Well, here we go again. Another POTUS inspired crisis, this time involving the Post Office and the upcoming elections in November.
I’ve reached the point where watching the news pretty much requires you to wear for your own health and safety a blood pressure cuff. Good grief. I digress.
Anyway, with Trump’s election prospects folding faster than a tent in a hurricane, the Doofus-in-Chief and his Republican lackeys have come up with a new strategy. Apparently they want to suppress voter participation by denying emergency funding to the Post Office.
Anything that makes it harder for people to vote during a pandemic must be good national policy. Right?
Well folks, you can’t make this shit up.
Here’s from The Washington Post:
President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.
Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.
Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.
I guess at some level you have to give Trump credit. No matter how outrageous the lie, he is more than willing to make a total ass out of himself by promoting it extensively in public. Most people, like me, only get to spread such nonsense in the privacy of one’s home — or from the safe confines of a padded cell.
Anyway, in Colorado we vote via mail in every election, federal, state and local. And as best I can tell it works well. You get the ballot in the mail and then mark it up before returning it by mail, depositing it in a safe box, or going to vote in person if you have nothing better to do and are trying to commit suicide by virus.
Oh, by the way, Bernie agrees with me:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday lashed out at President Trump on postal service funding, hours after the president signaled that he was opposed to giving additional funds to the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service (USPS) because he thinks it will allow Democrats to expand mail-in voting for November’s elections.
“What this is about is not complicated,” Sanders said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper while discussing Trump’s rhetoric on mail-in voting. “Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. And he looks at polling. He is behind. And I think what he and his friends believe [is] that if they can suppress the vote — make it harder for people to vote — they have a better chance to win the election.”
I understand that the Post Office has huge financial problems, most of which are caused by health care and pension benefits owed to thousands of retirees in addition to current employees.
And in an era of email, FedEx and Amazon, the Post Office may no longer have a sustainable business model. But it seems to this citizen journalist that the Post Office provides a valuable and maybe irreplaceable service to millions who rely on it for the delivery of prescriptions, checks and so on.
And come November, the future of our country may hinge on the Post Office.
Okay. I have to go now.
I asked Kamala Harris to send me a copy of her birth certificate. Maybe it’s in today’s mail.
Writing Above The Clouds 