Vice:
The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election
Good thing nobody's predicting a huge surge in mail any time soon
The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.
If this USPS interference was intended to be stealth cheating, good luck with that. It’s blatant, exposed, and a mushrooming political story that is not going to end well for Trump.
Politico:
Pelosi weighs bringing House back early to address Postal Service crisis
The chamber has no votes scheduled until mid-September, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi might bring lawmakers back sooner.
Democrats are looking to address organizational issues at the Postal Service in the coming weeks, not to provide additional funding at this time, according to sources familiar with the discussion.
One option would be to vote on a modified version of a bill introduced by House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) earlier this week that would prohibit USPS from implementing a planned organizational overhaul that critics maintain would handicap mail-in voting.
From one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress (yes, the parties are not the same):
NY Times:
Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation as Election Looms
President Trump’s furious objection to mail-in balloting and a new Trump-allied postmaster general are raising fears about the election and the Postal Service.
In Ohio, where mail voting is likely to double, piles of undelivered mail are sitting in a Cleveland distribution center. In rural Michigan, diabetes medicine that used to arrive in three days now takes almost two weeks.
taylor Swift has a follower or two.
This was back in April and still true, from Tech Crunch:
If we let the US Postal Service die, we’ll be killing small businesses with it
The impacts would have major negative repercussions for e-commerce
Since moving to the United States, I’ve come to appreciate and admire the United States Postal Service as a symbol of American ingenuity and resilience.
Like electricity, telephones and the freeway system, it’s part of our greater story and what binds the United States together. But it’s also something that’s easy to take for granted. USPS delivers 181.9 million pieces of First Class mail each day without charging an arm and a leg to do so. If you have an address, you are being served by the USPS — and no one’s asking you for cash up front.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service deserve sustained, red-alert coverage from the media
Listen to President Trump long enough, and, despite his penchant for falsehood, you’ll eventually hear some unvarnished truth.
That happened Thursday when he stated his intentions clearly in an interview with Fox Business Network. He doesn’t want to approve billions in emergency funding for the cash-strapped and struggling U.S. Postal Service for a simple reason: Democrats want to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic.
His words were stark: “Now, they need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.” He added that holding back funding means “they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”
In other words, he doesn’t want American citizens, fearful of exposure to the coronavirus, to have every opportunity to vote in November.
Molly Jong-Fast/Vogue:
Why TrumpWorld Is Losing Its Mind Over Kamala Harris
Example A: Soon after Harris was added to the Democratic ticket, John Kennedy, the U.S. senator from Louisiana, went on Fox and joked that his Senate colleague was like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "but without the bartending experience.”
I shouldn’t be surprised – but I am furious, in a way that I don’t think I was back in 2016 when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency. In 2016, I was “with her” but I was a sweet summer child filled with the belief that sexism was a problem that we could overcome.
What a difference the Trump administration makes. The last three days have been absolutely infuriating. But they’ve also seemed kind of pathetic, with Trump trying to figure out how he can make his attacks land on Harris, in ways that worked for him in 2016 with the risible chants of “Crooked Hillary”and “Lock her up.” Harris is not as easy a target, which Trump knows. (Despite a tweet he sent out saying Harris was “the kind of opponent everyone dreams of!”, White House insiders have been telling reporters he would have preferred either Susan Rice or Karen Bass on the ticket.) And, as a former prosecutor, Harris can give as good as she gets. She flashed a glimpse of what Trump can look forward to on the campaign trail this fall when she declared on Wednesday that, based on their mishandling of the pandemic, "The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut.”..
And that’s not where it ends. Trumpworld is furious! Earlier this week, I watched Tucker Carlson during his basement studio meltdown about mispronouncing Kamala’s name, and then becoming even more apoplectic when he was corrected, as if the vice presidential candidate didn’t merit having her name pronounced correctly. Then, Trump’s favorite TV pundit, Judge Box of Whine (aka Jeanine Pirro) said “I believe Joe Biden isn’t even going to be on the ticket in the end because I can’t believe he would pick this woman.” The implication here is that Kamala is being controlled by some other force or that Biden is being controlled by some other force or that Judge Box of Whine is being controlled by some other force. And that’s not the only disgusting attack against Kamala. After all the coverage about her being the first Black woman to join a national ticket, members of the conservative media immediately hit back, saying she wasn't really Black, which for those of you keeping track at home is what we call racism and also something the right wing media did to Obama.
Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:
Republican efforts to deny Senator Harris’s identity as an African-American and turn her into a noncitizen are destined to fail.
Jamaica, home to a brutal and violent plantation system, was at the center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a major node in Britain’s Atlantic empire, along with the Bahamas and its colonies on the North American coast.
Many Jamaicans trace their origins directly to slavery and the mass importation of African captives. Based on a genealogical account by her father, there is a strong chance Kamala Harris is one of them. What’s more, many descendants of enslaved people in the Americas have European ancestry on account of the pervasive sexual violence whites perpetuated wherever slavery took root.
Having said all of that, this bid to contest Harris’s identity — which continued on Thursday with President Trump’s clumsy attempt to stoke another “birther” controversy, this time about a woman born in Oakland in 1964 — gives us an opportunity to think more deeply about the contours of racial identity in the United States, and Black American identity in particular.
Margin of error difference from July, and not good numbers for Trump.
Biden needs to keep the white vote share ≥ 40%. Here, it’s 42 (Biden +9 overall). Pew (Biden +8) had it at 45%. ABC/WaPo has 45% (Biden +10 LV). And CBS/YouGov (Biden +10 LV) had it at 41.
The FiveThirtyEight aggregate has Biden +8.4 as of this writing, even with an outlier CNN poll (Biden +4). That represents no change, no tightening.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
The convention that could bend history
Their hopes are not fanciful. President Trump’s catastrophic fumbling in the face of a pandemic and economic collapse invites comparison to Hoover’s haplessness, even if the 31st president was as morally upright as the 45th is not.
Every second of the gathering will be an advertisement of Trump’s failure: The convention that could not meet because of the health crisis the incumbent could not manage.
And a New Deal-style commitment to active, fact-based, problem-solving government really does match the mood of a country that wants a virus conquered, jobs and incomes on the rise again and fairness enshrined in the economic system.
And a great cover illustration with a great story centered in PA and Trump’s Potemkin campaign…
