Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
Asshole of the Month: Rick Snyder
Life has been tough for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder this year. His approval rating has tanked, and he has been constantly heckled by irate citizens everywhere he goes. Dining out in an Ann Arbor restaurant with his family back in January, he was nearly run out on a rail. If tarring and feathering were still...
Asshole of the Month: Jim Jordan
Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio may be the most extreme, far-right legislator in all of Congress, earning a perfect score from the American Conservative Union. What did he have to do to earn this dubious honor? First, he corraled 78 freshmen radicals into a posse called the Republican Study Committee andwent headhunting for heretics who...
We Can’t Bomb Our Way to Peace
In late 2003, as our nation’s worst foreign policy disaster was beginning to unfold in Iraq, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to his top advisers asking how the United States would know whether it was “winning or losing the Global War on Terror.” “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists...
An Alliance That Deserves to Die
Our country’s foreign policy is generally a well-mannered affair that’s been known to mask truly bizarre events as reasonably tidy. But every once in a while the absurdity of it all is revealed for even the must gullible to comprehend. Such a moment occurred in Saudi Arabia when Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken clerical leader...
Voting Machine Boondoogle Continues
Last September New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice issued a terrifying report titled “America’s Voting Machines at Risk.” According to the comprehensive study, computers used to cast and count nearly every single vote are “rapidly aging out.” Coauthor Lawrence Norden told me the “biggest finding is that, in the vast majority of the country,...
Shady Arabia
Shit happens, okay, extremely evil shit like a lunatic couple in San Bernardino, California, deciding to turn the husband’s office holiday party into a killing-field bloodbath. The Revenge of the Crazy Muslim Health Inspector would be the title if some mindless screenwriter made it up. Of course the avenging hero who rights this wrong would...
Asshole of the Month: Donald Trump
Donald Trump has shocked the nation by leading the dense pack of contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination, prompting even the anointed candidate of the GOP establishment, Jeb Bush, to allegedly call him a “buffoon,” “clown” and “asshole.” It’s not hard to understand Trump’s appeal: For an electorate long weary of the mealymouthed evasions and...
Asshole of the Month: Trey Gowdy
The Tea Party is rhapsodic over its new gunslinger in Congress—South Carolina’s Representative Trey Gowdy, a former hotshot prosecutor and alumnus of Baylor University, mecca of the Southern Baptist faith. Gowdy won his seat against fellow Republican and longtime incumbent Bob Inglis Sr. in 2011, after Inglis cast too many sane and rational votes for...
Supreme Fuckup
During every Presidential campaign, I can remember being told, “This election is really about the Supreme Court!” No matter how I felt about the candidates, the argument went, the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and decisions made by the Court affect the nation—for good or ill—for decades. Given the damage the current Court has wrought...
Stone-Cold Bust
For nearly half a century the United States has driven much of the world bat shit crazy with its insane War on Drugs. That undertaking even trumped the other obsession of waging war on terrorism when, in May 2001, President George W. Bush authorized a payment of $43 million to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan...
Asshole of the Month: Mark Meadows
One of the Tea Party’s new young guns in Congress, Representative Mark Meadows— elected in 2012 from North Carolina—launched a radical insurgency against the Republican old guard last summer with a move to depose House Speaker John Boehner. Meadows and his fellow bomb throwers believed Boehner and the GOP leadership were just not conservative enough,...
Exxon’s Big Secret
Every 2016 Republican Presidential candidate is a climate-change denier or skeptic. Apparently, for them, it’s easier to ignore evidence of the greatest threat facing humanity than it is to run for the highest office in the land without funding from the ruthless profiteers jeopardizing the future of our planet. The GOP clown car climate claptrap...
Rigged Game
Sometimes the reality you encounter is so mind-numbingly depressing that it leaves you not wanting to go on even thinking about the subject at hand. Three “bummers” that come to mind are a horrible disease with no cure in sight, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to rogue dictators and the endless stupidity of gun violence...
Asshole of the Month: Benjamin Netanyahu
Twenty years ago the bloody Israel-Palestine conflict was very close to a peaceful resolution with the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords. In a landmark move, Israel recognized PLO chairman Yasser Arafat as a negotiating partner for the first time and agreed to exchange “land for peace” in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which condemned the...
Jim Crow Is Back!
In 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives’ Republican majority worked with Democrats to hold dozens of exhaustive hearings on whether to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). “There was a lot of invidious discrimination shown,” recalled then- House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin). Ultimately, the House (with 33 nays) and a unanimous...
Massive Betrayal
Where did all of those people come from? This past September the world’s conscience was suddenly confronted by an unprecedented stream of migrants and refugees—mostly from Syria, but also from Iraq, Libya, Kosovo and Afghanistan—seeking asylum in Europe. Some countries, notably Hungary, turned their backs on those suffering foreigners. Others, led by Germany and Sweden,...
Asshole of the Month: Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina won the “junior varsity” round of the first Republican Presidential debate on August 6, 2015, and was hailed by some pundits and right-wing activists as the GOP’s antidote to Hillary Clinton. They all praised her poise and elocution, which amounts to so much lipstick on a pig, because gnarly Carly embodies the supposed...
Hard Power Or Soft?
The concept of yin and yang came about when ancient Chinese thinkers began viewing the world as a harmonious entity. As Shen-nong.com explains, they theorized that every object and phenomenon “had complementary and opposing characteristics in nature. Some examples include: sky and earth, day and night, water and fire, active and passive, male and female...
Adios, Embargo!
Viva hookers, rum and cigars! The booze, the fried plantains and everything else just tastes better down there. Before the U.S. slammed the door shut in October 1960, Cuba was a veritable paradise. No one idolized it more than war correspondent, novelist and adventurer Ernest Hemingway. And not just for the great fishing. The casinos...
The True Gospel On Immigration
About this fellow Jesus, who is the object of much commercial attention right now: If you care a whit about his moral teachings, you’ll share my beliefs regarding the immigration dispute. According to the Good Samaritan parable in the New Testament’s Gospel of Luke, the divinely inspired message on obtaining safe passage to heaven is...
