Because it needs to be reiterated that Putin, via his agent 
, now controls the US government.
Here before the tariffs go into effect:
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I’m still waiting for the democrats to start pushing hard on this.
While George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Coast Guard signed a contract to get administrative help from a company in Northern Virginia. It paid $144,000, and the contract was completed by June 30, 2005.
Twenty years passed. Presidents came and went.
Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, said it had just canceled the long-dead Coast Guard contract — and in doing so, saved U.S. taxpayers $53.7 million.
That claim, posted on the group’s “wall of receipts,” bewildered experts on federal contracting. And there were others like it. Even after Mr. Musk’s group deleted several large erroneous claims from its website last week, The New York Times found that it had added new mistakes — claiming credit for “canceling” contracts that had actually ended under previous presidents.
“These are not savings,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose firm, The Pulse of GovCon, tracks federal spending. “The money’s been spent. Period. Point blank.”
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I’m reminded of this:
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And more:
Several of the updated receipts link to the wrong contract data, like a Small Business Administration listing for a “Contract for expired Shuttered Venue Program” that instead linked to a BPA for research support. Neither one of those have been canceled.
A DOGE listing notes a National Institutes of Health cancellation for “human capital management and development support” worth $99 million in savings, but erroneously ties it to a still-ongoing $99 million contract for “bioinformatics and computational biology.” A review of the federal contract database finds the actual NIH agreement that was canceled is $9.9 million, with less than a million dollars in estimated savings.
A Department of Health and Human Services contract for administrative assistants that was incorrectly listed in the first tranche of data was changed in this week’s update to a different, incorrect amount. It now promotes a hypothetical savings of $150 million while incorrectly linked to a still active contract for $119,000 in refrigerated liquid gases instead of the actual agreement with a $1.4 million ceiling.
“If DOGE is to have any credibility, especially within the government community, they have to be accurate and understand what they’re reporting,” Byrne, the former contracting officer said. “They can’t be flying by the seat of their pants.”
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In truth there are already lots of countries that have English as one of their official languages, meaning they promise to provide services in it, so I don’t think there is any real problem deciding what that would be. Though I imagine they would stick to the definition being a matter of common sense, it’s the language Jesus spoke as quoted in your presidential edition bibles.
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Maybe they were hoping that nobody would notice.
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Belize.
one reason i looked very closely at relocating to Belize in the first reign of the false emperor tRump, was that English is the official language there, having been previously British Honduras.
while i can understand and speak passible Spanish, moving to a Central American country where i wouldn’t have to try so hard seemed doable to my lazy-by-nature self.
note that, while English may be the official language, in the northern areas where i was looking, you will find a great deal more Mayan, Creole and Spanish speakers.
i loved it!
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Or applauded.
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I’ve been watching this, wondering what their angle is in this one. I don’t live in the US, so there’s likely several implications I’m missing. As you point out, there are plenty of perfectly fine places that have declared official languages.
The last bit I’ve quoted sounds like a clue: I’m guessing a lot of non-English government publications will soon disappear. Things like this:
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This from The Daily Beast: “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems,” [an insider] added.
Commercial interests. Perhaps that will move Trump-friendly CEOs to step in. Yeah. Right.
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Or, more sinisterly, fluency in English being a precondition for citizenship, and lack of fluency being grounds to have it revoked.
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I made a gif from the presser with Zelensky when Trump was talking about hunter biden’s bathroom…
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Oh, no, the “100% American” equivalent: Ku Klux.
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Exactly. The goal of Republicans is to inconvenience anyone who primarily speaks Español.
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This would be a lot funnier if it weren’t so hella stupid and sad:
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Yup, I think you’ve read between the lines perfectly. I mean, there’s the performative aspect, of course, but being able to make life harder for those who speak a different first language is icing on the cake.
Meanwhile, tomorrow is Casimir Pulaski Day in Chicago, meaning all city and county offices/services will be closed for the day (including public schools). Our government offices offer Spanish as an alternate language when you call or visit, of course, but they also offer Polish, which is often listed first.
This should not be considered a bad thing.
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A pointless story about something that happened around 2004 or 2005, while I was working at Macy’s.
I was passing by the Ray-Ban area and took a few minutes to talk to a friend who was working there. The “vendor” was also there in the background, restocking the displays. She was a nice, older woman who usually greeted us with a smile. The Ray-Ban display was a good place to hide-out if you needed a few minutes.
I have no idea what my friend and I were talking about, but eventually the topic came around to the official language of the United States. He was a rather conservative guy from the Dominican Republic. He said he maid a point of learning to speak English to show respect for the country. I said that since this is a democracy, there should be no official language — whatever the majority of the population speaks, that would be the official language.
At this point the vendor interrupted. She was visibly angry and said something speaking English and the soldiers in the Second World War, and then she stormed off. I had no idea what she said. She was no angry, she was incoherent. I still have no idea. But it stuck in my memory that this is an issue some people are very passionate about.
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Yeah I think if I understood correctly (big if) is that Trump’s order revoked an earlier order from another administration that mandated translators and interpreters. That’s a lot of work that won’t be around anymore just there if that is true… just a small slice of decent paying skilled labor jobs working class people won’t have access because that might have made life easier and enriched the economy which we all know is woke af.
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