Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Latest Politics
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...
Against the Wall
Most Americans residing along the border with Mexico are not clamoring for a wall, but many are resisting an invasion. Their existential menace is neither cartel drug-runners nor Central American families escaping poverty and crime to start a new life in “The Land of the Free.” The threat to local Texans is the Trump Administration, which has...
Indict Him!
If Donald Trump is lucky—and he usually is—he will only be impeached. He deserves far worse: to be prosecuted as a criminal and sent to prison. If anybody else did what we now know Trump did, he or she would almost certainly face felony charges and the prospect of years in a federal penitentiary. But,...
Asshole of the Month: Jerry Falwell Jr.
If we can hold one man responsible for getting Trump over the hump in the Presidential election, it would be Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the late Jerry Sr., founder of the Moral Majority and scourge of LGBTQ people everywhere. Falwell Sr. actually blamed gays for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Before this, he sued HUSTLER...
The War on Drugs Was a Bust
Sometimes a revolution happens and nobody notices. That’s the case with the widespread legalization of marijuana in this country and the grinding to a halt of the U.S. government’s century-old War on Drugs, which devastated the lives of millions of people around the world. It was a war in the most depressing sense of the...
Asshole of the Month: Heather Nauert
It’s finally dawning on more and more Americans, even die-hard Trump supporters, that the Donald’s administration is nothing more than a nonstop reality-TV show modeled exactly after the big hit that made him famous. The Apprentice Live is now governing the whole nation. In two years Trump has overseen a record-setting 65% White House staff...
Democracy Strikes Back
Well, it wasn’t a blue wave after all. It was, in fact, a blue tsunami last November, although you could be forgiven if you didn’t notice. Some key 2018 midterm election results were initially misreported by many in the corporate media, chomping at the bit to propagate a false narrative of Democratic Party failure. Take...
Outsmarting Capitalism?
Never hustle a hustler” is a street-smart dictum you would think President Donald Trump would have embraced long before launching his trade war with the People’s Republic of China. Maybe he was fooled by the Communist label that the leaders in Beijing still apply to their government, but the head honcho of the Trump franchise...
Major Civil Rights Triumph
Mainstream media has a difficult time covering good news. While there wasn’t much of that in the mixed results of a deeply divided midterm electorate nationwide, one pure bright light of decency and common sense emerged. That is the decision of more than 60% of Florida voters to amend their state constitution, restoring voting rights...
This Number Is No Longer in Service
There are a lot of scams in the Republican Party’s toolbox. One of the most insidious is the notion that cutting regulatory red tape is somehow meant to help you, the little guy, being held back by Big Government bureaucracy. But the Donald Trump/GOP Jedi mind tricks aren’t meant to help you unless you’re one...
Prepare for Impact(s)
It’s not your imagination. Natural disasters are getting worse—and we’re not ready. Roughly—and conservatively—speaking, one inch of rainfall is the equivalent of about one foot of snowfall. That might help you understand the deluge generated by Hurricane Lane, which dumped some 50 inches of rain on parts of Hawaii in August 2018. That’s enough moisture...
Saudi Money Trumps U.S. Morals
Donald Trump has the strangest crushes on questionable countries, ranging from North Korea to Russia to Saudi Arabia, not to mention several other bizarre choices. But the one for which he expressed the purest and earliest of affections as a newly minted President was darkly duplicitous Saudi Arabia, which is more an oil depot than...
Donald Trump Wants to Kill You
Thousands will die under the president’s new plan to “bring back coal.” During Donald Trump’s first tumultuous year in office, Republicans in Congress fought like hell to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Better known as Obamacare, former President Barack Obama’s landmark legislation gave 20 to 24 million Americans access to affordable medical care...
Stop Corporate Greed!
Bernie Sanders takes aim at thriving companies whose underpaid employees require government assistance to survive. Need further proof of how much better off this sad sack republic of ours would have been if U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders had made it to the White House? Check out the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act,...
Dark Money Is Now Darker
Transparency dies in the murky water of the swamp. Does anybody in the world think there’s too much transparency in American politics? That there isn’t enough secrecy in our electoral system? That millionaires, billionaires and corporations should be able to make it even more difficult for the public to know about their campaign spending? Apparently...
Google’s Black Eye
From the crack of dawn to the darkest hours of night, you are followed. In the most intimate detail, every step of your daily life is being permanently recorded without interruption—from your bed to your fast-food breakfast, your subsequent ride to work or to visit friends, then to lunch and continuing along the pathway of...
