Theresa May Calls General Election (VIDEO)

Brilliant!

From the Prime Minister, at the Telegraph U.K., "Theresa May: An election is the best way to strengthen Britain’s hand as we exit the E.U. (P.M. believes it is in Britain’s national interest to have a General Election now.)":

On Tuesday, I announced my decision to hold a General Election on Thursday 8th June in order to secure the strong and stable leadership the country needs to see us through Brexit and beyond.

I welcome the fact that the other parties have indicated they will support that decision in the House of Commons today.

It is not a decision that I have reached lightly. The priority when I became Prime Minister was to provide the country with stability after the long and passionately fought referendum campaign.

But having delivered that and reflected long and hard about the task ahead, I believe it is in Britain’s national interest to have a General Election now...

More, "Theresa May announces snap general election on June 8 to 'make a success of Brexit'":

Theresa May has called a snap general election for June 8, claiming that divisions at Westminster risked hampering the Brexit negotiations.

The Prime Minister will require the support of two-thirds of MPs to go to the country, with a vote scheduled in the Commons on Wednesday after the surprise announcement on Tuesday morning.

The move stunned Westminster, as Mrs May and Number 10 have repeatedly insisted she would not seek a general election before the scheduled 2020 poll.

Speaking outside Number 10, the Prime Minister said the Cabinet had agreed to call an early election. It later emerged that Mrs May had phoned the Queen yesterday to inform her of her intention.

The move takes place against the backdrop of the country's decision to leave the European Union in last year's referendum.

Justifying the decision, Mrs May said: "The country is coming together but Westminster is not."

She said the "division in Westminster will risk our ability to make a success of Brexit".

Keep reading.

Interstate 20, in Atlanta, Shut Down After Freeway Buckles (VIDEO)

The buckled pavement launched a motorcyclist, who suffered broken bones, apparently.

At CBS News, "Section of I-20 buckles in Atlanta, "catapults" motorcyclist into the air."

And at ABC WSB-TV 2 Atlanta:

Bill O'Reilly Out at Fox News

It's a done deal.

WSJ is reporting, and they should know, being owned by Murdoch, who also owns Fox News.

Also, Hadas Gold at Politico below.

Well, he had a good run, heh.

Breaking: Fox News is preparing to cut ties with Bill O'Reilly in wake of sexual-harassment allegations https://t.co/CbZedDSgYm

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 19, 2017

The drip drip on O’Reilly became full stream tonight ending with the Murdoch-owned WSJ saying O’Reilly likely out https://t.co/01jQlMWKii

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) April 19, 2017

ADDED: Politico's pulled the Hadas Gold piece, but I'm leaving that tweet up. Maybe Fox is now in fact confirming that O'Reilly's out. Expect updates.

More: Here's the link to the Hadas Gold piece, "Fox News won't confirm O'Reilly's return."

Bianca Balti Gets Flexible at Sumba Island (VIDEO)

She's a clean babe.

Following-up from previously, "Bianca Balti Uncovered for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2017 (VIDEO)."

At Sports Illustrated:

Out Today: David McCullough, The American Spirit

At Amazon, David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For.

He's a good guy.

On CBS This Morning, yesterday morning:

Christy Clark, British Columbia's Conservative Premier, Backs Off Province's Carbon Tax (VIDEO)

Heh.

Canadian leftists must want this woman dead.

At the Los Angeles Times, with the hilariously biased headline, "British Columbia was once a leader in fighting climate change. Now, it's embracing fossil fuels":

British Columbia promotes itself as “Super, Natural,” and for many years it was praised for walking that talk.

Nearly a decade ago, the province enacted North America’s first tax on carbon emissions, putting it on the cutting edge of government efforts to fight climate change. The economy grew even as emissions declined. Climate activists around the world admired the move, but so did conservatives like former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who sought market-driven solutions.

Now, however, Canada’s West Coast is striving toward a very different kind of cutting edge: British Columbia is positioning itself to become a global leader in exporting fossil fuels, with plans to nearly triple crude oil exports through a controversial new pipeline and vastly expand production of liquefied natural gas to be sold in Asia.

And although the revenue-neutral carbon tax is still in place, the province’s current political leadership has halted the annual rate increases built into the original plan. Emissions, meanwhile, are rising again.

“They definitely have horses on either side of the wagon,” Tarika Powell, who studies fossil fuel exports for Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank, said of the British Columbia government. “And they are going in opposite directions.”

In a province that has been influential in shaping environmental policy in Canada and beyond, the question is which horse will prevail — and one clue to the answer is expected to come next month, when Premier Christy Clark faces reelection.

Clark, who took office in 2011, leads the conservative but incongruously named BC Liberal Party. Her predecessor, Gordon Campbell, was also a member of that party, yet while Campbell pushed the carbon tax to approval in 2008 and still takes pride in it, Clark has shown little interest in climate leadership.

She instead has championed liquefied natural gas, which involves cooling natural gas into a dense liquid to make it easier and cheaper to ship.

If all 19 of the current LNG proposals in the province were built, according to Powell’s research, British Columbia would become the world’s largest LNG exporter many times over, dwarfing the current leaders, Qatar and Australia. Emissions from LNG terminals and refineries could drastically increase the level of greenhouse gas emissions within the province — and much of those emissions would be exempt from the carbon tax, according to analyses of Clark’s plans.

It was Clark who froze the carbon tax in 2012 and has refused to raise it since then, essentially ignoring the advice of a special task force she created to make recommendations. Although Clark does highlight the province’s leadership on the carbon tax, she has cited concerns among some business groups and others that increasing it would hurt the economy.

Her closest challenger next month, John Horgan of the New Democratic Party, has said he supports raising the carbon tax because “it’s the right thing to do,” and he has lashed out at Clark for accepting millions in campaign donations from fossil fuel companies and other industry groups.

Yet a New Democratic Party strategy document obtained and leaked by the BC Liberals made it clear that even Horgan’s party is wary of being cast as supporting tax increases, regardless of the benefits. It also expressed concerns that the province’s Green Party would peel away votes if it took no action.

“The BC Liberals will call it a tax increase — and they’ll holler from the rooftops in rural B.C.,” the leaked document said.

“We must holler back with: ‘Our plan puts more money in the pocket for a majority of B.C. families. Hers doesn’t. Our plan actually accomplishes the goals of a carbon tax — reducing carbon pollution. Hers doesn’t. Our plan creates good jobs that last in a more sustainable economy with more opportunities for the future. Hers doesn’t.’”

The political sensitivity over the carbon tax within the province is striking given its influence outside it...

Keep reading.

Dana Loesch: 'We the People' Have Had It with the New York Times

Following-up, "Dana Loesch: 'Old gray hag, we're coming for you...' (VIDEO)."

Stefan Molyneux Talks to Lauren Southern (VIDEO)

I'm having a problem with Ms. Lauren, in how she's on Twitter cheering out-and-out racist white supremacists. I'm not into that. (See the Modesto Bee, "White supremacist who created stir at Stanislaus State seen punching woman at Berkeley protest.")

And that's my problem with the so-called "alt-right" more broadly. Just because you can do or say something doesn't make it right, and that's particularly true with regards to race and racism. Some of the stuff at Taki's Magazine, for example, goes too far, and that publication's been doing this kind of thing way before Trump's MAGA movement attracted lots of such people last years.

So, while I really like her, I think Ms. Lauren needs to discern more carefully the bounds of political propriety.



PREVIOUSLY: "Lauren Southern Rocks Berkeley!"

Jennifer Delacruz's Tuesday Forecast

Well, it hasn't cooled off quite yet, but there's supposed to be an onshore flow of low pressure headed our way tomorrow. Perhaps it'll be a littler cooler. Either way, delightful weather.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

The Four Issues Driving Trump's Populism

From VDH, at the New Criterion, "Populism, VIII: The unlikeliest populist":

Leftists deride the “bad” populism of angry and misdirected grievances lodged clumsily against educated and enlightened “elites,” often by the unsophisticated and the undereducated. Bad populism is fueled by ethnic, religious, or racial chauvinism, and typified by a purportedly “dark” tradition from Huey Long and Father Coughlin to George Wallace and Ross Perot.

Such retrograde populism to the liberal mind is to be contrasted with a “good” progressive populism of early-twentieth-century and liberal Minnesota or Wisconsin—solidarity through unions, redistributionist taxes, cooperatives, granges, and credit unions to protect against banks and corporations—now kept alive by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Good leftwing populism rails against supposedly culpable elites—those of the corporate world and moneyed interests—but not well-heeled intellectuals, liberal politicians, and the philanthropic class of George Soros, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett, who make amends for their financial situations by redistributing their millions to the right causes.

The Right is similarly ambiguous about populism. “Bad” populists distrust government in sloppy fashion, failing to appreciate the intricacies of politics that understandably slow down change. “Bad” right-wing populists, given their unsophistication and wild emotions, are purportedly prone to dangerous excesses, American-firstism, social intolerance, and anti-capitalist bromides: think the pushback by the Tea Party or the Ron Paul zealots.

In contrast, “good” conservative populists are those who wish to trim the fat off complacent conservatism, reenergize the Republican Party with fresh ideas about small government and a return to social and cultural traditionalism, while avoiding compromise for compromise’s sake. Good populists for conservatives might include Ronald Reagan or even Ted Cruz.

Within these populist parameters, Trump appeared far more the “bad” or “dangerous” populist.

Despite Trump’s previously apolitical and elite background, he brilliantly figured out, even if cynically so, the populist discontent and its electoral ramifications that would erode the Democrats’ assumed unassailable “blue wall” that ran from Wisconsin to North Carolina. In contrast, sixteen other talented candidates, some of whom were far more experienced conservative politicians, over a year-long primary race lacked Trump’s intuition about the potential electoral benefits of courting such a large and apparently forgotten working-class population.

Critics would argue that Trump’s populist strategy was inauthentic, haphazard, and borne out of desperation: he initially had few other choices to win the Republican nomination.

Trump began his campaign with exceptional name recognition and seemingly with ample financial resources. Yet he lacked the connections of Jeb Bush to the Republican establishment and donor base, the grass-roots orthodox conservative movement’s fondness for Ted Cruz, the neoconservative brain trust that allied with Marco Rubio, and the organizations and reputations for pragmatic competence that governors such as Chris Christie, Rick Perry, or Scott Walker brought to the campaign.

Trump never possessed the mastery of the issues in the manner of Bobby Jindal or Rand Paul. Ben Carson was even more so the maverick political outsider. Nor was Trump as politically prepped as his fellow corporate newcomer Carly Fiorina. Despite his brand recognition, Trump’s long and successful experience in ad-hoc reality television, millions of dollars in free media attention, and personal wealth, he started the campaign at a disadvantage and so was ready to try any new approach to break out of the crowded pack—most prominently his inaugural rant about illegal immigration.

By 2012 standards, Trump, to the degree he had voiced a consistent political ideology, would likely have been considered the most liberal of the seventeen presidential candidates. In the recent past he had chided Mitt Romney for talking of self-deportation by illegal immigrants, praised a single-payer health system, and had at times campaigned to the left of both the past unsuccessful John McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns. Yet in 2016 Trump found a way to reassemble the remnants of what was left of the Tea Party/Ross Perot wing of the Republican Party.

Such desperation might explain his audacity and his willingness to campaign unconventionally if not crudely. Yet it does not altogether account for Trump’s choice to focus on what would become four resonant populist issues: trade/jobs, illegal immigration, a new nationalist foreign policy, and political correctness—the latter being the one issue that bound all the others as well. Trump’s initial emphasis on these concerns almost immediately set him apart from both his primary opponents and Hillary Clinton...

 Keep reading.

Chocolate Easter Candy

At Amazon, Shop Easter Chocolates.

BONUS: C.L. Lewis, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters.

Jennifer Delacruz's Easter Forecast

She's enough to bring you back all by herself.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer's forecast from last night, at ABC News 10 San Diego:

The Christian Exodus From the Middle East

From Robin Wright, at the New Yorker, "War, Terrorism, and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East":

On #Easter, my @newyorker piece on massive exodus of Christians from #Mideast, cradle of the faith. Stunning numbers https://t.co/nioa8yO3tt

— Robin Wright (@wrightr) April 15, 2017

A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.

At least half of Syria’s Christians have fled since then. The flight is so pronounced that, in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, wrote an open letter to his flock: “Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don’t emigrate!”

“We exhort our faithful and call them to patience in these tribulations, especially in this tsunami of stifling, destructive, bloody and tragic crises of our Arab world, particularly in Syria, but also to different degrees in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon,” he wrote. “Jesus tells us, ‘Fear not!’ “

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

Last weekend, suicide bombings in two Egyptian Coptic churches in Alexandria and Tanta, sixty miles north of Cairo, killed almost four dozen Egyptians and injured another hundred. The Palm Sunday attacks, coming just weeks before Pope Francis is due to visit the country, led the Coptic Church to curtail Easter celebrations in a country that has the largest Christian population—some nine million people—in the Middle East. A pillar of the early faith, the Copts trace their origins to the voyage of the Apostle Mark to Alexandria.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution,” Bishop Anba Macarius, of the Minya diocese, who survived an assassination attempt in 2013, said on Thursday.

The isis affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula claimed credit for the attacks. In the past two years, it has carried out a series of gruesome killings of Christians, including the forced march of twenty-one Egyptian workers in Libya, all Coptic Christians, each clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, to a Mediterranean beach, where they were forced to kneel and then beheaded. isis threats against Christians have escalated since a suicide bombing on December 11th at St. Mark’s Cathedral, in Cairo, killed more than two dozen Egyptians. After a February attack that killed seven Christians on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the majority of Copts have fled the Sinai, according to Human Rights Watch.

The largest exodus of Christians is in Iraq, where the group has been trapped in escalating sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, targeted by an Al Qaeda franchise, and forced to flee by the Islamic State. “There were 1.3 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. We’re down by a million since then,” with hundreds more leaving each month, Bashar Warda, a Chaldean bishop in the northern city of Erbil, the Kurdish capital, told me last month. He was wearing a pink zucchetto skullcap and an amaranth sash tied around his black cassock. A large silver cross hung around his neck.

“It’s very hard to maintain a Christian presence now,” Warda said. “Families have ten reasons to leave and not one reason to stay. This is a critical time in our history in this land. We are desperate.”

Last month, I drove to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and home for two millennia to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Within days of its conquest of Mosul, isis issued an ultimatum to Christians to either convert to Islam, pay an exorbitant and open-ended tax, or face death “by the sword.” Homes of Christians were marked by a large “N” for “Nassarah,” a term in the Koran for Christians.

Some thirty-five thousand Christians fled. Many of their homes were ransacked and then set alight. En route to Mosul, I passed other Christian villages, like Bartella, that had also emptied. Even gravestones at the local cemetery were bullet-ridden. In all, a hundred thousand Christians from across the Biblical Nineveh Plains are estimated to have abandoned their farmlands, villages, and towns for refuge in northern Kurdistan—or beyond Iraq’s borders...

Still more.

Lauren Southern Rocks Berkeley!

Following-up, "Trump Supporters Crush 'Anti-Fascist' Protesters in Berkeley (VIDEO)."

She's posted dozens of tweets and has produced a video report, which I'll blog later.

Meanwhile, this woman is hot, lol.

Pepper spray everywhere 👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/9EDLLL5cRq

— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) April 15, 2017

Trump Supporters Crush 'Anti-Fascist' Protesters in Berkeley (VIDEO)

At SF Gate, "Arrests made as protesters clash at pro-Trump rally in Berkeley."

And watch, at Associated Press, "Raw: Clashes at Pro and Anti-Trump Rallies."

Also, at KPIX CBS News 5 San Francisco, "Bloody Clashes As Trump Protesters, Supporters Exchange Blows At Berkeley Rally," and "Trump Supporter Insists Protest Wasn't Staged to Provoke Liberal Berkeley."

And at Instapundit, "The Antifa goons were so thoroughly outclassed, they were chased down and given wedgies."

Danielle Gersh's Glorious Easter Sunday Forecast

We're having fabulous weather, and it's going to continue through the weekend, with just slightly cooler temperatures tomorrow.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Roger M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade

At Amazon, Roger M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650.

For three decades, Native American history has been dominated by two major themes. The first is "The Cant of Conquest," the notion that all native peoples who came into contact with Europeans suffered devastating effects due to disease, alcohol, and warfare. However, the argument can be made that in some cases native peoples controlled their own fortunes, at least for awhile. The other dominant theme is the "The Contest of Cultures," the idea that Native American history needs to be examined in the context of dealings with Europeans. Europeans changed the Americas, but this approach concerns colonialism and colonists as well as Native Americans.

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade examines the changing worldviews of the Huron and the Iroquois in the first half of the seventeenth century, during a period of increasing European contact. From Samuel de Champlain’s armed encounter with the Iroquois, in 1609, to the dispersal of the Huron in the mid-seventeenth century, Carpenter’s book traces the evolving thought worlds of Iroquoian peoples.

The Iroquois and the Huron -- peoples with an intertwined history and many cultural similarities -- reacted differently to European contact. The Huron thought world began to change when the French initiated intense trade and missionary activity early in the seventeenth century. French missionary efforts resulted in a split within the Huron nation between traditionalists and Christian converts. By contrast, the Iroquois were interested primarily in trade with the newcomers. The Iroquois, like the Huron, accepted European trade goods, but unlike the Huron, they rejected European religion.

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade differs from other works of Native American history on several counts. Native American historiography has not been overly comparative. This work is a comparative history of two culturally similar Native American nations. It also differs in that, rather than another history of Native-European contacts, it is an Indian-centered history.

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*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Today's Deals New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

Also, Best Sellers in Televisions.

More, Deals in Laptops.

BONUS: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.

Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous

Here's more on the "Mountain Men," from Robert Utley, who's a national treasure.

At Amazon, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific.

And ICYMI, Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890.

Winfred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks

This book's great! I picked up a copy.

Available at Amazon, Winfred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks: A Tribute to the Mountain Men.