Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
Did Trump Actually Win?
Nobody knows if election results were manipulated in 2016 because nobody ever bothered to check. Before and after the 2016 Presidential election, U.S. election officials and private voting system vendors claimed, over and over again, that most voting systems utilized in this country are never connected to the internet. The implication is that they couldn’t...
Asshole of the Month: Lindsey Graham
South Carolina has long been the nation’s most militant state; more American Revolution battles were fought here than anywhere else, and South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union in the Civil War, after the Rebels fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, triggering the greatest bloodbath in our history. Ever since, South Carolina...
Snoopy Retail Giant
Amazon is making billions selling merchandise, but one of its prime cash cows is gathering personal info for Big Brother. From Amazon’s inception as an alternative to brick-and-mortar bookstores, and despite the carnage it visited upon those venerable cultural gathering places—replacing friendly and knowledgeable clerks with a two-day package delivery system—the company has projected a...
High Court Guts First Amendment
The Supreme Court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering is a direct assault on voters’ free speech. For more than 45 years HUSTLER has stood unapologetically for First Amendment rights, as underscored by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1988 ruling in HUSTLER Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell. So it must not go unnoticed here that the Court’s stolen...
Asshole of the Month: Jack Dorsey
When Twitter entered the online universe in 2006, it was widely panned as a joke. How much thoughtful content, really, could anyone express in a mere 140 characters? It seemed to be designed for complete idiots incapable of composing more than two sentences without brain strain. Twitter was made for twits. Conan O’Brien had a...
Is Peace Possible?
The Middle East has been a hornet’s nest for eons. Now Donald Trump can choose to start a war there or ease tensions. Trust me, this column about the threat of the United States and Iran going to war will be relevant no matter what happens between the moment I finish writing this first sentence...
Where Democracy Goes to Die
Jim Crow rises from the ashes in Florida even after a huge majority voted to kill the dirty bird. In the March 2019 issue my counterpart Robert Scheer trumpeted unabashedly “good news”: Nearly 65% of Florida voters from the left, right and center said yes to a November 2018 ballot initiative “to amend their state...
Asshole of the Month: Kay Ivey
The possibility of traveling back in time has been a staple fantasy of science fiction from H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine to the film Back to the Future. It’s more than a fantasy, however, and you don’t need some quantum physics gizmo to do it. Just move to Alabama. The state that gave us George Wallace, with...
Will the Dems Pick Another Loser?
Only a candidate with a truly progressive agenda can send President Trump packing in 2020. My prediction for the 2020 Presidential election is that the Democrats will lose if they nominate a “winner.” That safe bet would be another establishment-approved, terminally compromised, political-winds-sniffing candidate who pledges to unite all of those who hate Donald Trump...
Our Criminal President
Donald Trump is a serial federal felon, and Russia has nothing to do with it. Give credit where it’s due: Donald Trump is the Greatest Con Man of All Time. Period. How else could one personally lose more than $1 billion over a decade—as recently revealed by The New York Times—and still manage to not only dupe the...
Asshole of the Month: Rupert Murdoch
If our world seems polarized and riven by hostile partisanship and racial animosity, with crank wingnut fanatics flourishing here and abroad, we can thank the supreme godfather of it all, the Crocodile Dundee of gutter journalism—Rupert Murdoch. Rupert didn’t invent yellow journalism, but he refined it into a slick art and built a colossal, mega-profitable...
America’s Deaf & Dumb Party
Mark April 2019 as the month that President Donald Trump, for the first time, could rest assured that he would be reelected. Three events signaled the parting of the storm clouds that have hovered over the nation’s most turbulent Presidency. The office has been pure chaos ever since The Donald—primarily known for finding hapless would-be...
Asshole of the Month: William Barr
You have to admit, our Carnival Barker in Chief really knows how to run a circus. It may be one scandalous tweetstorming outrage after another, but it’s never boring. We’ve all been treated to a serial freak show of swamp creatures, corporate stooges, wingnut clowns and outright idiots appointed to high office and then ousted...
Don’t Blame Russia!
Any halfway honest person has to admit that if 19 government lawyers—working with FBI agents, intelligence analysts and forensic accountants for two years—can’t find evidence of a crime, then there probably wasn’t one. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s team issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, obtained over 230 communications records and...
Time for Wall Street to Pay Up
Democrats have a plan that could eliminate several of America’s biggest problems at once. So, naturally, Republicans oppose it. For decades they’ve claimed that the federal deficit—the government spending more than it brings in—is irresponsible and has increased the national debt to trillions of dollars. In truth, as proven again during the Trump Presidency, Republicans...
Asshole of the Month: R. Kelly
The tide of #MeToo enlightenment and reckoning has knocked another apex predator off his perch—R. Kelly, the king of R&B and one of the best-selling music artists of all time, was arrested and charged with ten counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February. Like Harvey Weinstein, Kelly ran amok with his insatiable lust for...
Free Healthcare for Everyone?
Medicare for All is the ticket to healthcare sanity in America, and the idea is being championed by more members of Congress than ever before. Progressive caucuses in the House and Senate have introduced some bold new proposals to finally deliver a single-payer healthcare plan similar to those that senior citizens and active military personnel...
A Green New Deal
The Green New Deal (GND) must be a great idea. How do I know? Just listen to wing nuts on the Right, like Sean Hannity of Fox News. He freaked out about the plan for millions of new jobs and clean, renewable sources of energy, which—with a straight face—he labeled a “serious threat to our...
Asshole of the Month: Brit Hume
Fox News, the Animal House of American journalism, ends up corrupting every soul who works there. Geraldo Rivera and Bill O’Reilly, in their younger, long-hair days, were good investigative journalists without a political ax to grind. They were honestly “fair and balanced,” breaking many important stories and scandals. Then Roger Ailes showered them with huge salaries to...
Another Foolhardy War
For many Americans, especially millennials, war has become nothing more than what’s depicted in the make-believe world of a video game. Couch potatoes can joyously kill and be killed without risking life and limb. Meanwhile strategists in high places in our government get to wage real wars like the disastrous failure in Afghanistan—the longest war...
