I went to a post office this week near where I now live in Portland, Oregon. There were two clerks working, and no one was ahead of me. Soon, another customer queued behind me. One of the clerks, upon finishing a transaction, put up a "next window, please" sign, then quickly turned and walked away. Perhaps because the clerk never even looked up before leaving, the customer behind me muttered 'great. can you believe this stuff?' Read more…

Don't you just love it when Republicans speak of death, destruction, and destitution as a "win-win" situation? They're so good at it, it just comes naturally to them. The important point of the MJ story:

That's a tradition that goes back to the origins of the nation. The founding fathers saw the press as the lifeblood of democracy—only informed voters could compose a true democracy, they believed—and thus created a postal system that gave favorable rates to small periodicals. (George Washington actually supported mailing newspapers for free.) For 200 years, small periodicals and journals of opinion were given special treatment.

The 2007 rate hikes, which went into effect this summer, changed that. Now, periodicals are still expected to cover attributable costs and pay no overhead, but because the cost of delivering mail has gone up, rates within the class have gone up as well. In advance of the rate hike, the Postal Service submitted a proposal to the Postal Regulatory Commission that would have raised the rates in the class more or less evenly. The PRC rejected the proposal in favor of a rate package put forward by Time Warner that, unsurprisingly, hands small periodicals much steeper rate hikes than their large counterparts. Read more…