Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Save Our Planet!
It has been a year of unmitigated disasters: Fires raged across Canada and ravaged Maui. The average high temperature in Phoenix for the month of July was 114.7 degrees. And as I write, Hurricane Idalia is devastating Florida and surging into the Southeastern states. In 2022 there were 18 weather/climate disaster events with losses...
SCOTUS Needs Ethics Oversight!
Public approval of the Supreme Court has plummeted, with pollsters at Quinnipiac University reporting that this year Americans gave SCOTUS its lowest marks in the poll’s history. A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll echoed these findings, with 62% of respondents citing little to no confidence in SCOTUS. We are losing faith in the Highest Court in...
Equal Rights for All!
The ACLU is currently tracking 491 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S. Twice the number of such bills have been introduced so far this year as were introduced in all of 2022—and ten times as many as just five years ago, in 2018. Included are bills to ban access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth,...
Abolish the Death Penalty!
Recently I listened to Andy Wilson and Maurice Hastings describe the 31 and 38 years, respectively, they spent in prison for murders they did not commit. Had they been given the death penalty, rather than life in prison, these innocent men would likely be dead. I was attending a Death Penalty Focus fundraiser, and...
End Debt Ceiling Politics
As of press time, Congress has raised or revised the debt limit 78 times since 1960. Two-thirds of those times have been under Republican Presidents. When we were spending less, Congress would need to give its approval every time we borrowed money. But then World War I hit, and we were borrowing more and...
Demand Gun Reform!
A GOP supermajority in Tennessee recently ousted two young Black lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for “violating the House’s decorum.” Their “crime”? Protesting from the House floor and calling for gun law reforms following a deadly school shooting in Nashville. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 11,500 people died from gun...
The Truth Matters!
We have the right to expect the truth when we listen to the news. It’s the news, dammit, meaning that we should expect to hear an accurate, factual reporting of events. Sadly, the truth has often been scarce to nonexistent in Fox broadcasts and has frequently been replaced with bald-faced lies. We have long...
2024 Is On!
Make no mistake: The 2024 election campaign is on! You have only to listen to the 2023 State of the Union (SOTU) address—and Sanders’ abysmal response —to know that the battle to become America’s next President is well underway. Much will be made in the coming year about Biden’s age. He will be 81...
The House Takes a Hard Right
The House is changing, and not for the better! In a scene not seen since before the Civil War, it took Kevin McCarthy four days and 15 rounds of ballots to become Speaker of the House. And with each and every round the power-hungry McCarthy negotiated with the far right faction of his party...
Sex Workers, Unite!
Support for unions in America is at its highest level since 1965. The labor movement has been revitalized, from employees at Starbucks and Amazon to sex workers. Strippers and sex workers are more organized than ever, and they are unionizing! From Star Garden in California to the United Sex Workers in the U.K. and...
It’s Up to the States of Our Union
It’s a new year, and with it a new crop of House and Senate representatives have just been sworn into office. But with a divided Congress, meaningful legislation on gun reform and abortion rights will be all but impossible to enact on a federal level. In typical fashion, the Grand Opposition Party will dig...
The Rise of Hate Crimes
Hate crimes in America have soared since 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected. His dog whistling to white supremacists—“There are good people on both sides,” after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—propelled bigoted extremists out into the open, and they’ve been rampaging ever since. According to the FBI, the number of hate crimes...
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Actions speak louder than words. Never has that old adage rung truer than right now! It’s a new year, and after another contentious election, tempers are feverishly high. Increasingly extreme rhetoric on both sides is only fueling the flames and increasing the partisan divide. What Democrats need are actions to prevent this country from...
This Is the Presidential Election
Turnout for the midterms is always lower than for main elections with POTUS on the bill. This could help the Republicans in two ways, if Democrats don’t counteract with a massive turnout in November: First, low turnouts almost always favor Republicans, who vote in higher-percentage numbers. Second, the party of the incumbent President historically...
Greedflation Drives Inflation
As citizens around the world suffer from rampant, runaway inflation and ever-increasing costs of living, some corporate honchos and Federal Reserve officials have pointed to a small rise in overall compensation to American workers as the problem. These are the selfish, hypocritical voices of oligarchy. It’s been well established that “real wages” for American...
