A Dark Memorial Blotting Out the Miami Skyline

I once wrote back at the end of trump's first turn at destroying America about how even as a failed president occupant of the White House he was entitled to a library in his dishonor. Even then, I dismissed the prospect because of several points (some of which proved prophetic):

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines...

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs...

With trump's return to office, the prospect of his Library getting done became more likely, and with trump basically claiming Florida as his place of power it was unavoidable that my home state is absorbing the potential damage of hosting it (via Kate Payne at AP News): 

A judge in Miami has dismissed a complaint challenging a college’s decision to gift prime downtown real estate for President Donald Trump’s future presidential library, clearing the way for the real estate developer-turned-president to build a towering monument to his political rise in an iconic stretch of the city.

A local activist brought the lawsuit against Miami Dade College, arguing the school’s board didn’t give sufficient public notice and violated the state’s open government law when board members voted in September to give away the nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property in downtown Miami.

The site is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on a palm tree-lined stretch of Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more...

After the college first voted in September to transfer the property to a fund controlled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet, the GOP officials voted to transfer the land again, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump; Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos; and the president’s attorney, James Kiley.

Eric Trump has pledged the future library will be “one of the most beautiful buildings ever built” and “an Icon on the Miami skyline.” Under local zoning rules, the best use of the property would be a towering condo building, according to one Miami real estate expert, who described the site as a potential “cash cow.”

That the local developers are picturing the library to be more of a condo seems apt considering how trump and his family view property as money machines for their own pockets. /sigh

As for Eric trump's promise to make the library "one of the most beautiful buildings ever built," you have to remember that the trump ideal of "beauty" is oversized crassness, and this week's preliminary reveal of what they want the library to be wasn't that shocking (horrifying, yes, but not shocking). As Cameron Adams at the Daily Beast documents:

President Donald Trump has shared the first images of his latest vanity building—a book-free library that includes a tacky golden statue of himself and shiny gold escalators.

The first look at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, to be constructed in Miami, Florida, suggests the building will be firmly on brand for the 79-year-old. It is a mammoth skyscraper with ‘TRUMP’ emblazoned near the top and images of the American flag.

"Book free". Yeah. /Librarian headdesking

An apparently AI-generated video shows multiple aircraft housed inside the library, as well as what appear to be replicas of the White House’s Oval Office and the president’s yet-to-be-built ballroom, as well as a huge gold statue of Trump in what looks like an auditorium.

Linked from the Daily Beast article.

"ALL HAIL THE GOLDEN IDOL! ALL HAIL trump! HAIL! HAIL!"

The president’s son Eric breathlessly posted that he had “poured my heart and soul” into the project over the past six months.

“This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he said on X... 

There's an AI-generated video - which just adds to the tackiness of the presentation - to which I don't want to link. I will share a few more pictures at least.

All images linked from the Daily Beast.

It's all just one big placard for trump's name and likeness, isn't it?

Also note how high this skyscraper is going: it's planned to be the tallest building in Miami, which is already a flat landscape due to Florida's geography. You couldn't avoid it even from the safe distance of Broward County, I'd wager.

I'd also wonder about the all-glass exterior, which can be common among Florida skyscrapers but not at that height, and not at the expense of whichever Category 5 hurricane decides to hit the place.

One more thing I just remembered: Can the ground support the weight of such a structure? It's not the bedrock of Manhattan Island, and South Florida runs the risk of collapsing buildings in this day and age.

One last thing to remember is how trump and his kids are grifters of the lowest order: Anything that can make them money while they produce little to no results. Early "fundraising" shakedowns have raised concerns:

This month, congressional Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to ABC, Meta, Paramount, and X requesting details about the money they pledged to Trump’s library project as part of their legal settlements, The Washington Post reported.

“Now it is unclear where this money has gone, exacerbating concerns about corruption that were apparent at the time of the settlement,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund was originally set up to manage the money, but was dissolved last year.

A second nonprofit fund, called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., was then established. The fund reported in December 2025 that it had received $50 million, though it did not confirm whether that sum includes the legal settlement funds...

There's no guarantee that trump's fundraising is actually going into this tower of triteness. I wouldn't trust anyone in this project with doing any fundraising to build a parking garage in Miami, which would be of greater value than this blight.

All this seems to me is - yet again - trump eager to build an oversized, underused monument to his own decaying corrupt ego, one that will likely get torn down the second he's out of power because nobody else really needs it.

The Unqualified Are Taking Over Thanks to trump

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article to Crooks and Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please remember to order an excessive supply of Lucky Charms Marshmallows to tide you over as the trump tariffs disrupt our cereal industry, that is all...

I mentioned last article there's a ton of things to catch up on, but trump is just overwhelming me with assholery aimed at my own profession so I got to respond to this bullshit (yes I am pissed over this). 

This past weekend, trump went and fired the head Librarian of Congress - is that even something he could do? - over "complaints" that she was too woke and for the most absurd reasons (via Kara Yorio at School Library Journal):

President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden in a terse, two-sentence email sent on Thursday night...

"This is unprecedented, and unnecessary; Dr. Hayden has served Congress and the American people with integrity and distinction,” EveryLibrary executive director John Chrastka said in a statement. “This is a purely political move. And coming as it does right after the Preliminary Injunction and TRO reopening IMLS, it is hard not to see it that way. Congress should be outraged at this overreach."

EveryLibrary has launched a petition asking the public to signal their support to stop the attacks on the Library of Congress.

Hayden was nominated to lead the Library of Congress by President Barack Obama and sworn in for a 10-year term in September 2016. She was the first woman and the first African American to serve in the position.

AP reported that Hayden had been targeted by a conservative group, American Accountability Foundation, which tweeted on Thursday: “The current #LibrarianOfCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids. It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!”

Her removal is the latest for the administration that is stripping federal agencies of women, people of color, and anyone whose work is believed to be in opposition to Trump's agenda...

In a later press briefing, the White House accused Hayden of being "woke" and including "inappropriate books" in the library collection, completely ignorant of HOW the Library of Congress actually functions (via Kerry Pickett at Washington Times):

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Carla Hayden was fired as librarian of Congress because she promoted DEI and pushed “inappropriate books” for children...

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

And we don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well. So, she has been removed from her position, and the President is well within his rights to do that.”

Leavitt - and everybody else in that press room - doesn't understand that the Library of Congress has a mandate to include every professionally published book securing its Copyright - by that I mean books from established large and mid-sized publishers, including university presses: they do NOT take self-published books, trust me - so that Congressional staff and elected members have access to research materials (and even fictional entertainment). Hayden couldn't stop getting LGBTQ+ books if she wanted to. 

Also, these are NOT books that circulate or even go into Interlibrary Loan: NO CHILDREN are going to get their hands on these books through LOC, let alone people from outside of Congress (there is a reading room where visitors can borrow a book if available but they can't leave it with, and threats to cutting / stealing pages prevent anybody from walking out with one). Every excuse trump and his fellow book-burners anti-woke mob are tossing out there are lies. It wasn't the taxpayers she was serving, it was Congress (and researchers able to visit in-person). If Hayden was doing anything, she was acting as Archivist for the printed works of human knowledge stretching back to the 1800s, with the Library of Congress as one of the world's largest holdings of the modern era (if not all of human history, bigger than the famed Library of Alexandria). And that is something the anti-woke mob cannot abide.

This morning, trump added onto the bullshit by appointing Todd Blanche - as white a name you can get - acting Librarian, in spite of the fact Blanche has no work history or experience as a librarian period (via Hillel Italie at AP News):

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been appointed acting Librarian of Congress, the Justice Department said Monday.

Blanche replaces longtime librarian Carla Hayden, whom the White House fired last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda. She was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama in 2015.

Blanche was named the number two Justice Department official after serving as a criminal defense attorney defending Trump against two cases brought by the Justice Department during the Biden administration. Blanche is a former federal prosecutor who was a key figure on Trump’s defense team in his New York hush money trial, which ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts.

There is NOTHING on this guy's resume that even hints he did time as a paralegal working a law library for research projects. I doubt Todd can tell you the difference between DDC, LC, and SUDOC (I've studied and worked all three, by the by).

The ONLY thing that qualifies this guy is his utter loyalty to trump, and a likely willingness to purge the entire Library of Congress - which is supposed to belong to CONGRESS - of every "woke" "DEI" "climate change" book in the collection. 

Do you understand the severity of what is about to happen if Blanche - an unqualified white boy hire - is able to weed out thousands of now-rare, hard-to-find books - some titles so old and out-of-print that even large research libraries like Harvard and Yale don't own them - all because they offend the racist/sexist/evangelical/ignorant sensibilities of the Far Right fringe? 

The book burnings of the Reich are about the most recent equivalence you can match that to. The destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria would be the closest poetic example, except that destruction honestly took centuries of fires big and small to wipe it out. Trump and Blanche and the entire MAGA fringe are capable of wiping out the Library of Congress in weeks if not days.

What the absolute hell, America. If even one rare book from 1860 gets destroyed, our nation will regret it forever.

Call your congresscritters. DEMAND they defend their own Library!

This incident, by the by, is a perfect distillation of the damage trump and his Republican cohorts are inflicting on our federal government. Purging our agencies of effective, qualified personnel, and replacing them with idiotic, toadying nobodies clinging to trump out of loyalty and self-interest. What's happening to the Library of Congress is happening to CDC, to the IRS, to Social Security Administration, to offices of Veterans Affairs, to our national parks, to even our Defense and Justice Departments. We're getting the worst government led by the worst people, and Americans are going to suffer for this for generations to come.

Update: Just finding out now trump fired the head of the Copyright Office at LOC, arguably over a published report about AI's ineffectiveness and potential to destroy copyright protections for authors, artists, and musicians. This is going to get worse.

Revision to the Update: Got pointed out on Bluesky that there's more to what trump is doing with the Library of Congress. he and his lackeys are trying to gain access to the personal data of congressmembers and their staffs, especially any legal questions/research requests that are supposed to remain confidential. Basically, trump is looking for his own kompromat on both his opponents and allies to compel them to submit to his rule.

trump Destroying Heroes

Update: Thank ye, Steve in Manhattan for adding this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Please remember to support your public libraries as trump and his lackeys are nuking library funding outright through shutting down the IMLS agency. (posted at my writing/librarian blog) /rage

If there's any good news is that millions of us are rising up in protest, if the turnout at the Hands Off rallies are anything (of course, the mainstream media barely paid notice).

There's been a lot of bullshit happening in this second round of trumpian destruction, but this is something that drew my ire. trump continues his war on American history - and on our education and literacy - by getting his fellow racists to purge our libraries to straight-up whitewash everything (via Lolita C Baldor at AP News):

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, U.S officials said Tuesday.

Academy officials were told to review the library late last week, and an initial search had identified about 900 books for a closer look. They decided on nearly 400 to remove and began doing so Monday, finishing before Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday that had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said. A list of the books has not yet been made available.

As a librarian, this enrages me. NO LIBRARY - be it public, be it school, above all a university library - SHOULD EVER PURGE A BOOK ON POLITICAL ORDERS.

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.

Pentagon leaders, however, suddenly turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books that promoted DEI. A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff...

Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.

In response, the department has scrambled to restore some of those posts as their removals have come to light.

The confusion about how to interpret the DEI policy was underscored Monday as Naval Academy personnel mistakenly removed some photos of distinguished female Jewish graduates from a display case as they prepared for Hegseth’s visit. The photos were put back...

While the AP News weren't able to confirm in that story which books were getting removed, follow-up reports got out that some of the books under fire were biographies on Martin Luther King Jr, and WWII soldier - and major league baseball Hall of Famer - Jackie Robinson.

In short, Hegseth and trump and the rest of their anti-woke racists were desperate and eager to purge books on American heroes.

This is indefensible. Former congresscritter Steve Israel makes the case (via The Hill):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I took on the issue of professional military education. It may not have garnered many headlines, but education was viewed as critical from the top echelons of the Pentagon to the remote operating bases I visited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sharpen our warriors’ effectiveness when we develop their skills in critical thinking, languages, cultures and history. But we are now going dangerously backwards.

The New York Times reported that the U.S. Naval Academy is identifying books in the school’s Nimitz Library that may be pulled from circulation because they relate to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the 900 potential offenders: a biography of Jackie Robinson, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “Einstein on Race and Racism.”

The Chinese military is expanding. Russia is threatening Europe. But you can sleep better tonight knowing that the Navy is keeping its men and women safe from Jackie Robinson...

The irony in this move is rich. In the name of freedom, we mustn’t let our future leaders do things like, oh, read what they want to read. We must treat them like snowflakes, so brittle and sensitive that they must be protected from the offensive views of Robinson, King, Einstein and whoever else is on the blacklist of the Navy Blue and Gold.

Our warriors need body armor, not censorship. The best of them want to build their intellectual resilience. When I visited them in Iraq, Afghanistan and our military academies at home, many consistently told me that they fought better when they had time not only to drill, but to learn. To read...

It was a Marine who later explained to me why military education was so important: “If you know how to think, you realize you don’t have to kick in the door and start shooting; sometimes, you can find a safer way — for yourself...”

Instead of supporting our warriors with libraries that will give them an unvarnished telling of history, the Pentagon has decided to whitewash it. Instead of encouraging critical thinking skills, the Navy has decided to dull them...

There was nothing offensive in what Martin Luther King represents even as a man of peace who stood for civil rights. MLK may have spoke against the Vietnam War, but so did others of his era, and there is no shame in letting our military schools offer his biographies to highlight the man's overall commitment to justice.

There was nothing offensive in what Jackie Robinson represents even as a veteran of the Second World War - one of the few "good" or Just Wars humanity's ever known - who faced court martial during his service over refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, and who broke the racial barriers in professional baseball to make it truly America's Game.

But these men - and many other men and women who impacted our nation's history over the centuries - offend trump and Hegseth and others among trump's ranks of hate-driven lackeys all because the likes of King and Robinson were heroes who dared to confront and bring an end to the institutionalized racism that scarred the United States since our nation's birth... and clearly still scars us to this day.

MLK offends the likes of trump because Reverend King dared to win the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for our nation's soul, sacrificing his own life in the pursuit of equality, justice, and economic fairness not just for Blacks but for the poor.

Jackie Robinson offends the likes of trump because Robinson suffered years of public attacks by haters while proving racists wrong that Black players were just as good as Whites, helping his Brooklyn Dodgers make playoffs and even a World Series championship. Jackie entered the hallowed Hall of Fame - notorious as one of the hardest sports halls to join - and his jersey number retired by all the major league teams in honor of what he endured.

King and Robinson and dozens if not hundreds of other American heroes - those who are Black, or Latino, or Natives, or Asians, or Women - offend trump and his ilk because King and Robinson and those hundreds of Blacks and Latinos and Natives and Asians and Women all defy the white supremacist myth that only White Men are capable and worthy of respect (that even the most mediocre White Man is superior to all others).

Rather than step away from an easily disprovable lie - that Whites can be mediocre and ought to live with the reality that We Are All Human capable of both greatness and failures - trump and the patriarchal racists would rather whitewash - literally - every fact and human face from our history books, from any form of information and knowledge that can inspire our generation and those who follow us.

trump will erase the fact we have heroes who aren't him - that there are heroes with different faces and different skins and different genders than him - just to make himself a false god.

Damn him.

Do not purge our heroes from the shelves, America.

Do not let these tiny, broken, hollow men erase everything good about our nation.

The Book Banners Really Want to Punish People As Well As Thought

Update: Thanks again to driftglass for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please check out the rest of the blog, and celebrate National Library Week (April 8-13) at your local public library!

The Conservative Far Right wingnuts are going after librarians, again. Look at this happening in Louisiana (via Kelly Jensen at Book Riot): 

Despite the fact that librarians are among the most trusted professionals, per data acquired in several studies of parents on the perceptions of the profession, lawmakers across the country continue to infantilize and criminalize library workers. The 2024 legislative session has been particularly eager to capitalize on the rhetoric from the far right on libraries, as seen through several bills aimed at not only limiting the types of books allowed in school and public libraries but also in how the profession itself may operate...

Louisiana continues these efforts in an ongoing move by politicians in the state to damage public libraries with House Bill 777. HB 777 was introduced March 25 by Representative Kellee Dickerson, who helped fund the Louisiana Freedom Caucus. The bill would criminalize library workers and libraries for joining the American Library Association.

The American Library Association (ALA) is the largest and oldest professional organization for library workers in the nation...

By creating a villain of the biggest professional organization for library workers, book banners pound away at the institutions that establish and uphold librarianship as a profession. Librarians lose their place as experts in their field, with the skills, knowledge, and passion for helping connect people to vetted, accurate, verifiable information. To real facts and not those crafted by so-called “alternative” library organizations developed by long-time library antagonists and sympathizers who themselves have worked hard to dismantle these democratic institutions...

You can picture the next round of state legislative or even US Congressional hearings by the Far Right demagogues chasing after the information professionals: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Awards Committee for the Reference and User Services Association?"

My profession has become the next Red Scare.

Library associations matter, in that they encourage and promote reading literacy and information learning skills. In the time I've been with the various associations out there - the ALA, the Florida Library Association - I've worked on committees that promoted scholarships for new students, and promoted Intellectual Freedom as a human right. With FLA, I worked on a Standards committee that set guidelines on the objectives and purposes that public libraries serve to our communities.

Libraries matter, because we serve a public trust: Access to information, be in online or in print or on DVD or CD, be it entertainment like movies and music and fiction or be it informational like works on natural sciences, history, the arts, philosophy, religion, true crime, cookbooks, business management, and self-help tutorials.

And yet to the Far Right wingnuts, we librarians are criminals. It's not because we threaten their "purity" by providing young adult books about romance, it's because we threaten their need to control everyone else's "purity" through their judgment and punishment of us.

We give access to differing thoughts, religious beliefs, world-views, that are poison to their rigid dogma. We provide access to resource and online tools to the poor and impoverished that could be used to improve their lives, whereas the Far Right would rather keep them ignorant, ill-informed, and poor.

It's been a struggle for decades - especially in Republican-controlled states - to fight for meaningful state and county funding just to keep libraries functioning. We still endure because of incredible advocacy through the local communities, who rise up either to vote in favor of local tax hikes to fund public libraries or through their petitioning the legislatures to keep libraries open (there are more than one tale of a committee chair's mother calling their son that libraries are where they take the grandkids for activities when they babysit, and they damn well better not close down where mom's knitting club meets every Monday).

Now the struggle is getting more blunt, more personal. The wingnuts are no longer trying to close libraries, they are now actively criminalizing them and the knowledge our community hubs provide.

Welcome to the Wingnut Republican War on Everybody, America.

Support your local libraries. Before the wingnuts put us ALL in jail for our freedom to read and think for ourselves.

Personal Promotion: Local Authors Event at Lake Wales Public Library April 9

To the nine official readers of this blog, if any of you can reach central Florida this coming Tuesday April 9th, I hope you can stop by Lake Wales Public Library for my Local Authors appearance in the morning.

Here's the event info:

Date:

April 9, 2024

Time:

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Location:

Library Lobby

Address:

290 Cypress Garden Lane
Lake Wales, FL 33853

Link:

Sign Up Here!

The library likes you to sign up ahead of time so they can track the turnout, please and thank you.

I'll be there - discussing my latest publication Funny Locations - as part of the National Library Week event that happens across the United States every second week of April. Lake Wales' theme this year is to support the local authors, and they're going to have a big showing of published writers that I know across Polk County and central Florida.

If you can't make it to Lake Wales, at least check out your local libraries to partake of their events, again please and thank you.

And psst buy my book (owstophittingme)

 

When My Library Closed Four Years Ago

If we're looking back to four years ago:

March 17th 2020 was a Tuesday night, and I work the evening shifts at my library those Tuesdays. That meant I have a desk turn at the Information desk, which also doubles as the checkout desk. There's often two of the part-time Library Assistants working the shift with me: one on desk and the other performing book processing, special project works, or reshelving.

The library itself was rather quiet. The COVID-19 pandemic had gone global back in January and by February we were seeing the signs in Florida. One interesting thing to note was how most our patrons (library users) are seniors from the surrounding retirement communities, and a lot of them had already begun sheltering at home well before March as the early reports had COVID being near-fatal to older people.

It may have been quiet but I had been busy all day, handling administrative duties as our Library Director position was vacant since 2018 (My previous experience as head of a library in another county did not go well, so I took it as a temp). I recall working on collection management of one of the non-fiction ranges, and then prepping for a One-On-One tutorial session (duties as the Reference Librarian) that ended up cancelling (they weren't sick, I remember that, they just didn't want to risk it).

When I started my desk shift at 5:00PM, I checked my work emails. I had two: Library and City. The Library email kept up with staff's last-minute schedule changes, any reports for what our Children's Librarian was lining up for that June's Summer Reading Program, notifications about patron complaints, in-house stuff. The City email was for the directorial duties to the city's operations, any notifications from the Manager, reports from the City Clerk, administrative stuff. The library system for the county used a different network than the city, hence the separate emails.

So it wasn't until 5:20PM when I got to the email from the City Manager's office sent at 4:00PM that everything was shutting down citywide due to the pandemic at 5:00PM.

/headdesk

<--- always the last to know

I told my part-timers as soon as I read that email. We roamed the library floors informing any remaining patrons - there were two on computers, a mother and child in Children's shelves, one reading in the Magazines area, nobody upstairs - that the library had to close early that night. One of the assistants checked the book drop while I worked on signage for the front doors, and then sent emails to all the staff about our work situation the next morning (library was closed to public, staff still had to work).

We had been expecting something about closing down. Other city libraries - we have a cooperative system, the cities manage their own library - had already closed a week or two prior. Those were the small libraries, with few staff - some of whom had caught COVID ergo the closings - on hand. They had every reason to close earlier in the month.

Thing about a library: we were... are a public facility, with hundreds of people going in and out all day, a pandemic hotspot, one of the worst places a virus could spread. As federal and state emergency agencies were begging elected officials to do the right thing, it was just a question of when, and that Tuesday afternoon was it for us.

By the time we finished locking up and shutting down, it was after 6:00PM. I remember standing in the parking lot, staring at the library and then circling around at everything else - a city lake behind the library, the little league ballpark across the street, the civic center just a ways over, one of those retirement communities to the far side of the ballpark, all part of a small quiet town in the middle of Florida - and just wondered what the hell was going to happen next. There was nobody else outside, even at sunset there were usually families in the surrounding neighborhood walking around the parks but not that night. Everyone was at home (or the grocery stores raiding whatever toilet paper was left), everyone was waiting for the next terrifying thing.

The day after we got instructions from our city's Emergency team - the firefighters did double-duty on that - about how we had to clean our workplaces, perform daily check-ins for fever and cough, required masking even as we were closed to the public. The plan - the hope - was to reopen to the public by late April, depending on how we could restructure the library to cut down on viral spreads.

We transferred everything we had on hold to Books-by-Mail as best we could. We started book pickups for drive-thru to the front door. We wiped everything down with cleaning solutions as much as possible. We dealt with co-workers calling in sick - some with COVID itself - though thankfully we never shared an outbreak amongst ourselves. We obeyed the recommendations and performed our duty to the library patrons.

That was four years ago. Everything changed, and some of it didn't get better.

Especially as trump - driven by ignorance, desperate to restart a shut-down economy to avoid making himself look bad, and unable to project any semblance of calm leadership - kept getting worse as COVID got worse.

But that's for another time.

Four years ago, everything for me shut down.

The Hostile Destruction of Florida Education

Update: Thank you Batocchio for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning! 

It's been noted before that Florida's current Governor Ron "Pander Away" DeSantis is waging a war against "Wokeness," the current catch-all phrase by Far Right wingnuts describing anything that exposes our nation's history of racism, sexism, and bad behavior by conservative elites.

DeSantis has escalated his efforts across every level of education our state can offer. Not only are the classrooms at our public schools been emptied of every book so that DeSantis' foot soldier censors can refuse whichever titles they fear, but DeSantis is happily plugging in conservative political hacks into leadership roles at every major state university (via Ian Hodgson, Divya Kumar, and Lane DeGregory at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)):

Carrying signs and wearing stickers and buttons Tuesday, hundreds of students, faculty and alumni filled the courtyard outside the building where the six new trustees appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to New College’s board of trustees were to meet for the first time.

“Jesus would not have wanted this,” one sign said. Others declared: “Stop the Steal,” “Queer Lives are Welcome Here,” and “Are we too woke or do you need to wake up?”

They rallied to save their school from what New College President Patricia Okker later called a “hostile takeover” by the new conservative appointees. They didn’t know that a key decision had already been made.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, told protestors she was “damn proud to stand with them,” and led a chant to “reject fascism and protect freedom.” Then she dropped a bomb: Okker was to be replaced by Richard Corcoran, the former education commissioner and Florida House speaker, who would serve as interim president...

It should be noted that Corcoran was rejected as a candidate for the Florida State University President opening a few years back, because the hiring committee considered him a straight-up political hack whose own educational background is dubious at best. This time around, DeSantis rigged the New College's board of directors first, and then got them to fire Okker to make room for Corcoran.

If any of this feels the same as the situation leading to University of Florida - a flagship institution that had become one of the top universities in the nation - hiring an unqualified political hack like Ben Sasse earlier this school year, don't be shocked.

This is essentially a hostile takeover, not just by DeSantis but also by Far Right Republicans obsessed with dismantling higher educational systems they fear are too liberal.

The six DeSantis-appointed trustees asserted their presence early, proposing to rid the school of its diversity office and talking about the “crisis” that needed to be solved. But confusion over procedural matters and their unfamiliarity with some issues took up more than an hour...

Earlier in the day, (Christopher) Rufo accompanied DeSantis at a news conference in Bradenton, just north of the New College campus. The governor pledged an infusion of $15 million at New College to be spent on hiring new faculty and scholarships for students, with an extra $10 million every year thereafter. As a part of a larger plan to reform higher education, he also denounced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at state colleges and universities, saying they would no longer be funded...

DeSantis is essentially saying that things like civil rights and Title IX protections won't be upheld at state universities. Segregation and racial discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile workplaces, hostile classrooms... all of this will become the norm in DeSantis' Florida.

This is all echoed in DeSantis' efforts to shut down ANY discussion of "Critical Race Theory" essentially meaning our state cannot teach one iota of Florida's history regarding racism, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights marches, all because Republicans are terrified that White People's Feelings (tm) will be hurt if we teach the facts that Yes Goddammit racism happened and keeps happening. He's just making sure that college students will be kept ignorant as much as our K-12 students.

Rufo is, by the by, a wingnut conservative hack actively campaigning to shut down public education of any kind in an obsessive desire to privatize something for greed and racism. DeSantis, desperate to win over 2024 Republican primary voters, is giving Rufo the opportunity to wreak havoc on Florida's educational system.

Goddamn Rufo. Goddamn DeSantis. Goddamn this wingnut Culture War that's committing serious acts of censorship against our children's' collective right to a fair and informed education, and an assault on our state's ability to promote higher education at all.

If I were a student today, at University of Florida (Alum 1992) or University of South Florida (Alum 1994), I would be walking the fuck out. I do not want the value of my college degree to turn into shit, all because a partisan hack of a Governor is weakening the quality of my university so he can score cheap political points for a 2024 Presidential run.

I am calling on all Florida college students: Just walk the fuck away. Yes, many of you have college loans to pay off, but you can start GoFundMe campaigns to help pay those down. Apply to out-of-state universities that won't go Red-State apeshit on you. Empty out the classrooms across Florida so that DeSantis has to live with the embarrassment of having our state's high-quality institutions void of any students. I know in some respects DeSantis would revel in the images of empty classrooms - "Look," he will say to his rabid anti-education voting base, "They would rather quit than learn a Godly conservative education!" - but he is going to have to live with the reality that he oversaw the dismantling of a statewide university system, something that has never happened to any other governor before him.

At some point, the shame of killing off Florida's educational system from kindergarten to doctorate ought to slap DeSantis in the goddamn face.

Regarding the Future of trump's Library

I saw this cartoon shared elsewhere and decided to hunt it down and share it here. Considering my interests as a librarian and my previous semi-serious consideration about the location of any future trump Presidential Library, I feel this is very apt to share.

Cartoon by Bill Bramhall at the New York Daily News, 
originally issued August 10, 2022

Although, if things end up the way they should with trump in federal prison, the library may well be at the Florence Colorado ADX SuperMax. We would hope.

The Book Burners Are Back, 2022 Edition (w/ Update)

First they came for the books about Critical Race Theory, except that Critical Race Theory wasn't taught in the public schools and they were just going after the books that made them "uncomfortable" having White folks depicted as racists.

NOW, they're coming for everything else in the libraries. I am not joking.

They're banning the graphic novel Maus in East Tennessee (via AP News):

A Tennessee school district has voted to ban a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman, according to minutes from a board meeting.

The McMinn County School Board decided Jan. 10 to remove “Maus” from its curriculum, news outlets reported.

Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian...”

The excuses this school board are making - that it contains "language" and nudity (which is non-sexual) - ignores the reality that as a memoir the book is documenting events as they happened, documenting the human suffering and cruelty and coarseness, with no sugarcoating. And there is no GODDAMN WAY you can sugercoat something as horrifying as the Holocaust.

The decision comes as conservative officials across the country have increasingly tried to limit the type of books that children are exposed to, including books that address structural racism and LGBTQ issues. The Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas have called on superintendents to perform a systemic review of “inappropriate” materials in their states’ schools...

This is happening in every Red state, every Republican-controlled school district, and I am not joking.

This is happening in Texas (via Ja'han Jones for NBC News):

In the last year, conservative lawmakers, school officials and parents across the country have embarked on a crusade against school lesson plans focused on social inequality. 

Laws and bans, ostensibly introduced to protect students from these allegedly “obscene” materials, have actually been crafted to coddle white parents — and by extension, their children —  who don’t want to be reminded of the ways they benefit from oppression. But we’ve rarely heard from students themselves about how they view the conservative assault on school lesson plans. 

High school students in Granbury, Texas, helped solve that problem Monday. Several of them teed off on education officials during a public meeting about their school district's efforts to review and potentially ban hundreds of books from school libraries...

“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys,” one student said.

Another student demanded the school district "stop the censorship."

“It’s plain and simple: If you don’t like it, put the book down,” another student said. “No one is forcing you to read it."

"Wake up to the reality that we are all different and we should all embrace each other with love — not blatant hate," she added...

This is happening in my own backyard (via Kimberly C. Moore at the Lakeland Ledger):

Polk County Public Schools Regional Assistant Superintendent John Hill and several of his colleagues spent Tuesday morning going to area middle and high schools to gather 16 books out of media centers after County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative political group, complained to Superintendent Frederick Heid that the novels, graphic novels, autobiographies, and sex education books contain pornographic material harmful to children...

PCPS spokesman Jason Geary said in an email that the books have been placed “in quarantine” and will not be available for checkout at this time.  

“It is important to note that these 16 books have NOT been censored or banned at this time,” Geary said. “They have been removed so a thorough, thoughtful review of their content can take place...”

Bullshit. This is censorship, and bending backwards for a partisan group desperate to convert the world around them to their hateful ways of thinking. That County Citizens group has also been protesting against mask mandates for schools, and complained about biology textbooks that depicted the human body as though our kids can't handle the reality we have anuses.

This is happening everywhere the wingnuts are terrified of people reading about different races, different religions, different identities. And not just in the high schools: They are going after public libraries to stop even the adults from our own reading choices. (via Nick Judan with the Mississippi Free Press): 

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.

Tonja Johnson, executive director for the Madison County Library System, told the Mississippi Free Press in an afternoon interview that she first reached out to Mayor McGee after failing to receive the City of Ridgeland’s first quarterly payment of 2022.

Johnson said the mayor informed her that no payment was forthcoming. “He explained his opposition to what he called ‘homosexual materials’ in the library, that it went against his Christian beliefs, and that he would not release the money as the long as the materials were there,” the library director said.

The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.

Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished...

That goddamned mayor (yes, he is) is putting HIS religious beliefs over everyone else's in that community. Straight-up First Amendment violation: We're not stopping him from praying to his Lord, but he's stopping the rest of us.

McGee’s office did not respond to several requests for an interview from the Mississippi Free Press before press time, though he did speak with this reporter on Wednesday morning, acknowledging that he was withholding the funds from the library system. Nor did he attend a Tuesday board meeting at 5 p.m. at Ridgeland Library, which addressed the matter firmly in defense of the library system’s current collection. The board voted unanimously to bring the issue to the board of aldermen before seeking legal remedies.

At the meeting, attendees asked Bob Sanders, counsel for the library board, if the mayor had any legal authority to override the contract with the library system and the decision of the aldermen.

“Uh, no.” Sanders said flatly...

Whatever authority the mayor intends to serve, it’s unclear as of press time if his action is legally defensible.

“This is taxpayer money that was already approved by the board of aldermen,” Johnson explained. “It was included in the city budget for 2021-2022. It’s the general-fund appropriation that the City of Ridgeland sends every year for daily operation of the library. That money goes to everything from purchasing materials to supporting programs and staff salaries.”

While the city’s aldermen may have approved the funds, Johnson said it was the mayor alone who is withholding it. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” she said.

That $110,000 represents roughly 5% of the annual budget of the entire Madison County Library System, the removal of which could have far-reaching consequences beyond the City of Ridgeland itself.

“It would definitely impact services,” Johnson said. “I can tell you that there’s a potential for staff members to lose their positions if the board is not able to move funding from something else to keep those positions open...”

That mayor is intentionally sabotaging a public service to serve his private faith. Again, GODDAMN him.

But that's how the haters roll, isn't it? Their fear of the Dread Other - by skin color, by faith, by gender, by identity - drives that hate to make the world around them bend to their fears.

These haters want to hide the reality that there are people of difference walking among us, they want to hide the history of the crimes our ancestors committed against those who were different - be they Native tribes, be they African slaves, be they Chinese laborers, be they Japanese families demonized after Pearl Harbor, be they Arabs and Hindi and Middle Easterners and Muslims after 9/11, be they Jews, be they agnostics or atheists, be they women, be they gay and lesbian, be they transgender. They want to cover up the sins of the past to excuse the sins of the present and justify the persecutions of the future.

Only Nazis would presume to ban something like Maus. https://t.co/RsRxxIQ5HZ

— Joseph Brassey (@JosephBrassey) January 27, 2022

This is where we are at, America. We've been through this before. Earlier generations had to cope with the holier-than-thou judgmental mobs, screeching against what they deemed unholy and communist, seeking to whitewash - literally - the dark history and dirty little truths about our Manifest Destiny and our Christian bullying.

They're not banning the books out of any sense of Christian "decency" or modesty.

They're banning books to make it easier to convince others later on to ban the people these books speak for and reach out to.

Never fall for these lies, America.

Support your libraries, support your schools.

And for the LOVE OF GOD, vote out of power the hypocrites and haters who are destroying our institutions over the power of the book.

(Update: 2/3/22) It is official, the book burners are in Tennessee and exposing their viciousness to the world (via Alejandro Ramirez at the Nashville Scene):

Last night, Mt. Juliet pastor and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Greg Locke decided to turn it up a notch by organizing an old-fashioned book burning. The books included millennial staples like Harry Potter and Twilight — hits of the early Aughts that were targeted by Christian book burnings back in the day.

In a sermon preceding the bonfire, Locke described beefing with "Free Mason devils" and said "I ain't gonna be 'suiciding myself' no time soon." Locke also said people aren't mad that they were burning books, but mad because of the books they were burning — implying that his critics, even other pastors, were devil and witchcraft supporters...

Everyone not of the Flock are the Other, everyone in Locke's world must either stand with him or burn forever. This is how far into extremism the Far Right has fallen.

This Dark Memorial In Some Discarded Corner of America

(Update: Infidel753 was kind enough to include this in his weekly blog roundup this Sunday!)

It's something that pops up on Twitter every so often, ever since November 2016, essentially this one question most of the people I follow end up asking aloud: "Does this Shitgibbon donald trump actually get a Presidential Library?"

It will be a disaster, less a library or research facility and more a messy gift shop with merch. I can't imagine enough reputable librarians would want to work there.

— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@PaulWartenberg) November 29, 2020

As a professional librarian this is a question that interests me and compels me to answer. Well, the simple honest answer is "Yes" the Shitgibbon will be granted the ability to form his own Presidential Library. The situation is a little more complicated than that.

We need to note what a Presidential Library actually is, what purpose it serves. If we go by the laws - like the Presidential Libraries Act of 1986 - set up by Congress, the primary purpose of the library is to serve as a depository for the National Archives and Records Administration (the agency responsible for storing, indexing, and sharing official documents so the government can keep track of what the hell it's doing and so historians will have something to argue over 100 years from now).

Every administration, especially trump's as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), will have a stockpile of papers, memos, agendas, agreements, Executive Orders, and other tidbits required by law to remained stored and made available for future reference. Personal notes and papers - diaries and private correspondences - are also considered for collections to add context (this is optional, some Presidential private papers remain with family or were destroyed after death). 

As the powers and responsibilities of the Executive branch grew, the need to store and archive grew with it. Sharing these responsibilities out to a library dedicated to that particular President (mutter grumble trump shouldn't fcking count but he does mutter mutter) is a way to keep things organized by era (and to keep it from being kept in one oversized warehouse constantly expanding to keep up with the storage. Look at your own closet, how stuffed is it with 10-20 years worth of books, utility bills, and winter holiday cards?).

To that end, the Presidential Library serves as an academic research facility, with study areas, meeting rooms, and workstations to allow visiting students/researchers to access the materials for their needs. This part will be most like a small college library with clerks, assistants, and full-time professional librarians overseeing access to the collection.

But in practice a Presidential Library is more akin to a museum (close cousin to the library). The facility will be open for tours, displaying memorabilia, artwork, and promoting themes and iconography prominently associated to that administration. A mock-up of the Oval Office will be built (it would likely be where the carpeting and furniture from that tenure ends up). Presentation halls for large gatherings to one side, gift shops on the other.

A perfect example is the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It's best known as a popular tourist attraction where every four years the Republicans would host a primary debate (so that the candidates can suck up to the ghost of Saint Ronnie to appeal to their party voters as Reagan's Heir to the Throne) in California.

The thing is, while NARA provides some funding, that funding is very limited. Every Presidential Library - and there are several NOT supported by the National Archives, usually the ones before FDR when the agency started managing presidential papers - has to fund itself in some form or another (hence the paid tours and gift shops).

Many a Presidential Library started through private funding and the setup of a non-profit organization to manage/oversee that library/museum. The non-profit is responsible for finding the land, planning the architecture, paying the construction, and hiring most staff at which point NARA signs off on the deal and shuffles the collected papers to that library's storage shelves. (Some libraries, serving more as memorials/museums, are overseen by National Parks instead. There's still a non-profit overseeing each of those)

This is where it gets tricky for trump himself. his track record with non-profits is... um... colorful at best, criminal (at the New York state level) at the least. trump's ability - or even the ability of his family and business associates - to start such a non-profit has been crippled at the moment (that and he's too busy grifting over the "fake votes" argument to set up emails begging for library funds). I haven't seen a foundation/non-profit set up for a Presidential Library for him, have you? (seriously if you did and it's a legit one not a parody site, add the link to the comment section please and thank you)

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines.

It's not going to be much of a Presidential Library if the President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) shredded the entire paper trail.

Another big question about a trump Library will be "where the hell are they gonna put that thing?"

Insert flaming dumpster GIF here.

Others have already planned out a trump Presidential Library... as being a long hallway of Twitter posts and nothing more. Another one has plans for a fake border wall and COVID memorial pool.

Okay, all joking aside, this is a serious question. Most Presidential Libraries place themselves in areas of most importance to the President it honors (usually birthplaces, colleges they attended, or their primary residence when they became President). Gerald Ford is unique among NARA-supported facilities by having a Library where he went to college (Ann Arbor) and a separate Museum where he grew up (Grand Rapids). U.S. Grant's Library is at Mississippi State University (!) rather than Illinois or other places he resided. Obama is setting up his Center (it won't be a library for some reason, more a museum and advocacy office) where he came to political power (Chicago) instead of birthplace (HAWAII, YOU BASTARDS) or college (Columbia or Harvard). 

trump's Library placement situation has already been discussed, among the more serious punditry, although it's still a guessing game at this point. It seems unlikely trump will get an opportunity to use his college - UPenn and its Wharton College of Business have not bragged about their connection to trump since 2016 - and his unpopularity in New York (city and state) makes it unlikely he'll find a place in his birth-town of Queens.

One thing trump has advantage of is he already owns properties across the states - his trump Towers, his trump Resorts - that he could arguably turn into tax write-offs um non-profit center(s) to build his Library. Mar-A-Lago has oft been cited as a likely spot: It's where he relocated his residency status in 2019 and more likely where he'll go into hiding from arrest warrants after January 20 until he can sneak a ride out to a nation that won't extradite him. Property laws in Florida are relatively protective for owners: Lawsuits that might otherwise wipe out every other source of revenue trump could have won't be able to touch his Florida properties. It is unlikely that NARA will approve it as an archives location, however: Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach is right between the Atlantic Ocean and Intercoastal Waterway, extremely vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. It would never be a library in any sense.

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs.

Any honest, reputable librarian with a Masters degree in Information Sciences is going to steer clear of the place. I doubt there will be a need for a librarian at all: Only hucksters need apply.

The Return On Investment With Public Libraries (AKA Professor Mourdoukoutas Does Not Care To Invest In Us)

Usually I write about my librarian profession at my other blog, but right now I gotta slap the taste out of some entitled upper-class libertarian's mouth who went and wrote a shitty op-ed in Forbes about turning public libraries into Amazon stores. I won't link directly to the SOB (actually, as I was writing this article I find out Forbes removed the op-ed for reasons I can't yet confirm, but I'm willing to guess has something to do with the op-ed being a pile of dingo droppings), so here's a link to Gizmodo reflecting my mood:

This weekend in ratios we have a jaw-droppingly bad op-ed in Forbes explaining that the age of the crusty old library is dead, and instead of them, we should all get Amazon. Not some kind of Amazon-like digital public library, or even Amazon Prime itself, mind you, but physical Amazon Books retail locations. Titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” it is written by Long Island University Post economics professor and seemingly prolific Forbes contributor section writer Panos Mourdoukoutas.

Mourdoukoutas writes that the government should stop funding libraries in part to save taxpayers a vague (and within the article, never quantified) amount of money and also to jack up Amazon’s stock price for some reason...

Lemme guess, Mordorsukoulot owns stock in Amazon, why else fcking care about a company already worth billions on the market.

The professor also argued that because Amazon had online ebooks that it could be a lending library already (and in reality it is, using services like Overdrive to provide ebooks for Kindle readers), so all the brick-and-mortar places can just double as coffee shops.

Essentially, the article reads like it was written by an asswipe who hasn't stepped inside a public library in ten-twenty years, completely overlooking the growing trends towards Makerspaces - crafts, 3D printing, quilting projects for the homeless, art classes for teenagers, what have you - and ignoring the reality that a lot of children, adults, and retirees still read print books in this day and age.

The article doesn't consider the library as a community information resource hub, not just with public computers for access, research, and emailing but also a place where local groups can use rooms and equipment to work on projects, classrooms and presentations. I doubt an Amazon bookstore would create such resources for sharing (and from personal experience almost no bookstore does because it takes floorspace away from SELLING SHIT).

This article WAS written by someone complaining that he was paying 400 bucks or so in yearly property taxes, which points to the libertarian/Far Right ideology of "why do I have to pay for the poor to use community resources and places to do things like read, use computers, write resumes, and job hunt?"

Dear Professor Mourdoukoutas: You wanna know what your Return On Investment is with libraries? It's very simple to find - you can even GOOGLE SEARCH IT using "Return On Investment" and the words "public libraries" and not bother a reference librarian like myself - and you'll get a 2011 report from the state of Minnesota's Department of Education. In that report, on the front page so you won't miss it, you'll find you get a ROI of $4.62 per tax dollar spent. That's a pretty good return on investment, seeing your community get the kind of financial support that EVERYONE can benefit from.

There's a reason why, in nearly every tax hike or bond issue that comes up in local elections regarding library spending, a vast majority of residents heartily APPROVE of tax hikes to pay for their public libraries. I still feel enormous civic pride from the days I worked in Broward County and the county residents voted FOR a bond issue to build and upgrade library buildings back in 1995 (or 1996, I'm trying to find the citations now, sorry)

I guess the problem is, professor, you don't want any of that investment in our communities. You just want it in your goddamn stock portfolio.

It's a good thing Forbes dropped your op-ed, considering how poorly researched and lacking in citations it had. I seriously argue your university should investigate your failure to do the one thing I'm sure you tell your college students to do, which is to use peer-reviewed citations in your work.

In the meantime, to every American citizen out there: Library cards are FREE to apply for in most public libraries, we've got the latest popular hot titles in books and DVDs you can check out, and when you stop by take a look at the Activities Calendar to see what you can do with your families at your local library. We've got Paws To Read, we've got Story Times for Three-Year-Olds, we've got Lego Builders, we've got Gaming clubs, we've got Drone Flyers, we've got things to do that Amazon can never plan for you.

Public Libraries serve the public trust. Libraries are one of the few service points in a city/county government where people WANT to be there, and are happy using it.

That should be something certain professors need to study up on.

I Have Got No Service In the Club You See

So trump's hand-picked destroyer of the FCC flipped the script on Obama's Net Neutrality orders today.

The agency scrapped the so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone service.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to have stronger oversight over broadband providers as Americans have migrated to the internet for most communications. It reflected the view of the Trump administration and the new F.C.C. chairman that unregulated business will eventually yield innovation and help the economy...

Deregulation does not lead to innovation. INVESTMENT leads to innovation. Deregulation leads to shoddy mismanagement, greed, and the inevitable collapse of the industry involved leading to expensive government bailouts.

RAGE

They are taking away cheap Internet... which wasn't all that cheap to begin with (looks at his $35-77 part of his cable/phone bill)

THEY CAN PRY MY REASONABLE ISP RATES THAT ALLOWS ME TO ACCESS PORNHUB FROM MY COLD STICKY DEAD H

Serious question to the academic institutions that need affordable Internet for information sharing: any chance you guys can start your own non-profit network that the rest of us can sign up for?

Every Ann Coulter Mystery Ever Written, Before She Threatens To Write One

So, this is out there:

Ann Coulter: "If Trump doesn't win, it's over. I'll be writing cookbooks and mysteries."

Look, I know as a librarian I shouldn't ban books, but I swear to the Old Gods and the New I ought to be able to maintain some standards, people. I don't wanna shelve those books if they ever see the light of day...

I've got a hard enough time living with myself while my library patrons request these Far Right titles on politics and current affairs. They have a right to read what they want, so that's how I rationalize it, and also why I make sure there's a balance on the shelves with sane moderate or Progressive Left works to at least provide a marketplace of diverse ideas.

But an Ann Coulter cookbook?!?! If the title's To Serve Man someone better sue her.

And if you've ever read Ann Coulter's political stuff - where liberals are evil, conservatives are touched by God, and she is the judge of all Earth - you might get a pretty good idea how an Ann Coulter mystery will read:

It's 1952 in Midvale (it's always 1952 in Midvale). The middle-aged widower sheriff overseeing this delightful small town is rocked by shocking news of a young happily married couple - they had just gotten hitched at the Baptist church just last week! - found murdered one morning. Struggling to make sense of the crime, the sheriff teams up with a thin stunningly beautiful blonde reporter to figure out the clues.

Using her detailed understanding of Randian Objectivism, the pair uncovers the murderer as a doctor of Middle Eastern origin who killed the couple because the wife refused to let him abort her baby. The doctor is also a prominent defender of the FDR-era New Deal, which makes the town's mayor - a weak yet politically ambitious Democrat who wants to prove himself to a stern father (retired war hero general that once saved MacArthur's life in the Philippines) who hopes his son could one day serve as governor - unwilling to press charges because it might start a race riot.

When the doctor threatens the life of the token African-American family in town, the sheriff bravely oversteps his authority, forms a posse with his now-girlfriend reporter, and raids the doctor's home to find a coven of Stalin-worshiping Communists about to kill a honest and unyielding US Senator who served as a tail-gunner during The War. There's a clean shootout where all the bad Commie characters die - the Randian reporter gets to sniper-shoot the lead Commie between the eyes - while the good guys don't even get splinters. The evil doctor is forced to make a public confession where he admits the errors of his baby-killing ways before he hangs himself, the town celebrates with a special election to vote out the craven politician to replace him with a well-meaning television actor, and the sheriff and reporter decide to get married and move to the Big City where the sheriff's Small-Town sensibilities as Police Commish will save that city from collapsing into the moral rot of LBJ's Great Society in the coming decade.  

There. Done. Just change the calendar date (although it will ALWAYS be 1952) and the name of the town, and that will be every Ann Coulter mystery novel ever written before she even writes one.

And the sad thing? Publishers will line up for her mysteries because she has a known name, she has an agent on payroll who will line her up. Even if the official mystery publishers refuse her works, she can easily go to her conservative printing buddies and have them start a mystery series imprint just for her, and make arrangements for bookstores and retailers to shelve her crap at the front door of every Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble out there.

Here's a mystery that's worth solving: can someone figure out why universities and public organizations are still willing to cough up $50,000 in speaking fees for this hack writer Ann Coulter?

This Is How Bad It's Gotten In The Republican Senate

You would think that the Republicans in our U.S. Senate could make an easy job of advising and consenting on a relatively non-partisan federal position as Head Librarian of the Library of Congress.

Nope (via the Washington Post).

It seems even a job as uncontroversial as librarian of Congress isn’t immune to congressional infighting.

Librarian of Congress nominee Carla Hayden — the chief executive of the Baltimore public library — breezed through a Senate committee hearing in April, and, within weeks, the committee voted unanimously to recommend that the Senate approve her nomination to be the 14th librarian of Congress.

“The nominee, in my opinion, brings a wealth of experience to the position and it is my hope that this experience will lead the Library of Congress in a way that . . . meets the demands of the 21st century,” Senate Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said of Hayden, who would be the first woman and the first African American to lead the agency.

But not all Republicans agree, and as a result Hayden’s nomination has been held up. There has been no public explanation for the five-week delay, although privately some conservatives have been critical of the positions Hayden took as head of the American Library Association, including her opposition to parts of the Patriot Act and a law requiring libraries to install Internet filters to block pornography. Others decry her lack of academic heft, saying the position is a scholarly one...

Trust me, public librarians can handle reference research requests as well as the college librarians! /rage

Any excuse would do in a storm of their own making...

The most likely reason is that at least one Senator wanted to throw a conniption at ANYTHING that could get passed during an Obama administration, so said Senator placed yet another "secret Hold" to delay the floor vote.

This is, after all, a Republican-controlled Senate that has refused to fill the largest number of vacancies our government's seen in modern times.

Just remember these GOP Senators can easily avoid even TALKING to a Supreme Court nominee like Garland without punishment, while legal decisions are stuffed into limbo or sent back down to appellate courts woefully understaffed.

While lacking a Librarian of Congress wouldn't have brought the entire world collapsing, it's a sign of how lazy and ineffective these Republicans have been in some of the worst underperforming legislative sessions we've seen since 1948.

My professional emails the last four-five weeks had been packed up with pleas by fellow librarians to call our Senators to push for a vote. I dunno if our calls had much effect, but they FINALLY held a floor vote today... and Hayden passed 74 to 18, making her the first woman and first African-American Librarian running our nation's largest library.

It wasn't even a close vote because there wasn't much scandal or controversy involving Hayden or the Library of Congress itself (although the LOC is under calls to upgrade aging tech to improve its archival and copyrighting responsibilities). And yet her vote was on hold because someone wanted to be a jerkass.

Government isn't really broken, America. Government just has one branch under the whims of a political party - Republicans in both House and Senate - that wants to act like it's broken.