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#libraryofcongress — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #libraryofcongress, aggregated by home.social.

  1. The Hill

    Several years ago, I started a birthday tradition of taking either a day trip or a vacation. In 2017, it was a day trip to the Peabody Essex Museum for their Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed and Style exhibition. Last year, I went to Ticonderoga, NY, for a few days to visit, among other things, the Star Trek: Original Series Set Tour. But for my birthday this year, I decided to visit Washington, D.C., for nearly a week. Although I have been to D.C. a few times on business, I never really had the chance to explore the city during those trips, except for a quick afternoon walk around the National Mall. That changed last week.

    USS New Jersey.

    Although I considered flying, I decided to drive because I’ve always wanted to visit the WWII battleship USS New Jersey. After a slightly over four-hour drive, I arrived at the Iowa-class battleship. Having previously visited the USS Iowa in Los Angeles, I found the New Jersey no less impressive. As the most decorated of all the Iowa-class ships, the New Jersey’s tour reflected the pride of those who work on and visit her.

    View from the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

    The following day, I arrived by the Metro’s Red Line in Washington, D.C., and walked down to the National Mall. I had forgotten how majestic the city is. It doesn’t matter what your political views are; it’s the city’s design and grandeur that engulfs you. With the United States Capitol on one side and the Washington Monument on the other, the city invites exploration.

    Neoclassical rotunda of the National Gallery of Art.

    My first museum visit was to the storied National Gallery of Art. Its outstanding collection spans the Middle Ages to the present and encompasses two buildings—the neoclassical original and a contemporary one designed by I.M. Pei. The sculpture garden is also a delight. There are so many wonderful exhibitions and works of art on display that it’s hard to pick a favorite. I did, however, love Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life. If you love museums, the National Gallery will take most of the day.

    United States Capitol rotunda with the fresco The Apotheosis of Washington.

    The next day started with a VIP tour of the United States Capitol by a staff member of my state congressional representative. From the spacious visitor center and Exhibition Hall, the tour traveled from the original entrance, Senate, and Supreme Court to the wondrous Capitol Rotunda and National Statuary Hall. The tour concluded with a visit to the House of Representatives Chamber (no cameras/cell phones were allowed). As all points in Washington, D.C. radiate from this point geographically and politically, it is here that you literally feel our republic in action.

    The Great Hall in the Library of Congress.

    From an architectural standpoint alone, the Library of Congress is well worth a visit. The Main Reading Room would compel even the most reluctant reader to pick up a book. I particularly enjoyed the Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution exhibition. The exhibition contrasts two living legends who lived at the same time – George Washington and King George III.

    The view from the top of the Washington Monument.

    Needless to say, a visit to the top of the Washington Monument reveals breathtaking views of D.C. From there, a visit to the solemnity of the World War II Memorial, followed by the Lincoln Memorial, was in order. One can’t help but be reflective and thankful when viewing President Abraham Lincoln’s statue. If it were not for Lincoln, there would not be a United States of America. Although I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address in grade school, the following excerpt from his speech, written over 150 years ago, still resonates today, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” I know we can.

    “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As an American citizen (and for all those who aspire to be), that singular sentence in the Declaration of Independence forms the bedrock of this country. My visit to the National Archives the next day to view the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was rightly an emotional one. For it was the authorship, execution, and adherence to these documents that established the United States. While it’s easy to take what we have here for granted if you’ve never traveled outside the country, I, for one, am both happy and thankful to see the sign “Welcome to the United States” when I return from an international trip.

    1964 Aston Martin DB5 at the International Spy Museum.

    For those who follow me on social media or know me personally, you know I love the world of James Bond. Therefore, a visit to the International Spy Museum was a must! When you first enter the lobby, you are greeted by the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger. That certainly gets you in the mood for spying! But this museum is much more than Bond. It takes you into the world of covert intelligence agencies around the world, with their stories, gadgets, and missions. The museum does an excellent job of covering spy networks in the OAS (precursor to the CIA) from WWII through the Cold War decades, and it features riveting exhibitions that test your abilities as a spy. Although I was there for 3.5 hours, I easily could have spent the majority of the day.

    The Apollo 11 command module at the National Air and Space Museum.

    With my passion for NASA, space exploration, and all things aviation, day four was my visit to the National Air and Space Museum. Although I had previously visited the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia near Dulles International Airport, I had yet to visit the museum’s location on the Mall. As you enter the lobby, you’re greeted by the Friendship 7 space capsule that carried John Glenn—the first American to orbit Earth—to space. Just next to the capsule is the unflown Lunar Module from the Apollo era. You don’t need to walk far from the Lunar Module to see the iconic model of the Starship Enterprise from the 1960s TV series Star Trek. When you juxtapose the original Wright Flyer with the Apollo 11 command module, Columbia, in the same building, you can’t help but be in awe of what mankind can accomplish. In less than a century, we went from flying 120 feet at just over 6 miles per hour to landing a man on the Moon. In a museum like this, you can imagine what’s possible in the next 100 years.

    A Siberian Tiger at the National Zoo.

    My vacation to Washington, D.C. concluded the next day with a visit to the National Zoo. Having grown up on a farm, I became very familiar with a variety of animals. But certainly, the variety I lived with didn’t compare to what this magnificent zoo offered! From Giant Pandas, Asian elephants, Andean Bears, Brown Pelicans, and Siberian Tigers to over 2,000 other animals, the National Zoo has something for everyone. I particularly loved seeing the Beavers. When we lived on our farm, a family of Beavers turned our small brook into a large lake!

    The Lincoln Memorial.

    While my vacation to our nation’s capital may have come to an end, I left with a renewed appreciation for my country. While the Capitol represents our government, it is the museums that embody the very essence of the country. From history to art to science and all their interrelated fields, one leaves Washington, D.C., knowing more than when they arrived. The uniqueness of the United States should never be taken for granted. As the United States will soon celebrate its 250th anniversary, the founding fathers would be proud that, because of three words in the Constitution, the United States has withstood tyranny and triumphed, resulting in American exceptionalism. 

    “We the People”

    Until my next visit! #GoldfingerMovie #history #InternationalSpyMuseum #LibraryOfCongress #LincolnMemorial #Military #NationalAirAndSpaceMuseum #NationalArchives #NationalGalleryOfArt #NationalMall #NationalZoo #StarTrek #travel #UnitedStatesCapitol #usa #USSIowa #USSNewJersey #vacation #WashingtonDC #WashingtonMonument #WorldWarIIMemorial
  2. What To Watch On YouTube Right Now – Part 138

    Welcome back my readers, YouTube viewers and all others who followed this series of articles focused on YouTube videos worth watching.

    Have you been searching for something fun or interesting to watch on YouTube? Do you feel bored right now and you crave for something to see on the world’s most popular online video destination?

    I recommend you check out the following videos I found.

    #1 How To Get The Strongest And Most Optimized Spaceship Crew In Starfield – This year, Bethesda launched several important updates to make their 2023 science fiction role-playing game Starfield better and they also offered new DLC for those who crave for new content. One of the more defining aspects of the game is space travel and this includes setting up your own crew for your spaceship and there is impact on its functions and capabilities. If you want to learn how to get the stronger and most optimized crew for your ship, I encourage you watch the video below.

    https://youtu.be/vy8iOx7eqVU?si=gn7W1mZxTOQ4SSrd

    #2 Mari Iijima And The Defining Song of Macross: Do You Remember Love? – I really love watching the 1984 anime feature film Macross: Do You Remember Love? Apart from the great animation, the spectacle, the memorable characters and the solid storytelling, the movie also has a great soundtrack made to delight the long-time Macross fans. Still, the movie has its very own song performed by none other than Mari Iijima (Minmay) and it is a classic among Macross fans. In the videos below, you will see Mari Iijima perform the song live in a 1980s TV broadcast and the song playing with selected footage of Macross: Do You Remember Love? Enjoy these!

    https://youtu.be/OfuW_Wbt73c?si=Q1DE8eJxo4Zk90pc

    https://youtu.be/uJBMYV9e1Nc?si=veDGYU4r7s0flQ_H

    #3 The Tuna City In Japan Is Changing With Tourism In Mind – If you plan to visit Japan at all, you might want to discover Miura City located in Kanagawa Prefecture. Miura City is famous for its fresh tuna and in recent times there has been a series of changes as several room-only hotels and new trends have sprouted as the locality is finding new ways to turn visitors into overnight guests. This is a place I would like to visit someday if ever I get the opportunity to return to Japan. Watch and learn from the Nippon TV video below.

    https://youtu.be/fUPP30fYH78?si=MrC6Dml3IRVe7fcV

    #4 Women’s Rights Activist Marries Islamist And Things Went Wrong – Did you notice that there is a gradual rising number of feminists and women’s rights activists who not embrace Islam (wicked and ugly) but also marry Islamists believing that things will be alright and they can just continue their activism. Of course, many of them activists and feminists do not fully understand Islam nor the full content of the Quran. As such, when things go very wrong, they are get into deep trouble. Watch and learn from the video below.

    https://youtu.be/bx3YvoyP6cw?si=omxqhyR8CQfpfhYK

    #5 Islamists Violate Hindu Women In India And Get Arrested – Let’s be very clear here. Islamists are oriented to conquer others even though they may not be numerous within a locality. Believe it or not, a group of such people who wielded power inside a business violated the Hindu women (plus at least one male employee) with regards to cultural norms and doing things that go against their faith. Even forced religious conversion happened. Watch and learn from the video below.

    https://youtu.be/9xjFS-3Vuws?si=xuDIivIonrp9tQux

    #6 Meatballs Reaction And Retrospective – When it comes to cinematic comedy, Bill Murray is iconic and his early work in 1979’s Meatballs already involved the late Harold Ramis and the late director Ivan Reitman. That said, there is something about Meatballs – produced for less than $2 million – that helped it achieve tremendous commercial success with ticket sales of $70 million. Remember, three of the creative minds behind the classic Ghostbusters are involved in this old movie and you will see how You, Me and The Movies react to it in the video below. Be aware that as of this writing, there are not too many movie reaction videos about Meatballs on YouTube. Also posted below is an in-depth retrospective about Meatballs by GoodBadFlicks.

    https://youtu.be/nhR9xUCvpAI?si=Zh6gjAX0SdIrtSfT

    https://youtu.be/D0BS-K3K_vE?si=HtyR_VThLUKv0Wj6

    #7 Ashleigh Burton Reacts To The Thin Man – Have you ever heard of The Thin Man? It’s not a UFO reference. It’s the 1934 American pre-Code comedy-mystery movie that was eventually named to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress having been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 1997. Apart from its reputation in American film history, The Thin Man also resulted in five sequels. If you want to discover the 1934 movie but you don’t have the time nor resources to watch the movie, watch Ashleigh Burton’s reaction video and see how it impacts her.

    https://youtu.be/IJRQXuw–20?si=mSYY7_Eb4EK6reBY

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    #1930s #1970s #1980s #1990s #amusement #animation #anime #AshleighBurton #Asia #Bethesda #BethesdaSoftworks #BillMurray #CarloCarrasco #CBR #CBRCom #ChatGPT #cinema #classics #ComicBookResourcesCBR #Communist #crime #entertainment #entertainmentBlog #Facebook #feminism #feminist #film #fish #food #forcedConversion #fun #geek #GoodBadFlicks #Google #GoogleSearch #Hindu #holiday #immigration #Inclusion #India #Indians #Instagram #IslamicTerrorists #Islamist #IslamoLeft #IvanReitman #Japan #KanagawaPrefecture #KhanNida #liberal #LibraryOfCongress #LynnMinmay #Macross #MacrossDoYouRememberLove #MariIijima #Marxist #meatballs #Minmay #MiuraCity #movies #music #Muslim #MuslimWomen #Muslims #mustSee #mustWatch #NationalFilmRegistry #Nippon #NipponTV #nostalgia #onlineVideos #religion #Reviews #rolePlayingGameRPG #SaharTV #sciFi #scienceFiction #sex #sexualAssault #sexualHarassment #ShariaLaw #ShariahLawIsWicked #SJW #SJWs #socialJustice #socialJusticeWarriorSJW #SocialJusticeWarriorsSJWs #socialMedia #socialist #spaceTravel #spaceship #Starfield #SuperDimensionFortressMacross #Tata #TataConsultancyServicesTCS #terrorism #terrorists #The1930s #The1970s #The1980s #The1990s #TheThinMan #tourism #tourismBlog #tourists #travel #travelBlog #Tumblr #tuna #Twitter #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmericaUSA #USA #vacation #video #videoBlog #videos #WhatToWatchOnYouTube #women #womenSInterest #womenSRights #WordPress #WordPressCom #Xbox #YouMeAndTheMovies #YouTube #YouTuber #YouTubers
  3. Pop Culture Library Review @popculturelibraries.wordpress.com@popculturelibraries.wordpress.com ·

    Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

    After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

    Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

    Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

    The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

    In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

    Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

    Compilation of four photographs of the Reading Room within the British Library, taken on August 3, 2025 (Photographs by me. Sorry for the blurriness in one of these photos)

    What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

    The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

    The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

    This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

    My photograph on the left on August 3, 2024, of the Rosetta Stone replica in the Enlightenment Gallery, and image of the replica from K-On! the Movie on the right.

    The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

    The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

    When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

    Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

    © 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

    Sources used

    #AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

  4. The Roberts court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with these key exceptions – Los Angeles Times

    U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, foreground, and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett attend President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in March. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

    Politics

    The Supreme Court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with key exceptions

    U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, foreground, and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett attend President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in March.
    (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

    By David G. Savage, Staff Writer Follow. Jan. 1, 2026 3 AM PT

    • For much of the year, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the five other conservatives were in the majority ruling for Trump.
    • The court has been criticized for handing down temporary unsigned orders with little or no explanation.

    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ended the first year of President Trump’s second term with a record of rulings that gave him much broader power to control the federal government.

    In a series of fast-track decisions, the justices granted emergency appeals and set aside rulings from district judges who blocked Trump’s orders from taking effect.

    With the court’s approval, the administration dismissed thousands of federal employees, cut funding for education and health research grants, dismantled the agency that funds foreign aid and cleared the way for the U.S. military to reject transgender troops.

    But the court also put two important checks on the president’s power.

    In April, the court twice ruled — including in a post-midnight order — that the Trump administration could not secretly whisk immigrants out of the country without giving them a hearing before a judge.

    Upon taking office, Trump claimed migrants who were alleged to belong to “foreign terrorist” gangs could be arrested as “enemy aliens” and flown secretly to a prison in El Salvador.

    See caption and more at below link.

    https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-23/supreme-court-trump-national-guard-chicago – See more at the above link.

    Politics

    Supreme Court rules against Trump, bars National Guard deployment in Chicago, Dec. 23, 2025

    Roberts and the court blocked such secret deportations and said the 5th Amendment entitles immigrants, like citizens, a right to “due process of law.” Many of the arrested men had no criminal records and said they never belonged to a criminal gang.
    Those who face deportation “are entitled to notice and opportunity to challenge their removal,” the justices said in Trump vs. J.G.G.

    They also required the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. He is now back in Maryland with his wife, but may face further criminal charges or efforts to deport him.

    And last week, Roberts and the court barred Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago to enforce the immigration laws.

    Trump had claimed he had the power to defy state governors and deploy the Guard troops in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Chicago and other Democratic-led states and cities.

    The Supreme Court disagreed over dissents from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Roberts court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with these key exceptions – Los Angeles Times

    Tags: 2025, America, Chief Justice Roberts, Donald Trump, Health, History, Libraries, Library, Library of Congress, Los Angeles Times, National Guard, Only Two Checks, Opinion, Politics, Presidential Power, Republicans, Resistance, Right-Wing Votes, Roberts Court, Science, SCOTUS, Supreme Court of the United States, The Los Angeles Times, Trump, Trump Administration, Trump's Power, United States
    #2025 #America #ChiefJusticeRoberts #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #LosAngelesTimes #NationalGuard #OnlyTwoChecks #Opinion #Politics #PresidentialPower #Republicans #Resistance #RightWingVotes #RobertsCourt #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheLosAngelesTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSPower #UnitedStates
  5. The political danger of the Epstein files for Trump – CNN Politics

    Ghislaine Maxwell

    The political danger of the Epstein files for Trump

    Politics• 4 min read

    Analysis by Aaron Blake, 10 hr ago

    Jeffrey Epstein andDonald Trump pose for a photograph at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida on February 22, 1997. Davidoff Studios Photography / Getty Images.

    If President Donald Trump has nothing to hide vis-à-vis Jeffrey Epstein, he sure has a weird way of showing it.

    Trump hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with the convicted sex offender, but he’s doing a great job of looking suspicious.

    And that could be a political problem in and of itself – regardless of whatever ultimately comes from the Epstein files.

    A batch of newly released Epstein emails on Wednesday added details about Trump’s past relationship with Epstein but no smoking guns. (The White House said the emails “prove absolutely nothing.”)

    In one of those emails from 2011, Epstein expressed surprise to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump’s name hadn’t surfaced amid accusations involving Epstein. Epstein added that Trump had at one point spent hours with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre at Epstein’s house.

    Related article Takeaways from the new Epstein emails mentioning Trump

    And in 2019, Epstein appeared to signal Trump was quite aware of Maxwell recruiting girls from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the early 2000s, saying “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

    While some have claimed these emails show Trump had knowledge of or even involvement in Epstein’s crimes, it’s not nearly so evident. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, has acknowledged meeting Trump and never accused him of wrongdoing. And Trump has acknowledged being aware of Maxwell recruiting employees including Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago. (The big question there is whether Trump had any inkling about what Maxwell was recruiting a minor female like Giuffre for.)

    But also notable on Wednesday was Trump’s reaction.

    As all this was going down, he and his White House seemed preoccupied with what appeared to an 11th-hour campaign to thwart a House discharge petition that would force a vote on releasing the full Epstein files.

    With the petition due to get a decisive 218th signature when a new Democratic member of Congress was sworn in later that day, the White House held a meeting in the Situation Room with a key GOP lawmaker who’d signed on, while another said she was playing phone tag with the president. Both GOP congresswomen later told CNN Trump hadn’t personally lobbied them to remove their names. But the president also publicly pressured Republicans who sided with Democrats on forcing Epstein disclosures.

    It was a weird move, to be sure. No Republicans removed their names from the petition, and Speaker Mike Johnson quickly said he would schedule a vote for next week on compelling the Justice Department to release the full files.

    Related article Trump is getting pulled deeper and deeper into the Epstein drama

    Even if the measure passes in the House, that’s not the end of the story. The GOP-led Senate would still have to take it up, and Trump would still have to sign it. So it’s not like this will cause the imminent release of the documents.

    But Trump’s resistance to something his base has long clamored for – and the optics of the Situation Room meeting in particular – would only seem to deepen the huge suspicions that a large number of Americans already harbor about the government covering up Epstein-related matters.

    And that gets at the big point here – and the political danger for Trump.

    This is merely the latest baffling episode in the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Among the others:

    Even if Trump doesn’t have anything to hide, the danger here is in making it look a whole lot like he does.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: The political danger of the Epstein files for Trump | CNN Politics

    Tags: 2025, America, CNN, CNN Politics, Denials, Donald Trump, Education, Epstein, Epstein Files, False Claims, Ghislaine Maxwell, Health, History, Jeffrey Epstein, Libraries, Library, Library of Congress, Maxwell Interview, Opinion, Politics, Prison, Resistance, Science, Trump, Trump Administration, United States

    #2025 #america #cnn #cnnPolitics #denials #donaldTrump #education #epstein #epsteinFiles #falseClaims #ghislaineMaxwell #health #history #jeffreyEpstein #libraries #library #libraryOfCongress #maxwellInterview #opinion #politics #prison #resistance #science #trump #trumpAdministration #unitedStates

  6. Perlmutter Tells SCOTUS Trump is Making ‘An Inexcusable Mess’ of Library of Congress Governance – IPWatchdog.com -Patents & Intellectual Property Law

    By Eileen McDermott, 7 hours ago

    Perlmutter Tells SCOTUS Trump is Making ‘An Inexcusable Mess’ of Library of Congress Governance

    “The question here is not whether the Register of Copyrights or the Librarian of Congress has any functions that can be characterized as ‘executive’ for constitutional purposes; it is whether Congress decided to organize the Library as an ‘Executive agency’”.

    Photo from article…

    Two weeks after the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay an interlocutory injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in September that allowed Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to return to her post pending her lawsuit against President Donald Trump for allegedly illegally removing her from office, Perlmutter has responded.

    In her opposition to the application for a stay, filed on Monday, Perlmutter accused the administration of making “an inexcusable mess of Congress’s plans for the governance of its Library.”

    Trump’s application argued that the D.C. appellate court’s injunction represents “another case of improper judicial interference with the President’s power to remove executive officers” and that its “analysis contravenes settled precedent and misconceives the Librarian’s and Register’s legal status.” The powers of the Librarian and Register have been classified as executive by the Supreme Court, said the administration’s brief, “such as the power to issue rules implementing a federal statute, to issue orders in administrative adjudications, and even to conduct foreign relations relating to copyright issues.”

    But Perlmutter argued in her opposition that “the question here is not whether the Register of Copyrights or the Librarian of Congress has any functions that can be characterized as ‘executive’ for constitutional purposes; it is whether Congress decided to organize the Library as an ‘Executive agency’—not just for purposes of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (“FVRA”), 5 U.S.C. § 3345 et seq., but for all of the purposes for which the same definition of “Executive agency” is used in Title 5, 5 U.S.C. § 105.”

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Perlmutter Tells SCOTUS Trump is Making ‘An Inexcusable Mess’ of Library of Congress Governance – IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Intellectual Property Law Perlmutter Tells SCOTUS Trump is Making ‘An Inexcusable Mess’ of Library of Congress Governance

    Tags: "Inexcusable Mess", Copyright, D.C. Circuit, Donald Trump, Intellectual Property, IPWatchdog.com, Library of Congress, Patents, SCOTUS, Shira Perlmutter, Trump, U.S. Congress, U.S. Court of Appeals

    #inexcusableMess #copyright #dCCircuit #donaldTrump #intellectualProperty #ipwatchdogCom #libraryOfCongress #patents #scotus #shiraPerlmutter #trump #uSCongress #uSCourtOfAppeals

  7. Letters from an American – November 10, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

    Letters from an American, November 10, 2025

    By Heather Cox Richardson, Nov 10, 2025

    Last night, the Senate advanced a measure to end the government shutdown, which at 41 days today is the longest in U.S. history.

    November 10, 2025 by Heather Cox Richardson

    Read on Substack

    Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece.

    The measure stops the administration’s firings of public employees during the shutdown, reinstating them with full pay. States will be reimbursed for monies they spent covering for federal shortfalls during the shutdown. This means air traffic controllers, who have been working without pay for more than a month, will get paid again.

    The measure also funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), although it does not restore the cuts Republicans made to it in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

    While the measure provides more funding for Indigenous health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums. Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

    Senate Democrats said they would not advance a measure to end the shutdown without a deal to extend the premium tax credits, but seven of them, along with one Independent, have now done so. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has promised to bring to the Senate floor a bill to extend the premium tax credits before the end of the second week of December. It will be written by the Democrats.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: November 10, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

    Tags: 2025, America, Democratic Party, Democratic Shutdown Deal, Donald Trump, Education, Heather Cox Richardson, History, Letters from an American, Library, Library of Congress, Opinion, Politics, Resistance, Science, Trump, Trump Administration, U.S. Federal Shutdown 2025, United States

    #2025 #America #DemocraticParty #DemocraticShutdownDeal #DonaldTrump #Education #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USFederalShutdown2025 #UnitedStates

  8. One Trillion Web Pages Archived: Internet Archive Celebrates a Civilization-Scale Milestone | Internet Archive Blogs

    Internet Archive Blogs, Updates from the Internet Archive

    Photo by Ruben Rodriguez, October 22, 2025.

    One Trillion Web Pages Archived: Internet Archive Celebrates a Civilization-Scale Milestone

    Posted on October 31, 2025 by Caralee Adams

    One trillion! There was no mistaking the number that was center stage at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on October 22.

    “We are celebrating a major goal of one trillion web pages…shared by people all over the world, wanting to make sure that what they know is passed on,” said Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “It’s a fantastic, phenomenal success story.”

    Watch the livestream: https://archive.org/embed/the-web-weve-built-2025?start=525

    Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been saving the digital history of the internet. In October, it surpassed the threshold of preserving one trillion web pages—a fact that was met with enthusiastic applause each time it was mentioned at the party held at the non-profit research library’s Funston Avenue headquarters in San Francisco.

    People should not take for granted the important role that libraries, including the Internet Archive, have played in compiling accurate information and making it accessible to all, said California State Senator Scott Weiner, who presented a Certificate of Recognition from the State of California Senate to the Internet Archive. “We’re seeing now in this country people trying to rewrite history and come up with alternative facts,” he said at the event. “What the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine does is to make clear that everything is there. I am so deeply grateful.” [watch remarks]

    California State Senator Scott Weiner. Photos by Brad Shirakawa, October 22, 2025.

    In a video message, Vint Cerf, creator of the Internet and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, said the one-trillion-page mark is an incredible milestone. “[The Internet Archive] has preserved an enormous amount of history over the course of their data collection, something which I feel is absolutely essential,” he said. “In the absence of what they have done, the 22nd century will have no clue what the 21st Century was all about.”

    Looking Back, Looking Ahead

    The program included a glimpse back at early days of the web and a hopeful vision for the future.

    “There was this dream of an internet that was made for us, by us, to be able to make us better people,” Kahle said. “Yes, using technology. Yes, having games with lots of different players and winners—a fun and interesting world, and that is very much still within our grasp.”

    Audrey Witters, creator and community builder.

    Audrey Witters, a veteran of the early web, brought the audience back to 1994—when all existing websites could still fit on a single “What’s New” page. Reflecting on her early days at NCSA and her creative experiments on GeoCities, Witters shared the story of how a small animated alien GIF she helped create became an unlikely icon of the early web. “It’s so important for us to remember that context, that spirit, that joy of creation—what happens when you give people the tools and invitation to publicly and exuberantly celebrate themselves,” she said. Thanking the Internet Archive for preserving that era’s spirit of discovery and collaboration, Witters urged the next generation of creators “to look for new opportunities to promote exploration, collaboration, and joyful expression. Here’s to the next trillion!”

    Lily Jamali, BBC News.

    Lily Jamali, an investigative journalist with BBC News, said she appreciates the Archive’s public service mission and tools that are “absolutely fundamental” to hold the powerful to account. “They help us journalists fact check claims,” she said from the Great Room stage. “They help us see how companies and governments may have selectively edited online materials, or even deleted statements or social media posted that they would rather that the public didn’t see.” [watch remarks]

    Journalists can no longer rely on their news outlets to store their work, Jamali said, so many turn to the Wayback Machine to access past articles and inform their reporting.

    In a highly entertaining segment full of Wikipedia screen shots and laughs, Annie Rauwerda, creator of Depths of Wikipedia, spoke about the crucial partnership between Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. She highlighted how archived pages make citations stronger and more durable by ensuring that even when the original source disappears, the evidence remains. “If Wikipedia is worth anything at all, it’s because of the citations,” Rauwerda said.

    Annie Rauwerda, Depths of Wikipedia.

    CEO of National Public Radio Katherine Maher offered her congratulations via video for the event. “One trillion web pages. That’s one trillion artifacts and snapshots of our interconnected world,” she said. “It’s a testament to the Internet Archives’ unwavering commitment to safeguarding the integrity of the open web and its history, ensuring that this vast digital record remains free and open for everyone.”

    NPR and the Internet Archive share a deep commitment to providing access to information, a dedication to public service and a belief in strengthening societies through information and dialog, Maher said. “We live today in an era in which information is unstable. It emerges suddenly, decays rapidly, disappears instantly,” she said. “In this moment, the Archive’s role in preserving news, public discourse and our shared stories is more critical than ever.”

    With Wayback Machine, ‘Knowledge Will Not Be Lost’

    Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine

    When the U.S. government websites started going offline after the change in presidential administrations earlier this year, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, said he wasn’t panicking. Why? Because since 2004 the Internet Archive has collaborated with many partners to save federal web pages, through the End of Term Web Archive effort. Since last fall, Graham described efforts to preserve more than 400 million web pages, 2 million videos and hundreds of thousands of data sets—all published by the U.S. government, and therefore available to the public. [watch remarks]

    With the Wikimedia Foundation, the Archive has identified and fixed more than 28 million broken links from Wikipedia. It also added more than 4.2 million links to books and papers available from www.archive.org. Graham announced the new partnership with Automattic Inc. to make it easy for WordPress operators to automatically find and repair broken links with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer.

    The Internet Archive faces challenges with the advent of AI. More services are blocking access, Graham said, making it harder for memory institutions, like the Internet Archive, to do their  jobs—yet, the team remains diligent in its efforts.

    “We’re going to keep on building the library that the world deserves, one that remembers, one that connects us, and one that ensures no matter how much the web changes, that knowledge will not be lost,” Graham said.

    The Path Forward

    Luca Messarra, cultural historian, Stanford University

    Luca Messarra, a humanities scholar and educator at Stanford University, said preserving webpages is important because the past is always shaping the present moment. “History is essential because it helps us understand how our own lives came to be. But more importantly, for me, history helps us understand how our lives can be made different,” he said. “The past tells us that the present does not need to be the way that it is.” [watch remarks]

    Messarra said he has used resources from the Internet Archive to write conference papers, recover his old chat messaging history and recover a favorite family biscuit recipe.

    “The Wayback Machine has tended to one trillion seeds that will nourish our future. All that remains is for us to harvest and use them,” Messarra said. “One trillion pages are one trillion opportunities to change our present moment. That requires that we look at the past not with nostalgia, but with initiative.”

    The largest repository of internet history ever assembled is possible thanks to thousands of donations to the Internet Archive and 200,000 unique donors, said Joy Chesbrough, director of philanthropy. At the event, she announced a new campaign that encourages individuals to create their own fundraising teams to support the Internet Archive. See https://donate.archive.org/1t [watch remarks]

    It was the largest gathering for the Archive’s annual party in years, said Chris Freeland, director of library services, and he hoped the gathering fostered a sense of connection.

    “It was a nostalgic throwback, but it also showed people a path forward for a web that we want,” Freeland said. “I hope people come away with this sense of optimism and a thought that this is our web, and we can be in control of it again.” Posted in Announcements, Event, News, Wayback Machine – Web Archive | Tagged celebration, Wayback1T | Leave a reply

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: One Trillion Web Pages Archived: Internet Archive Celebrates a Civilization-Scale Milestone | Internet Archive Blogs

    #2025 #America #Books #CivilizationRecord #Education #History #HistoryPreserved #InternetArchive #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Milestone #Movies #October22 #Opinion #Preservation #Reading #SanFrancisco #Science #Technology #Television #UnitedStates #WaybackMachine

  9. Opinion – Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era – The New York Times

    The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion. Credit…The New York Times.

    Opinion Interesting Times

    Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era

    The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion.

     There’s a roster of cases before the Supreme Court that could reshape the entire Trump presidency and redefine executive power. And my guest this week, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is likely to be the decisive vote in some of these cases.

    Unfortunately but predictably, that means that she couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to my most direct questions about the Trump administration.

    But my goal was to push the justice on a question that she can answer, and one that she addresses at length in her new book, “Listening to the Law.” I wanted to know whether her preferred legal theory, originalism, can bend and flex in response to prudential and political concerns.

    Barrett believes strongly that it shouldn’t, that justices should rule without worrying about public opinion or who happens to be in the White House. But I tend to think real-world politics constantly tests and limits that ideal. So in our conversation, I’m trying to find those limits and the ways in which even justices devoted to the original meaning of the Constitution have to deal with the highly unusual pressures of right now.

    Amy Coney Barrett Doesn’t Need You to Like Her

    The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion.

    Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Editor’s Note: Embedded from Spotify below.

    Ross Douthat: Justice Barrett, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

    Amy Coney Barrett: Thank you for having me, Ross.

    Douthat: I honestly would never have said no. [Barrett chuckles.]

    Your book is mostly about — and we’re mostly going to talk about theories of jurisprudence, the place of the Supreme Court in American life, possibly some issues related to the Trump presidency and executive power — but it does start with a little window into the personal world of Amy Coney Barrett, so I’m going to start with a couple of questions about that terrain.

    We looked it up, and you are the first guest we’ve had on the show who has more children than I do — which is only because we haven’t yet succeeded in booking Elon Musk, I should say.

    Barrett: [Laughs.] There’s still time for you to catch up with me.

    Douthat: That’s a bold statement. I appreciate your confidence in my youthful energy and vigor.

    When you were being nominated, this newspaper, The New York Times, ran a story that talked about your mix of personal and professional obligations and how it made you a certain kind of trailblazer. And the story described you — and you can accept this description or not — as “a woman who is both unabashedly ambitious and deeply religious, who has excelled at the heights of a demanding profession,” even as she speaks openly about prioritizing her faith and family.

    I’m curious if you actually see yourself this way at all? Do you see yourself as a particular kind of trailblazer or role model in that kind of balancing act?

    Barrett: I don’t see myself as a trailblazer, nor do I love the word “ambitious,” because I feel like the word “ambition” puts a focus on success or ambition for its own sake, which isn’t how I’ve ever conceived of my career.

    When I was growing up — I was born in 1972 — my mom stayed home, and the parents of most of my friends had a working dad and a stay-at-home mom. My kids have had a mix, and for them, it’s become unexceptional to have a mom that worked, whereas it felt like a big thing for me to make the choice because my own mother had a large family — I’m one of seven — which is, I say in the book, that’s what I always wanted. That was my No. 1 priority. And I wasn’t sure that I could do that and work at the same time, but I always have, since I had our first child.

    So I think my life looks different than the life of my mom and my aunts and my friends’ parents at the time, but it’s one that my own daughters and sons and their friends, I hope, can just treat as unexceptional. Like, you can stay home if you want. You can work if you want. You can do both.

    Douthat: Do you think of yourself as a feminist — a conservative feminist, if that is a category that you would accept?

    Barrett: I don’t know, labels are so dangerous because they mean different things to different people. I mean, if being a feminist simply means having the view that women can do whatever it is they put their minds to and have opportunities open to them, then yes, I am.

    But I think any stripe of feminism that you describe is going to have — labels are risky. So I’ll just say: Yes, yes, labels are risky.

    Douthat: Labels are risky, especially when you are charged with the interpretation of the entire U.S. Constitution.

    Barrett: [Laughs.] It’s so true.

    Douthat: How do you actually do it? And I say this as someone who, obviously, works. Here I am working. My wife is a journalist and writer, and we do a lot of the same kind of balancing that you and your husband have done, and it takes some strange forms. But it’s very challenging. Any number of kids is challenging, but to have a large family and have a busy professional life — I’m just curious: As a Supreme Court justice, how do you feel like you guys make it work?

    Barrett: A lot of people ask. That’s probably the question that I get asked most often.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era – The New York Times

    #2025 #America #AmyConeyBarrett #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #InterestingTimes #Interview #JusticeBarrett #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Podcast #Politics #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #Technology #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpEra #UnitedStates

  10. Letters from an American – October 13, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

    Letters from an American

    Letters from an American, October 13, 2025

    By Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 13, 2025

    Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump showed to Canadian officials a plan for a triumphal arch that would sit on the banks of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial in a traffic rotary at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge below Arlington National Cemetery. The idea, apparently, is to build the arch to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States in July 2026.

    On Thursday, the White House press pool reported, the plan was laid out on Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. The massive stone arch appears to be the same height as or taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Early in the morning on Saturday, October 11, Trump posted on social media an artist’s rendering of what such an arch might look like, complete with what appears to be a gold winged victory statue at the top of the arch.

    Triumphal arches are free-standing structures consisting of one or more arches crowned with a flat top for engravings or statues. They hark back to ancient Rome, where leaders built them to commemorate military victories or significant public events. Those arches inspired others, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, built to honor those who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

    Observers immediately noted that the photographed plan showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, and compared the Trump Arch both to the Arc de Triomphe and to another arch modeled on it: the German Arch of Triumph proposed by Adolph Hitler to commemorate Germany’s victory in World War II.

    That triumphal arch was never built.

    Architect Eric Jenkins told Daniel Jonas Roche of The Architect’s Newspaper that the proposed arch would disrupt the symbolic connection between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The two are connected not only by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but also by the Civil War. During that war, the nation began to bury its hallowed dead on the grounds of the former home of General Robert E. Lee, who led the troops of the Confederacy. Lee’s Arlington House sits directly behind the memorial to Lincoln, who led the United States to stop the Confederates from dismantling the nation.

    The proposed construction of a triumphal arch contrasts with the expected sale and probable demolition of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1940, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was built to house the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.

    In August 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. That law established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

    The vision of government behind the Social Security Act was very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, those behind the Social Security Act recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. They replaced that vision with one in which the government recognized that all Americans were equally valuable.

    Their reworking of American government came from the conditions of the United States after the rise of modern industry. Americans had always depended on community, but the harsh conditions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century had made it clear that the government must protect that community. City governments like New York City’s Tammany Hall began to provide a basic system of social welfare for voters, making sure that they had jobs, food, and shelter and that women and children had a support network if a husband or father died.

    Editor’s Note: Please subscribe if you can. Heather provides insights into the legal fiasco, Trump, legal challenges, and more.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: October 13, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

    #2025 #250AnniversityAmerica #America #ArcDeTriomphe #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Substack #triumphalArch #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WashingtonDC

  11. 3 Pillars of Trump’s Power—Including Tariffs—Head to Supreme Court | TIME

    President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House on August 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump’s authority on tariffs, deportations and sending the military into U.S. cities are at stake in major court cases. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

    Sep 10, 2025, 4:00 AM PT

    3 Pillars of Trump’s Power Are Tested, as Pivotal Cases Head to Supreme Court

    By Brian Bennett, Bennett is the senior White House correspondent at TIME.

    The Brief September 10, 2025

    The Brief September 10, 2025

    Editor’s Note: Audio on the linked article/site. Not available to embed.

    In early September, President Donald Trump’s White House sent out a press release laying out ways Trump has been “delivering historic results.” It outed $158 billion in tariff revenues coming into the U.S. since Trump took office. It said that Trump’s border crackdown has led to a 97% drop in northward migration from Central America and that his use of the military for law enforcement in Washington DC is a “model” for other cities.

    It was just the latest example of the Administration highlighting how Trump is following through on his campaign promises to aggressively deploy tariffs, ramp up deportations, and send the National Guard into U.S. cities. But a recent drumbeat of court rulings have called those three central actions of Trump’s presidency into question. Lower courts are repeatedly finding that Trump has exceeded his powers as President under the Constitution. In just the last two weeks, federal courts ruled that most of his tariffs are illegal, that he violated a law prohibiting the use of soldiers for law enforcement inside the U.S., and that many of his most high-profile deportations were based on a faulty reading of law.

    The White House is challenging all of those decisions, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to ultimately determine if if Trump may have to rein in his efforts in those areas The high court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority thanks to the three justices Trump hand-picked during his first term, has so far taken an expansive view of Trump’s ability to act.

    Here are three major actions Trump has taken that are in jeopardy and appear destined for the Supreme Court:

    Issuing Tariffs

    A federal court ruled in late August that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal because they were imposed without Congressional approval. But that lower court held off on enacting its order to give the Trump Administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the high court announced it was expediting the tariff case, demanding briefs from all sides from the government and the plaintiffs by Sept. 19 in order to hear in-person arguments in early November.

    The case was brought by a group of small businesses that said the tariffs Trump imposed so far “amount to an average tax increase of $1,200-$2,800 per American household.” The business owners argued that issuing those tariffs were beyond the President’s powers under the Constitution. Article I of the Constitution empowered Congress to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and demands that bills for raising revenue “shall originate in the House of Representatives.” (CONTINUED)

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: 3 Pillars of Trump’s Power—Including Tariffs—Head to Supreme Court | TIME

    #2025 #America #DemocraticStates #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalGuard #Opinion #Pillars #Politics #Resistance #Science #SpeedingDeportations #Tariffs #Three #Time #TimeMagazine #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSPower #USCities #UnitedStates

  12. Closer Look: Library Collections Pages | Teaching with the Library

    Teaching with the Library Primary Sources & Ideas for Educators, ISSN 2691-6916

    Closer Look: Library Collections Pages

    June 24, 2025, Posted by: Cheryl Lederle

    Many of the online collections from the Library of Congress include tools to help researchers, including student researchers, find what they need in the collection. Exploring those expert resources early in their research process can give students valuable context, a better understanding of what might be in the collection, and can help them decide whether or not to examine the collection further, reducing frustration and improving search results.

    Though the available information varies by collection, collections typically include a tab “About this Collection” as well as the “Collection Items” tab. Some collections also have a tab of “Articles and Essays” for additional context. The left navigation of the “About…” page links to related resources, when available, and includes information about “Rights and Access.”

    Featured Content, a carousel highlighting select items, is a prominent feature of the “About this Collection” pages. Students might browse the carousel to get a sense of the kinds of items in the collection, or they might select an item and examine it to glean information and to generate questions to inspire and focus additional research.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Closer Look: Library Collections Pages | Teaching with the Library

    #2025 #Blogs #Books #CloserLook #Education #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryCollections #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Reading #Science #TeachingWithTheLibrary #Technology

  13. Letters from an American – August 13, 2025 -Heather Cox Richardson

    August 13, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson

    On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

    The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

    The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.

    Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

    As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

    The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

    The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

    The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 13, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

    Original article: View source

    #2025 #America #DonaldTrump #FDR #FrancisPerkins #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #SecretaryOfLabor #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

  14. Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid – SFGate

    FILE: A protestor flees as Customs and Border Protection officers fire chemical agents into the crowd during a raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, Calif., July 10, 2025. BLAKE FAGAN / AFP via Getty Images

    CANNABIS

    Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid

    By Lester Black, Cannabis editor, Aug 4, 2025

    Glass House Brands released its first public comment Monday since the California company faced a violent raid from federal authorities last month that left one man dead and hundreds arrested. 

    On July 10, federal agents searched two of the company’s Southern California cultivation facilities — one in Ventura County and one in Santa Barbara County — in an operation that quickly descended into chaos. Officers fired tear gas inside the facilities and searched for immigrants as hundreds of protesters gathered outside to protest the Donald Trump administration’s action. One worker fell from a green house and later died, marking the first known death in Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

    Following the raid, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had arrested at least 361 people suspected of being in the country illegally, as well as 14 “migrant children,” although the agency hasn’t shared any court documentation behind those figures. 

    Glass House, one of California’s largest legal cannabis companies, had not issued any public comment in the weeks following the raid other than a post to X on July 11 confirming it was being raided. 

    On Monday, the company broke its silence with a news release that outlined details of the operation, including that nine company employees were detained or arrested. The company said any other people arrested would have been employed by farm labor companies that provide employees for the farm, which is a common practice at agricultural facilities.

    AI image created for post…

    Glass House said that it has not been able to determine the identities of the alleged minors but said that if minors were at the facility “none of them were Glass House employees.”

    There has been widespread fear in the cannabis industry that federal agents could have been conducting a much broader operation investigating the cultivation of marijuana itself, which is still federally illegal and could lead to federal criminal charges against the company and its staff. Video apparently taken during the raid and posted to social media showed a federal agent saying, “This is not an immigration raid.”

    Monday’s news release countered that narrative, saying the raid was led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that the search warrant was authorized specifically for “evidence of possible immigration violations.” Glass House said that “very few documents were seized pursuant to the search warrant.”

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid

    #2025 #America #California #CannabisFarm #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #SFGate #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

  15. Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

    Attendees pass a political “free-speech zone” at Cochise College in Douglas, Arizona, on Sept. 27, 2024. (Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

    Opinion

    Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

    New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

    July 14, 2025, 5 mins

    By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

    Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

    As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

    Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

    Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

    Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

    Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

    #2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

  16. Letters from an American – July 15, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

    By Heather Cox Richardson, July 15, 2025

    Heather Cox Richardson

    Without any explanation, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court yesterday granted a stay on a lower court’s order that the Trump administration could not gut the Department of Education while the issue is in the courts. The majority thus throws the weight of the Supreme Court behind the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of departments established by Congress—a power the Supreme Court denied when President Richard M. Nixon tried it in 1973.

    This is a major expansion of presidential power, permitting the president to disregard laws Congress has passed, despite the Constitution’s clear assignment of lawmaking power to Congress alone.

    President Donald J. Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education because he claims it pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” Running for office, he promised to “return” education to the states. In fact, the Education Department has never set curriculum; it disburses funds for high-poverty schools and educating students with disabilities. It’s also in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding.

    Trump’s secretary of education, professional wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, supports Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. In March the department announced it would lay off 1,378 employees—about half the department. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the layoffs, and Massachusetts federal judge Myong Joun ordered the department to reinstate the fired workers. The Supreme Court has now put that order on hold, permitting the layoffs to go forward.

    Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan concurred in a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noting that Trump has claimed power to destroy the congressionally established department “by executive fiat” and chastising the right-wing majority for enabling him. “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” they say.

    “The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers. Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.”

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: July 15, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

    #1973 #2025 #America #Children #DepartmentOfEducation #DonaldTrump #Education #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Nixon #Politics #PresidentialPower #PublicSchools #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

  17. Firings without explanation create culture of fear at Justice Dept., FBI – The Washington Post

    Attorney General Pam Bondi, as President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting at the White House on March 24. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post)

    Firings without explanation create culture of fear at Justice Dept., FBI

    Widespread, abrupt terminations have left Justice Department and FBI employees wondering if they will be next, people familiar with the matter say.

    Updated July 10, 2025, 8 min

    By Perry Stein

    The Trump administration is firing and pushing outemployees across the Justice Department and FBI, often with no explanation or warning, creating rampant speculation and fear within the workforce over who might be terminated next, according to multiple people with knowledge of the removals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

    Some people are simply fired, delivered a notice signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi that cites the broad powers afforded to the president in the U.S. Constitution. Others, particularly at the FBI, are told they can leave or be demoted or terminated.

    The removals appear more individually targeted — and are happening in smaller numbers — than the high-profile ousters of senior Justice Department and FBI officials in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, when he vowed to clean house at the department that had brought two criminal cases against him. They are unrelated to the mass reductions-in-force and reorganizations that Trump has launched at many other federal agencies, which the Supreme Court has said may move forward for now. 

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: Firings without explanation create culture of fear at Justice Dept., FBI – The Washington Post

    #2025 #America #DonaldTrump #FBI #Firings #Health #History #January6thAttorneys #JusticeDepartment #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #PamBondi #Politics #Resistance #RevengePolitics #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

  18. "On May 8th, Trump abruptly fired the 14th Librarian of the LOC, Carla Hayden, from her role for “the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” Trump then immediately appointed Todd Blache - his personal attorney from his hush money trial and current Deputy Attorney General - as acting Librarian."

    @5calls

    #Politics #LibraryOfCongress #5Calls

    5 Calls - Protect the Library of Congress - Medi-Nerd 2

    medi-nerd.com/b/2KU

  19. 5 Calls – Protect the Library of Congress

    "On May 8th, Trump abruptly fired the 14th Librarian of the LOC, Carla Hayden, from her role for “the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” Trump then immediately appointed Todd Blache - his personal attorney from his hush money trial and current Deputy Attorney General - as acting Librarian." Voice, Y. (2025). Protect the Library of Congress ⭑ 5 Calls. 5 Calls. https://5calls.org/issue/library-of-congress-librarian/

    medi-nerd.com/2025/05/16/5-cal