Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
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...
Pretending to Protect Democracy
Hundreds of major corporations demand voting rights for all! (No, not really.) The banner for the two-page advertisement in The New York Times and The Washington Post was striking: “WE STAND FOR DEMOCRACY.” Below it the body copy declared, “We all should feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any...
Asshole of the Month: Elise Stefanik
Now that we’ve been spared Donald Trump’s daily dose of illiterate bullshit for months—Twitter and Facebook have continued his suspension indefinitely—a lot of people think the nightmare is fully over. Not quite so fast. Like a resurrecting monster in a horror movie, Trump is clawing out of his electoral grave and terrorizing the nation with...
Asshole of the Month: Matt Gaetz
The state of Florida is famous for many things, but perhaps none so much as the “Florida man” meme: a chronic freak show of bizarre behavior unrivaled by any other place in the U.S. or even the world. It seems every week Florida headlines report insane news: a homeless man attacked by a face-eating cannibal;...
Forget Trump—Reagan’s Era Is Ending
President Biden and reinvigorated Democrats step up to prove that, yes, government can be the solution. In the dark days of the 2008 financial crisis, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart featured politico guests working to staunch the bleeding at the time. Why, Stewart repeatedly asked, were hundreds of billions in emergency relief being gifted...
Asshole of the Month: Josh Hawley
Some people born with all the stars aligned for a successful life nevertheless manage to fuck things up with a few horrible decisions; they bet the whole farm on the wrong horse or hitch their wagon to a leader who turns out to be a false prophet. Then their soaring ambition flames out like a...
Never Forget Your First
Larry Flynt may be gone, but his indelible legacy as a free speech champion must live on. There’s been a lot of free speech about free speech lately. Much of it—particularly from those defending Donald Trump—is bullshit. But the First Amendment protects free speech that is bullshit. You have the right to be wrong. You...
Asshole of the Month: Marjorie Taylor Greene
Over the years, Asshole of the Month has featured a bounteous parade of blithering idiots, con men, habitual liars and hypocrites, the vast majority of them either Republican politicians or right-wing pundits and players. So we’ve grown a little complacent, thinking we’ve pretty much seen it all—and then along comes a new Asshole so outrageously...
