Exit polls in the UK show a “Hung parliament with Tories as largest party with 307 seats. Lab[our] 255. L[iberal] D[emocrats] 59.”

This may not be as hung as some people would like if British exit polls, like those over here, undercount conservative performance.

UPDATE:  From the updated link above, why does this sound familiar?

2242 Lord Mandelson on BBC1: “People have voted for change but they don’t know what type of change they want”. So that’s cleared things up.

UP-UPDATE:  Tories take King Offa‘s seat!  Been following some of Michael Barone’s coverage of the British election at the Washington Examiner and just learned that the Tories captured the first capital of England: “Conservatives gain High Peak (a suburban district outside Manchester) and Montgomeryshire in Wales (where the Lib Dem had won big in 2005), Leicestershire Northwest , Aberconwy, Basildon South, and they’ve gained Tamworth from the Lib Dems.”  In the 8th century, Tamworth was the seat of King Offa, the first man to be called rex Anglorum–or King of the English.  The word Englisc (so spelled but pronounced as we pronounce the language we speak) did not appear until two centuries later.

Technically, Offa was King of Mercia, but the various kingdoms, Wessex and Kent for example, looked to him for leadership and protection.  Only the Nothumbrians did not fall under his sway.  He was most famous for building Offa’s Dyke, which was, contrary to some of our readers’ hopes, not the court lesbian, but a great fortification protecting the English from Welsh raids.

Several Beowulf scholars believe that that, the greatest poem written between the early days of the Roman Empire and the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance, was written in Offa’s court.

Thus, the Tory taking of Tamworth has great historical significance.

Greece is on the brink of anarchy due to their debit crisis.

The Dow Jones is down 350 points today on reports that European banks’ lending has seized up.

And US retail sales reported today were much lower than expected — consumers are not spending.

Most top U.S. retail chains reported weaker-than-expected April same-store sales Thursday, suggesting that Wall Street’s hopes for a consumer rebound have gotten ahead of the actual pace of recovery.
Sales at stores open at least a year rose 0.5 percent in April, well short of Wall Street estimates of a 1.7 percent increase. Nearly 70 percent of 28 retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters disappointed, with the biggest misses seen among apparel retailers like Gap and teen chains like Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Nobody has told American consumers that the recession is over although some officials have rosy predictions of growing consumer spending,” consumer trend expert Britt Beemer said in a note. “We’re seeing a lot of people on the edge of financial distress.”

So why the hell did we spend $787B last year for the Stimulus and another $1T this year on healthcare “reform”?

The President needs to address America’s financial distress quickly or his dreams of a Socialist Utopia are going to go up in flames.  Literally (see: Greece).

Welcome to the Double Dip Recession.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

A woman who stood up to entrenched interests and corruption the Republican Party in her home state and for smaller more efficient government, has just signaled her support of another strong woman.

Sarah Palin has endorsed Carly Fiorina to replace a Senator who has sat idly by while businesses flee her state, taking jobs with them.  The accomplished former Alaska governor said:

Carly is the Commonsense Conservative that California needs and our country could sure use in these trying times. She’s not a career politician. She’s a businesswoman who has run a major corporation. She knows how to really incentivize job creation. Her fiscal conservatism is rooted in real life experience. She knows that when government grows, the private sector shrinks under the burden of debt and deficits. We can trust Carly to do the right thing for America’s economy and to make the principled decisions she has throughout her professional career. . . .

Please consider that Carly is the conservative who has the potential to beat California’s liberal senator, Barbara Boxer, in November. I’m a huge proponent of contested primaries, so I’m glad to see the contest in California’s GOP, but I support Carly as she fights through a tough primary against a liberal member of the GOP who seems to bear almost no difference to Boxer, one of the most leftwing members of the Senate.

Now, you can bet that when Carly wins the primary next month, Ma’am, knowing that liberals blanche in terror at the mere mention of Palin’s name, is going to wrap the former Governor around the former HP CEO, doing anything she can to deflect attention from her sorry record.

With Tom Campbell unable to commit to opposing tax increases, Carly remains the one viable candidate in the race committed to fiscal conservatism.

UPDATE:  Over at Conservatives for Palin, Ian Lazaran explains why Sarah Palin is backing Carly: (more…)

“In his half-hour infomercial” the Wednesday before the 2008 election, the Washington Post reported, candidate Barack Obama “repeated earlier assurances that he had ‘offered spending cuts’ to pay for every cent of the post-election bonanza that he plans to shower on his fellow Americans.”  (Emphasis added.)  Indeed, in the third debate that fall, pointing out ”that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments” he told what he’d been doing ”throughout this campaign”: he had proposed “a net spending cut.”

So, if he favored a net spending cut throughout the campaign, why would he be so upset if Republicans opposed en masse a post-election spending bonanza that didn’t offer any compensatory spending cuts as Obama promised in his infomercial:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

So, we see two things here about Obama.  He’s incredulous that his political adversaries would act in the spirit of his campaign rhetoric.  And that he responds to a grassroots political movement based on principles identical to that rhetoric.

Guess he just assumed those ideas would stop resonating once he won election.

The more I followed the 2008 campaign, the less I believed Barack Obama’s rhetoric, his mellifluous voice and telegenic presence notwithstanding, that he was some new kind of politician, committed to ideals of open government, immune to the pull of special interests — particularly those with lots of cash to spread around.

He cut his teeth in the hardscrabble world of Chicago politics and never once showed any inclination to buck the machine.  He was — and remains — a loyal team player.  He didn’t do anything to take on corrupt politicians nor did he support their challengers in primary elections.

So, it comes as little surprise that his Administration did a favor for a campaign contributor:

Turns out Barack Obama has gotten more money from British Petroleum than any other American politician. Not just that, but BP spent $15.9 million lobbying the Democrats and Obama last year.

The result of all that money to Obama? The Obama Administration exempted British Petroleum from an environmental drilling study.

“What the odds?” Doug Ross asks, “Obama biggest recipient of BP cash in last 20 years; U.S. exempted BP’s Deepwater site from environmental oversight in ’09“.  Now, I’ll grant that more investigation is warranted, but there is more evidence here of pay-for-lax enforcement than of collusion between the Bush Administration and Halliburton.

When I checked the home pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Yahoo!, none reported the link.  If this were a different Administration, they would have already ran stories similar to those we have seen on right-of-center blogs and have dispatched their top reporters to research this matter.

The one who uncovered the scandal would be sure to win a Pulitzer Prize.

UPDATE:  Right after posting, caught this on Instapundit:

GOVERNMENT REGULATORS GAVE BP A PASS: “The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental-impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.”

I had linked the original WaPo version of this below, but, strangely, that link now goes to a completely different story. So here it is again. Thanks to reader Joseph Nunke for pointing out this odd behavior at the Post, and for sending the new link. We saw similar behavior from The New York Times with a critical story about the Administration the other day. Hmm. Anybody at the WaPo or the NYT want to explain this? ‘Cause it looks pretty bad.