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July 2017

I have to admit, I love love love these stories.  It's sweltering hot in Texas at this time of year, so when Andy Mitchell learned that Justin Korva was walking three miles to work each day, he posted about it on Facebook. The community rallied around the industrious and dedicated fast food worker and bought him a car. CBS News reports:
When Andy Mitchell spotted a young man in a fast food uniform walking along the side of a road on a 95-degree summer day in Rockwall, Texas, he felt compelled to pull over.

Earlier today, President Trump tweeted out what has been reported to be a WrestleMania video from 2007 in which he took down a wrestler outside the ring. In the place of the wrestler's head, the CNN logo has been superimposed. See video from Trump tweet below. Carl Bernstein had a dark and apocalyptic reaction on CNN's Reliable Sources today. Notably, Bernstein said that the video goes to questions raised by "military leaders" about "the stability of the President of the United States."

More than $300 million in debt, Colonial Williamsburg has been forced to outsource some functions and cut staff. One of the best, long-standing American Colonial History attractions, Williamsburg has experienced a sharp decline in attendance over the last few years.

For a century Palestinians have been denying and denigrating the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel even as they’ve been doubling-down on their own fictitious claims to ‘Palestine’ in antiquity and to family lineages in the Holy Land that predate that of the ancient Hebrews. A former adjunct lecturer of Jewish history at Haifa University, now the creative director at a Tel Aviv advertising agency, decided to poke fun at this absurd situation in which Palestinians reject the historical accuracy of a Hebrew/Jewish presence in the land while simultaneously concocting an essentially fraudulent narrative of their own history. The literary product is History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era.

Late last year, we reported that there will be a total eclipse of the sun that will be visible throughout a good portion of the United States on August 21. As the date of that event draws near, transportation officials are gearing up for potential gridlock along the interstate that may occur because of skyward rubbernecking.
The eclipse will be visible in 14 states, and FHWA estimates that over 200,000,000 will be within a day's drive from traveling into the phenomenon's path.

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is becoming increasingly violent. We have seen this in the U.S. through frequent physical disruptions of Israel-related events. Indeed, as I have documented many times, disruption of Israel-related events was a precursor to the more general campus intolerance we are seeing at places such as Berkeley, Middlebury, and universities in Britain and Ireland. In my post, With campus shout downs, first they came for the Jews and Israel, I provide many examples of increasing BDS violence and physical intimidation that accompanies these shout downs. Disrupting Israel-related events is not limited to the U.S. and Britain. At Humboldt University in Berlin, a criminal complaint has been filed after an aggressive disruption.

Healthcare reform has taken center stage once again, but tax reform still lurks in the background. It's yet another issue that Congressional Republicans cannot agree on, mainly on the border adjustment tax. But there's a tax deduction the Republicans may eliminate that could cause problems and possible resistance among lawmakers, including within the party: interest deduction. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that taking away "the deduction that companies get for interest they pay on debt" affects everyone from those on Wall Street "to wheat farmers in the Midwest looking to make ends meet before harvest."

The last time that we checked on the National Endowment for the Arts, the progressives were clutching their pearls over President Donald Trump's threat to drain this particular pond of the government swamp. Yet, the agency still exists...and just gave a fairly substantial grant to The Public Theater of New York, which just concluded its run of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar featuring the assassination of a Trump-like character.  Here is an entry from the list of 2017 grants:

On Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning, guest Tamara Holder—who Reid, ironically, billed as an "equal rights attorney and advocate"—mocked the women in Donald Trump's life. Holder was upset that they had failed to condemn the president over his tweets directed at Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. Said Holder:

"I think the women in Donald Trump's life probably have smaller minds than his small hands . . . he has continued to surround himself, Donald Trump, with very, very, weak-minded women, who are afraid of him."