Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
Asshole of the Month: Justin Bieber
The time has come to celebrate. The international nightmare known as Justin Bieber has entered self-destruction mode. By the time you read this, there’s at least a 50-50 chance this talentless pile of wuss will be dead, maimed, jailed, held in a basement by crazed adolescent lesbians or crucified by hordes of Beliebers for changing...
They Can Follow You Everywhere
I’ve previously mentioned my gratitude to Google for its swift and verifiable answers to my research questions. But the Silicon Valley leviathan is increasingly a menace to what’s left of our privacy. Now being developed is Google Glass, a controversial glasses-like device that “allows users to access the Internet, take photos and film short snippets,”...
Dangerous Powers
Finally, even that old hawk John McCain woke up to the fact that Congress had betrayed its Constitutional obligation after 9/11 by granting President George W. Bush and those who’d come after him unlimited executive power to take the nation to war. In panic over the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,...
Asshole of the Month: Mike Huckabee
Mike Huckabee sees the world through the lens of a bizarre horror flick. Demons are everywhere, tempting him with buckets of deep-fried sin that only he and his band of white, male Christian warriors have the strength to resist. Some days the demons are whiny liberals who want equal rights for everyone. Other days they’re...
Fukushima Radiation Slams Our Shores
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...
Asshole of the Month: Darrell Issa
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...
Military’s Invasion of Privacy
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...
Selling Out to Big Brother
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....
Inside the Koch Brothers’ War Room
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...
Asshole of the Month: Ann Coulter
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...
These Are People Who Died
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...
Becoming A Lifelong Learner
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...
Immoral Values Republican
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...
10 Americans Who Should Be Locked Up
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...
Asshole of the Month: Ken Cuccinelli
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,...
Jazz Is Still Kickin’
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...
Stalkers Paradise
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...
Asshole of the Month: Pope Francis
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...
Bold Move
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...
Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye
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,...
