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.

The Darkest Habit That Could End trump's Reign of Error (w/ Update)

Can you imagine it? Twenty years from now, Netflix will produce a miniseries where an intrepid reporter will meet with a shadowy deep informant from the donald trump Administration, and the informant - whom the producers will label "Deep Stoat" and look suspiciously like John Bolton (no, the idiot with the mustache, not the Michael Bolton with a pirate hat) - will reveal how chaotic the White House was, due to trump's insane habit of trashing every document that came his way.

Deep Stoat will lean back into the shadows of the dimly lit parking garage and utter the immortal line, "Follow the clogged toilets."

...

No, I am NOT making that detail up.

Okay, getting serious here. This week saw a number of revelatory reports regarding the National Archives recovering at least fifteen boxes from trump's Mar-a-Lago resort of White House documents he took with him once his administration ended back in January 2021. Quoting from Jonathan Franklin's article at NPR:

As first reported by The Washington Post, the documents retrieved last month from the Florida property contained important records of communication along with Trump's self-described "love letters" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as well as a letter addressed to Trump from his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

According to the newspaper, keeping the boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago violated the Presidential Records Act — which requires that the government keep all forms of documents and communications related to a president's or vice president's official duties.

As required by the act, the records discovered at Mar-a-Lago should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump administration in January 2021.

"The Presidential Records Act mandates that all Presidential records must be properly preserved by each Administration so that a complete set of Presidential records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of the Administration," said David Ferriero, archivist of the United States...

I've mentioned the National Archives before, when discussing how Presidential Libraries come into existence as depositories of paperwork for each administration. It's their job to sort through the hundreds of daily documents generated by the actions and decisions that comes out of each presidency, especially because a lot of those documents were - and perhaps still are - highly classified pertaining to national security matters.

These are matters that have to go through a vetting process independent of the President in order to determine what can go public and what remains under security clearance... which trump and his people interfered with by taking at least 15 boxes worth of stuff and holding them for a year without likely safeguards for those classified documents. Ever hear of Chain Of Custody, the means of protecting sensitive documents to ensure the information is not compromised or broken? The minute trump took papers that had to go to NARA, he broke that chain. 

And he made matters worse by taking all this to Mar-A-Lago, well-known trumpian retreat notoriously vulnerable to spies and leaks. You could pretty much imagine the joy a lot of trump's "guests" had being in close proximity to paperwork most likely shoved into some office cubicle without supervision.

It doesn't help trump's argument - whatever it is, probably along the lines of "The papers belong to ME, donald trump" - about why he took all these papers. What we do know is that the National Archives did ask the Department of Justice to open an investigation into this because they DID find classified materials among the boxes making it likely there were national security breaches (Via Charles R. Davis at Business Insider because I can't link to the original Washington Post article behind its firewall, yes I operate on the cheap):

Former President Donald Trump took documents that were clearly marked as "top secret" with him to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing two unnamed sources.

"Top Secret" is the highest level of classification, referring to material that could harm national security if released.

According to The Post, the documents were found by the National Archives, which stores and preserves presidential records...

After uncovering the documents, officials referred the matter to the Department of Justice, which in turn asked for the National Archives' inspector general to conduct an investigation.

Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the last administration's records are owned by the public, not the former president.

In addition to taking documents, Trump has also been accused of destroying them. Reporters at The New York Times and Bloomberg have both said sources confirmed that torn-up records were found near White House toilets...

Yes, this is when you'll see more reports of toilets as the story deepens.

Just as an aside, the national media punditry accused Hillary Clinton back in the 2016 election cycle of ignoring or violating national security matters by maintaining her own email server, and their constant jumping on half-baked reports that turned into nothingburgers is often viewed in hindsight as a major reason she failed to secure more votes in close-contested states. "But Her Emails" enjoined with trump followers' cries of "LOCK HER UP" kind of points out a serious case of irony here. Hillary turned out to be better with national security stuff than trump ever did.

Because trump never took any of that shit serious. Look at his history with top secret materials. He blabbed in 2017 about an ongoing joint US-Israeli operation to a couple of Russian buddies that ended up shutting it all down. He Tweeted out sensitive surveillance photos of a failed Iranian rocket launch that pretty much told Iran how much info we're getting on them (and likely exposing human resources our intel agencies had in Iran's government). That was so egregious a reveal that the intelligence experts in the media couldn't even look at those photos without risking their own clearances (Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice had a massive meltdown over this one).

All of this because trump has no understanding or respect for anything outside of his own limited world-view. This is a man who does not read much as a hobby, nor a man known for focusing on the topics at hand other than if it's something that makes him richer or more worshiped.

His mistreatment of paperwork, his willingness to hide documents and visitor logs and phone conservations, all of it tied into trump's background as a businessman where hiding questionable paper trails seem to be a habit... and in trump's case an obsession, considering all the failed business dealings he'd committed over the decades.

This is a man in trump who spent more time - allegedly, as the ongoing criminal investigation in New York keeps uncovering on a weekly basis - figuring out tax loopholes and rigging accounting ledgers to cheat the legal system as much as possible.

So what happened when trump jumped from the private sector of his business dealings into the public sector of government paperwork and accountability was a clash of styles. trump's willingness to shred everything ran into the legal requirements that nothing gets shredded (until vetted by the proper agencies).

There have been stories for years about trump's mishandling of White House papers. In 2017, Politico reported the National Archives had to remind trump not to destroy any documents. In 2018, Time published a report about trump staffers retaping torn up shreds in order to comply with NARA demands. By 2020, the watchdog group CREW sought to file a restraining order on trump's outgoing administration - because yes by then trump lost the November elections - because there were still reports that trump and his aides were destroying files.

All of this leading up to reports from Maggie Haberman coming out with a tell-all book later this year about it (via Igor Derysh at Salon): 

Trump, who reportedly had a habit of tearing up documents and failing to follow federal document preservation laws, needed a repairman on more than one occasion to fix his bathroom plumbing, according to Haberman's upcoming book "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," which was recently excerpted by Axios.

Staff at the "White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged," Haberman told CNN on Thursday. "The engineer would have to come and fix it, and what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up printed wet paper."

Haberman stressed that this was "not toilet paper."

No duh. Anyone who survived middle school bathroom hazings will tell you that printing paper is too thick to disintegrate or soften in water the way toilet paper does. Yet trump kept trying like the blabbing idiot that he is to flush unwanted documents away. It never occurred to trump that there are working fireplaces in the White House and he could have easily burnt all that paper along with the kindling on cold nights when nobody else was looking. (Not like I'm trying to give out tips here... You're not supposed to destroy any of these papers in the first place, okay!)

(Also, Haberman deserves some scorn here for failing to adequately report these stories to media outlets when the damn reporting mattered between 2017 and 2020. She's one of the people responsible for the over-reaction to Hillary's emails and in some ways trump is her bloody fault.)

I'm not going to comment yet on the alleged report from 2018 of trump caught in the act of EATING some of those papers because so far it's just one source and we need more verification. 

With all of this in play - trump's history of destroying documents, trump's horrifying habits of mishandling classified top secret documents, and the fact he rolled out of the White House with 15 boxes of documents he shouldn't have taken - the question arises, "Is this one more legal scandal that trump is going to have to weasel his way out of?"

Because yes Virginia, it is looking like trump violated a couple of serious laws here.

First off is the Presidential Records Act, a set of laws created after Nixon's Watergate and other scandalous fiascos. It ranges from 44 USC s2202 that spells out the UNITED STATES and not the President owns those papers, to 44 USC s2203 how the President and his office cannot dispose of such papers until the National Archivist says so (44 USC s2203(f)) AND that the Archivist is the one who possesses all the documents when the President's term ends (44 USC s2203(g)(1) so skating off to Mar-A-Lago with 15 boxes is a serious no-no).

Then you get to Title 18 of the US Code, where the criminal penalties kick in. 18 USC s2071 makes it clear: 

(a)Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b)Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

In short: donald trump has been caught red-handed violating various provisions of the Presidential Records Act and can get punished for willfully - you have to go out of your way to flush documents down a toilet for God's sake - destroying and willfully concealing/removing all those documents, records, maps - yes, he took the hurricane map he Sharpied, remember THAT one boys and girls! - and other things that SHOULD HAVE gone to the Archivist instead.

Consider this: For all the illegal things trump has done, documented over all these years but that he's never had to answer for, with all the criminal and civil trials he's still facing... The one thing that is fucking airtight is that trump broke the rules over his mishandling, destruction, and theft of official documents. The one person who can push for trump's downfall, imprisonment, and banishment from any hope of future political office will be a career civil servant in our National Archivist.

Basically, trump can go to jail for pissing off one of the highest-ranking librarians in the United States.

Schadenfreude, do your thing!

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(Update 2/12/22): Two national security experts - John Gans and Jon Wolfsthal - weigh in at The Atlantic on how serious this matter is, and why trump must answer for the rules he broke (paywalled):

...Everyone from the president down to the most junior federal bureaucrat swears an oath to protect the Constitution and is informed that keeping records is a crime. Many citizens, including those who are in or have left office, have been charged in violation of these rules, their careers destroyed or damaged, some sent to prison. Even with these “lesser” cases, it is the Nixon example that sets the bar, indicating that this is not some minor issue or mere convention. Protecting the paper of a presidency is about nothing less than the rule of law, government accountability, and whether everyone in our government, and in this country, is held to the same standards...

...The president has to follow the same rules as anyone else. This is part of why we were infuriated to learn that former President Donald Trump is reported to have removed unique materials from the White House that later had to be recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort. And it is why we believe that the Department of Justice must investigate Trump for his handling of government records and, if the facts justify it, prosecute him, just as other less prominent Americans have been for similar behavior.

The Presidential Records Act and other archival regulations are intended to ensure that all documents and materials are protected and preserved for posterity. Executive privilege protects the president while in office; afterward these documents explain what the commander in chief and his teams did or did not do, as well as why. This accountability is linked directly to the core of the American government’s creed—that the governed, not an individual sitting in government, are the source of all authority. The law ensures that Americans will eventually know just what their government and their elected and appointed officials do with the power granted by the people. Although reasonable disagreements exist over how and when the National Archives can make these records accessible, advocates for good government and democracy agree as to the importance of eventual disclosure and accountability.

This is why Trump’s behavior has caused an uproar, and why the National Archives has also asked the DOJ to investigate. Although the 45th president’s predilection for tearing up documents (and also reportedly flushing some down the toilet) has gotten the most attention, the brazen theft—and it is theft—of at least 15 boxes of materials from the White House is most alarming... On Thursday The Washington Post reported that some of the information taken to Mar-a-Lago was designated “top secret.” This is no longer just a case of removing materials important for historians and accountability. This has morphed into a full-blown intelligence scandal that could undermine both national security now and democratic norms in the future...

If the DOJ does not hold a president accountable for misconduct, it will weaken a standard, perhaps irrevocably, that has prevailed for nearly 50 years. When you serve at the pleasure of a president, as so many in the federal government do, knowing whether the person in the office will be held accountable matters. If they are not, anyone taking the oath on their first day or closing up their files on their last will do so with the understanding that the rules only matter in certain cases, or that they do not matter at all...

For the LOVE OF GOD, Merrick Garland, investigate trump for his theft of Presidential records.

Cross-Posting From My Librarian Blog: Time to Defend Your Libraries!

I posted this at my other blog - the professional librarianship / amateur writing one - but it's also a political call to action so:

Well, this is unsettling (Via Nikoel Hytrek at the Iowa Starting Line):

The effort to ban books has expanded beyond the classroom now to public libraries, with a new GOP-backed bill adding librarians to their target for prosecution and civil fines of those they believe give access to materials that are “obscene or harmful to minors.”

A collection of 14 Iowa Republican representatives introduced a bill Tuesday that makes it illegal for a person affiliated with a public school or public library to knowingly spread “material the person knows or reasonably should know, is obscene or harmful to minors.” Colleges and universities are exempted.

The penalty would be an aggravated misdemeanor, upgraded to a class D felony if the person was previously guilty of this.

Aggravated misdemeanors can be punishable by up to two years in jail and a fine between $625 and $6,250. Class D felonies are punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine between $750 and $7,500.

In short, Iowa Republicans want to turn librarianship into a criminal profession. Putting us up there with robbers, drug dealers, and people who talk at the theater...

Goddamn wingnuts. They know it's not enough to ban books at the school libraries. They're going after the public libraries as well.

Unable to ban books due to First Amendment restrictions, these Republican bastards are going to do the next-best thing: Make it impossible for public librarians to do their jobs lest they fear getting fined and jailed.

You want to know how this game will get played if Iowa makes this a law?

Say a mature-looking young adult comes in, claiming they're a college student, asking for a book on sexual identity from the 306 Dewey Decimal (DDC) shelves. As a librarian, I would direct them to the shelf area, show them the titles we've got there. And then WHAMMO the "college student" turns out to be a 17-year-old high schooler on "dual enrollment" with the local community college and they call in the cops to arrest you for "knowingly spreading obscene material" to a minor.

You think that if this law passes, the courts will only rely on the fines to punish librarians, I mean who wants to send a sad little librarian to jail over an obscene book? Thing is you WILL get judges who will punish sad little librarians "to send a message," because those judges may agree with the Far Right religious conservatives who want to ban "obscene" books from the face of the Earth. Even then, those fines aren't cheap: A full-time librarian usually makes between $35,000 to $45,000 a year. Even a $625 fine is cutting into rent or mortgage, not to mention the costs of fighting these charges in court. Want to take care of $1000 fines every month? There goes most of a monthly paycheck for librarians. This would bankrupt most of us...

I'd really like it if you went to that blog and read the rest of my rant. Suffice to say, I am calling on every honest American to stand with your public library. Join your Friends of the Library group. Tell the religious wingnuts they will not take away your right to access a great public service.

You are going to pry my library catalog
from my cold dead hands, Republican wingnuts.

This is where the Far Right war against libraries is taking us, America. Fight back.

 

A Sad Story: A Librarian Killed

This is a story that has hit pretty close to home, not just in my county but in my library cooperative where I work. Per WFLA, a sad tale about a librarian taken from us in a brutal act against her family:

...According to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, Elijah Stansell, 18, intentionally ran Suzette Penton over outside her Polk City home last month. She died on Nov. 25 leaving behind her four children and several grandchildren.

“Every kid in town loved Suzette because she’s just that type of person. She was flamboyant. She was just an outgoing, wonderful person,” said Ann Blethen (Suzette's friend).

“Suzette Penton helped make it a wonderful community,” said Sheriff Grady Judd. “She was known and loved by the people of Polk City.”

Penton's place in Polk City was at the community library, where she served the public and helped with children's events and literacy efforts.

What happened to make Stansell kill Penton?

On Nov. 9, Stansell, joined by Raven Sutton, 16, Kimberly Stone, 16 (who was 15 at the time of incident) and Hannah Eubank, 14, drove to Penton’s home.

There was an ongoing romance-related dispute between the group. They were there, officials said, to beat up Penton’s teenage son.

After a physical altercation between the teenage boys, Penton arrived home. She went outside to take photographs of the teens’ getaway vehicle, Stansell’s van. That’s when, authorities believe, Stansell intentionally ran her over, leaving tire tracks on her body.

“He didn’t clip her. He didn’t try to turn away from her and accidentally hit her and fell down. She was squared up and he ran over her,” said Sheriff Judd.

The van belonged to Westwood Missionary Baptist Church where Stansell’s father is a pastor, according to the sheriff...

Stansell may have been a young adult but he was answering to the rage of the Angry Guy mentality. It's that toxic bullshit mindset that pushed him to go out of his way to pick a fight with his girlfriend's ex, and it was in that rising rage that escalated the violence straight into murdering a woman trying to protect her son.

And now an entire community is reeling from the loss of a woman who served the public good, who helped families, who gave children smiles and books to read.

I may have met her, but briefly maybe once or twice, in the years since I've worked at Bartow Public Library. We're part of a county-wide Cooperative of shared library resources, but not a full county system. As such, most libraries are run by their cities and we have little interaction between our libraries. But we've been holding annual training sessions for staffers to try and get as many librarians together, make the cooperative more cohesive and understanding. Penton may have been at one of those Staff Days, I may have shared a table with her, working on team building projects or sharing stories of lurid library lore.

But that's all I can tell you, that's all I can share. Just a brief glimpse into possibility, into a life snuffed out. There are so many others - her children, her friends, the people of Polk City who visited the Library as a safe place almost like a home for them - who can tell more about her and what she meant to their lives.

All of that gone now, all because of an Angry Guy who went out of his way to express that rage without a care to the consequence. Until it was too late, until there was blood in the street.

All those stories lost now.

A Librarian-Writer-Jedi-Pirate-Wannabe Looks Back at 50

Sigh.

I remember I first wanted to become a writer when I was still in single digits, around maybe 8 or 9 years old, trying to write stories and slowly learning the mechanics of plot, character development, and the need for white-out goo while using an old-style typewriter.

I remember wanting to be a Jedi from A New Hope onward. Too bad my midichlorian count is too low my lack of faith is disturbing.

I didn't get too much into the being a pirate thing even while growing up a Tampa Bay Buccaneers sports fan. I really didn't get into it until I saw Emma Thompson's version of Sense and Sensibility where Edward points out "Piracy is our only option. ...What is swabbing anyway...?"

Becoming a librarian in real-life happened in college, when I worked in the Cataloging department with bindery processing at University of Florida. My Journalism studies were floundering (I graduated with barely a C average in those classes) and it had gotten to where I was there more to work in the library than to take the classes (things might have been different if I was able to switch majors to something I was getting better grades in like History or Political Science, alas my parents were paying out-of-pocket - I missed the scholarship requirements by a single grade in high school - and they needed me to finish as quick as possible). Anyway, long story short, I went to South Florida to get my Masters (THAT I got an A average in) and went straight into working in libraries ever since 1994.

There was that dark period during the Great Recession where I lost my job as a librarian in 2008 and spent four years struggling to regain full-time employment, up until 2013 when Bartow Library took a chance on me and I've been there ever since. There were times I was hoping the Obama administration were hiring, but I kept missing my chances to drop off my resume with him and damn it all I wasn't able to get my shot at being in the room when it happened.

  

In terms of all the other things, I've got the pictures of me being a Jedi, not so many of me being a pirate, and a good number of me being a mostly self-published writer. I keep running into the writer's block - the usual problems with chronic depression, work-related stress, real-world anxieties from horrific political dis-leadership and a current pandemic - of unfinished stories all over the place, and I should be using this time I still have to finish at least one of them to feel the accomplishment of completion again.

There's still a lot in my life I haven't done that I wanted so much to do when I was younger: To travel to places to see the world (Grand Canyon, Prague, London, Ireland, the coasts of Spain to Italy, Japan), to break out of my shell and learn social skills, to be better as a friend, to figure out how to flirt proper with ladies, figure out relationships (how to start one, obviously), stuff like that. There's a lot there that I should have done and figured out when I was younger - the regrets of being 20, and then 30, and then 40... - and part of me knows with all that's going on that I don't have many chances left.

So there's me, looking back at 50. I'll add pictures of the cake for today a little later.

Personal Notes

It's gotten a bit hectic in the Real World for me. There was a sudden resignation at work last month, and that job's duties ended up getting sorted out to the remaining full-time staffers to handle until a new library director can be hired.

As such, I'm really really distracted and the political ranting is kinda taking a back seat for me. I can barely correct fools on Twitter right now as is.

I am working on a blog entry for the midterm voting for Florida, especially the always-popular Ballot previews, but until further notice I am not going to...

what the hell...?

What's all this about Mario Kart?

(reads up on it)

OH SWEET JESUS CHRIST ON A BIKE WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO OUR WORLD.

It's a good thing I never got into Nintendo games...

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.

Defining Unfit

For the eight regular readers of this blog, you might recall my alter ego is working as a reporter for the biggest newspaper in Metropolis librarian for a decent and well-loved city library in the heart of Florida.

I also work an online shift with Ask-A-Librarian, a chat service for people that well have to ask a librarian some serious questions. Some of them are reasonably easy but sometimes I get a deep-level research question that engages the mind.

Well, today I got a research question.

Someone wanted to know if - historically - the United States ever had a sitting President call a candidate for the office "unfit."

I had a pretty good idea who the question was in reference to - hi, Trump! - but was curious about what prompted the research request.

I had been busy all morning, so I missed the morning presser where Obama went off on Trump (this via NBCNews.com):

The president's remarks come amid Trump's ongoing feud with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a slain U.S. soldier who criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention...

"The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, Asia means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job," Obama said.

I read about this as I began my research, trying to dig up previous election cycles where sitting Presidents spoke out against an opposing party candidate. I didn't have time to bring up a point to the library patron (this is how I was trained to call a library client/user) I was helping that we're actually in an unusual circumstance already: That rarely have we had a sitting President prevented from another re-election bid (due to the 22nd Amendment), and that it's been rare for that retiring President to actively campaign for his successor. This is true: Dubya was too unpopular to try it, Clinton was available but Gore was convinced to run on his own terms, Reagan did some work for Bush the Elder in 1988 but mostly stayed on the sidelines...

Can't count Carter or Ford. Nixon didn't survive a second term, neither did LBJ. Kennedy... well...

We get to Eisenhower, he was in a position to campaign for Nixon in 1960, but he infamously was quoted as saying "Give me a week, I might think of one (idea or discussion he and Nixon shared)." It didn't end well.

One thing I've been digging up has been an unwritten rule/tradition that a term-limited President (self-imposed before FDR and imposed after by the 22nd) just didn't campaign on behalf of one candidate or opposed to another. What Obama did today, what he's been doing from the DNC convention onward, is unheard of. If there's any excuse for this, it's that Obama is facing a situation no retiring President ever had before: an obstructionist opposition party willing to burn down every last shred of his administration's achievements.

As for calling an opposing candidate "unfit", specifically that term, the best I could find for my library patron was the 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, where LBJ was running for his own electoral win and Goldwater had won a divisive Republican nomination on an extreme Far Right platform. While Johnson himself never came out accusing Goldwater as "unfit" - in personal interviews he did question Goldwater's sanity - he used attack ads and third-party advocates to make the accusations for him. Including an underhanded attack that relied on polling psychiatrists for their professional opinions on Goldwater's behaviors and statements where enough of them declared him unfit. It was so unethical a mudslinging tactic that the American Psychiatric Association created a Goldwater Rule preventing their members from such armchair analyses.

It wasn't exactly what the patron wanted, and I really wasn't finding much research that could go back further into history covering any other kind of mudslinging attacks on character that were out there. Which is kind of odd because there's entire history books on Presidential campaigns that cover all kinds of mudslinging insults and slights since Gods help 1800. I did find one, a good book titled appropriately enough Presidential Campaigns by Paul Boller (see if your library owns a copy) and informed the patron of the book for future reference.

I finally had to tell the patron that what we're seeing is an oddity, a historical anomaly. That one big reason why Obama is able to call Trump unfit for the office of the Presidency is because we've never really had a candidate as inexperienced as Trump before.

Trump honestly has no history of public service: no elected office, no nominated office, never served as judge or administrator, no military service, nothing. We've had relatively inexperienced candidates before: We've had several generals - Harrison, Taylor, Winfield Scott, Grant, Eisenhower - but they had an understanding of organization and executive responsibilities. We've had men who served only as Cabinet officials (Hoover) or high-ranking bureaucrats (Arthur). And then again, they still had some experience. I didn't realize until today there was a Judge who ran once - Alton B. Parker - back during Teddy Roosevelt's era. Parker had a legal understanding of the Constitution, making him experienced.

There was - famously - Wendell Willkie, a businessman/lawyer with no elective or administrative experience who ended up the nominee in 1940 as a compromise candidate between Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey. In Willkie's defense, he was prominently active in politics with a strong understanding of public service (and as a lawyer had honest respect for the Constitution and the federal system). But even then, there's no evidence FDR went after Willkie for his inexperience, and Willkie ran a conventional campaign that did not point out clear character flaws that required Roosevelt to make that charge.

Obama attacking Trump as "unfit" is unique in our long proud history of negative political campaigning. We've had candidates accused of adultery and bigamy and sexual misdeeds. We've had candidates accused of graft and corruption. We've had candidates accused of warmongering, candidates accused of cowardice, candidates accused of failure. But we've never really had a candidate accused of being unfit to serve the office.

Because Trump really is that unfit to serve. Not only because he lacks the experience and because he clearly lacks the temperament: it's also because he lacks the purpose and honest intent to serve.

Well, that part I didn't tell the patron. I shouldn't politicize a research request: My job is to be as impartial as possible and focus on the information I could find. I merely pointed out Trump's lack of civil service and left it at that.

But even that alone disqualifies Trump to run for President. And Gods help us, this is why we ALL need to NOT vote for Trump.