Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
2nd Amendment Double Standard
Once again some nutcase finds it all too easy to lay his hands on an arsenal he has no reasonable need to possess, and innocent people are randomly slaughtered. The latest example of deadly mayhem occurred in a college town in California, a state with some semblance of sane gun control, but not enough to...
Asshole of the Month: Tom Coburn
Early this year, Tom Coburn—the junior U.S. Senator from Oklahoma who has spent his entire career trying to plug the pipes of progress and keep people in his state below the poverty line—finally decided to do something good for the country: quit! Of course, like a good Republican manure spreader, he used the announcement that...
Banksters Are Not Our Only Option
“Epic in scale, unprecedented in world history.” That is how William K. Black—professor of law and economics and former banking regulator—describes the scams in which JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has now been implicated. They involve more than a dozen felonies, including bid-rigging on municipal bond debt; colluding to rig interest rates on hundreds of trillions of...
Affirmative Inaction
Just days before a recorded conversation with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling established that racism is alive and well in America, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that racial discrimination in college education is no longer a problem. Affirmative action had been the main vehicle for integrating higher education, but that door finally closed with...
Asshole of the Month: Representative Eric Cantor
Mr. Cantor, your attention please! After reviewing your ten-year career as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, where you are now the Majority Leader, it has come to our attention that you have forgotten a very important fact! To wit: You were put in office to represent the people of Virginia’s Seventh Congressional...
Assholes of the Month
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in four decades of writing about assholes, it’s this: An asshole taking a massive shit on our country will keep taking a massive shit on our country until somebody puts a stop to it. Call it Flynt’s First Law of Assholery. Judging by how many colossal creeps have been...
Why I Dig Being in HUSTLER
As a reporter, historian, critic and columnist for more than 60 years, I’ve never wanted to write just for the choir—readers who always agree with me. The wider and more combative the audience, the better. So I was eager when HUSTLER Magazine not only published my article “The War on Free Speech” in October 2007...
Mr. Indecency
This is a fit time and place to mark the memory of one Charles Keating, the scoundrel who wanted to be remembered for having put Larry Flynt in jail. Instead, this holier-than-thou guardian of other people’s morals was locked up much longer for his own transgressions. In 1977, thanks to Keating’s incendiary crusade, Flynt was...
Asshole of the Month: Lindsey Graham
Heard this one? Why did the senator support the antigay Defense of Marriage Act? Because he was happy as a bachelor! Now don’t get us wrong, we don’t give a crap where the non-marrying, nonbreeding U.S. Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham sticks his shriveled Congressional member. But if he does indeed eat a bowl...
America Or China?
Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that a huge number of citizens were engaging in “un-American” activities, free-thinking friends of mine became very careful of what they said on the phone. Some even tried to disguise the titles of books and publications they bought. In my book...
The Smear Matrix
Porn has a new hotshot, and I fear for Larry Flynt’s financial future now that Big Brother is challenging him for market share. Who needs HUSTLER Magazine when you have the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)—in cahoots with America’s National Security Agency—setting “honey traps” to snare or blackmail individuals by enticing them into...
Asshole of the Month: Eric Bolling
It’s no surprise that Eric Bolling’s favorite TV show is The Walking Dead. That’s not just because he walks among the zombies at Fox News or because station chief Roger Ailes has obviously chowed down on major portions of his brain. It’s because—judging by his ravings on Fox’s pundit show The Five—Bolling imagines himself surrounded...
A Scam to Die For
There’s nothing new about public officials lying to you, but in this case the lie is immoral and potentially deadly. You’re being told that the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is a failure. A fiasco. A nightmare! A government takeover of healthcare! All of them are the opposite of true. And the fact that you’re...
Spies and Lies
Our government has totally shredded our right to privacy and will blatantly lie about the vast extent of its domestic surveillance apparatus. We suspected it before, but now—thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—we know it. The lying didn’t become a matter of established record, however, until Senator Ron Wyden’s persistent questioning at a Senate Select...
Asshole of the Month: Rand Paul
This month’s shit-for-brains is a Republican only because the Libertarian Party ain’t got a turd’s chance at the toilet factory of ever getting into the White House. And because the Tea Party isn’t really a party, just a whacko faction of the GOP. And because the Ku Klux Klan isn’t a party either. And because...
Schoolyard Police State?
The National Security Agency’s voracious surveillance of Americans shows what the federal government thinks of privacy. But local law-enforcement agencies and school administrators nationwide are also destroying We the People’s Constitutional rights with impunity. In his TomDispatch.com blog “The Over-Policing of America,” lawyer Chase Madar details how oppressive our country has become: “There is the...
Truth, Treason & The American Way?
Edward Snowden is the John Peter Zenger of our time. In case you don’t get the historical reference, Zenger was a key figure in this nation’s grand struggle for freedom of the press. In 1734 he was charged with seditious libel for printing articles challenging the power of New York’s colonial governor. Zenger was jailed...
Asshole of the Month: Martha MacCallum
Fox News Channel chief Roger Ailes must be running a stupidity sweepstakes. He probably pays his bottle-blond Aryan airheads based on how high their sound bites score on the outrage meter. You gotta admit, that would explain a lot. Unfortunately for morning propaganda mistress Martha MacCallum, she’s up against the likes of Megyn Kelly. It’s...
A Supreme Injustice
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order that Verizon hand over all its customer records to the National Security Agency. The outcome, as CommonDreams.org reported in November 2013, didn’t surprise me: “We Don’t Wanna Hear It.” The august justices gave no reason for...
To Hell With the Money Changers!
Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin hate Pope Francis, and that’s all the recommendation you need that he may be blessed with divine wisdom. Hallelujah and about time for a break between those who affirm the sanctity of human life in the spirit of Jesus and the charlatans of the Christian Right who believe only in...
