Oct 2, 2020

COVID-19 Update

The big news today of course is that President Stoopid tested positive for COVID-19 late last night.

There's a weird combination of "Gee, I hope he's OK" plus "Serves the prick right" going on.

I'm not the least bit inclined to give that jerk any quarter at all, even though I really don't wish shitty things on anyone, and I don't celebrate the destruction of any human being.

But I'll say this: It won't hurt my feelings if it turns out he's in for a long painful illness that leaves him crippled or dead. I will not mourn his passing if it comes to that.

USA
  • New Cases:  47,389
  • New Deaths:      920




‘The virus spares no one’: World reacts to Trump’s positive coronavirus test

LONDON ­— As the world woke up to the news Friday that President Trump and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, just one month ahead of the November U.S. election, foreign leaders and lawmakers began reacting and expressing their well wishes.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to respond Friday, writing on Twitter: “Wishing my friend @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS a quick recovery.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also offered support.

“Like millions of Israelis, Sara and I are thinking of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump and wish our friends a full and speedy recovery,” Netanyahu, a close Trump ally, tweeted.

“My best wishes to President Trump and the First Lady. Hope they both have a speedy recovery from coronavirus,” said Johnson, who was diagnosed with the infection in late March and spent a week in a London hospital, where he received oxygen therapy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a tribute to Trump, reportedly writing in a telegram: “I am confident that your vital energy, high spirits, and optimism will help you cope with the dangerous virus.” The Kremlin said this week that Putin plans to be vaccinated soon against the coronavirus with an experimental Russian vaccine.

Trump has often faced widespread criticism from abroad over his handling of the pandemic. Foreign researchers have repeatedly criticized the Trump administration for failing to adequately take into account scientific advice in the coronavirus response, as the death toll in the United States continues to climb past the 207,000 mark.

In July, Trump donned a mask for the first time in public after months of downplaying their importance in the global effort to slow transmission and previously mocking Democratic rival Joe Biden for wearing a face covering.

“Nobody is immune from #COVID19,” the United Nations Office for disaster risk reduction, tweeted Friday, responding to the news of Trump’s positive test.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also sent the president “best wishes” on Friday, despite Trump accusing the body of “severely mismanaging” the coronavirus outbreak and threatening to permanently cut U.S. funding to the WHO.

French government spokesman Gabriel Attal wished the president a “swift recovery” but also struck a more critical note. Trump’s positive test result is “a sign that the virus spares no one, including those who are the most skeptical about its reality and gravity,” Attal said.

A senior member of the British government, Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick, wished the 74-year-old U.S. leader a quick recovery. “Setting aside politics, we all want to see him and his wife get better soon,” Jenrick said on Sky News.

Following this week’s fiery presidential debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, others questioned what the president’s positive diagnosis meant for the future of the U.S. election and the health of others who had recently come into contact with him or the first lady.

“If he infected Biden, then what?” tweeted Tomas Valasek, a Slovak lawmaker and a former ambassador to NATO.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is fourth in the presidential line of succession, is wrapping up a five-day trip to Europe, where he has traveled to Greece, Italy and lastly, Croatia. Pompeo said Friday he and his wife, Susan, had both tested negative for the virus.

Pompeo has more consistently worn a mask when appearing in public than Trump. He said he was last with Trump on Sept. 15.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also joined the growing list of politicians sending their well wishes, saying he hoped the Trumps would “overcome the quarantine period without problems.”

Like Trump, other world leaders have also tested positive for the coronavirus during the global health crisis.

After Johnson’s condition worsened after he was infected with the virus in March, he was moved to an intensive care ward for oxygen treatment. His diagnosis triggered questions about Britain’s government succession plan and who would run the country if Johnson, now 56, did not recover.

When he was discharged from hospital, Johnson thanked health-care staff and his nurses, adding that it “could have gone either way” for him.

Trump’s mockery of wearing masks divides Republicans

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for the virus in July. The 65-year-old populist leader had often dismissed the severity of the virus, referring to the illness as “a little cold” earlier this year.
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Oct 1, 2020

Today's Tweet

 















"Conservatives" are so oddly servile - and so totally self-unaware - I'm wondering if you can order this shirt with the Gadsden flag on the back.

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COVID-19 Update

History Snapshot - Dead Americans
  • MAR 1:            1
  • APR 1:      6,465
  • MAY 1:    67,077
  • JUN 1:  109,612
  • JUL 1:  130,985
  • AUG 1: 158,238
  • SEP 1:  188,991
  • OCT 1:  211,849
USA
  • New Cases:   40,929
  • New Deaths:       955



WaPo:

Trump will hold weekend rallies in Wisconsin’s coronavirus ‘red zones’

President Trump plans to hold large campaign rallies in Wisconsin this weekend, even though his White House coronavirus task force has called for increasing social distancing “to the maximal degree possible” as the state’s caseload surges. La Crosse and Green Bay, where the events will take place, are both considered coronavirus “red zones.”


Other Stuff
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Sep 30, 2020

Today's Today

A few hours after this picture was taken, he'd be dead

James Dean's death is one of those odd cultural milestones that mark both the ending of something and the beginning of something, both of which are all balled up together.

 I don't know how to articulate it properly, but it seemed like we started to wake up a little in the mid-50s, thinking we should be aspiring to something more and better than what we had - that we should put an end to the weirdly rosy attitude that everything's fine as long as we all smile and chit-chat and pretend that nothing could possibly go wrong with this charmed life we're all living just ten years after a 35 year period that saw two World Wars sandwiched around almost 20 years of economic depression.

 We were on top of the world, but it just didn't feel right - we needed it to change.

 America can be a very strange place.
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Call It Off


Eric Boehlert - Press Run:

Shedding all semblance of decency, let alone public civility, a desperate Trump turned Tuesday’s presidential debate not only into a brawl, but also a national embarrassment. Behaving like a petulant teenager, Trump rolled his eyes, constantly interrupted, hectored, tried to pick fights, and generally made a fool of himself as more than 80 million Americans tuned in, most of whom were likely thinking, ‘What have we become as a nation?’

It was clearly the worst presidential debate in American history, as Fox News moderator Chris Wallace got completely steamrolled by Trump’s bullying ways. And it was a debacle that Trump pre-planned. Allergic to debate prep and still seething about the blockbuster revelation about his massive tax evasion practices, Trump arrived with one goal — to make sure the debate was incomprehensible and that viewers learned as little as possible.

That’s why it’s time to call off the next two debates. Tuesday’s car wreck was a complete waste of time.

Months ago, I urged the Biden campaign to not show up for any of the debates this election season because I didn’t see the benefit of sharing the stage with a madman for 90 minutes. There's no upside to normalizing his behavior with a presidential debate and the legitimacy it provides. Now everyone sees the results. Biden held his own last night, there’s no question, telling Trump more than once to “shut up,” which in the past would have been unthinkable for a Democrat to utter on a debate stage. And it was exactly what was called for.

But there’s no need to repeat the fiasco. There’s no need for Biden to show up again so Trump can smear Biden family members, make a mockery out of public discourse, and lie relentlessly about every topic discussed during the forums. Running for president is serious business, and Trump is a child.

And yes, the 2020 debates are already so much worse than the 2016 debates, when, in retrospect, Trump at least pretended to occasionally follow some of the norms of public behavior. But all of that is gone now. Lost in the authoritarian power that he craves in the White House, Trump deems it beneath him to share the stage, and the spotlight, with another politician.

Another reason for Biden to politely bow out is because while the press is going to correctly portray the Tuesday debate as a stunning failure, they’re going to couch it in Both Sides language, suggesting Biden was somehow at all responsible for the national embarrassment, when it was entirely Trump’s doing.

That was apparent in real time last night. From Politico: “The first Trump-Biden debate: A trainwreck.” New York Times: “Sharp Personal Attacks and Name Calling in Chaotic First Debate.” CNN: “Pure Chaos at First Debate.” The Washington Post: “First Trump-Biden meeting marked by constant interruptions by Trump.” Technically those headlines were accurate, but all the news outlets presented the story as if both sides were to blame for the televised disintegration.

There’s also the simple fact that unless the the Commission on Presidential Debates allows moderators to cut off Trump’s mic for the next two forums, it’s not possible for any moderator to keep control of the event. Wallace was completely humiliated by Trump, who ran over the Fox News anchor at every turn, making it impossible for there to be anything remotely resembling a revealing or intelligent debate.

Comically, Wallace told the New York Times he wanted to be “invisible” during the debate, meaning it was up to the candidates to engage each other. Commission officials actually thought Wallace would act as a “facilitator,” gently walking Trump through the evening’s topics. That makes sense if you think Trump is a rational, sane person. But Trump’s a nihilistic actor. And the Beltway’s refusal to knowledge that — to think that protocols like presidential debates could still be adhered to — fueled last night’s disaster.

It also lends credence to canceling the next two debates, because it’s not possible to stage a two-person debate when one of them is a sociopath. The debate Commission can act quickly to try to save this format, by allowing Trump’s mic to be cut. But anything short of that would be a waste of time. It would be a waste of Biden’s time, and a waste of Americans’ time.

Trump has torn up so many norms and traditions with his radical behavior. So let’s add another one to the list — cancel the next two debates. Nobody will miss them.
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Today's Deep Fake

The video is faked - the threat is very real.

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About Last Night


The big debate was on last night, and I did my usual thing - I checked in once in a while to see if there was anything worth hearing. There was very little.

Frank Luntz:

The first presidential debate left undecided American voters in agreement about at least one thing: President Trump's negativity.

Republican consultant and pollster Frank Luntz asked his focus group to use one word to describe the president and basically "every single word was negative," observed Politico's Tim Alberta. One respondent from Wisconsin called Trump obnoxious and un-presidential, while a Pennsylvania voter said he behaved like a "crackhead." Others described the president as being "un-American" and "arrogant."

In all, from 17 voters in swing states, 15 used negative words and just two used positive words or phrases to describe the president (that is, if you consider "an ass but a confident ass" to be a compliment).

The focus group's opinion of the debate tracks with a CBS poll, which found that 83 percent of debate watchers believed the tone of the evening to be "negative" while 17 percent thought it was "positive." Which raises the question: What debate were those 17 percent watching?

And I'd like to reiterate - these are not debates. A debate is when there's a topic or a question, and each side states their arguments &/or rebuttals.

That mess last night was too fucking typical - especially typical of what 45* does, which is simply to put as much chaff in the air as is necessary so nobody even knows what to think or even what the fucking point was to begin with.

It's a game show, so why not set it up like one. Put both of these guys in a glass booth, and turn their mics off until it's their turn to speak.

I'm betting Biden would do quiet well under those rules - because we'd finally have some fuckin' rules.
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Today's Tweet



45*'s got nothing to talk about. All he ever does is interrupt with his little quips and insults. He's the drunk at the end of the bar - who can't stand not being the center of attention - so he tries to bully his way into a conversation he has no business being in.

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COVID-19 Update

USA
  • New Cases:   44,227
  • New Deaths:      977



WaPo:
Seven former FDA commissioners accuse Trump administration of undermining the agency

In a rare and extraordinary rebuke, seven former commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration wrote an op-ed accusing the Trump administration of interfering politically with the agency, with potentially catastrophic effects on public trust in a coronavirus vaccine.

The column, which was published online Tuesday afternoon in The Washington Post, detailed a recent pattern of interference, including President Trump’s threat to reject a proposed FDA guidance detailing the criteria the agency will use to judge a coronavirus vaccine, and decisions by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to revoke the FDA’s authority to regulate lab-developed tests and to sign its own rules.

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Sep 29, 2020

Talk About Heroes

There are real life heroes amongst us.


We were enamored with docs and nurses for a while, and the other frontline working people taking risks to do good things for us, and the latest of these are the mail handlers and letter carriers and clerks at USPS, who show up and do the work we need them to do - with some going several extra miles for us - while Republicans fuck with them and try to kill off the service in favor of their big-money donors and their buddies on Wall Street.

Make whatever arguments you feel like making, but there's no denying the simple fact that politics has played a roll in this. Republicans have hated the Post Office for a very long time, and they've taken some pretty extreme measures to try to kill it off.

Maybe there's a real case to be made for efficiencies, but not when GOP fuckery seems so obvious.

The short version is: Republicans can't be trusted with these decisions when we know they've spent 40 years trying to privatize the whole fuckin' government.


This summer, as controversial new procedures at the U.S. Postal Service snarled the nation’s mail delivery and stirred fears of how the agency would handle the election, rank-and-file workers quietly began to resist.

Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and removal of mail-sorting machines until their supervisor gave up on the order. In Michigan, a group of letter carriers did an end run around a supervisor’s directive to leave election mail behind, starting their routes late to sift through it. In Ohio, postal clerks culled prescriptions and benefit checks from bins of stalled mail to make sure they were delivered, while some carriers ran late items out on their own time. In Pennsylvania, some postal workers looked for any excuse — a missed turn, heavy traffic, a rowdy dog — to buy enough time to finish their daily rounds.

“I can’t see any postal worker not bending those rules,” one Philadelphia staffer said in an interview.

With the Postal Service expected to play a historic role in this year’s election, some of the agency’s 630,000 workers say they feel a responsibility to counteract cost-cutting changes from their new boss, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, that they blame for the mail slowdowns. They question whether DeJoy — a top Republican fundraiser and booster of President Trump — is politicizing the institution in service to a president who has actively tried to sow distrust of mail-in voting, insisting without evidence that it will lead to massive fraud.

DeJoy insists the operational shifts were not politically motivated, emphasizing that he inherited an agency on the verge of financial collapse. At the time of his arrival in June, the Postal Service also was trying to fend off a takeover by Trump’s Treasury Department, according to internal Postal Service documents. Its workforce was getting flattened by the pandemic as a result of surging absences and package volumes, and its biggest customer, Amazon, was threatening to pull its multibillion-dollar business.

With a mandate to stabilize the Postal Service’s balance sheet, especially its $160.9 billion deficit, DeJoy imposed stricter dispatch schedules on transport trucks that prohibited late and extra trips, forcing workers to leave mail behind. Managers cracked down on overtime, though DeJoy contends they did so of their own accord. He also declined to reinstall hundreds of mail-sorting machines and blue collection boxes removed under his watch. Though he put some of these efforts on hold after public backlash, and four federal judges have since issued temporary injunctions on all operational changes, DeJoy has deeper cuts in store. He told lawmakers last month to expect “dramatic” changes after the November election, including reductions in service and price increases for Americans in rural areas.

DeJoy’s approach marks a fundamental shift, experts say, modeling the agency as more business enterprise than government service. But it also has profound implications for employees in the form of heavier workloads and lost overtime.

In interviews, 15 Postal Service workers and local union leaders in eight states described a deep decline in morale since DeJoy made clear his intent to retool the Postal Service — with little input from the heavily unionized workforce — that have fixed intense public and congressional scrutiny on the agency. They also say they are prepared to defy directives that would limit how they do their jobs.

Most of the workers interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were acting against agency guidance. Last month, an internal Postal Service memo warned employees not to speak to journalists and to be wary of customers who ask “a series of questions.”

The Postal Service’s dire financial situation, coupled with mounting political pressure, and worries about an election in which nearly 180 million Americans are eligible to vote by mail, has begun to overwhelm its workforce.

“People are burned out,” one New Jersey letter carrier said. “I haven’t been this burned out in a long time, and I’ve been doing this a long time. We’ve never had a summer like this. I tell my customers, ‘Call your congressman, because I’m being told not to deliver your mail.’

‘Every piece, every day’

New postal workers are introduced to the agency’s unofficial motto within their first days on the job: “Every piece, every day.” It’s referenced so frequently that “EPED” is shorthand to work faster, or longer, when mail piles up. Any conscious effort to delay mail is, under federal law, punishable by fine and as much as five years of imprisonment.


Many postal workers see the changes that have slowed mail as violating the spirit, if not the letter, of that law.

They view themselves as couriers of prescription medications, paychecks, bills and more, and also as neighbors to the people on their routes, checking in on elderly residents and delivering life’s necessities. The coronavirus pandemic has only magnified that sense of responsibility, they say.

“You look at the news and you get worried,” said one Philadelphia postal worker. “Are we going to be the end-all, be-all of election integrity and covid response for this country? Having your own personal problems, too, it all adds up. I think it’s really starting to get to people, both newer and seasoned veterans of the job.”

Since his June 15 start, DeJoy has focused on shoring up the Postal Service’s finances. Despite surging package volumes during the pandemic, the agency has been losing ground on first-class and marketing mail — its most profitable products — for years.

“The thing is, right now the size of their hole is so big and continuing to grow, there is no one silver bullet to fix this,” said Kenneth John, president of the Postal Policy Associates consultancy and a former senior analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “They’ve done a lot of the low-hanging fruit already, so you’re left with a set of really difficult choices. You’re left with really big changes.”

What’s more, he added, DeJoy’s efforts can close only a relatively small portion of the agency’s deficit. “You’re either left with these difficult choices and big changes, or ultimately, Congress is going to need to pay for it.”


Much of the Postal Service’s financial difficulty is structural: Congress reorganized the agency in 1970 and essentially ordered it to operate as both a public service and business. As such, it is supposed to be self-sustaining without benefit of taxpayer funding. But the passage of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act mandated that it prepay employees’ retirement and health-care benefits, an obligation held by few other government agencies, let alone private companies. Today, retiree costs account for nearly three-fourths, or $119.3 billion, of its deficit.

Because the Postal Service lacks revenue streams divorced from mail volumes, nearly any cost-cutting maneuver would almost certainly hurt service, an issue that draws heaps of congressional attention even as lawmakers have put off substantial postal reform. But some of DeJoy’s changes go right to the heart of the agency’s operations. Some flexibility in delivery schedules, such as allowing late or extra delivery trips, ensures that mail arrives on time, experts say, and prevents backlogs.

Postal leaders have long relied on overtime to keep the mail moving, as it is more cost efficient than expanding payroll. That supplemental income is a boon for many workers — comprising nearly 10 percent of all work hours within any given pay period — but an albatross for agency finances. Yet government watchdog groups, including the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, have identified overtime as a potential source of cost savings.

“If it means you’re going to hire more workers, there are going to be more families that have a family-sustaining union job, that’s fine with us,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents more than 200,000 current and retired postal employees. “If it means you’re going to cut out overtime and, therefore, the people are not going to get the service that they need and deserve, then it’s horrible.”

The cost-cutting efforts have led to multiday delays in communities all over the country. As of the final week of August — five weeks after DeJoy’s changes took effect — on-time delivery rates for first-class mail had declined from more than 90 percent to roughly 85 percent, according to Postal Service data provided to Congress. For periodicals, they went from 80 percent to 75 percent.

John Barger, a Republican member of the Postal Service’s governing board, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month that DeJoy’s changes were starting to “bear fruit” and that the board was pleased with his performance. “The board is tickled pink,” he said.

“Thanks to the great work and dedication of our employees, our service performance continues to improve,” a Postal Service spokesman said in an emailed statement to The Post.

But some workers vividly recalled scenes of mail and packages piling up, days at a time, this summer during the worst stretches of the transition. Postal workers in Michigan and Iowa described seeing entire pallets of boxes go unsorted and sit outdoors in the rain or summer heat. Sometimes the smell of rotting food attracted swarms of flies, they said.

At the Royal Palm Processing and Distribution Center in Opa-locka, Fla., massive stacks of marketing mail sat untouched for 43 days, according to local union officials.

“You know, it’s just disheartening,” said Dana Coletti, president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 230 in Manchester, N.H.

Four federal courts also took issue with DeJoy’s changes. Judges in Washington state, New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia all held that the Postal Service should have sought an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission — a process that would have allowed for public comment — before instituting the new cost-cutting measures. The judges blocked the agency from pursuing DeJoy’s plans, and lawyers representing 19 states and a group of voters who brought the suit are in negotiations with the Postal Service over a potential settlement.

‘The stakes definitely feel higher’

The long mail delays made some postal workers think more about the role they’d be playing come election season.

The Pennsylvania primary in early June provided a taste of what was to come, said the Philadelphia worker. Though the pandemic was the biggest worry at the time, “we had a lot of issues. There were people at the plant that weren’t coming in or were sick. We were seeing delays with that. So now we’re looking at this [general election] and going, ‘Oh, jeez, this is not going to be good.’ The stakes definitely feel higher, especially given what this election really means.”

In Michigan, one postal worker considered the removal of public mailboxes, which are subject to periodic checks to ensure they are being used, as disproportionately affecting people of color. When a collection box is removed in a wealthy suburb, residents have the time and resources to push back, said the carrier, who is Black. But when it’s removed in a racially diverse working-class neighborhood, it’s just another government service that’s been clawed back.

“It’s kind of like everything else. It wasn’t built for us,” the worker said of the Postal Service and its relationship with Black people.

DeJoy’s background — he’s donated more than $2 million to the Trump campaign and GOP causes since 2016 — doesn’t help matters, the postal worker said, and makes him feel as though the Republican Party has co-opted the Postal Service.

Taken together, Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in voting, his connection with DeJoy, and DeJoy’s operational changes look too conspicuous to be coincidental, the carrier said, even if DeJoy has stated publicly that he’d stand up to the president when necessary. Some postal workers say the pushback has to start with them to show that DeJoy’s instructions go against the mail service’s operational and ethical mandates. Plus, they say, they are legally bound to ensure the timely delivery of mail.

In New York, one mechanic expressed dismay that he is surrounded by a “bunch of yes men” who are simply going to follow orders.

“It’s disheartening to hear from my boss that he wants me to do something that could very potentially cripple the system. It’s disheartening to hear that people think we’re going to fail. We handle this kind of volume all the time,” he said of the election. “But if they do these things with delivery times and we get high volume around holiday season and the election, it will fail. No question. It will fail. We should get the ballots out. We really should, but all it would take is one person in a nice shiny suit to say, ‘Leave those ballots, take the other mail.’ And everyone would say, ‘Yes sir.’

“There’s a point where I got angry. I’m not happy at all that I’m being politicized. I’m literally trying to do my job, and they’re telling me that I can’t.”

‘Don’t do anything illegal, unsafe, immoral’

DeJoy on Aug. 18 suspended parts of his cost-cutting program after congressional and public blowback — much of it on social media, where images of mailbox removals were met with suspicion and outrage. But it was too late for most of the 671 mail-sorting machines that had been tapped for dismantling and removal across 49 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

The agency said that the massive machines, representing close to 10 percent of its inventory and capable of sorting 21.4 million pieces of paper mail per hour, had been earmarked long before DeJoy and that their decommissioning was simply a reflection of Americans’ diminishing use for letters and growing reliance on package delivery. But many workers saw it as further erosion of a finely calibrated infrastructure, one with real ramifications for customers who rely on the agency for their prescription medications and other crucial deliveries.

“It bothers me, because I like to do my job. Some of us do this for 20 years,” said the New Jersey letter carrier. “You see kids grow up from babies and watch them get married. They see you in Wawa, and they buy you a coffee. They say, ‘This is my mailman, he’s a great guy.’ Now they say, ‘Where’s my mail?’ ”

Postal workers’ responses varied from insubordination to small acts of neighborly heroism. In Florida, one manager told of instructing employees to meticulously document their hours and what happens to mail to uphold accountability standards. There are forms for reporting late or undeliverable mail and to record overtime, though several postal workers say supervisors have downplayed the need to complete them in recent weeks.

“What I try to tell people is this: Yes, if you get an instruction, you should follow the instructions of your supervisor,” the manager said. “But every manual says the same thing: Don’t do anything illegal, unsafe, immoral. Well, my manager knows that if he doesn’t want mail to be reported late, to keep the mail out of my building.”

Last month in New York, machinists were ordered to remove sorting machines and use spare parts to augment another, one of the workers said. The person told supervisors that such a move wouldn’t help; the enlarged sorter would be able to collate mail into more carriers’ routes, but it also would process letters more slowly than two machines doing the job simultaneously. When his supervisor told him to repeat the process for another set of machines, the machinist and colleagues balked and drew out the steps required to implement the change. Eventually, superiors gave up on the order.

By then, House and Senate committees had called emergency hearings to cross-examine DeJoy over his relationship with Trump and his operational changes. “I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee on Aug. 24. Days earlier, he told a Senate panel he planned to vote by mail.

In Toledo, mail is shipped to the Michigan Metroplex outside Detroit for processing. When items arrive too late for the trucks headed to Michigan, a manager not eligible for overtime will hop into a Postal Service van and transport that mail separately, said Martin Ramirez, president of the APWU Local 170. That way, the Toledo offices won’t log overtime hours, even though that worker still puts in extra time.

“This is the dancing between the raindrops,” Ramirez said.

As Toledo’s trucks arrive at distribution centers, clerks scan the wire racks carrying the mail to try to spot medications, checks and bills, said Jennifer Lemke, the clerk craft director at Local 170. Even if the day’s mail gets delayed, Lemke and other clerks will retrieve essential items and send them off with carriers.

When angry customers call the post office or come to the retail window, Lemke said, she apologizes for mail delays, then sends for the local postmaster.

“I will put it off on the people that are causing the damage,” she said.

“My message to [local union members] is: You do what you can to satisfy the customer,” Ramirez said. “Look, we’re going to fight from national on down. I don’t need you losing your job.”
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