Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
Asshole of The Month: Maria Bartiromo
Largely unrecognized, another pandemic swept across this nation prior to COVID-19. It didn’t cause loss of smell, but loss of common sense. It didn’t cause corporeal death, but the numbing of brain cells. It compelled previously rational, responsible people to abandon all their principles, flip their lids and act like brainwashed zombies idolizing a cult...
Save the Nation: Run for Something
HOW YOU—YES, YOU—CAN ACTUALLY MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Spring is upon us, but there’s a blizzard of snowflakes across our great nation: champions of “cancel culture” demanding “safe spaces” for their kids’ oh-so-tender eyes and ears. No, not vegan, latte-sipping lefties. Hard-right MAGA loons have muscled their way onto school boards, city councils and state...
Asshole of the Month: Kyrsten Sinema
This U.S. Senator from Arizona has become infamous lately for joining hands with Joe Manchin of West Virginia to derail President Biden’s legislative agenda: first the Build Back Better program, then two voting rights reform bills. Both senators are Democrats who essentially abetted a unanimous block of 50 Republicans in gutting these proposed laws. What’s...
Donald Trump: Mass Murderer
Decisions by the last administration led to hundreds of thousands of “absolutely unnecessary” deaths. Will anyone be held accountable? Throughout Donald Trump’s post-presidency, many have focused on his criminal involvement in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But the probe of his attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power by resorting...
“Prime” Time for the Working Class
Unlike Amazon deliveries, better wages and benefits won’t arrive overnight, but they’re on the way if we fight. We’ve learned a few things while struggling to emerge from two years of COVID-19. For example, Wall Street doesn’t keep the country going. Those who show up to work day after day do, even while risking their...
Asshole of the Month: Joe Manchin
Aided by human intervention, nature can produce some strange hybrid creatures, like the liger (a lion bred with a tiger) or the zorse (a zebra bred with a horse). Worth noting about the zorse is that they can be difficult to handle and very strong—which is an apt description for another type of hybrid creature,...
Asshole of the Month: Steve Bannon
The batshit crazy godfather of the alt-right movement, Steve Bannon, is treading in a deep cesspool now that his role in fomenting the January 6th insurrection is finally coming to light. A member of Trump’s inner circle and a bellicose pusher of the Big Lie regarding the outcome of the 2020 election, Bannon was held...
Age of Rage
Americans on the right are furious, but don’t blame conspiracy theories, social media or even Donald Trump. “With every passing day, it looks less like we have one nation divided by differing political beliefs and more like we have two warring countries battling each other within shared borders,” author David Rothkopf tweeted recently. He’s right....
Cops, Lies & Videotape
Corporate media parroted police propaganda to falsely blame reformers for 2020’s unprecedented homicide spike. It’s grotesquely fitting that a failed presidency, inaugurated on the promise that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” would end with unprecedented carnage in its final horrific year. More than 600,000 Americans were lost to COVID-19 on...
Asshole of the Month: Kristi Noem
Donald Trump may be out of the spotlight for now, slumping down in the fever swamps of Florida like a submerged gator, plotting his 2024 comeback, but his brigades of loyal Trumpites—many of whom got elected on his coattails—are still in power in Washington, D.C., and numerous states. They despised him at first, along with...
Asshole of the Month: Brett Kavanaugh
Ever since Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over the Supreme Court’s great expansion of civil rights laws in the 1960s, conservatives have been bitching about so-called “activist” liberal judges taking over the role of Congress in deciding how the nation should be governed. The judges should just abide by the strict letter of the Constitution,...
Shadow Puppets
A corrupt, cowardly right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Majority sends an unmistakably dark warning. The stolen Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is not only corrupt. They are also cowards. Most corrupt public officials are. If their nefarious acts could withstand scrutiny in the light of day, they wouldn’t need to undermine laws, norms and...
Asshole of the Month: Tony Perkins
Christian conservatives have long sought to legislate their version of morality, enforcing their religious beliefs on the population at large. But to do this as Americans, they have to wear a one-eyed blindfold, ignoring what the Founding Fathers ordered in the Constitution: separation of church and state. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and company had seen enough...
Code Red
We are out of time to act on our climate emergency. Action is needed right now… or humanity is cooked. Congratulations! If you were alive this past July—and if you’re reading this, there is a better than zero chance you were—you made history! You survived the hottest month ever recorded on planet Earth. Well done!...
Right-Wing Radicals in Robes
Activist GOP Justices on the Supreme Court are ignoring the constitution and demolishing American democracy. Look. This is simple. The 15th Amendment, ensuring former slaves the right to vote following the Civil War, is only two sentences long. “Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or...
Asshole of The Month: Greg Abbott
Republican governors now control a majority of U.S. states, 27, meaning there is stiff competition for most backward Asshole governor in the nation. Leading the pack, along with Ron DeSantis of Florida and a few others, is the cretinous caudillo of our most populous red state, Greg Abbott of Texas, who proves the old adage...
Asshole of the Month: Bill Cosby
The rise, fall and now supposed redemption of Bill Cosby—he was released from prison in late June after serving three years for sexual assault—is a complex story about the evolving emancipation of two defining identities in American culture: race and gender. For unfamiliar Millennials and the generations beyond, and boomers with bad memories…Bill Cosby was...
Is Garland up to the Task?
Biden’s attorney general must step up to save Democracy and detour Trump’s “Road to Tyranny.” Nothing is gonna be easy for the new U.S. attorney general. Writing in Washington Monthly, law professor Jennifer Taub quipped, “This is Merrick Garland’s Tylenol moment, and by which I mean he has more than a headache, but a poisoning...
Asshole of the Month: Ron DeSantis
Leave it to Florida—home of the “Florida Man” meme and just about every freakish perversion known to humankind—to elect a governor truly representative of the state: the wild, woolly-brained wingnut Ron DeSantis. You would expect a man who graduated from both Yale and Harvard Law School to be more reasonable and better informed than the...
No Cops for Traffic Stops!
People of color are getting killed in the USA for expired license plates or broken taillights. While driving home from a grocery store with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over in a St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb for a broken taillight. Due to the driver’s “wide-set nose,” the responding...
