So a man goes to the doctor and says, “doctor, recent events in American politics have left me feeling really depressed.”
The doctor says, “you should go read Thieves in the Temple; it’s a blog by this guy Alec Mento. It’s really incisive about politics, it’s funny, and he has this unlikely, irrepressible optimism about the American people no matter what happens! Go read it right now; you’ll feel better about everything!”
“But, doctor,” the man says, “I am Alec Mento.”
Hello, good peoples! Posting will be light or nonexistent this week, so be happy and safe out there. Also, read Greg Palast’s report describing how December 11 could be the new January 6. Better to know two months ahead!
UPDATE. However! A Fulton County, GA judge has ruled that Georgia’s election board must certify election results, writing that “(i)f election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so—because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud—refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.” This ruling might throw a wrench into right-wing plans to keep state Governors from sending slates of electors to the National Archives (which would essentially throw the election to the House of Representatives, which would be bad). Of course, whiners will whine and drama hounds will drama, so I expect there’ll still be riots in swing state capitals in early December.
Thieves in the Temple will take the month of August off; we'll be back with the action alerts after Labor Day. In the meantime, thank you for reading, and thank you for all your good works!
Thieves in the Temple will not post this week; we’ll return with an “Around the Table” roundup on Sunday, July 7, and resume action alerts the following day. In the meantime, enjoy your holiday, and thank you for all your good works!
Hi all! Posting will be extremely light (if not nonexistent) for the rest of August, as I (once again) work on my next book. A real Dichotomy paradox, this project; it’s felt almost done since I put in 12-hour days on it that week in mid-April, and yet, it is still not done. Soon, perhaps. In the meantime, know that I appreciate the hard work you do for the country we all love.
Posting will be light until early next week, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday.
Hi all! Posting will be light this week, while I work on my next book.
In the meantime, know that I appreciate all the hard work you do for the country we love.
This'll be the last post of 2022; we'll be back in 2023 to build on our accomplishments and confront a Republican House majority that'll be nowhere near as dysfunctional as they want us to think.
In the meantime, have a safe and happy New Year. We're going to need you.
Posting will be light over the next week-plus, so enjoy your holiday, and prepare yourself for the drama of a Republican House (albeit one with a rather slim majority).
For today, though, two items: the U.S. Senate may vote on H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, as early as today, so you'll want to get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to vote for that bill. This bill might actually pass, and if it does, it will protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from whatever horror our Supreme Court is cooking up. I told my right-leaning Senator, who will be replaced by John Fetterman in January, not to listen to people who claim their "religious" "conscience" demands that our government prevent gay folks from marrying. If you don't want to gay-marry, I said, then just don't gay-marry. Shame that rage-filled right-wingers seem to have no idea how that works.
Also, Pennsylvania residents, take note: not long after I declared the Larry Krasner impeachment dead, the Pennsylvania state house up and impeached him, for something, I guess. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania's state Senators will have to vote to remove him from his office as Philadelphia District Attorney; Pennsylvania has 29 Republicans out of 50 state Senators, so they'd have to bully at least four Democrats into voting to remove him. Thus now's a good time to call your state Senator and tell them not to enable this right-wing sore loser drama Republicans want to inflict upon us. (Republicans rushed to impeach Mr. Krasner because, pending the results of two races in the Philly suburbs, they may have lost the Assembly.) Mr. Krasner has, frankly, enacted rather mild criminal justice reforms in his five years as DA, and any cop who says I CAN'TZ DOZ MYZ JOBZ ANYMOREZ!!!! simply because he can no longer indefinitely detain a guy for peeing against the wall of a bar at 3 AM is a whiner. And Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate whiners. I hate whiners with guns even more.
Anyway, enjoy time with family and friends this week, and thank you for all your good works.
Posting will be light around here through the holidays, though I should note the death of the Build Back Better Act at the hands of West Virginia "moderate" "Democratic" Senator Joe Manchin.
Sen. Manchin said yesterday that he's a "no" vote on the Build Back Better Act, which in a Senate with exactly 50 Democrats means it won't pass. Naturally he adds, as he often does, that "(i)f I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can't vote for it." Good! Now he can explain to the good citizens of West Virginia that he is the reason they can't get paid family medical leave, a cap on insulin prices, a cap on child care costs, higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, or an extension of the Child Tax Credit expansion that just delivered the last of the $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts on December 15. Of course all he'll talk about is inflation and COVID and the national debt, though all of the things I just listed would actually help battle inflation and COVID, and the Build Back Better Act would add less money to the national debt than his pet "bipartisan" "infrastructure" bill from earlier this year.
Naturally Joe Manchin couldn't stop there: he also said that the Build Back Better Act represents an attempt to "dramatically reshape our society." To which I say: that is to laugh! The Build Back Better Act is already a compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise, and I'm sure I left a few compromises out. And the fact is that all the Big Gummint spending programs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, all part of this effort to "dramatically reshape" America, actually promote freedom. Are you more free or less free when you're figuring out which bills you can pay this month and which ones you can get away with "forgetting" to pay? Are you more free or less free when you're paying one working parent's entire year's salary just for child care? Are you more free or less free when you can't afford insulin because big corporations charge whatever for it? Are you more free or less free when you can't take a day off to care for a sick child or a sick parent without losing pay or losing your job? Are you more free or less free when more of your taxpayer money goes right into the pockets of big pharma CEOs? Are you more free or less free when absurdly wealthy billionaires can just buy Congressfolk to change laws so they can make even more money without doing any more work or contributing to civilization in any conceivable way? I trust you know the answer to all of these questions, even if Joe Manchin doesn't.
Or, more likely, pretends not to. He's not stupid, and nor are any of his comrades in Congress, so I must reluctantly conclude that I was right, earlier, when I supposed that the Democrats set up this whole process to fail. So Democrats absolutely deserve to lose both Houses of Congress -- except that we don't deserve what'll happen to us if Republicans take Congress again, and anyway, why let the Democrats off easy? So we should still clog up their phone lines, and then make them pay for their greed and their venality and their folly -- preferably by making them lose their next elections to real liberals, but short of that, by making their names mud for as long as they're in office, the way Joe McCarthy's name was mud during his last term as Senator after he'd doubled down one time too many. I want people like Joe Manchin to be afraid to show their faces in public, and then I want them to lose their primaries and slink away. Because he doesn't have the power. We do. And we need to wield it until they all understand that.
Posting here will resume on Monday, as I try to crank out as much of another book as I can.
I've been following the Republicans' latest electoral drama, of course, but I have little of consequence to say about it. Congressional Republicans are a bunch of diaper-loaded brats! How much more of the elephant dung do we need to see?
So, yeah, posting has been light and may be light for a bit yet until things shake out. At times like this I think of Bob Dylan in "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" singing "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." I expect I'll know that song at least a little better by the beginning of next week. In the meantime, deep breaths.
So it looks like I won't post anything new until after the New Year, when we'll start (of course!) with the ever-longer list of good House-passed bills the Senate won't touch.
In the meantime, this blog does have a Facebook page (it's right here), and if I find any good memes over the next two weeks, I'll share them with you there.
We've done a lot of good work in 2019, but we've got a lot more to do in 2020, and I hope you will keep coming to this site and keep using the action alerts here to tell your Congressfolk (and state legislators, and corporate leaders, and maybe even our President) to do the right thing. Thank you for all your efforts -- even during the bleakest times, these efforts help us move forward, even if we don't see that right away.
Posting will be light this week, which I suppose isn't a surprise, since it's a holiday week, but I've received fewer action alerts than normal these past few days, which, actually, is a surprise, to me, at least.
So perhaps we should take this opportunity to take a few deep breaths and gather up our strength, for though the finish line of 2019 may be in sight, 2020 is right behind it, promising an order of magnitude more drama than even the last three years -- or the last 15, or 20, or 40 -- have done.
Posting will be light a bit longer, as I am thisclosereally to getting book number three to the printer.
I do have goals for the new year, though. I want 2019 to be the year we start kicking this President to the curb. The Special Counsel's report notwithstanding I don't particularly want him out of office, but I want good Americans to shun and shame him out of any serious discussion about America's traditions and America's future. I guess I really want him to become the proverbial Mayor of Deadwood, a man who aches to get in on the action only to get pushed out of the way. But I also want 2019 to be the year that America gets tired of drama. And by "drama" I don't just mean all of the right wing's manufactured outrages -- I mean a culture that can't stop showing folks acting obnoxious in public, a culture that follows celebrities around and calls it "news," a culture that winks with approval at corruption. Big dreams, I know, but America is the place for big dreams.