Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
Democracy Is on Your Ballot
This year you get an extra vote for the 2024 Presidential election. Please vote wisely. I am not a member of the Democratic Party, but I will vote like one this year. The Republican Party has left me (and, I would argue, you) no other option. It has clasped hands, like Thelma and Louise, with...
Asshole of the Month: Dr. Mehmet Oz
If it’s true that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, what would be the second oldest? There are many possible candidates, but a good wager would be snake oil salesman. Humanity has always been afflicted with a terrifying array of diseases and maladies; before modern medicine, dealing with them was the province of witch doctors,...
Supreme Court Now Just Making Shit Up
The Republican radicals in robes go rogue, and this is how democracy dies. Literally. As I’ve long warned here, Republicans have now trashed hundreds of years of constitutional norms and Senate traditions to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with radical, extremist right-wingers. The nation and planet will pay the price for generations. In the past...
Asshole of the Month: John Eastman
It was a long, hot summer, with parched farmlands and cities across the U.S. breaking all-time heat records. The hottest city of all was the nation’s capital, blistering from the heat of the House Select Committee’s January 6 hearings. Now, with enough evidence presented to support criminal indictments, Trump is playing his usual tune when...
This Way Madness Lies
As your rights and freedoms are struck down, the corrupt Supreme Court majority is now anything but “conservative.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent extremist rulings were tragically predictable. We know this because at the end of its 2021 term a frequent guest on my syndicated radio program, The BradCast, forecast precisely what has now happened....
Asshole of the Month: Clarence Thomas
It’s often said that people get more conservative as they grow older. People who were party animals in their teens and 20s eventually get married, have children, pay a mortgage and worry about their children’s future as much as their own. But it doesn’t necessarily translate into political conservatism. Then there are the assholes who...
Unconventional Times
Historians and TV pundits are betting on a GOP sweep in November’s midterm elections. Don’t take the bet! In early May, when a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked voters who they planned to vote for in this year’s midterm elections—a generic Republican candidate or a Democrat—they selected the Dem by a 5-percentage-point gap, 44% to 39%....
Asshole of the Month: Marco Rubio
During his failed Presidential campaign in 2016, U.S. Senator Rubio was nicknamed “Little Marco” by Trump. Trump loved dishing out folksy monikers to belittle opponents, mostly dumb schoolyard bully taunts, but he may have really hit the mark with Rubio. Not because Marco stands only 5-9, but because he seems to possess a genuine Napoleonic...
Asshole of The Month: Samuel Alito
Since the dawn of civilization, human progress has often been slow: two steps forward, one step back…repeat. And it’s always the old guard—the tight-assed priests or rich, Ivy league frat boys—who turn the clock back, usually because their privileges are threatened or they think all contemporary problems can be solved by returning to the romanticized...
The Corruption of Clarence Continues
The U.S. Supreme Court Justice and his wife have undermined the law of the land for decades… but we let them. With his Publisher’s Statements, Larry Flynt established a nearly 50-year tradition of punching well above his political weight. His commentaries often cut straight to the bone of the day’s politics, even as the American...
Asshole of the Month: Kevin Stitt
Oklahoma is the latest state reverting to the Dark Ages, when women had to use a coat hanger or seek a back-alley quack to get an abortion, thanks largely to Governor Kevin Stitt, another Bible-thumping Republican troglodyte. He signed off on the new bill that will charge any medical professional terminating a pregnancy at any...
Heat Pumps for Peace & Freedom!
It may not be sexy, but new electrified tech can help defeat a Russian tyrant and save the planet with the stroke of Joe Biden’s pen. Authoritarianism will not defeat itself. Years-long efforts—militarily, economically, morally—were required during World War II to end it in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. Decades of such efforts by democratic...
Asshole of the Month: Victoria Nuland
When Biden appointed Victoria Nuland to the third most powerful position in the State Department in January 2021, Medea Benjamin, the cofounder of CODEPINK and our premier antiwar activist, warned, “Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia...
Chain of Fools
The pandemic exposed the U.S. supply chain debacle, but Wall Street greed and American stupidity perfected it. Finally! A story about “both sides” collectively fucking up. And lawmakers from both political parties will be needed to fix it, if that’s even possible. Corporate media doesn’t like to focus on it, but after a year of...
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,...
