Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
The Big Fix
“This whole election is being rigged,” Republican candidate Donald Trump warned supporters before Election Day. “The whole thing is one big fix.” Even after being declared the winner, despite losing the national popular vote by a record 2.9 million votes, Trump claimed that “millions” of illegal ballots had been cast. But when America was given...
Asshole of the Month: Jared Kushner
The standard practice in every third-world banana republic is gross cronyism and nepotism. The big honcho in power stifles competition, ladling out monopoly contracts to his pals and hiring relatives for key government positions, guaranteeing obscene fortunes for his tribe at the expense of the general public. The whole nation is turned into a private...
Trump’s Big Con
And the winner is…Goldman Sachs! Fueled by outrage over the bankster-wrought economic misery exploited by Donald Trump’s faux populism, the 2016 Presidential election was nuttier than vaudeville. But it was business as usual on Wall Street the morning after. Even before moving into the White House, Trump revealed that Goldman may run the Treasury Department...
Breaking News
During the early years of the George W. Bush Administration, following the vast corporate press failure that helped lead our country into war, I spoke at an independent media conference in Northern California. I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond, but I proudly held up a copy of HUSTLER Magazine featuring my investigative report...
Asshole of the Month: Devin Nunes
Back when the Cold War was really hot, the West was rocked with the biggest spy scandal of all time: the infamous Cambridge Five brouhaha. No less than five top honchos in MI6 (the Brits’ CIA) turned out to be Soviet double agents who had fed the Kremlin sensitive intelligence secrets for decades. Kim Philby...
Asshole of the Month: Jason Chaffetz
It’s ironic that Utah’s Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz owes his seat to an insurrection at town hall meetings back in 2008, when he defeated six-term incumbent Republican Chris Cannon in the primaries. An angry grassroots wave swept Chaffetz in, and soon it may be another angry wave that sweeps him out: the majority who gave...
End of the (Pipe)line
While the corporate media and much of the country were obsessed with the threat posed by Donald Trump’s Presidential candidacy, the Lakota and Dakota Sioux nations had another concern. Their people gathered en masse near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to protest a more immediate threat: Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.7-billion, 1,200- mile Dakota Access Pipeline,...
Working-Class Woes
How did this happen? As I absorb the once impossibly ludicrous spectacle of the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, I remain in a state of shock shared by the majority of Americans who rejected him at the polls only to be startled by the tally of the antiquated...
Asshole of the Month: Sean Spicer
Like faithful dogs, most press secretaries come to resemble their master’s style and personality. Ron Ziegler was as oily and defensive as Richard Nixon. Joseph Goebbels aped Hitler’s frantic, melodramatic harangues. And now we have Donald Trump’s mouthpiece, Sean Spicer, channeling his chief’s raw-skinned bluster and aggressive ignorance before the cameras. He even looks a...
DEA’s Reefer Madness
Legalized marijuana is a hit. The production, distribution and sale of medical marijuana is no longer prohibited in the majority of states, and even in those that have also legalized cannabis for recreational use, the worst fears of dead-ender opponents have gone up in smoke. Take Colorado, where voters approved legalizing recreational marijuana statewide in...
Kill the Death Penalty
Let’s put the Christ back in Christmas by recalling that he was put to death following a sham trial. This is a fact I pondered after interviewing a former death row inmate named Gary Tyler, who was released in April 2016 after spending more than 41 years in Louisiana’s Angola prison for a crime he...
Asshole of the Month: Betsy DeVos
Donald Trump has astounded us with his rogues’ gallery of cabinet appointments. The main qualifications seem to be, one, they should be generally ignorant of the field they will be supervising and, two, they must be filthy rich. Explaining the latter, Trump said, “I want people that made a fortune because now they’re negotiating with...
Hard Time for Private Prisons
Crime pays. At least it does for the private prison industry, which annually is allocated about 5 billion in taxpayer dollars and nets more than $600 million in profits. But those dollars are about to dry up. A scathing report from the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice has resulted in...
True Patriotism
It was spectacularly great news: Freedom had triumphed, and our flag was still there. Occasionally in a nation’s history, sanity abruptly intervenes when a few heroic figures save the day by finding the courage to do what is right. Such a rare moment occurred on May 31, 2015. A once-resistant U.S. Senate was compelled to...
Go Vote!
If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it,” Mark Twain is believed to have quipped. However, there is no clear-cut evidence he said anything of the sort. Who ever first uttered those words did so anonymously. Little wonder. That person was wrong. And if you want to tell yourself that it makes...
The Filthy Rich Get Richer
And the winner is…Goldman Sachs! America’s big bankers don’t really care whether the next President is named Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Once Bernie Sanders was knocked out of the race, the threat to the fat cats who own this country was over. Do I exaggerate? Well, once Bernie was sent back to Vermont, how...
Asshole of the Month: Michael Flynn
A lot of people who voted for Trump expected a revolution against the whole corrupt, pay-to-play cesspool in Washington, D.C. “Drain the swamp!” he bellowed to the roar of his loving crowds. He funded his own campaign! they swooned. So he’s not owned by Wall Street, the military-industrial complex or the rest of the corporatocracy...
Asshole of the Month: James Comey
Poor James Comey—the FBI director was hated first by the Republicans, then the Democrats and now by much of the country after his spectacular intervention in the final weeks of the election shocked the world and helped an ignorant buffoon ascend to the highest office in our land. Last July Comey declined to file criminal...
Patriotic Pretense
When it comes to national security, we Americans are a pathetic herd of sheep, easily led from one disastrous foreign entanglement to another without seriously questioning the leaders who consistently betray us. Such is the case with the 9/11 attacks, which have been used by Presidents of both parties to wage pointless, costly wars that...
Supreme Chaos
The U.S. Supreme Court finished its 2015-2016 session with a number of positive surprises. Many were stunned to see liberal-leaning decisions concerning guns, abortion and race-conscious school admission policies. The Court even delivered a unanimous—yes, unanimous!—ruling on a definition for bribery of public officials. Those judgments certainly weren’t expected— not with an empty seat on...
