He's been likened to Barack Obama, though perhaps it's easier for Americans to see him as a Ross Perot -- albeit a Ross Perot who not only helped decide the election but who captured a key role in the new government.

He's Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, and key to extraordinary political events taking place in the United Kingdom. Here's a handy Ticket analysis of these events, specially tailored for American readers.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will lead Britain tonight in an unprecedented power-sharing deal that will change the balance of British politics.

Conservative leader David Cameron has traveled to Buckingham Palace to be invited by Queen Elizabeth II to form a new government as prime minister. Clegg is expected to take the role of deputy prime minister.  Incumbent Prime Minister Gordon Brown has tendered his resignation, leaving Downing Street for perhaps the last time on a day of political theater not seen in the U.K. for decades.

Cameron at 43 becomes the Queen's 12th prime minister and the first to be younger than the Queen's youngest son, Prince Edward. Clegg is also 43. Cameron vowed to govern "in the national interest."

"I came into politics because I love this country, I think its best days still lie ahead and I believe deeply in public service," he said.

The Conservatives, who did not seal an overall majority in last week's general election, were forced to give up major concessions to the Lib Dems to woo them from doing a deal with the outgoing Labor administration.  These include a more progressive tax curve and, most importantly for the Lib Dems, a referendum on an alternative voting system. 

It is precisely this political dynamic that has allowed Clegg to become kingmaker, and somewhat ruthlessly trade off the two bigger parties against each other to secure his party's support in a voting system that usually downplays the role of the third party.  This is why the Liberal Democrats, which secured 23% of the popular vote and just 57 out of 620 seats, wield a much bigger stick in this election than, say, third-party candidates Perot or John Anderson in previous U.S. elections.  

The Conservatives will seek to distance Britain from the ongoing debt troubles in the euro-zone, and the U.S. is a natural ally. Cameron will be keen to bolster his newly found international reputation by seeking to strengthen the so-called "special relationship" between the U.S. and U.K., which prospered under previous British Prime Minister Tony Blair but had soured somewhat of late under Brown (but which reached its zenith in the Reagan-Thatcher years). During the campaign, Cameron moved quickly to take the political center -- a move widely criticized within his own party -- and preaches a brand of "compassionate conservativism" he has carefully sought to brand as "change."

Clegg, meanwhile, has been hailed as the British Barack Obama (this theme has played out continually on the campaign trail, with one newspaper painting Clegg in the Obama "change" poster colors, and another painting Cameron in the famous strokes).  Traditional Lib Dem policies such as...

Arizona’s tough new law to combat illegal immigration has prompted all sorts of chatter -- passionate and emotional, analytical and angry. With all that chatter, it might have been easy to miss a jaw-dropping anecdote about a future Supreme Court chief justice tossing about an ethnic slur.

The anecdote comes to us from the always insightful Times columnist Tim Rutten. In a commentary about the possible impact of Arizona’s new law -- which was written by state Sen. Russell Pearce. Rutten recalled how the Supreme Court deliberated an earlier case concerning undocumented immigrants.

We’ll let Rutten take it from here:

Anti-immigrant groups already are lining up in support of Pearce because, if passed, his new bill might give them a chance to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 ruling that struck down Texas' attempt to deny public education to undocumented immigrant children. The Plyler decision is a bete noir to many conservatives, who regard Justice William Brennan's opinion on behalf of the 5-4 majority as a kind of high-water mark of judicial activism.

Pearce and his supporters are fishing in particularly angry and ugly waters with this new initiative, for the court's deliberations on Plyler took an unusually personal turn. According to Brennan's notes, at one point during their conference on the case, Justice William H. Rehnquist, the future chief justice, referred to the plaintiffs as “wetbacks.” When an angry Thurgood Marshall objected to the slur, Rehnquist -- who had practiced law in Arizona for nearly 20 years -- replied that the term was commonly used where he came from. Unappeased, Marshall demanded an apology, comparing it to the vulgar epithet for blacks to which he'd been personally subjected. Rehnquist declined to back down.

Commonly used. Well, other offensive terms -- for the Irish, Italians, Jews and African Americans -- have been commonly used at various points in the country’s history too. Follow this link for Rutten's column.

-- Steve Padilla

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Photo: William H. Rehnquist in 2003. Credit: Associated Press

The political fight over Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court is going virtual.

One day after President Obama nominated Kagan, Vice President Biden said she was "the right age," hinting at one of the factors that led to her selection. At 50, Kagan would be the youngest justice on the court -- if confirmed.

But the "if confirmed" part will require negotiating some tricky politics.

To prepare for the battle, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee used their own YouTube channel to launch an information dump on Kagan.

Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Judiciary Republicans, told CNN the YouTube channel would be used as a "hub of information for the public, a resource, a place for the exchange of ideas and a place for a national discussion the senator is planning to foster during the course of the current Supreme Court nomination." The videos feature interviews of Alabama's Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the committee.

Not to be outdone, Senate Democrats also unveiled their YouTube version on Monday, featuring video of Vermont's Patrick Leahy, committee chairman, extolling Kagan's virtues. And the Judiciary Committee unloaded a vast acreage of material on its website about Kagan's confirmation hearings for solicitor general, complete with past writings and the committee questionnaire.

At least they're not killing trees for this.

-- Johanna Neuman

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Is President Obama really a technology-challenged dunce, or does he just play one on stage?

In his commencement speech at Hampton University on Sunday, Obama again fell back on his tried-and-true gag about not being able to operate popular gadgets before making his broader point.

"With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," he told a class of more than 1,000 graduates. "All of this is not only putting new pressures on you. It is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."

That line about not being able to "know how to work" an iPad or Xbox succeeded in drawing some laughs. But it worked against Obama when the reactions from technology enthusiasts online began pouring in.

Obama "drinks from the 'information overload' Kool-Aid," claimed one blog headline. Having not actually spent time trying to optimize his workflow with a device like the iPad, the president appears to have little basis from which to make such a contentious claim.

So if Obama doesn't know how to use Apple's portable music player -- a product hailed for its ease-of-use, even for a Harvard Law graduate -- was the preelection Rolling Stone magazine article about what's on his iPod a farce?

Come to think of it, his picks did seem a little too varied, uncontroversial and universally respectable to be the real deal. Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Sheryl Crow and Ludacris? Give me a break.

Sunday's backlash wasn't unlike the time in November when Obama disappointed his fans online when he told a roomful of Chinese youths, "I have never used Twitter."

That admission hasn't appeared to have slowed down the growth of his "official" Twitter account, for which the Democratic National Committee recently shopped around for a new administrator. It's grown by more than a million followers since then -- from about 2.6 million to 3.9 million.

During that same speech in Shanghai, he went on to say, "My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone." Doesn't look that way from this picture, right, unless A) it was staged, or B) he was composing the following e-mail:

fda jfl;hdsajg  dl;isagjdal;ksf jfjda;rsklg;i asdl;sfjdas;tf das;ik;nlfj asd;afjas f

-- Mark Milian

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Photo: Associated Press

Pennsylvania voters go to the polls May 18 to select candidates for the U.S. Senate. The Republican winner is a given -- "tea party" favorite and former Club for Growth president Pat Toomey, a onetime Republican congressman who came close to winning the seat six years ago. In fact, Toomey's popularity with the GOP base is one reason that the incumbent Republican senator -- Arlen Specter -- switched parties. Asked last year why he was becoming a Democrat, Specter made no bones about his motive, "to be reelected."

But now the 80-year-old Specter is in a spirited primary fight against Democrat Joe Sestak, a former Navy two-star rear admiral who represents the Philadelphia suburbs in Congress. Despite Specter's enormous money advantages, Sestak has now pulled ahead in some polls.

Sestak wasted no time Monday in undercutting Specter by pointing out that the then-Republican senator voted against Elena Kagan, just nominated for the Supreme Court, when the Senate voted on her confirmation as solicitor general last year.

On Tuesday, Specter plans to respond by running a TV ad reminding Pennsylvania's Democrats that President Obama has endorsed him.

The only problem is that Sestak has a dueling ad up pointing out that President Bush made almost the same speech endorsing Specter in 2004. See for yourself.

As Sestak's ad concludes, "Arlen Specter switched parties to save one job -- his ... not yours."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: President Obama speaks for Sen. Arlen Specter at a fundraiser in Philadelphia in September 2009 Credit: Reuters

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