On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. An enormous amount of radiation was discharged by the calamity and continues to endanger mankind around the world. Now it’s been acknowledged that human error is to blame. In July 2012 a...

They say it takes a crook to catch a crook. Maybe that’s why the GOP chose Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) to head the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This powerful committee is charged with investigating government operations (and looking for bad guys). You’re aware, no doubt, that Issa’s most recent target—having already chalked up...

With more and more unmanned drones flying overhead, has the President or Congress told you that the U.S. Air Force, like the CIA, does not have the authority to conduct domestic “nonconsensual surveillance” unless the spying (so it says) is “accidental”? Secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists dug up an Air...

The most sacred principle of American life, honored in our Constitution and throughout our history, is that of privacy—or as Larry Flynt puts it, “the right to be left alone.” But thanks to the information revolution, the government’s assault on privacy is now more pervasive, though largely invisible, than ever under any preexisting totalitarian government....

A thank-you card seems like the appropriate response for having reaped a cool $18 billion under the administration of President Barack Obama, especially during the worst economy in nearly a century. But that’s not the Koch brothers’ style. Because Obama, no matter how Republican he acts, is actually a Democrat. And, dammit, being two of...

When the name Ann Coulter is mentioned, a flood of words comes to mind: mean, angry, extremist, conservative, inflammatory, hideous, arrogant, male. Regarding that last adjective, we are speaking specifically of a male who is angry because he looks like a woman—sort of. You could throw the adjective ugly into the mix, but that’s probably...

I read the obituaries every day. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. For my entire life, I have been afraid of death. I just can’t comprehend what it is like to not exist. My father, who was very wise, told me simply that I had been there already, before I was...

All the growing furor about the vital need to reform education is based entirely on changing what happens in schools: making sure kids can go on to college, evaluating teachers to get rid of incompetents, broadening parents’ choices of schools. Does that mean that hordes of dropouts are doomed to poverty and uselessness? I’ve known...

There’s hope yet for Larry Flynt. If a total sleazebag like Newt Gingrich can be embraced by the so-called Christian Right the way he has been in the Republican primaries, then a mere pornographer like Flynt should easily attain salvation or at least have a credible run for the Presidency. Even in his heyday, Larry...

For every scumbag doing time, there’s a bunch more still at large. Here’s a roundup of rogues still making a mockery of our justice system. Ben Roethlisberger The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Super Bowl-winning quarterback has beaten the rap on rape charges on two occasions. Back in 2010, Big Ben frequented nightclubs to get coeds a decade...

What kind of absolute, total asshole tries to outlaw blowjobs? This one does. With his recent attempt to reinstate Virginia’s throwback “Crimes Against Nature” law, the state’s attorney general has once and for all declared himself the mortal enemy of all men. If Ken “The Cooch” Cuccinelli had his way, there’d be no oral sex,...

I began reporting on jazz and knowing its key players in the late 1940s, also learning life lessons from them ever since. Tenor saxophonist Ben Webster advised, “Listen, kid, when the rhythm section ain’t making it, go for yourself!” I’ve done that in hassles with editors and wives. Obituaries for my favorite musical genre began...

The snoopers are our new best friends? Unbelievable but true when, for the first time in human history, it is the norm for people to volunteer to be spied upon. Folks eagerly pay for the very apps that betray their privacy with a ruthless efficiency unmatched by the most oppressive tyrants of old. The secret...

With the mainstream media hailing the new pope as a cuddly, squeaky-clean messiah for the shamed and shit-stained Catholic Church, it looks like it’s up to HUSTLER—and a few diligent historians—to do the journalistic dirty work. Formerly known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina, the new human hotline to heaven may have dropped his old...

Impressed by his insistent, often-solitary championing of civil liberties in the U.S. Senate, I twice wrote that Rand Paul should be our next President. But at that time I knew it was just a pipe dream because the Republican’s national name recognition was so low. Now, thanks to his filibuster during the Senate’s ultimate confirmation...

Ever read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Probably not, or you—like most Americans—would not be so accepting of its demise as a pillar of the freedoms guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. The Fourth is the one that guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,...

In the proud tradition of our very own Graffilthy, let’s kick off this crapfest with a verse cribbed from a shithouse stall: “Here I sit, my buns a flexin’. Just gave birth to another Texan!” The Lone Star Stater this time is the Tea Party pile we like to call Turd Cruz. Now brace yourselves...

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was a nonviolent, direct-action enabler of social justice whom I was privileged to know. In New York City she organized the first civil-disobedience protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and I was there protesting. Carrying on the late activist’s unflinching spirit is the Los Angeles...

Why did we go so crazy after 9/11? The idea that somehow our freedoms could be easily sacrificed, including those that our Constitution declared most fundamental to the survival of our republic, became the norm. This past February, more than a decade after attacks that would seem relatively minor in the histories of most war-torn...

Among the chief celebrators of the Presidential reelection of the most voracious Big Brother in our history was the FBI, Barack Obama’s tireless partner in putting this country under ubiquitous surveillance. But like the master spy in the White House, the FBI’s head honcho has yet to be satisfied. Robert Mueller’s zeal has not waned...