Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 52m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred seventy-sixth day.
On this day in 1944, in Operation Dragoon, Allied forces land in southern France.
Recommended for reading in full —
AJ Vicens reports Michigan’s Postal Workers Say the Fix Is In:
While President Donald Trump forthrightly acknowledged only yesterday [8.13] that weakening the Post Office will help him obstruct mail balloting this fall, postal workers in the key swing state of Michigan say his mission has been clear for weeks.
Delayed mail, a consequence of battles over funding for the United States Postal Service and of the agency’s staffing shortages, affects many aspects of American life—the delivery of millions of prescriptions, paychecks, bills. But recentfunding cuts, overtime reductions, and other changes imposed by Louis DeJoy, the man Trump recently appointed as head of the postal service, have left postal workers warning about new multi-day delays—and that a deliberate effort to slow down the mail and interfere with the election is underway.
“I think it’s absolutely true,” said Steve Wood, a mail clerk who works at the Michigan Metroplex, a massive mail sorting center near Detroit. He says he was convinced in recent weeks as he and his colleagues saw the removal of almost a quarter of the facility’s mail sorting machines, a lack of substitute employees to replace workers missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a general lack of urgency to locate and send along ballots that have piled up in bins.
Rachel Maddow reports Donald Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, had to halt the removal of mailboxes from city streets after reporting in Montana led to widespread public outcry:
Paul Waldman asks Is QAnon the shape of the Republican backlash to come?:
The leading contender is already taking shape and working its way into the GOP: the lunatic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. It already has its first soon-to-be member of Congress, along with a raft of candidates who have captured Republican nominations for a number of offices, including in the U.S. Senate. And it has establishment Republicans confused and uncertain, aghast at what it represents but too cowardly to purge it from their ranks.
In case you’re not familiar, QAnon began a few years ago with posts on 4chan claiming that an anonymous government insider (“Q”) was revealing the hidden forces behind all current events. The theory posits that Trump is a messianic figure at war with an international cabal of satanic, cannabalistic pedophiles; at any moment, the president (who in some tellings was partnering in this effort with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III) will expose his enemies and cart them all off to Guantanamo Bay. The FBI believes QAnon poses a domestic terrorism threat.
At Trump rallies, you could see signs and T-shirts promoting QAnon, and the Trump campaign has courted the movement’s adherents. For a president who is, himself, both a consumer and an advocate of all manner of conspiracy theories, it was an easy fit.
I’m having trouble wrapping my arms around the whole “Kill the USPS” campaign. It seems like more of a distraction/desperation move than a serious threat to democracy.
The post office processes/delivers 470 million letters a day, not counting packages. 136 million voted for president in 2016. Considering that every vote-by-mail transaction takes two, or at the most, three pieces of mail to complete, the whole process adds up to about a day’s work for the PO, presuming all absentee ballots are sent in, and not dropped off, requested by mail, and everyone votes by mail. Not all ballots will be sent out, or returned, at the same time, so the whole process is spread out over days or weeks.
It would be very easy to spot returning ballots at the PO, as they are in distinctive envelopes, and give those letters priority handling, and make sure they are postmarked. The Postmaster General could order this not to happen, but that might be a wee-bit too obvious, even for a Trumpie, particularly one that is likely to be thoroughly investigated by the next administration. I’ll be amazed if responsible local postmasters have not already issued those sorts of orders. No Postmaster wants to have to explain how his office miss-handled mail-in ballots. Anyone who orders postal workers to play games with ballots will be outed immediately. Postal workers take their jobs seriously, and have not been shy about speaking up.
This move by Trump has a performance-art whiff to it. It seems to be more aimed at delaying Amazon’s package deliveries than anything else, because Trump is pissed at Bezos. Delaying Amazon packages is not going to win the election for Trump. It might have a measurable effect on a really close election, but this one ain’t gonna be close, and no amount of monkey-wrenching around the edges is going to change that.
The Democrats have done a good job exposing what Trump is doing to the USPS and informing the public about ways to ensure their ballot gets delivered and counted. That the Republicans are doing absolutely everything they can think of to depress turnout is telling. The national R-Team might take a look at the Wisco-World Supreme Court election and ponder the backlash Vos/Fitz got last May from mucking in that election. Messing with folk’s voting rights tends to fire them up.
One thing is for sure: Postmaster Louis DeJoy is rapidly becoming yet another great shining example of the absolute immutability of Joe’s First Law of Trump, which states unassailably that if you get too close to Trump, you get spattered with shit. Looie got way too close to Trump and is now covered with a rapidly thickening cocoon of shit, sort of like a man-sized mud-wasp, or the world’s largest dung-beetle.
It is odd, and seemingly incoherent. If Trump wanted merely to obstruct the return of ballots, why be so obvious in slow-down efforts? He insists on re-opening the economy, but now allows actions in the postal service that will affect businesses and consumers. Trump’s no strategist, but he does have an animal’s instinct for foraging.
It’s likely that there is an anti-Amazon bias (even if that acting on that bias undermines Trump’s supposed economic recovery plans). He’s a narrow and vindictive man, so appetite may easily outweigh reason.
Joe’s First Law still holds: DeJoy risks much in his role as postmaster general, with no upside. Like Gordon Sondland, DeJoy’s donor money may have led to a role, but it’s a role not worth having. At least Sondland could hide in the ambiguities of diplomatic discretion; DeJoy is acting within a highly regulated administrative framework. Sondland has, for his sake, already begun to fade from memory. If DeJoy wrote something reckless to please others, he may find himself (sometime in 2021) less forgettable.
America would be far worse off if these were competent men.