In response to "It is not the purpose of the State Department website to educate people about the US", you reply, Then why bother having it?
I was pointing out to the respondee, who claims to be a State Department employee, the silliness of his remark that the purpose of the State Department's web site was not to educate people about the US. Think about it for a moment. If the web site isn't intended to educate people about the US then why does it have huge amounts of content to do just that? Why does it explain how the State Department works, who its leaders are, how to get a visa to the United States, how to find travel information about the United States, and so on? What would be the point of the United States government having a web site which didn't convey information about our country?
If you look around the State Department web site you will see that it in fact is designed to teach people about our country -- including among other things the names of our ambassadors around the world, and the locations of our embassies. Adding a few kbytes of content to lead visitors, many foreign, to more information about our country seems like a pretty reasonable enhancement to me.
My comments are only peripherally related to the original posting -- I suggested a solution for the kind of perception the original post implies -- namely just making a simple page in the set of country pages that points to exactly the same kind of informative web sites you cited. I don't see why suggesting an enhancement to the State Department web site to avoid the kind of mis-perception evidenced by some of the other posts is so radical an idea.
You're not going to find anything about agriculture in the US on that site. Nor information on mining within the 50 states. And don't expect to find anything about City Hall office hours in Peoria, because that's not what they do!
You guys think you've found the Mother Lode here, when in actuality all you're doing is mining Fool's Gold.
The State Department deals in US governmental relations with foreign entities. If you're looking for stuff in that vein, yeah, it's pretty good. I mean, in the sense of, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica being good for looking up something on Brazilian exports. It won't be the real thing, but for you, safely tucked away in your den, it's close enough.
CA....
To make it a little easier, I’d suspect that taking the current “U.S. and Organization of the Americas” link and doing either of the following is something that they won’t ever do.
— Remove the “U.S.” from the link (the majority of posters on this thread have already shown how silly it is...at least to them)
— Separate the “U.S.” from the OAS and provides its own link.
The majority of posters thought it absurd to even have the U.S. listed, so the case is already made to perform the first of the two suggestions. To do anything, they have to acknowledge them being together to begin with.