Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
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...
Asshole of the Month: Steve Bannon
Desperate to make his clownish Presidential bid credible, Donald Trump hired a new CEO for the campaign last summer: Steve Bannon, who took a leave of absence from his post as chief of Breitbart News. It’s just as well, since Breitbart was already acting as Trump’s number-one mouthpiece in the media—Trump Pravda or Trumpbart, as...
Asshole of the Month: Pam Bondi
A fresh, new cheerleader has taken center stage on the Donald Trump bandwagon—current Attorney General of Florida and former Fox News legal analyst Pam Bondi. Bondi fleshes out the GOP Blonde Squad, that bevy of attractive gold ilocks girls trying to put a hap py face on The Donald’s deep-seated misogyny and bigotry. We don’t...
Cold, Dead Hands
It’s all the fault of Moses. Or more precisely Charlton Heston, who portrayed God’s emissary in the epic 1956 film The Ten Commandments. The actor turned activist subsequently lent his divine authority to the cause of guaranteeing that even the most deranged gun nut in America has the “God-given right” to own a firearm. Heston...
The Voter Revolution
For Democrats the 2016 Presidential primary season was rough and exhilarating. Hillary Clinton, with all her millions in corporate campaign cash, barely eked out a victory against Bernie Sanders, a popularly funded, self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont. His unlikely rise from virtual obscurity nearly toppled Clinton while sparking the imagination of millions of Americans struck...
Asshole of the Month: Kellyanne Conway
Donald Trump’s brief political life has turned as chaotic as his private life: married three times and now on his third honeymoon with a new campaign manager replacing Paul Manafort (a bagman for every corrupt foreign junta in the world), who replaced Corey Lewandowski, the bushleaguer in charge when Trump’s vanity campaign took off against...
Brainwashing America
Hillary Clinton first warned us about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” during the Presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. So did Larry Flynt. For decades the Right has spent (and made) billions creating its own media, think tanks and universities, as well as its own reality and facts. More insidiously, rightwingers have also bought up our...
Outed Again
Hulk Hogan’s toughest bout didn’t take place in the ring. It was a high-stakes legal fight that began in 2012 when the former wrestling champ filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media for posting a video of him having sex with a friend’s wife. In March 2016 a Florida jury awarded Hogan, whose real name...
Hitler Happens
Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Not yet, anyway. Hopefully Americans are collectively smart enough not to ultimately fall for his divisive message of hate. But enough Republicans have fallen for it that we ought to ask ourselves, How can so many in a major political party be drawn to someone so dangerously lacking in...
Class Warfare: We’re Ready to Fight!
Bob Dylan’s lyrics capturing the turbulent 1960s—“Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”—resonate today with the enormous shift in American politics brought center stage by the upcoming Presidential election. Now, as in the ’60s, the establishment represented by Mister Jones just doesn’t get the depth and intensity...
Asshole of the Month: Mike Pence
If by some dark twist of fate Donald Trump gains the White House, with all of his many contradictory statements and positions, how would he really run the country? Thanks to his pick for Vice President, we now know: Mike Pence, current governor of Indiana, would actually be in charge, while his nominal boss would...
Live at 5: Donald’s Craziest Tantrum!
It’s easy enough to get angry with Donald Trump. He has scapegoated hardworking immigrants for the inequities of American capitalism—inequities that have left billionaires like him in control of most of the country’s wealth and its political power. But some of that anger should clearly be directed toward the mass media, which has turned this...
Asshole of the Month: Paul Ryan
Ever since Paul Ryan was picked as Mitt Romney’s VP sidekick for their failed 2012 campaign, he’s been the standard-bearer for the GOP. Along with Mitch McConnell in the Senate, he has spearheaded the scorched-earth strategy of the past eight years—knee-jerk opposition to anything and everything Obama and the Democrats have proposed, however reasonable and...
Vicious Guard Dog?
Trying to take a bite out of Apple Inc., the FBI descended into a hell of its own when Director James B. Comey demanded that the tech giant create special software that bypasses an iPhone’s passcode, violating the privacy protections it guarantees to all of its customers. “The path to hell starts at the backdoor,”...
Raging Bull
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decades-long lurch to the hard right may finally have come to a blessed end with the sudden death of its most vocal wingnut, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Albany Law School professor Vincent M. Bonventre nailed Scalia’s “abhorrent” record: “His position on gay rights was homophobic, on racial discrimination it was hostile...
Asshole of the Month: Curt Schilling
Baseball has a reputation as the American sport most beloved by conservatives, or at least by conservative pundits and blowhards. Why? Right-wing guru George Will once said, “It has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.” Daniel Foster from the National Review further explained: “It’s reliable, dependable, faithful, and I...
Asshole of the Month: Pat McCrory
The current governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, has been stewing in a vat of global vilification ever since he signed off on the state’s notorious HB2 law that forbids cities from passing LGBT anti-discrimination ordinances. The backlash has been titanic: Over 100 major corporations have denounced the bill; cities from Durham to Raleighto Greensboro...
Asshole of the Month: Ted Cruz
For the diminishing percentage of Americans nostalgic for the good ol’ days, when rich white men exclusively ruled the roost, “godly” Puritans burned witches in Salem and greedy robber barons ran amok with no regulation by the “tyrannical” Federal government, there is one hero above all others: the radical-right senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. But...
Asshole of the Month: Dan Flynn
If you want to abolish something completely legal, but don’t have the political support to back you, there’s a sneaky workaround: Create a maze of absurd, costly regulations to render whatever you’re trying to abolish inaccessible or impossible to practice or own. That’s how marijuana and industrial hemp, for example, were effectively “outlawed” by the...
War On Whistleblowers
If President Barack Obama wants to keep one of his foremost 2008 campaign promises, he should issue a blanket pardon for all of those brave people faced with imprisonment for attempting to expose the U.S. government’s crimes during the so-called War on Terror. After all, many of us voted for him because the onetime Constitutional...
