Opinion

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.

A Trump administration-approved paid family leave plan is actually an attack on Social Security, argues a new study by the Urban Institute—and one that is intent on promoting the falsehood that the U.S. can't afford to provide paid leave to new parents while also ensuring that retirees are provided for financially.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Thursday morning to vent about so-called "fake news" reports which claim that White House counsel Don McGahn has been pushed out by the president's daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

In Florida’s August 28 gubernatorial primaries, Democrats and Republicans both went with non-establishment candidates. Democrats, in a major upset, nominated Andrew Gillum, the left-of-center mayor of Tallahassee and an ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders (who campaigned for him) over centrist establishment pick Gwen Graham (daughter of former Florida Gov. Bob Graham). Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the nominee was Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Tea Party favorite, member of the House Freedom Caucus and far-right supporter of President Donald Trump (who has endorsed DeSantis). The Florida gubernatorial race could become a referendum on Sanders’ ideas versus Trump’s ideas, and DeSantis is way beyond conservative—he is extreme.

Donald Trump is a dangerous, authoritarian leader who was elected by appealing to racism and is overtly trying to undermine democracy. He is an embarrassment to the American people and the United States. Despite these facts, or perhaps because of them, Trump remains remarkably popular among Republicans and his other diehard supporters. This is a cause of constant handwringing, confusion, and consternation among many American journalists and other members of the chattering class. As former Salon editor Joan Walsh recently wrote in the Nation, this is a "distracting journalistic exception." But it does no good waiting for Trump's flock to abandon him, and the frustration only grows.

He was born in Queens and moved to Manhattan to make his fortune.

American mass shootings often have death tolls of more than a dozen, so it was mildly surprising that Sunday's shooting in Jacksonville, Florida — when a disgruntled gamer allegedly murdered two other men at a video game tournament before killing himself — captured the nation's attention at all. A Twitch livestream captured the shooting, however, and also captured the last moments of 22-year-old Eli Clayton, who was on camera playing Madden under his gamer tag "TrueBoy" when shots rang out, leaving Twitch viewers with Clayton's controller disconnection message and the sounds of people screaming in panic and pain.

As Pennsylvania investigators worked to confirm up to 1000 cases of sexual abusecommitted by Catholic priests, a panel of Catholic ethicist-theologians appointed by the bishops was also hard at work.