Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
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,...
Asshole of the Month: Ted Cruz
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...
Humanizing ALL of America’s Murder Victims?
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...
Orwellian Decision
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...
The FBI’s Accelerating War on Freedom
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...
Killed!
If you’ve been swallowing mainstream news from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC or even the New York Times, you’re not getting the whole picture. Corporate-owned broadcasters and publishers suppress stories that threaten their profits and their cozy relations with secretive government agencies. Thanks to our friends at Project Censored, here’s our list of stories that Big...
Asshole of the Month: Carmen Ortiz
Will dragging the name of U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz through the shit bring back Internet martyr Aaron Swartz? No, but it’ll serve more justice than the poor guy ever got at the hands of this sadistic inquisitor. Ortiz is a bitter reminder that sometimes the good guys lose and the war must go...
Congress Tunes Its “Instrument Of Villainy”
My most exciting memory of growing up in Boston during the Great Depression was learning how our independence was born. A pivotal event occurred in 1761 in a Boston courtroom. Lawyer James Otis Jr. spent nearly five hours arguing against extension of the “writs of assistance,” which British officials drew up themselves—like today’s FBI does—so...
Outsourcing Torture
If you are the least bit squeamish, don’t read “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” an Open Society Justice Initiative report published by the Open Society Foundations. The OSF was established by philanthropist George Soros, one of the handful of the super rich still guided by a moral compass. Soros was a Hungarian...
Asshole of the Month: Mark R. Levin
This month’s addition to the asinine shitpile has such a twisted idea of patriotism, he’d sue the government if it tried to regulate fireworks that backfired on kids. As president of the notorious Landmark Legal Foundation, Mark R. Levin has positioned himself as the new ideologue behind the conservative push for a new hard-right, antiliberal,...
Raping the Bill of Rights
Much to my dismay, I saw little notice, let alone celebrations, around the country on the recent 221st anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Those initial ten amendments to the Constitution guarantee our most essential individual liberties. But on the occasion the Wall Street Journal ran “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of...
Greedonomics
Let me tell you how screwed we are. Better yet, let me once again quote my favorite economist, the late Beatle John Lennon. I’ve frequently cited the words he sang in “Working Class Hero” because they make the most salient point concerning our devastated economy: “A working class hero is something to be/Keep you doped...
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...
Education Is Flunking
We know that the No Child Left Behind law—the lingering legacy of the George W. Bush Administration—requires standardized testing to measure elementary-school students’ proficiency in reading and math. But with emphasis placed on those learning tools, with a regimen of tests and more tests, many thousands of youngsters are deficient in history, civics, the arts...
Wholesale Charade
Hallelujah! Every four years there’s a Presidential election, and We the People should be excited about this exercise of our Constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights. Wrong! It’s a pathetic charade that has nothing at all to do with the sort of republic of the free stakeholders that the founders of this nation had in mind when...
Earth First! Strikes Back
In 1990—23 years ago this month—Judi Bari was critically injured by a car bomb, and fellow activist Darryl Cherney was nearly blinded. The FBI and Oakland Police Department immediately accused the two environmentalists of bombing themselves. Who Bombed Judi Bari?—produced by Cherney and directed by Mary Liz Thomson—chronicles the activists’ ongoing investigation into the FBI’s...
