Monroe Gazette Announces Statewide Credit-Card Audit—Starting Now
Every municipality in New York is on notice: We’re coming to review your credit card statements, and we won’t stop until Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli does his job in South Blooming Grove
Ok. The book is now live at StupidSexyPrivacy.com. You can read it here, for free.
The manuscript went to my agent, John Marshall Media, and our friends at The Shooting Star Press for production work. The only other thing that needs to be done is the endnotes. In the unlikely event anyone remembers my last book, the endnotes took up 25% of the manuscript. That’s why I waited until the end to do the endnotes this time. I knew it would take forever.
The good news is that I can get that done over the next week, and nobody is really going to care. I mean, I do. But everything about this book has been unusual, so another week or so isn’t going to make anyone crazy. Especially because the July 4 holiday is right around the corner. Are you really going to notice that the endnotes are late when there’s shit to blow up in the sky?
That leaves us with The Monroe Gazette. I don’t know how many of you remember Mike Royko. But if you remember the glory days of newspapers, the odds are good you read a Mike Royko column because his Chicago Tribune column was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers.
I want to tell you I first read a Mike Royko column in the pages of The New York Daily News, but that could be an outright lie. (In the glory days of newspapers, my dad would come home with three of them: The Times-Herald Record, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. So it had to have been one of the three. These days, The Post is still The Post, The New York Daily News is more known for the unionization efforts of its writers than much else, and The Times-Herald Record is a zombie newspaper. It maintains barely any local presence and assembles the paper in San Antonio with interns receiving low pay and little actual journalistic training.)
Pictured above: One of the best newspaper men of his time, Mike Royko wrote for decades about the inner workings of Chicago politics and its impact on the day-to-day lives of its residents. The book above is one of my favorites.
Royko wrote a daily column — about 900 words — five days a week. Sometimes there was a longer one on Sundays. I’ve always struggled with a consistent writing schedule. Part of that is my environment. There are other people here, and they’re all wildly unpredictable, meaning there is a constant source of disruption to any kind of regular schedule. The other part is, despite being very good at writing, I treat writing like a part-time job and don’t put as much effort into it as I should. Sometimes I have an excuse. I average two migraines a week, and those can shut me down — which is an even bigger concern because, at the end of this year, alongside almost 500,000 New Yorkers who are losing medical insurance next month, I’m going to lose access to health insurance, which means I’ll also lose access to the migraine medication I’m taking to manage them. Other times I don’t.
But I’ve been thinking I’m going to try, for one year, to do a column Monday through Friday, covering local news, state news and some of the other stuff I’m working on. This includes filing a small-claims court case against the Town of Monroe for hilariously bungling a very simple FOIL request. The federal pro se case I will be filing against the Village of South Blooming Grove involves the Ku Klux Klan Act. And there is a litany of other stuff that has been sitting in my inbox for the last several months — much of which I couldn’t get to because the book needed to get done.
We’re already over 900 words, so here’s the deal: I am going to attempt, without making any promises, to update The Monroe Gazette every Monday through Friday. I will try to do this for one full year — from now until June 24, 2027. If we do not hit at least 1,000 paying annual subscribers by that date, I’m going to pull the plug on this thing and just focus my efforts over at Stupid Sexy Privacy. That may sound like a tall order, except we already have well over a thousand free subscribers. So if I can convince half of you to convert to paid, we’ll hit our goal in no time. Which reminds me …
The Monroe Gazette is brought to you commercial free and with no pay-wall to access over two years of our coverage of issues in Orange County and beyond. If you would like to help keep the lights on, we’re looking to recruit 1,000 new, paid annual subscribers between now and June 24th, 2027. Otherwise, we’ll need to shut down on that day.
All you have to do is hit the button below. Paid subscribers get access to occasional bonus content and the ability to comment on posts just like this one.
We’re Going to Audit Everybody
If you have sent me an email — for example, there are people around Woodbury who have been subject to a swatting attempt that I need to respond to — I will respond to you in July. That’s going to be the focus of the column right now: I’m going to clean up my inbox, respond to everyone waiting a response, and then update this thing. If you have something you want me to investigate, whether it’s in Orange County or at the New York State level, email me at bj@monroeGazette.com or reach me anonymously on Signal at Bjmendelson.32. Please don’t text me. For my own safety, I need to stop using SMS. Signal is free, easy to use, and easier to download. You can get it here. It’s an encrypted messaging app, meaning people can’t intercept our conversation.
You can also, without putting a return address on the envelope, send me mail anonymously. The address is The Monroe Gazette, PO Box 5, 996 Route 17 Stop 2, Arden, New York 10901.
Once I get comfortable with posting every week day on a regular schedule, I will bring back the videos and podcasts, since those are more time-intensive to do. For now, I’ll leave you with this teaser: New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli won his primary yesterday — June 23. That means we can forget ever seeing the South Blooming Grove audit. It also means we can expect the same amount of shenanigans we’ve come to expect from the comptroller’s office. For that reason, until Thomas DiNapoli releases the South Blooming Grove audit, The Monroe Gazette is going to do an audit of our own. We’re going to ask every town, village and city in the state of New York to show us how they’re using their credit cards, and we’re going to publish the results.
That’s right. We’re going to do Mr. DiNapoli’s job for him until the South Blooming Grove audit comes out. And if any municipality is unhappy about this, they can take it up with DiNapoli and the New York State Democratic Party for shielding two criminals from prosecution. When the South Blooming Grove audit is released, or when Joel Stern and Isaac Ekstein are criminally prosecuted for conspiracy to prevent people from voting, we’ll stop.
Until then, it’s game on, Tom.