Good morning, it’s Monday and if you happen to work for a government entity at the local, state or federal level, you probably have the day off from work. Same case if you’re a bank employee, work on Wall Street or attend a public school. If so, good for you.
Many who work in the private sector, however, aren’t so lucky.
The third Monday in February is a national holiday that is commonly – though not officially – known as Presidents Day, as the Associated Press prefers, (or Presidents’ Day or even President’s Day, which is viewed as incorrect might could be argued to be actually appropriate, technically speaking; we’ll get back to this in a minute).
Yes, you read that right, this holiday is NOT, in fact, Presidents’ Day (we’ll go with the most common spelling for the moment), though you could be forgiven for assuming so.
Officially speaking, it’s Washington’s Birthday, as per federal law (5 U.S.C. § 6103(a)), even though the nation’s first president was actually born on Feb. 22, 1732. Yes, this is confusing for a whole host of reasons. And the story is really convoluted and pretty long, truth be told, so if you really want to know all the details, click here and prepare yourself for some very in-depth reading.
Many presidents also recognized Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, but that never became an official holiday. The name “Presidents’ Day” was proposed for the holiday in 1951, but it was never officially changed. However, U.S. retailers did embrace the concept, using the name to advertise their three-day weekend sales.
It should be said that George Washington, despite all his accomplishments, was a pretty humble guy. He didn’t like to make a big deal about his birthday, but his many fans had other ideas. His birthday was celebrated around the young nation both before and after his death in 1799, but didn’t become a formal, federally recognized holiday until 1879.
Also, only two Americans – Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington – have been honored with individual federal holidays, and the original intent was to honor them on their actual birthdays. But thanks to the Uniform Monday Holiday Law, Feb. 22 was forever removed from its connection to Washington, and MLK Day only sometimes falls on the civil rights leaders’ actual birthday.
So, since this is still officially Washington’s Birthday (observed), one could argue that President’s Day (possessive, indicating a day belonging to a single president), is actually not wrong. But since it is commonly believed to be in celebration of multiple presidents, then Presidents’ (possessive, belong to multiple commanders-in-chief) Day is also accurate.
There is once place where George Washington’s actual birthday is still celebrated: The U.S. Senate.
The tradition of reading George Washington’s Farewell Address aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate on his actual birthday started in 1896 and still continues to this day. Last year’s reader was Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), so this year, the honor is expected to be bestowed on a yet-unnamed Democratic senator, maintaining the tradition of alternating parties.
Temperatures will top out in the mid-to-high 30s today and skies will be cloudy.
In the headlines…
The White House is declaring victory on turning around the economy, after months of aides’ urging the president to find a more empathetic tone on Americans’ financial struggles.
New renderings provide the most detailed vision yet of Trump’s proposed $400 million White House ballroom addition.
The renderings, submitted by the project’s architects and released on Friday by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), depict a vast sprawling structure, expected to be around 90,000 square feet, from multiple angles.
Former President Barack Obama over the weekend indirectly addressed a racist video posted earlier this month by Trump, which depicted Obama and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, as apes.
In a podcast interview Obama was asked about the “devolution of the discourse” in American politics. “I think it’s important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling,” the former president said.
The DNC, which began 2026 in debt and nearly $100 million behind its Republican counterpart, made a $6.5 million bet in the final weeks of 2025 to buy former Vice President Kamala Harris’s old email list of supporters, helping her pay off 2024 campaign debt.
Ted Roosevelt IV, the great grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, and several of his relatives recently wrote to Republican senators, urging them against allowing mining upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
It was a remarkable rebuke of the Republican Party’s apparent retreat from the environmental ethos of Theodore Roosevelt, who protected around 230 million acres of public lands during his presidency.
The search for Nancy Guthrie appeared to intensify yesterday with the recovery of DNA from a glove resembling those worn by the shadowy figure who appeared on doorbell camera footage the night she went missing from her Tucson home.
Savannah Guthrie shared a new video on Instagram tonight pleading for the person who took her mother to come forward.
Guthrie told whoever had abducted her mother that “it is never too late to do the right thing,” making an emotional direct appeal at the two-week mark of her mother’s disappearance.
Advocates for expanding immigration protections are calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul to go beyond her proposal to ban agreements between local enforcement and federal immigration officials, which would sunset in three years – after the end of Trump’s term.
If GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman hopes to unseat Hochul in November, it will take the best fight New York Republicans have put up in 24 years.
Hochul announced that the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) has launched a formal proceeding aimed at ensuring large energy users, including data centers, pay their fair share for electric grid upgrades while protecting everyday ratepayers.
Criminal justice advocates rallied at the state Capitol last week, accusing Hochul of hypocrisy for demanding federal accountability while ignoring deaths in New York state prisons.
Hochul wants a provision in this year’s state budget to bar medical providers in New York from exercising a process created a decade ago that’s allowed them to receive higher payments from Medicaid by disputing the amounts paid by the state.
Hochul’s SEQRA reform proposal has been gaining support from developers and municipal officials in the Lower Hudson Valley. But some advocates warn the changes could limit opportunities for public input and weaken community health and safety protections.
A well-connected New York City fund-raising firm repeatedly asked the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to make contributions to the campaigns of some of New York’s best-known Democratic politicians, years after he was convicted of sex crimes in Florida.
Former Ulster County Executive Marc Molinaro is reportedly preparing to quit his influential perch in the Trump administration after just six months to run for a backbench seat among the Republican minority in the New York State Assembly.
Prominent leaders on the right in New York said on Friday that they were baffled by the decision, which was first reported by Politico, particularly given the fact that Molinaro, 50, had graduated from the Assembly to higher office 15 years ago.
Molinaro did not directly comment on his political future, but late Friday he posted on X to say he would leave the Trump administration this week to “get back into the fight” and that observers should “stay tuned.”
Federal funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel, which had been suspended for more than four months, began to flow again on Friday after lawyers for the Trump administration told a federal judge that it would comply with her orders.
The federal government disbursed $30 million to the Gateway Hudson Tunnel project on Friday after a recent court order. New York and New Jersey officials said the payment is the first installment of $205 million withheld since October.
Over Mamdani’s objections, a Queens man was charged with attempted assault on Friday for wielding a knife at police officers during an episode last month that ended with him being shot.
Mamdani yesterday signed the certificate of incorporation creating a new Business Improvement District in Coney Island with a first-year operating budget of up to $1 million.
Riders Alliance, which backed Mamdani’s election, skipped the press conference where he announced bus lane improvements on Fordham Road and criticized him for setting aside the city’s “original” busway plan that he pledged as a candidate to implement.
An activist think tank is pushing City Hall to build thousands of affordable housing units on the City of University of New York’s properties and parking lots across the five boroughs.
Mamdani’s administration is starting to drop a few clues about how it plans to accomplish one of his biggest campaign promises: free child care for New York City families.
Orthodox Long Island GOP Assembymember Ari Brown slammed fellow pols for silencing him as he tried to grill Mamdani about antisemitism in Albany last week, saying his his “pure communist” colleagues wanted “to prove to Zohran that they hate the Jews.”
Queens Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a Mamdani-backed congressional candidate, has a resume so light that her campaign is touting her signing of a pro-Mahmoud Khalil letter with 40 other people as one of her big “achievements.”
A veteran staffer of the New York City Health Department said he wished all Israelis were wiped off the Earth in a vile X post recently dug up.
After a nationwide lifeguard shortage exacerbated by the pandemic, the city’s parks department expanded its recruiting efforts to all five boroughs. Mamdani promoted the hiring push with a video posted on social media.
Mamdani’s pick to head the city’s Law Department was confirmed by the New York City Council after promising to be a lawyer for the entire city, not just the mayor, at his confirmation hearing last week.
Phylisa Wisdom, the progressive Jewish leader chosen to head New York City’s Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, says she is preparing to take a broad view of her mandate as she steps into the role under intense scrutiny.
A NYC manufacturer that supplies drones to Israel to monitor the Gaza Strip border was booted from the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard six weeks after pro-Palestine Mamdani took office.
Mamdani should end his calls for more taxes in the already heavily taxed Big Apple — and instead get the city’s longtime overspending under control, a fiscal watchdog warned.
A long-derelict state-owned building at 1024 Fulton St. in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, may finally be headed for rebirth after nearly half a century of vacancy, political detours and collapsed redevelopment plans.
A woman whose remains were found in a trash compactor in the basement of a public housing building in Brooklyn this month most likely died after slipping down a garbage chute and into the compactor, police officials said on Friday.
Wealthy “super speeders” in luxury cars racked up more than $10 million in speed-camera tickets last year — with one brat still driving despite owing $90,000, a new analysis said.
Tesla reports it has hired more than 300 additional employees in Buffalo and is finally meeting the job requirements in its dollar-a-year factory lease with the state.
Proposals for revitalizing the City of Albany are detailed in a planning document outlining how $200 million allocated by Hochul’s administration will be deployed in targeted investments.
Empire State Development, New York’s public-private development agency, which will oversee the distribution of the funds set aside in last year’s state budget, commissioned the study as a blueprint for the most effective way to execute the plan.
Around 50 couples reaffirmed their marriages — some well over half-a-century long — during a vow renewal ceremony at Jack’s Oyster House over the weekend.
Mayor Carmella Mantello, in her third annual State of the City address, vowed to fill downtown Troy’s longest-standing void – 1 Monument Square – with help from the city government’s private purchasing arm.
Cyber criminals stole nearly half a million dollars from the Cambridge Central School District, the district announced Friday.
Albany County is buying an artificial intelligence platform to help stop chronic absenteeism at local schools.
An O’Rourke Middle School substitute teacher was removed from the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake School District substitute list after the teacher allegedly made what is being called “a racially insensitive comment to a student.”
The roller rink Guptill’s Arena, a Cohoes institution, celebrated seven and a half decades and four decades of family ownership this past Saturday.
The Saratoga County Airport restaurant is slated to open in the spring as Sunset at Saratoga Kitchen + Bar. Originally, the Alexis Diner was slated to open a location in the terminal, but owner Alexi Lekkas withdrew his bid. It remains unclear why.
A state appeals court upheld a death benefits claim for the widow of a truck driver who died from COVID-19 in the initial days of the pandemic.
Schenectady Democrats failed to endorse a candidate for a contested Council seat after a bruising debate about the longstanding practice of allowing votes from absent committee members, what constitutes a quorum, and issues that split committee members.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
