OMFG.... they are having financial problems, so they hire an expensive public relations agency to help them re-spin what they are doing to help trump win the election????
http://theglitteringeye.com/in-what-world/ In What World? Dave Schuler August 19, 2020 I have followed the bickering over the U. S. Postal Service with some amusement over the last week and would like to make a few observations. First, my wife and I avoid sending anything by U. S. Mail to the greatest degree possible. We have learned from painful experience that it cannot be depended on. That did not begin with Trump. It did not begin with Obama. It has been true for decades. You just need to search the newspaper archives for stories of retired mail carriers with tons of undelivered mail in their attics to understand part of the problem. Another component is that the schedules according to which mailboxes are serviced is aspirational rather than something upon which one can depend. We will not pay bills by automatic checking account deduction for the simple reason that I know for a fact that very few companies follow their own security policies (how I know that is another story) and I don’t wish to publicize my checking account information. We will not bank online for similar reasons. Banks don’t even follow their own security policies. I am completely convinced that handing a letter to the next passer-by heading more or less in the direction of your addressee with a request to pass it on to someone going in that direction is about as good as the USPS. Second, I served for more than 20 years as an election judge for the City of Chicago. I have firsthand experience of how elections are tabulated. Fun fact: universal voting by mail provides a by-the-numbers method for engaging in voter suppression at a monumental level. I won’t go into the details here but it would be enormously easy. That would be more than enough to throw elections presently being decided by a percentage point one way or another which is a lot of them. It’s an extremely poor idea and pointing out absentee votes or that it works in Oregon is irrelevant. In Chicago precincts that didn’t vote for the regular Democratic candidate in the last election would magically have astonishingly low turnout. Third, the USPS’s business model has been failing for decades. Email and online payment were its death knell and the rise of e-Commerce occasioned by the lockdowns of 2020 will be the final nail in its coffin. Once the USPS lost its fight for exclusivity against FedEx and UPS the fight was already lost. It won’t be saved with a bailout of $50 billion or one of $150 billion. It’s dead but the corpse is still twitching. But I’ve got to give the Democrats credit. If they can pin the blame for the USPS’s decline or an election in doubt due to universal vote-by-mail on Trump, more power to them. Finally, George Washington appointed his campaign manager (Ben Franklin) as the first Postmaster General of the United States. Complaints about politicizing the USPS are laughable. It was born politicized. In what world was it not politicized?
"The Postal Service Democrats": https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-postal-service-democrats-11597877645?mod=hp_opin_pos_2 The Postal Service Democrats Forget the sturdy Democratic donkey. Nancy Pelosi has changed her party’s logo to a post office. By Daniel Henninger Aug. 19, 2020 6:54 pm ET An eon ago, Nancy Pelosi entered national politics as the host committee chairwoman of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Other than sending former Vice President Walter Mondale to defeat by Ronald Reagan (Mr. Mondale carried one state, his own, plus the District of Columbia), the convention survives in memory only for being branded by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the Republican convention as “the San Francisco Democrats.” Never has so much political derision filled eight syllables as “the San Francisco Democrats.” So it is astonishing to see Speaker Pelosi in the twilight of her career as party leader presiding over a political convention in the same week that she transformed her party into the Postal Service Democrats. Being on vacation last week, I took a few days to focus on the fact that the Democrats were indeed betting the party’s public standing on a nonstop defense of, believe it or not, the post office. Mrs. Pelosi gave a press conference in front of a San Francisco post office, at a lectern draped with the Democrats’ new logo: “#DontMessWithUSPS.” She is requiring Democratic House members to abandon their re-election campaigns and return to Washington this weekend to vote $25 billion in spending for the post office. Probably every adult in the U.S. has a favorite post-office story. Mine is the letter delivered here in New York City from a woman in California addressed to her friend in . . . Sacramento. At least the numbers on the street address were the same. I mailed it back to her. After years of Russian collusion, Ukraine and impeachment, the Democrats have arrived at saying that Donald Trump—in his apparently limitless infamy—is now intent on destroying the U.S. Postal Service so that he can “sabotage” mail-in voting and steal the election. Joe Biden, who earlier said he would order the military to remove Mr. Trump from the White House if necessary, claimed from a Delaware fever swamp that the president was responsible for “tractor trailers picking up mailboxes.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an unimpeachably reliable guide to where the party winds are blowing, said: “An attack on our Postal Service, and an attempt to dismantle our Postal Service, out of a selfish desire to sabotage our democracy, and maintain a grip on power, is an attack on all of us.” Now that the Democrats have adopted the Postal Service as a party paragon, voters are obliged to consider the implications. At their convention, the Democrats have elevated an array of policy goals—eliminating fossil fuels in 15 years and making health care “affordable” for everyone and public college “free.” No such grandiose goal is required of the Postal Service, whose single task is delivering envelopes or boxes from here to there. Still, with the post office now coequal with the donkey as the Democratic Party logo, it’s worth considering where they are taking us. It means that for all the airborne rhetoric of their convention speakers, the Democratic Party in power will settle for doing less. A lot less. It means the benchmark of achievement for the party’s programs isn’t excellence but something more akin to mail delivery. It means they have no interest in setting incentives to improve. And no matter how many years, or decades, pass of subpar performance, there will be no serious effort at reform. Reform is “sabotage.” The USPS has seven unions, which makes the idea of effective management an oxymoron. Work-rule modernization, such as ending overtime abuse, can’t happen. Structural inefficiency becomes the norm, as do massive operational deficits. California is experiencing rolling power blackouts this week because the state’s alternative-energy subsidies suppress efficient changeovers to natural-gas plants, which have closed. When the breakdown of the power supply came, Gov. Gavin Newsom blamed the grid operators. No surprise that when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy tried to put in place reforms recognized as necessary years ago, Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer forced him to revoke them. Don’t expect the party’s wind farms to be run any more efficiently. Speaker Pelosi is making her members vote $25 billion for the Postal Service just as her urban counterparts are voting to defund police departments in Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; New York; Los Angeles; Baltimore and Philadelphia. Joe Biden is upset about at-risk mailboxes, but don’t expect him to say anything in his acceptance speech about children being shot in cities across America. In San Francisco and New York, the Democratic post-office solution to homelessness caused by addictions or mental illness is to ship these people from one neighborhood to another, with no real effort to fix the problem. U.S. students in K-12 underperform their foreign counterparts in standardized tests year after year. So just as people use FedEx now to ensure timely delivery, parents put their kids in private, parochial or charter schools to bypass the post-office-like public schools. Naturally the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force proposes to suppress that competition. The San Francisco Democrats represented only a slice of America. The Postal Service Democrats will subsume the entire country into an ethos of mediocrity. Write henninger@wsj.com.
My little USPS out here in country is notoriously bad so we can use any injection of funds that Nancy will give us. I have been able to meet most of my neighbors since their mail gets delivered to my house so that is a positive. Good people.
trump's assault on voting and democracy hurts some states worse than others... In rule change, Postal Service forbids employees from signing absentee ballots as witnesses https://www.adn.com/politics/2020/0...s-from-signing-absentee-ballots-as-witnesses/
Unfortunately the party of no appears to be blocking any funds to USPS... https://www.politico.com/news/2020/...uis-dejoy-postmaster-general-selection-398518
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/ba...shipments-arent-working/#.Xz2r2uDLBuI.twitter Baby chicks arrive dead as Maine farmers wonder why formerly reliable USPS shipments aren’t working
