ANOTHER CRITICAL ELECTION – AT 9:03 A.M. ET:  And it ain't here.   Important local elections are being held across Britain today.  They test the strength, or more happily the weakness, of the Labour Party's new, militant leftist head, Jeremy Corbyn.  He is the most left-wing party leader in British history, and pals around with folks like Hamas and Hezbollah.  From The New York Times:

LONDON — Londoners will decide whether to elect Sadiq Khan, the Labour front-runner, as their first Muslim mayor on Thursday, but in elections being held across Britain the wider results will pose a bigger test for the party as a whole — especially for Jeremy Corbyn, its left-wing leader.

Ahead of this election cycle it would usually be the governing party — not the opposition — feeling the pressure. And these elections come at a particularly precarious time for Prime Minister David Cameron’s governing Conservatives as the party faces a crisis in the steel industry and strikes by doctors. In March, a cabinet minister quit, and the Conservative Party is deeply split over a referendum in June on whether Britain should quit the European Union.

In London, Labour’s mayoral candidate, Mr. Khan, who is the son of an immigrant bus driver, is the favorite to replace the outgoing mayor, Boris Johnson, a Conservative.

But outside London the elections may provide Labour with more ominous results that could increase pressure on Mr. Corbyn at a time when newspapers have been filled with speculation about plots against him from within the party in the aftermath of a dispute over allegations of anti-Semitism in its ranks.

And...

Things would be “pretty bad” for Labour, apart from the London mayoral contest “and London should not be of much comfort to Jeremy Corbyn because Sadiq Khan campaigned despite Jeremy Corbyn,” said Steven Fielding, director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham. He was referring to the fact that Mr. Khan has distanced himself from Mr. Corbyn since last year, when Mr. Khan nominated Mr. Corbyn in Labour’s leadership contest, but then opted not to vote for him.

COMMENT:  Britain is one of our closest allies, and what happens in Britain politically is of importance here.  Keeping the Labour Party out of power is in the national interest of the United States.  Mr. Corbyn is so extreme that he actually wants to abolish the British army.

These are local races, but they usually indicate national trends.  Hope for conservative victories.

May 5,  2016