#U.S. Government

[whenweallvote]

September 30th is the end of the fiscal year and the last day for Congress to fund the federal government. If funding isn’t passed, the government shuts down.

To date, the federal government has shut down 21 times, four times in the past 10 years. What does a government shutdown mean? Who’s impacted? What’s currently happening in Congress? Swipe through and remember, government shutdowns are impacted by your vote. 

Check your voter registration at weall.vote/check and remind a friend to do the same.

[gwydionmisha]

Musk's DOGE granted access to US Medicare and Medicaid systems

U.S. government officials privately warn Musk’s blitz appears illegal

Urgent Action Item: This is a quiet Coup! Contact your Senators right now, and tell them to block all Trump Nominees in response, particularly Russell Vought.

If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Five Calls to your critters: https://5calls.org/

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

"Congress. gov:" https://www.congress.gov/

ACLU advice for writing to your Critters: https://www.aclu.org/writing-your-elected-representatives

[deadpresidents]

"Somehow disruption doesn't begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming President has in his lifetime.

He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation's capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Mr. Trump has said that 'real power' is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.

Mr. Trump's early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the Founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.

He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional health care to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favored by Russia to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies.

Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.

The message to Washington is simple, according to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump friend who relishes his own reputation as a political dirty trickster. 'Things are going to be different,' he said by text."

-- Peter Baker, "Trump Signals a 'Seismic Shift,' Shocking the Washington Establishment,' The New York Times, November 17, 2024.

Here's another incisive article about President-elect Donald Trump's transition and his frightening Cabinet nominees, who are abnormal even for Trump and the personality cult that has been built around him since 2015. For the past quarter-century, Peter Baker has been one of the very best, most level-headed analysts of the contemporary American Presidency, and he seems be stunned by the direction the incoming Trump Administration is already heading. Once again, all of these links are gift links to bypass the New York Times paywall so that you may read and share these important pieces and remain alert to the very real consequences of the 2024 election which are already taking shape.

[elumish]

Things to keep in mind when writing stuff involving (U.S.) federal offices/federal employees/federal contractors:

You need a badge to get in. If you don't have a badge you will at minimum have to go through a metal detector and have your stuff be x-rayed and sign in and then have an escort. You might get a guest lanyard, a temporary ID badge, or a wristband. At maximum you just won't get in.

You can potentially get in with a badge for a different agency, but you will still likely need to sign in and be let in manually, because your badge won't have building access to swipe you in past security

It can take a long time to get a badge, and it's way worse for contractors. For contractors it can take anywhere from days to over a year to get badged.

Working for the federal government doesn't necessarily mean you have a security clearance. A lot of civilian agencies just require a public trust, which generally involves much lower requirements and a much less invasive background check but can involve the equivalent of a Secret clearance background check (namely if you have a law-enforcement sensitive public trust).

You need to get fingerprinted, which may happen at the actual badging office or at a random contracted fingerprinting place. Basically all fingerprinting is digital at this point.

You need to get fingerprinted even if you have already been fingerprinted/badged elsewhere. They generally don't talk to each other.

Having a clearance can make it a bit easier/faster to get a public trust elsewhere due to reciprocity, but it can still take a while.

Federal buildings are often set pretty far back from the road and/or they have barricades in front of them.

It's not uncommon in some agencies to see mix of people in uniform and people not in uniform. Not all uniformed services are military. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps are both non-armed uniformed services.

Most federal employees operate under the General Service (GS) pay scale, and people will sometimes be referred to as a GS-X (e.g., GS-13, GS-14). This is an easy reference of relative position.

Some federal employees may operate under other pay scales, such as the Federal Wage System for blue-collar workers. High-ranking federal employees may be under the Senior Executive Service (SES) which is above the GS scale. Other agencies (e.g., the SEC) use their own pay scales.

[themisinformer]

Nation’s Biggest Dumbass Doesn’t See Need for Department of Education

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Calling the government institution “completely unnecessary,” the country’s biggest dumbass, President Donald Trump, has once again stated his intention to completely dismantle the Department of Education, claiming that there isn’t a reason for it to exist in this day and age.

“The Department of Education is a complete and utter disaster,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social. “We’re wasting billions of dollars to educate our nation’s young people when they all have social media, television, and books that they can use to learn completely for free. It’s all one big waste, people!”

Trump has also expressed concern about the supposed “woke” learning content being taught in schools across the country. “There’s no learning going on anymore,” Trump claimed. “It’s all indoctrination. They’re teaching kids to hate America, and that’s something that I just can’t stand for.”

Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education has received criticism as it would cause public schools to lose a significant amount of their funding, and could severely hurt programs such as special education and low income student assistance, something that Trump has brushed off.

“All kids need to know is the truth, and we have Truth Social for that,” Trump concluded.

[eugenedebs1920]

Holy crap!!! Never in my life would I have thought a Rand Paul speech would be so riveting! FINALLY!!! A Republican is standing up for the Constitution, choosing country over party! Abiding to his oath of office!! F*ck yea Rand!! There may still be hope.

Seriously! I’m so proud of this guy. It’s borderline inspiring. 🇺🇸

I miss actual Republicans. Again! I didn’t see that phrase coming any time soon.

Hecken yes Sen. Paul!

[stone-cold-groove]

Vegetable Gardening in Wartime. The World Publishing Company - 1943.

[faramirsonofgondor]

literally wdym the trump administration fired over 300 top secret nuclear analysts that had access to classified information about our nuclear arsenal bc they didn’t know that that’s what the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) was for??? and now he wants them back bc they know sensitive information??? but he can’t get in touch with them because they don’t know anymore since he FIRED them???

[mostlystuckony]

Rewatching FaTWS and thinking about how if the American Government appointed someone as a superhero to guard us I would not trust that person at ALL

[luckydiorxoxo]

It's official: For the first time, the U.S. Senate has two Black women as members.

Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware have just been sworn in as part of the 119th Congress.

[sailor-alt]

Screw it here comes my rant. The Pledge of Allegiance is actually awful and too few people know why. My ramble/informal essay is below the cut. If you have the time and the mental energy then I would really like it if you read it, because more people should know about this, especially Americans.

(All my sources for this will be at the end.)

Starting off with the obvious: the pledge is creepy. A lot of people I’ve spoken to agree that overall it’s weird that every single day children need to pledge their allegiance to the country. It’s very totalitarian. What’s worse is that no school I’ve come across actually teaches about why we do that or what the pledge’s history actually is. You might know a bit about the “under god” addition, but that’s generally where common knowledge ends. There’s a reason for that. The history of the Pledge of Allegiance is bad. Really bad.

The pledge’s history starts with how much America loves capitalism. I’d argue it’s a little too much. The Pledge of Allegiance was originally published not as some historic call to rally patriotism, but as an advertisement. It was written by Francis Bellamy for a magazine called The Youth’s Companion. It was a part of a promotion to sell flags to their subscribers. In addition, any school that recited the pledge on October 21, 1892 would receive a free flag.

Now you may or may not know that October 21st 1892 is the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus “discovering” America. In celebration of this anniversary, The Youth’s Companion partnered with patriotic groups to celebrate. This was when Bellamy was tasked with writing the pledge. It was written in celebration of Christopher Columbus. You know, just the guy who raped, murdered, tortured, and committed mass genocide on tremendous amounts of indigenous peoples, and then bragged about it. And the terrifying thing? Celebrating a genocidal rapist isn’t even the worst part. We’ll get to the worst part later. For now, let’s look at how the pledge became wide spread.

After The Youth’s Companion published the pledge, its popularity boomed. New York was the first state that made it mandatory for all students to recite it each morning. The legislation for that was made the day after the U.S. declared war on Spain. Many states followed in its footsteps when the U.S. joined World War 1. From that day on, students have been reciting an ad each morning while staring at an American Flag. It is important to note that there was never a federal law requiring students to recite the pledge. However, that doesn’t mean the federal government wasn’t involved.

Most people are familiar with the “under god” revision, but that’s not the only revision made to the Pledge of Allegiance. The original version went as follows:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

This is obviously, quite different from the version we know today. “Under god” was added in the Cold War era, around 1954, when various Catholic groups lobbied for it. Their reasoning was it would protect the children from corruption by “godless communists” even though communism actually has nothing to do with religion at all. In reality, this change was just made to spread Christianity through the U.S. and blur the lines between church and state, overlooking the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees individuals the right to practice their religion (or lack thereof) freely without government interference. However, there was another change made around 30 years prior, and unsurprisingly it has to do with Americans hating immigrants.

In 1923 the National Flag Conference decided that the phrase “my Flag” was too vague and that it could result in immigrants interpreting it as meaning the flag of their country of origin. So, they changed the line to “the flag of the United States”. In 1924 they added “of America” to the phrase to prevent any and all alternate interpretations. This change was very blatantly made with the idea of making immigrants more patriotic in mind. They did not hide it. While this was not in Bellamy’s original version, when he wrote it he hoped that it could “Americanize” the new waves of immigrants coming into the country at that time. To make things worse, the Pledge of Allegiance being taught to young children is a very deliberate move to advance this goal. It is significantly easier to get someone to believe something when they’re young. The pledge very clearly intends to manipulate young Americans into being more patriotic, much of which is targeted towards immigrants.

It worked on me for a while; when I first learned the pledge I was so proud of myself and I felt like such a good American, even though I actually had no idea what the words meant. I hated people who didn’t like the pledge. Since I was only in elementary school and lived in a predominantly white area where we didn’t get many immigrant's, most of that was targeted at people who wore hats. Only in my sophomore year of high school did I think “Hey the pledge is kind of weird. I wonder that that’s about.” And then I did research and learned all this. I wasn’t prompted to do any of that research, I just did it because I was curious. This isn’t on other people for not getting curious, it’s on the system. If you don’t know that the pledge might have a complicated history, then you won’t know to research it. On top of that, a lot of the reliable resources that I accessed I only knew about because my school pays for subscriptions to them. I got lucky enough to live in a wealthy school system, a lot of people didn’t. The widespread ignorance about the pledge can’t be blamed on individuals, the blame falls on the school systems for not teaching it.

I’m going to be explicit about this now, this part that I’m about to talk about is the worst part. This is the really really bad thing that is worse than all the others. Changes to the phrasing of the Pledge of Allegiance weren’t the only changes made. There was a particular very significant– and very necessary– change made to the original salute of the pledge. The original version involved what was called the Bellamy Salute, which looked like this:

Look familiar? Yeah, that’s because it was nearly identical to the Nazi salute. American schoolchildren would salute their flag every morning by holding up their right arm with their palm face down, nearly identical to the way Nazis would hail Hitler. America didn’t stop doing this until 1942, three whole years into WWII, but only one year after the U.S. got involved. However, the Nazis didn’t start doing their salute at the beginning of WWII, the Nazi salute became widespread in around 1931. That means there were 11 years when American schoolchildren were doing the same salute as Nazis. The American government didn’t think to change the salute until America got involved in the war.

Yeah. I told you it was bad. But if the pledge is so bad, then why don’t people just not do it? It is true that now there is federal law that says no person can be forced to recite the pledge. Part of the reason why some students still do it is because they have not been taught how bad it is, and part of the reason is because they still feel like they have to. There are social standards that are enforced in schools, both by students and teachers. A student who doesn’t recite the pledge can be risking more than just being seen as weird. There have been case after case of students being verbally or physically harassed be teachers for not reciting the pledge.

1997, in Connecticut, a student was refused admission to the Honors Society.

2006, in Florida a student was ridiculed by their teacher.

2009, in Maryland a teacher berated a child and forced her to leave the class.

2023, in South Carolina a teacher yelled at a student and pushed her against a wall.

2023, in Texas a teacher tried to force a student to translate the pledge and retaliated against her when she refused.

That’s just to name a few. In most of these cases (maybe all, I’m not certain) the teachers did not receive repercussions unless the victim and their family really pushed for it. And even then the punishment was never severe enough. On top of that, school is a really hard social environment to be in. Your peers expect things from you, and being different is hard. Even if you don’t live in an area where your safety could be in danger from not reciting the pledge, you’re still risking your social life.

To recap, the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written as a part of a marketing campaign which celebrated Christopher Columbus, one of the purposes for reciting it daily is to “Americanize” immigrant children, the original salute was almost identical to the Nazi salute and wasn’t changed until the U.S. joined the war effort, and students who don’t recite it are often punished. It’s almost terrifying how fitting this is for the current state of the U.S. government. There are a lot of problems here, but I’m not about to point out problems and then provide no solution.

It’s simple: stop having children recite the pledge each morning. It should certainly still be taught as it is an important part of American history and culture, but the tradition of saying it each day needs to be broken. In addition to this, students will be educated on its history. The pledge can be initially taught to young children, as it always has been. Show them the words and make sure they know what they mean. Later on, when kids have grown up a little and are able to understand the complexities of the pledge’s history, they’ll learn about how it came to be, the issues with it, and why it would no longer be recited. This can fit well into an immigration unit, because of the relationship between the pledge and attempts to “Americanize” immigrants. Immigration is typically taught to older elementary schoolers, usually 4-5th grade, which is just old enough to start understanding this complex history. It can also fit nicely into units like the Spanish American War, World War I, the Cold War, and separation between church and state as it has relation to all of those. Educating American children and having them learn about the more negative sides of this country’s history will help them grow into introspective and thoughtful adults. On the contrary, if they continue to be taught to simply obey authority and love their country blindly, they will become compliant and easy to manipulate, which opens the door for dangers to democracy itself. 

Now we’ve reached the obligatory counter argument, because this is the internet and people are probably going to try to disagree with me. I’d hope that after reading this you wouldn’t argue that in reciting the pledge each morning, we encourage patriotism, but it’s always possible someone will. To which I would argue patriotism is very different from what is actually being encouraged: blind compliance. Patriotism isn’t just doing whatever your country tells you without question, patriotism is “... loving our country so much that we do not tolerate its mistakes.” That quote came from a letter that a woman named Alice Alexander wrote to the New York Times after reading an article about a girl who refused to recite the pledge. Ultimately, if we really want what’s best for the country, then we will teach our children what true patriotism is, we will encourage them to question and critique everything until they make it the best that it can be, and we will praise them for working to create a more perfect union. In making just a small change with the Pledge of Allegiance, we can create a butterfly effect-like impact that will better the country for years to come.

Thank you for listening to my rant. If you want to debate me on this then you’re welcome to, I love discussion on this topic. I just ask that you be respectful and don’t “debate” as in hurtle insults at me without making a point. If you want to do more research, or are curious where I got this information, all of my sources are below. I think a few articles may have been deleted by now, unfortunately. Maybe someone more tech savvy than me can find a way to recover them. I also highly encourage you to reblog this (but of course I won’t tell you that you have to) because I think a lot more people need to know about this issue.

Works Cited

Alexander, Alice. “Pledge of Allegiance, Another View.” Gale In Context: Global Issues, New York Times, 20 April 1997, http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A150346809/GIC?u=nhais_htb7&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=46e74698. Accessed 3 April 2024.

EB Editors. “Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.” Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 1 August 2018, http://school.eb.com/levels/high/article/Pledge-of-Allegiance-to-the-Flag-of-the-United-States-of-America/60389. Accessed 3 April 2024.

Grant, Teddy. “Lawyer calls for criminal investigation after student allegedly assaulted over Pledge of Allegiance.” ABC News, 15 March 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/US/9th-grader-sues-school-district-after-staffer-allegedly/story?id=97803847. Accessed 13 May 2024.

Howard, David. “Student Gains in Temporary Ruling.” Gale In Context: Global Issues, New York Times, 22 June 1997, https://go.gale.com/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=News&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=MultiTab&retrievalId=2fb084a2-4de1-4bc7-80df-8a71567c76d8&hitCount=2&searchType=BasicSearchForm¤tPosition=2&docId=GALE%7CA150318705&docType=Article&sort=Releva. Accessed 13 May 2024.

Post, Dianne. “Children Cannot Be Required to Recite the Pledge of Allegiance.” ProQuest; SIRS Issues Researcher, Arizona Capitol Times, 3 March 2023, https://explore.proquest.com/sirsissuesresearcher/document/2903965524?accountid=6160. Accessed 8 April 2024.

Roos, Dave, and John Donovan. “How the Pledge of Allegiance Went from Marketing Ploy to Classroom Staple.” People | HowStuffWorks, 13 March 2020, https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/national-traditions/pledge-allegiance.htm. Accessed 10 April 2024.

Ryan, Cathy. “Villain Columbus | Christopher Columbus: The good, the bad and the ugly.” Ohio State University, https://u.osu.edu/posterchildchristophercolumbus/villain-columbus/. Accessed 14 May 2024.

U.S. Const. amend. I, cl. 2

WJCL. “Parents of South Carolina teen file suit against school district over Pledge of Allegiance incident.” WJCL, 14 March 2023, https://www.wjcl.com/article/marissa-barnwell-pledge-of-allegiance-lawsuit/43305680. Accessed 13 May 2024.

[nando161mando]

Priorities Exposed: Inequitable Aid

[stone-cold-groove]

Air Raid. Louisiana State Defense Council - 1943.