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Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

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Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

Subscribe to Postage Due:
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Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

Subscribe to Postage Due:
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Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

Subscribe to Postage Due:
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Exempt postal employees (i.e. most managers and Postmasters) can purchase copies of Microsoft Office for about twenty dollars under the Microsoft Home Use Program. The offer is available to employees who have a valid USPS.gov email address, and have been issued an ACE desktop or laptop computer by the USPS.

The offer also includes several other Microsoft software titles, including Visio and Project- but you can only purchase one item at the reduced price.

For more information, go to:

https://hup.microsoft.com

You’ll need to enter your USPS email address, and this program code: BB0780D42D

Yesterday’s story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer headlined “Appeals court rejects Jewish postal worker’s bias claim” raised some interesting questions. The most obvious, of course, was whether Jewish postal workers are entitled to avoid working on the Sabbath. There was just one problem with the story- the postal worker in question isn’t actually Jewish. A postalnews.com reader noted that the story identified postal worker Martin Tepper as a “Messianic Jew”. “Messianic Judaism” is actually a pseudo-Christian cult that adopts many practices that it perceives as “Jewish”. The followers of the cult are not considered Jewish by any recognized Jewish organization, including the State of Israel.

Our reader contacted the Plain Dealer, which admitted the error:

You are correct, of course, that the headline on the story about the postal worker was inappropriate. As the story accurately noted, the postal worker was a “Messianic Jew” and not Jewish. We took a shortcut in writing the headline that we should not have taken. We should have taken greater care.

I’ve reminded all of our editors and other staffers about the difference, and I’m confident this won’t happen again. We are publishing a correction of Page A2 of Friday’s paper.”

While the story printed in the newspaper identified Tepper as a “Messianic Jew”, the Plain dealer web site did carry an Associated Press story that began “A Jewish postal worker made to work on the Sabbath day because of staff cutbacks lost an appeal claiming his work schedule violated his civil rights.” To be fair to the Plain Dealer, several other news outlets also carried the AP story. Interestingly, the story, and headline, also made it to some orthodox Jewish sites, including “The Voice of the New York Orthodox Jewish Community”, Voz iz Neias; and Yeshiva World. Read the comments after the Yeshiva World story to see why some Orthodox Jews, regardless of their opinion of “Messianic Judaism”, regard the ruling with some alarm. While the distinction between Judaism and “Messianic Judaism” is clear, the commenters point out that the same principle would apply to an Orthodox Jew, or an adherent of any other traditional religious faith making a similar claim.

Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

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Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has told the US Postal Service to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, and provide information about the location, phone numbers, business hours, and final collection times of every US Post Office. The USPS had claimed that the information was “information of a commercial nature” and therfore not subject to public dislosure. This despite the fact that the information is already available on the USPS’s “Post Office Locator” web page.

The USPS contended that revealing the information en masse would, among other things, draw customers away from the USPS web site, and undermine its “business relationship with the company, Switchboard, Inc., which maintains and operates the Post Office Locator website”. The USPS’s “Web Specialist”, however, admitted that “USPS pays nothing to Switchboard, Inc., for its web services, but permits Switchboard to redirect Post Office Locator users to other Switchboard client sites.”

The court held that “Post office names, addresses, telephone numbers, hours of operation and final collection times are not ‘information of a commercial nature’”. The court did not decide “whether the complete USPS database from which Carlson requested an electronic version of this particular information is commercial nor whether the USPS database may be exempt from disclosure. In so ruling we do not preclude further consideration by the district court nor do we preclude consideration of reasonable conditions.”

The case now goes back to the District Court for reconsideration based on the Appeals Court decision. The USPS, having lost the appeal, will be required to pay Carlson’s costs for the Appeals Court proceedings.

Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan

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