26 thoughts on “When’s a holiday not a holiday?”

  1. postal workers union’s answer to thread question:

    APWU statement on Juneteenth Holiday – Postal Times

    On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the S. 475 Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. This law establishes June 19th of each year as a Federal holiday. President Biden then declared it would be observed beginning June 18, 2021, as the 19th falls on a Saturday.

    On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, TX the end of slavery in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. This day has become known as Juneteenth to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth is currently recognized by 48 states as the official commemoration of the End of Slavery and some states recognize the day as a paid holiday.

    We are demanding that the Postal Service recognize Juneteenth as a holiday as well. Under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the Postal Service is required to be a model employer for other employers in the country. Also, the Postal Service is one of the most diverse employers in the country. Failing to recognize this holiday is an insult to the hard-working postal employees.

    At this historical moment, dozens of private companies will honor the day by making it a paid holiday for their employees, including Target, Best Buy, Google, the “Big 3” automakers, Nike, Uber, Twitter, and more. The Postal Service needs to do the same and recognize Juneteenth as a Federal holiday.

    There was a strong bipartisan support for this holiday, as the Senate voted unanimously in favor of the bill, and the House of Representatives voted 415 to 14 in favor of it. The APWU applauds the act of Congress in enacting this law and believe it should be applied to all Postal Workers .

    he APWU immediately raised and discussed this important issue with management today and will continue to demand that the issue gets resolved that the Postal recognizes the paid holiday.

  2. from postaltimes:

    In a June 17 memo to USPS executives, Deputy Postmaster General and Chief Human Resources Officer Douglas Tulino wrote that while the organization is “fully supportive of annually observing and setting aside a day to recognize this historic event,” it is not possible to cease operations to accommodate an observance within 24-48 hours.

    “We are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure and our customers are relying on us to deliver our essential services. Closing down our operations without providing appropriate time would lead to operational disruptions and be a disservice to our customers and those who rely upon us. For that reason, the Postal Service will be operating on June 18 and 19, 2021, on a normal schedule, serving our customers to the best of our ability.”

    The Postal Service will discuss future recognition of the new holiday with its unions, management associations and other stakeholders, consistent with its collective bargaining and consultative obligations. “Once those discussions take place, we will update you on appropriate developments, but we reiterate that we are fully supportive of this important national holiday,” Tulino wrote.

  4. Yep.   Texas kids won’t be able to study the origins of Juneteenth in school, but now it’s a holiday.   

    Banning “critical race theory” could actually prevent teachers from talking about a lot stuff.

  5. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/06/17/cruz-mcconaughey-texas-governor-495009

    https://www.mediaite.com/entertainment/matthew-mcconaughey-mocks-anti-maskers-i-dont-believe-youre-really-scared-of-this-little-cotton-thing/amp/

    “McConaughey also teased his potential run for Governor of Texas, revealing he is “not interested in going and putting a bunch of Band-Aids on that are gonna be ripped off” as soon as he were to leave office.“

    BETO is all over Texas, doing voter registration and town hall meetings. He doesn’t seem to be running for anything, though. He’s doing the hard work and building support for the future as he goes.

    Since the Lt. Gov. is the power position in TX, maybe BETO for Lt. and Matthew is the face at the top of the ticket?

  7. another question: when’s a holiday already a holiday – except in so. dak

    the hill:

    Other states slowly followed Texas’s lead: Florida adopted a Juneteenth holiday in 1991, Oklahoma in 1994 and Minnesota in 1996. Thirty-one states adopted the holiday between 2000 and 2009, and another 13 did so in the decade that followed. 
    Just this year, legislators in Hawaii and North Dakota approved measures recognizing the holiday.
    Only six states — Texas, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Washington and Oregon — have made Juneteenth an official state holiday, meaning state workers get a paid day off. That group is likely to grow in the coming years, now that Congress has approved a paid holiday for federal workers too.
    Only one state — South Dakota — does not recognize Juneteenth as either a state holiday or day of observance. And even there, legislators are pushing to add the holiday to the state’s list of formally recognized celebrations.
    “We should all be able to celebrate the end of slavery,” said state Sen. Reynold Nesiba (D), who introduced one of two bills to honor the holiday this year. “South Dakota is the only state in the Union that happens to have a 60-foot statue of the Great Emancipator carved into the side of a mountain, so I think South Dakota is a great place to celebrate Juneteenth.”

  8. 94 year-old civil rights activist Opal Lee, who spent decades lobbying for recognition of Juneteenth as a national celebration of Black independence, let out a cry of pure joy upon learning that Congress passed legislation declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday. #Colbert #Comedy #Monologue

  10. Yes ok; holidays are very nice, and very fine.

       Now, “Where’s the beef?”

    Ok,ok, baby steps. Fine.

  11. Politico on the court’s conservative rift:

    “The key fault line in the Supreme Court that Donald Trump built is not the ideological clash between right and left — it’s the increasingly acrimonious conflict within the court’s now-dominant conservative wing.”

  13. When is a holiday not a holiday?
    I guess when it is not your holiday.
    I suspect most African Americans don’t give a damn if  white folks don’t want to celebrate the holiday as long as they give the holiday the respect it deserves.
    Jack

  14.  
    To read the rest of the article on the PBS web site,  go here
     

    What Is Juneteenth?
    by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
    While national black leaders continued to debate the importance of remembering other milestone anniversaries, the freed people of Texas went about the business of celebrating their local version of Emancipation Day. For them, Juneteenth was, from its earliest incarnations, as Hayes Turner and others have recorded, a past that was “usable” as an occasion for gathering lost family members, measuring progress against freedom and inculcating rising generations with the values of self-improvement and racial uplift. This was accomplished through readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, religious sermons and spirituals, the preservation of slave food delicacies (always at the center: the almighty barbecue pit), as well as the incorporation of new games and traditions, from baseball to rodeos and, later, stock car races and overhead flights.
    Like a boxer sparring with his rival, year after year Juneteenth was strengthened by the contest its committee members had to wage against the Jim Crow faithful of Texas, who, in the years following Reconstruction, rallied around their version of history in an effort to glorify (and whitewash) past cruelties and defeats. When whites forbade blacks from using their public spaces, black people gathered near rivers and lakes and eventually raised enough money to buy their own celebration sites, among them Emancipation Park in Houston and Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia.
    When white leaders like Judge Lewis Fisher of Galveston likened the black freedman (“Rastus,” he called him) to “a prairie colt turned into a feed horse [to eat] ignorantly of everything,” Juneteenth celebrants dressed in their finest clothes, however poor, trumpeting the universal concerns of citizenship and liberty, with hero-speakers from the Reconstruction era and symbols like the Goddess of Liberty on floats and in living tableaux. And when Houston refused to close its banks on Memorial Day in 1919 (only to do so four days later on Jefferson Davis Day, honoring the former Confederate president), Juneteenth celebrants still did their own remembering, in Hayes Turner’s words, to project “identification with American ideals” in “a potent life-giving event … a joyful retort to messages of overt racism … a public counter-demonstration to displays of Confederate glorification and a counter-memory to the valorization of the Lost Cause.”

  15. Lake Oroville is California’s second largest reservoir and generates enough electricity to power up to 800,000 homes at full capacity.

    If the level continues to drop at its current rate, the plant will have to shut down in about two to three months, a time frame that coincides with the peak of wildfire season, CNN noted.
    “If lake levels fall below those elevations later this summer, DWR will, for the first time, cease generation at the Hyatt power plant due to lack of sufficient water to turn the plant’s electrical generation turbines,” Liza Whitmore, public information officer for the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), said.

     
    https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/559109-california-hydroelectric-plan-expected-to-shut-down-for-the-first
     
     

  16. Juneteenth is the holiday of ending slavery inTexas…. A year after the rest of the country
    Certainly nothing has changed in Texas

  17. KGC
    Lots of things have changed in Texas, There is lots of stuff still unfinished.  That has been the way from it’s beginning. Kinda the purpose of day.
    Jack

  18. There would still be slaves in Texas if they could.   In my opinion Texas is a worse place today.

  19. Worse? No.  But better only marginally.  It seemed backwards when I moved here and that has not changed.  I feel like I’m on a different planet down here. 

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick waffles over whether he still supports stronger gun background checks

    Lt. Turd, Dan Patrick, seems to be owned by the NRA, again.

    “…he said was “willing to take an arrow” and go against the National Rifle Association by pushing for Texas to extend background checks to gun sales between strangers. But Patrick’s outspoken advocacy did not last long…”

  20. jack, that thread question is no way meant to be taken as a negative expression of my personal opinion about juneteenth (aka jubilee day or emancipation day or freedom day for over a hundred years).

    it  was meant to be commiseration for the postal workers who didn’t get the choice of a day off  or *extra pay for having to work on a holiday*.   in addition to that sentiment, the cartoon is there to reflect the GOPers disconnect with reality. 

    sorry you took it that I was slamming a well-deserved observance of an important historical event.

    ** admittedly, the usps was in a bind this time what with very little heads up plan & prep time for normal business compounded by a fathers day weekend with many mailed cards & presents to deliver. i can see why the mail had to go through (just like election day) but they could have promised holiday pay when they sent out the mandatory work announcement.

  21. I’m totally fine with the holiday and fully on board with the message but I’m ready to see indictments and subpoenases. 

  24. As far as I’m concernered it’s summer.   I’m sweatin’ my ass off out dere.
    But ‘cept for I quit smoking cigarettes and so every bit of ass I sweat off out there manages to come back by morning with reinforcements.

  25. It is hot here — hopefully the heatwave is almost over.  And supposedly this is the worst heatwave predicted for the summer.
    So I’ve been shopping for some way of getting Mr. C up the hill in case of an emergency.  He can walk up but it takes a long time.  We have decided to get a DR mechanical cart (power assist wheelbarrow)  It’s been quite an arduous process.  And once I decided then I had to figure out whether to order it online or from a local hardware store.  I went with local hardware.  I like to buy local just because but in this case I wanted to make sure I would get good service.  
    Biden should only meet with Pootin on zoom

Comments are closed.

Join the Trail Mix

Get an alert when Craig goes live, and the link when our Open Thread heats up.