Opinion

Despite the cloud of scandal darkening over Donald Trump — or perhaps because of it — Republicans are rushing his second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to his confirmation hearings, trying to get the Federalist Society-approved judge seated before many major cases are heard, possibly some involving Trump himself. As Kavanaugh's hearings begin on Tuesday, all eyes will be on Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who considers herself pro-choice but seems inclined toward voting to confirm Kavanaugh, even publicly claiming to believe his statement that Roe v. Wade is "settled law." If Collins does so, that will be enough to push Kavanaugh over the top. Republicans only have 50 votes in the Senate at the moment (after the death of John McCain) and may need all of them.

The current occupant of the White House has been compared to other figures from history from Joseph McCarthy with whom he shared the dubious legal counsel of Roy Cohn, a harrier Benito Mussolini, a character from a Sinclair Lewis novel, James Buchanan, a minor league Hitler, Andrew Johnson and, previously by this writer, Huey Long.

Bullies like Donald Trump consolidate their power by dividing the population, and then  by creating a crisis which further fractures the polity. If they can at the same time make their cronies richer, why so much the better.

Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday held the first Monday every September. Unlike most U.S. holidays, it is a strange celebration without rituals, except for shopping and barbecuing. For most people it simply marks the last weekend of summer and the start of the school year.

Labor Day has been a national holiday in the U.S. since 1894. Many struggles for workers’ rights that have occurred since then, from the labor movement and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s/early 1940s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And history not only teaches us that gains in economic justice are incremental—it is also demonstrates that gains can easily be lost when workers aren’t vigilant about protecting them. The Donald Trump era has been a painful reminder of that fact: from Social Security and Medicare cutbacks to anti-union right-to-work laws to an increasingly far-right Supreme Court, the Trump administration and the Republicans who control both houses of Congress are determined to obliterate what’s left of FDR’s New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Are Donald Trump's supporters driven by immoral hatred, or simply shaped by moral codes that most liberals or leftists don't understand? That question, phrased in more sophisticated and technical terms, has sharply divided political scientists ever since Trump's emergence on the scene -- and in fact long before that.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

It was December of 2003, and I was in Tal Afar, Iraq with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The Brigade was based at an old Iraqi air force base just outside of the town. I had spent the last week in Rabihya, a small town on the border with Syria. When I say “on the border with Syria,” I mean it literally. The wall along the western side of the Army compound where I stayed was the actual border between Iraq and Syria. You could step up on a pile of sandbags just inside the wall of the compound and see into Syria, where a huge billboard-size photo of the recently deceased Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad stared back at you. While I was there, they succeeded in erecting a matching billboard depicting the new strongman, Bashar al-Assad, next to the one of his father.

In the face of a nauseating and poisonous election cycle that ended with Donald Trump’s presidential victory, many commentators are quick to argue that Americans have fallen prey to a culture of incivility. This is the discourse of “bad manners” parading as insight, while working, regardless of intention, to hide the effects of power, politics, racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

While it has been severe since Trump began campaigning for president, recently mainstream news has picked up on the scope of the problem of rampant belief in bogus conspiracy theories that involve politicians with nefarious plots. Ironically, the politicians with the truly nefarious plots are the ones who support and encourage the spread of these heinous stories, which are precisely and intentionally designed to target mentally-vulnerable people. While the conspiracy theory crowd—who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy Q—may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, the truth is that many of them suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are prone to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

This week's memorial to the late Sen. John McCain has not brought out the best in President Trump. Indeed, he seems to be increasingly upset as he obsessively watches cable news and sees the drama of the funeral and all the accolades pouring in from around the world in tribute to the nation's most famous elder statesman.