 40s.

Journalists, even on the left, know a cover up when they see it. That is why the story in Germany's Der Spiegel is so damning on the issue of global warming. Discovery Senior fellow Wesley Smith cites the article and comments on his blog site.

Note the relevance he ascribes to stem cell research and the Darwin issue.

Dave Earling, a former Discovery Institute colleague (in the Cascadia Center), is president of the Senior Services board of directors, and Deborah Knutson is president of the Economic Development Council of Snohomish County (Everett, Washington and the northern Seattle suburbs), but their message is for the country as a whole. In an oped article in today's Seattle Tmes, "A Commitment to Help Nation's Golden Boomers," Earling and Knutson lay out the new ethic for the Baby Boom generation as it begins to enter senior citizen status.

The history of Communism is not over, it continues in North Korea, Cuba and--in a hybrid form, in China. It may be struggling to be born in Venezuela. But the chief international agency for Communism in the past 100 years was the Soviet Union. The full story has not yet been told.

Claire Berlinski describes some remarkable documents--scores of thousands of them--that Soviet dissidents managed to copy and distribute in the West as the Communist system was crumbling. They mostly are being ignored. Liberals don't want to be reminded of the true state of the system whose threat they underestimated for decades, while today's conservatives seem to want to move on to other topics.

The popular Instanpundit correctly cites George Gilder for his early prediction of the Internet (what he called the Teleputer):

"LIFE AFTER LIFE AFTER TELEVISION: With nearly 20 years of hindsight, the blurb for George Gilder's book Life After Television, published in 1992, shortly before the first browser was available for consumers to access the still-nascent World Wide Web, sounds remarkably prescient:

"Gilder's thesis, written in layman's terms, is that the United States will soon lose its rightful preeminence in the telecommunications field to foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Unless, that is, American business executives, legislators, judges, and consumers look beyond separate, limited, and hierarchical forms of communication such as television, telephones, and online databases to a multifunctional, interactive, and democratic "telecomputer." Instead of envisioning a brave new telecomputerized world, the powers that be in American business, government, and law are wasting time protecting obsolete existing systems, he posits. Gilder also warns that expensive, user-unfriendly online databases such as Dialog and NEXIS are, at best, transitional technologies. Though much of Gilder's argument is based on his own opinions and peculiar personal preferences (Gilder doesn't seem to like to leave the house*) rather than real evidence, his thoughts make interesting reading."

Now what? Gilder, Discovery Senior Fellow who helped found the Institute in 1990 privately is predicting a replacement for the Internet. Stay tuned.

An emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington State University (Bellingham, WA), Don Easterbrook, says we are in for global cooling for another twenty years or so.

It certainly seems so this spring. Winter on the East Coast was grim and summer temperatures are hard to find now in the West. Snowfall also higher than in decades past.

It doesn't mean anything except this: there is (and should be) a real debate.

How can we get out of the deep economic hole we're in?

The old advice, "First, stop digging," is apt, since the Obama Administration continues to contend that "stimulus" is helping and we just need more of it. We also supposedly need more taxes on individuals who make investments in businesses and jobs.

The stock market for a while had some people feeling confident, even though salaries weren't rising and unemployment has remained high. Now that confidence is shaken, too. Demand side economics isn't working.

The real advice we need is reduced public spending and reduced (or at least not increased) taxes especially on investments. We need growth.

At some point, one gets tired of hearing conservative intellectuals pronounce solemnly in their speeches, "Ideas have consequences." Well, yes, ideas do have consequences. But what ideas and what consequences? And where does the fequently incanted phrase come from? Seldom--almost never--is one told, as speakers rush on to declaim, say, for spending cuts or a strong defense.

In fact, the phrase is the title of a seminal work of modern traditional conservative thought, Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences. First published in 1948, Ideas and subsequent Weaver books and essays, especially The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), influenced the young Bill Buckley and inspired generations of still younger conservatives in such groups as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

These days Weaver's Ideas appears to be cited almost infinitely more often than it is read, and that's a pity. Likewise Weaver's other books and essays.

My colleague David Klinghoffer not only has read extensively in Weaver, but also has enlisted the philosopher's ghost in the battle against Darwinism. Weaver correctly saw Darwinism as an idea with profoundest consequences. How odd it is that he and some other notable conservatives fifty or so years ago (C.S. Lewis, Irving Kristol, Whittacker Chambers, Bill Buckley) could see the scientific flaws in Darwin's theory, and the philosophy of materialism behind the theory, while so many conservative public intellectuals today quietly seek appeasement.

Start with David's first post and work your way forward through the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth entries. Then check-out Weaver yourself.

UPDATE: One of the most thorough analyses of the background of the Flotilla, including a report from the Danish Institute on International Studies that reveals the terrorist nature of several Flotilla sponsors, is by Melanie Phillips.

Iran and Hamas--and Islamists in Turkey--have a keen sense of Western media and how to play them. The Peace Flotilla is a good example. The flotilla was trying to break a blockade, and that is dangerous by definition. Like 60s radicals in the U.S. confronting the police or military, the whole idea was to provoke a reaction from Israel and sympathy from Western media.

That they succeeded is too bad for them and, because of the crocodile tears of Western governments, unfortunate for Israel.

But instead of "deploring" the Israeli reaction, the West should be deploring the intentional provocation. To the extent that the U.S. fails to back Israel in its insistence on security terrorists will continue to probe. They are probing the resolve of the U.S. at the same time.
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Weapons Found Aboard the Vessel Mavi Marmara: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvS9PXZ3RWM

Our colleague Jay Richards, co-author with Guillermo Gonzalez of The Privileged Planet, responds to the perfervid, unremitting efforts to posit, if not find, life in outer space. People like Richard Dawkins and the New York Times-- that condemn theorists who cite evidence for intelligent design--get weak-kneed and giddy when offered totally speculative aspirations to life discoveries by scientism's guardians.

Like the economic theorist describing how to get out of a hole--"First, assume a ladder."--the materialist indicates that all it takes to find life in other galaxies is a near-infinity of stars and a near-infinity of time. Theory conquers all.