Category: Politics

Trump’s cuts force the elimination of Mass. library access to academic databases and The Boston Globe

Photo via PickPik

The Trump administration’s war on access to knowledge will result in the end of public library access in Massachusetts to a number of academic databases and The Boston Globe. The cuts take effect on July 1.

The dispiriting news is reported in a memo issued May 20 by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners that is weirdly titled “MBLC Maintains some Databases, Support for eBooks, and ComCat.” I don’t mean to be critical of the commissioners, since Trump’s perversity is not their fault. But the news here is what’s being cut, not what’s being saved.

The cuts are the result of an executive order issued by Trump on March 14 titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” The order eliminates a number of agencies and programs, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which in the current fiscal year provided $3.6 million for library services in Massachusetts as well as grants to local libraries. The MBLC spent about $2.2 million of its federal allocation on access to various online databases. MBLC director Maureen Amyot said in a statement:

The federal impact cannot be overstated. In Massachusetts, over 1,600 school, public, academic and special libraries from across the state benefit from federal IMLS funding. Millions of people rely on federally funded library services. Developing a plan for services in an environment of almost daily federal change has been challenging, but our goal has remained constant: to maintain services that are integral to the functioning of our system and heavily relied on by the people of the Commonwealth.

The MBLC was able to preserve access to some databases. The decisions about what to cut and what to keep were based on usage, according to the MBLC. In addition, the statewide program that funds access to e-books and audiobooks will continue, as well the Commonwealth Catalog, or ComCat, which provides access to items that a local library may not have.

Needless to say, there is no reason for any of this. Trump inherited a strong economy that continues to perform reasonably well despite his efforts to take a wrecking ball to it. These cuts call to mind his infamous outburst in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.” It appears that he wants to keep them that way.

What’s being cut

  • Boston Globe Article Archive
  • Britannica Moderna
  • Gale Academic OneFile Select
  • Gale General OneFile
  • Gale Health and Wellness
  • Gale in Context: Biography
  • Gale in Context: Elementary
  • Gale in Context:Environmental Studies
  • Gale in Context: Global Issues
  • Gale in Context: Middle School
  • Gale in Context: Science
  • Gale in Context: US History
  • Gale in Context: World History
  • Gale Interactive: Science
  • GaleLegalForms
  • HeritageQuest Online
  • Peterson’s Career Prep
  • Peterson’s Test Prep
  • Science Database (ProQuest)
  • Transparency Language Online

What’s being saved

  • Britannica Escholar
  • Britannica Library
  • Britannica School
  • Gale Academic OneFile + OneFile Collections
  • Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints
  • PebbleGo

A disturbing profile of John Fetterman’s struggle with mental-health issues

Sen. John Fetterman. Photo (cc) 2022 by the office of Gov. Tom Wolf.

New York magazine has published an incredibly disturbing story (paywalled, but see below) about U.S. Sen John Fetterman, the hoodie-wearing Pennsylvania Democrat who was elected in 2022 while recovering from a serious stroke.

Reporter Ben Terris portrays Fetterman as suffering from what sounds like serious mental-health issues. We knew about his struggles with depression, but this goes much deeper than that, veering into what at times seems like a disconnection from reality, compounded by a refusal to take his medications.

Adding to its power is that much of the story is based on the on-the-record comments of Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, as well as a 1,600-word email that Jentleson wrote to Fetterman’s doctor. “I believed in John’s ability to work through struggles that lots of Americans share,” he told Terris. “He’s not locked into a downward trajectory; he could get back in treatment at any time, and for a long time I held out hope that he would. But it’s just been too long now, and things keep getting worse.”

This is an important piece of journalism, but unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall. So I’m going to tell you something you may or may not know: There’s a service that lets people save paywalled articles at publications they subscribe to so that others can read them for free. It’s at archive.is. You can search by keywords or URL. That’s how I found the Fetterman article.

I’m going to be a hypocrite and tell you that I’m uncomfortable sharing free links from archive.is, but that I’m not adverse at telling you how you can do it yourself. So if you want to read the Fetterman story, you know what to do.

Lindsey Graham’s bizarre suck-up; plus, the LA Times’ latest woes, and the Trumps’ crypto grift

Image via ChatGPT

It’s now being laughed off as a joke, and I suppose that’s right. But social media on Tuesday was going a little nuts over Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ridiculous post on Twitter in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s expressed desire to be the next pope. I thought the always astute Richard Nixon, writing on Bluesky, put it best:

On the bright side, becoming pope would get Trump out of the U.S.

Tough Times in LA

Jeff Bezos isn’t the only billionaire-gone-bad who’s running a major American newspaper. In fact, he may not even be the worst. After all, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before Bezos did the same at The Washington Post, is actually using AI to label the bias of opinion journalists.

An aside: Opinion journalists are supposed to be biased.

Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy, who’s done yeoman’s work in keeping track of the LA Times’ travails, writes that layoffs are on the way. Darcy also cites reporting by Adweek that the paper lost $50 million in 2024 and that subscribers continue to head for the exits.

You’d like to think that steady, forward-looking ownership would put the Times in a position to thrive as other billionaire-owned papers have done — principally The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Maybe Boston and the Twin Cities are just better news towns with a higher level of civic engagement than the notoriously transient Los Angeles area. Still, Soon-Shiong’s feckless and irresponsible management certainly has not helped.

The crypto presidency

I read this in horror Tuesday — an in-depth investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s crypto grift, an entirely new way for foreign powers to bribe Trump while skirting federal laws.

As Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess report, the Trump-controlled crypto company World Liberty Financial also puts the Trump family in close contact with some might unsavory characters. They write:

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

Because it’s the last day of the month and I still have some gift links to distribute, you can read it here for free. And here’s a gift link to a sidebar on yet another dubious Trump crypto relationship.

No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin

Judge's gavel
Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.

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We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.

Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.

Continue reading “No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin”

Rumbles on the right: David Brooks calls for an ‘uprising,’ while Bill Kristol and Lisa Murkowski speak out

David Brooks. 2022 LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin.

Today is going to be a big grading day. But before I get started, I want to share with you a remarkable column by David Brooks of The New York Times (gift link) as well as a couple of eye-opening statements from the political right.

Moderate in his politics, deeply conservative by nature, Brooks is a longstanding anti-Trumper, but he leans toward the rhetorical rather than advocating any sort of specific action beyond voting. Now, though, he’s calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” and closes by alluding to Karl Marx: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” He writes:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault.

Earlier this week, another prominent anti-Trump conservative, Bill Kristol, posted a photo on Bluesky of ICE thugs detaining Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and wrote: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?”

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the last remaining moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke frankly about the fear that she and other members of her party feel about what might happen to them if they speak out against Trump. Just to say that out loud is an important step, although of course it needs to be followed by action. At a public forum she said:

We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.

I don’t want to get carried away. Over the past decade, there has been no group less influential and consequential than the tiny band of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives. But we may be starting to see the stirrings of — well, of something.

Why Democrats, lacking power, won’t be able to keep the war-plan texting scandal alive

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

We are about to experience the full consequences — or, rather, the lack of consequences — stemming from the Democrats’ electoral wipeout last November.

The texting scandal exposed by The Atlantic earlier this week is serious business. As you have no doubt heard, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used that chat to share war plans about an upcoming air attack in Yemen. In case you haven’t had a chance to read Goldberg’s story, here’s a gift link.

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The scandal raises all sorts of questions. Why were top White House officials using Signal, a commercial app not approved for secure governmental communications? Signal messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time; were steps taken to override that and preserve those messages in accordance with the law? Are Signal chats about sensitive national security issues common within Trump’s inner circle? Are any foreign adversaries listening in? (One of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, took part while he was in Russia.)

So where do we go from here? Not very far, I’m afraid. A number of observers have compared this to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, which became the cause célèbre of the 2016 presidential campaign. So consider:

• This time there will be no criminal investigation — or, if anyone tries, Donald Trump will quickly shut it down. James Comey is not walking through that door. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president in 2016, but he was also a person of integrity who did not interfere with the independence of the Justice Department or the FBI. Such is no longer the case.

• There will be no congressional investigation, not with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. (In 2016, Republicans held both branches.) House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to fire Hegseth, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that Republicans and Democrats should work together on a “full investigation.” Good luck with that.

• Absent a criminal investigation or meaningful congressional hearings, the media coverage will soon fade away. We all remember The New York Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, but we tend to forget that it was largely fed by governmental action, especially by Comey. It was his last-minute intervention over what he described as another round of emails — followed by a “never mind” — that probably cost Clinton the election.

The print edition of today’s Times leads with two stories related to the scandal. I thought I’d point that out given the outrage I saw on social media claiming that Tuesday’s print edition played the story down — a consequence, I’m sure, of early print deadlines and the difficulty of reacting instantly to a huge story broken by another media outlet.

Unless there are more revelations, though, the media wave is likely to crest within the next few days. And then we’ll be on to the next Trump scandal.

Correction: I had a brain cramp regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s name. Now fixed.

Trump extorts a major law firm — then lies to make the deal sound even worse

Illustration via Pixabay

To make the humiliation complete, Donald Trump has apparently lied about the agreement he reached with Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, in order to cast the terms of surrender as being even worse than they actually were.

According to a four-byline article in The New York Times (gift link), Trump’s claim that Paul Weiss had agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion program appears to be false. So, too, is Trump’s assertion that the firm had admitted to “wrongdoing” on the part of former Paul Weiss lawyer Mark Pomerantz, who had worked for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial — you know, the one in which Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, a verdict that still stands.

The Times reports:

The copy of the agreement that Mr. Karp shared with Paul Weiss differed in some ways from Mr. Trump’s characterization of the deal in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Although Mr. Trump said the law firm had specifically agreed to not follow any diversity, equity and inclusion policies in its hiring practices, there is no reference to D.E.I. in the agreement that Mr. Karp shared. Mr. Trump has mounted an aggressive campaign against diversity initiatives in the federal government, labeling it as a form of workplace discrimination.

There also was no mention of Mr. Pomerantz, the former Paul Weiss partner, in the copy of the agreement circulated by Mr. Karp. Five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.

Karp deserves no sympathy. It was bad enough that he was willing to cut a deal with the extortionist-in-chief rather than stand strong. It’s just interesting that Trump would succeed in this corrupt scheme and then decide that it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t resist the urge to pile on false details that made Karp and his firm look even worse.

A couple of weekend reads from the Times that stand out from the daily Trump din

Illustration based on a photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

Today I’m using my gift links to share two important stories from The New York Times. Amid the torrent of news about Donald Trump, I think these two articles rise above the din and underscore the menace he represents both to our democracy and to world peace.

People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”

He [Trump] told Mr. Trudeau [Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada] that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.

Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.

Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”

Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress

My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.

The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.

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Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.

I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.

Continue reading “Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress”

After the ambush of Zelenskyy, some smart commentary — and an exceedingly dumb take

I share the shock and revulsion of every decent person over Donald Trump and JD Vance’s shameful attack Friday on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We are sliding into authoritarianism, and Trump has made it eminently clear that his role model is Russia’s homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin.

There are any number of places you can go for analysis that’s sharper and better-informed than mine, but I do what to share a few tidbits I’ve gleaned in my reading over the past day.

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Among the more interesting questions is whether this happened spontaneously or if Trump and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic argues for the latter (gift link). His evidence: the very fact that Vance spoke up, which was not something he would normally be expected to do and was almost certainly scripted in advance. Nichols writes:

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio — in theory, America’s top diplomat — was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

Also of note is that New York Times political reporter Peter Baker is speaking truth to power. Baker often gets criticized for showing Trump too much deference and normalizing his sociopathic behavior. On Wednesday, though, Baker compared Trump’s treatment of the media to Putin’s during his early days of establishing his authority. Baker was covering Moscow at that time, and he said Trump’s banishment of The Associated Press over the news agency’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” was reminiscent of Putin’s efforts to mold  “a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.”

Baker added we’re still a long way from Trump ordering that anti-regime journalists be poisoned. But it was a harsh characterization of Trump from someone who usually likes to keep his options open. I’d say there’s no going back.

And indeed, Baker brought the truth with him again on Friday, writing this as a riposte to Trump’s invocation of “the Russia hoax” in his meeting with Zelenskyy. Baker says:

In fact, the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was no hoax and concluded definitively that Mr. Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the election eight years ago to Mr. Trump. Although Mr. Mueller said in his final report in 2019 that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” he made clear that Mr. Trump’s campaign benefited from Russian assistance.

Baker could have gone one step further and pointed out that Mueller may well have charged Trump with criminal acts were it not for guidance from the Justice Department that a sitting president is exempt. Still, good for Baker for reminding everyone that the 2016 Trump campaign was awash in Russian influence.

Finally, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, an enthusiastic Trumper, wrote an embarrassing column (gift link if you’re interested) on Thursday headlined “Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow,” with the subhead “A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.” That deal, of course, was what Zelenskyy had supposedly come to the White House to sign, only to be sandbagged by Trump and Vance.

So how did Thiessen react? Naturally, he took to Twitter and blasted Zelenskyy, writing:

There was no ambush. Z was set up for success. All he had to do was not get into a public fight and sign the minerals deal. Not hard. A lot of work went into making a successful moment possible and he blew it and then refused to apologize.

Thiessen has been at the Post for years, so you can’t blame this on Jeff Bezos’ edict that the Post’s opinion section is going full MAGA. But this is the sort of garbage you can expect will be rewarded, while the future of liberal columnists like Dana Milbank, Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart is left very much in doubt.