Opinion

Almost from the beginning of his term, President Trump has been excitedly anticipating a fancy state visit to the United Kingdom. Unlike recent presidents Obama and Bush, who didn't want to strain the security services, he particularly wanted to ride with Queen Elizabeth in the golden coach, as royal brides and heads of state do on such grand occasions. Normally, such visits happen early in a president's term. Trump's was postponed for a variety of reasons and he had to settle for that horrific short visit last summer during which he insulted Prime Minister Theresa May, yelled at the press, kept the Queen waiting for 15 minutes and then practically tripped the 92-year-old monarch while they were reviewing the troops.

As the 2010 elections neared, Mike Hubbard had a huge dream and an even bigger dilemma. The chairman of Alabama’s Republican Party wanted to end the Democrats’ 136-year hammerlock over the state legislature. If Hubbard could surf an anti-Barack Obama wave and capture control of Montgomery, he thought, it would be the most “monumental public achievement” in Alabama’s modern political history.

The other day walking from my office in lower Manhattan to City Hall across Broadway I saw an MTA bus billboard for the HBO mini-series Chernobyl. The image on the poster was of clean-up workers with respirators shrouded in a toxic cloud with a simple question under the haunting image that read “What is the cost of lies?”

Whether they are in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump or adamantly opposed to it, one thing most Democrats in the House of Representatives have in common is a strong desire to see former special counsel Robert Mueller testify before Congress. And according to a report by Sam Stein and Asawin Suebsaeng for the Daily Beast, there are some Republican Trump allies who hope to see that happen as well — albeit for very different reasons. While Democrats would use testimony from Mueller to try to discredit Trump, Republicans would, according to the Beast, try to discredit Mueller himself.

In his May 29 televised statement, special counsel Robert Mueller told us that everything he had to say was contained in his written report, and that it contained everything that Congress and the public needed to know about his investigation. This, however, is incorrect in several material respects, and the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees should insist that he appear before them to answer extremely urgent questions.

Founder of the biotech company, Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes is currently awaiting trial for cheating investors and deceiving her clients. She claimed that her company was building a device that would revolutionize healthcare by running dozens of lab tests on a single drop of blood. This device, called the Edison, was to become widely available in a nation-wide chain of drug stores, providing nearly every American with quick, affordable access to important information about their health. Holmes appeared to be doing the impossible, and nearly everyone believed in her, from seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to wealthy investors to former Secretaries of State. By the time she was thirty she had accomplished another childhood dream: she had become a billionaire. But quick and easy blood testing, it turns out, really is impossible. While a legal decision about her behavior as CEO lies in the future, the verdict on her character appears to be in. Elizabeth Holmes is a fraud.

Donald Trump is the first president of the United States who is openly angry and traumatized over the portrayal of him on NBC’s long-running “Saturday Night Live.” Whenever Alec Baldwin lampoons him on “SNL,” it’s a safe bet that Trump will be ranting and raving about it on Twitter. But politicians, as a rule, have had a sense of humor about the way they are lampooned on the 44-year-old sketch comedy program — and the show’s influence is so strong that in a recent interview, President George W. Bush revealed that for around 17 years, he thought he really did say “strategery.”

We can all agree that Nancy Pelosi is driving Donald Trump crazy, by which I mean, of course, crazier than usual. We can agree, too, and that no one has ever gotten this far into his head — not Comey, not Mueller, not anyone.

Last Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy organizations and health care providers filed suit to overturn the Trump administration’s most sweeping effort to advance the religious right’s discriminatory agenda. This was a Health and Human Services rule announced on May 2 that would vastly expand the “right” of individuals and entities to refuse to provide a service based on religious grounds.

Science and poetry haven’t always got along. The English poet John Keats (who also trained as a medical doctor) famously wrote the following in his narrative poem “Lamia” in 1819:

In the horror genre, black is definitely back.

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.