Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Trump Removing Mailboxes to Defeat Democrats in November-- Really?

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For the past few days the radical left Democrats---dancing cheek to cheek with the media--- have been creating a new hysteria that we'll call the "mailbox conspiracy."

Did you know that President Trump is deliberately crippling the US Postal Service so that it cannot handle votes by mail in November---even forcing USPS to remove mailboxes?

The issue is so important that Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from vacation.

It must be true, because even Joe Biden says it's true.

The truth is often inconvenient.

Be informed. Not misled.

The lie.

Matt Viser with the Washington Post, posted a quote from Joe Biden expressing his deep concern and outrage over Donald Trump's attempt to steal the election from him.

Biden said

"I wonder if you're outside trying to hold down your mailboxes. They're going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes. You oughta go online and checkout what they're doing in Oregon. I mean it's bizarre."

Speaker Pelosi says she's going to call House members back into session from their August vacation. They call it a "recess."

She says the mailbox issue is so important that the post office has become "Election Central" thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and Trump.

She says: "Alarmingly across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the President's campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters."

Pelosi is also urging Democrats to appear at their local post offices to protect mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election.

The Speaker went on to slam Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, calling him "a top Trump mega-donor" who has "proven a complicit crony as he continues to push for sweeping new operational changes that degrade postal service, delay the mail, and ---according to the Postal Service itself---threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion."

She added, 

"That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week to vote on Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Maloney's 'Delivering for America Act, which prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in in place on January 1, 2020."

And she is calling for all members of the House in an effort to "save the Postal Service" to "participate in a Day of Action on Tuesday (today) by appearing at a Post Office in their districts for a press event."

The truth.

About the mailboxes.

In 2009, the postmaster general proposed moving to five-day-per-week mail delivery to cut costs. President Obama had been very critical of the USPS that year for failing to keep up with the private sector competitors.

The Obama-Biden administration considered closing nearly 3,700 post office locations that year and proposed cutting 12,000 postal jobs.

President Trump chose a different approach and demanded a new more favorable deal from Amazon regarding the prices they are charging the US Postal Service for delivering their packages.

One aspect of trying to save the USPS has been to remove low-volume mailboxes---boxes where few people drop mail---which has measurable cost savings for the postal service.

It began under the Obama administration. Biden knows what he posted on Twitter is a lie. But it doesn't matter. The end always justifies the means in the mind of the so-called progressive.

In fact, the mailboxes pictured at the top of this story is a picture of boxes actually removed by the Obama-Biden administration, not the Trump administration. However, Trump's administration has continued the policy in an attempt to save the postal service.

Kimberly Frum, a spokesperson with the postal service, told the Hill the low volume mailboxes are a drag on the Postal Service budget that lost more than $2 billion in the second quarter alone.

She noted that people with their own residential or business mailbox "can use it as a vehicle to send outgoing mail."

To avoid further confusion, the USPS has said they will discontinue the practice until after the election.

The real problem.

The real bottle-neck with an all-in mail election lies with the state and local election officials who set arbitrary deadlines for postmarking ballots, and who will have to sort out millions more additional mailed ballots than they are used to handling.

Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah — currently conduct elections almost entirely by mail. The others do not.

The rest of the states can be divided into two categories: those that allow any registered voter to apply for mail-in ballots, and those that require an excuse.

The Hill has published an excellent article detailing the policy of each state.

A prelude.

We've already seen the possibility of disaster and chaos.

In the Democrat primary, more than one out of every four ballots was disqualified. In Clark County Nevada, 223,000 mailed ballots were returned as undeliverable. That is not a postal problem; it is a government problem that cannot be fixed by November.

And the Democrats are counting on that. Progressives thrive in chaos because they never let a crisis go to waste.

Takeaway.

Last week Dr. Tony Fauci, who does not lean right---in my opinion much more left in some of his thinking--told ABC doing an interview for National Geographic, there is no reason why voters should not vote in person.

He said, 

"I think if carefully done, according to the guidelines, there's no reason that I can see why that cannot be the case. If you go and wear a mask, if you observe the physical distancing, and don't have a crowded situation, there's no reason why [people] shouldn't be able to do that."

Unfortunately, there is a reason, but it has nothing to do with Fauci or the Post Office.

Manipulation

Yesterday. a new story emerged on social media. A picture of a "locked mailbox" appeared on former NBA star and far-left activist Rex Chapman's Twitter account. He noted that the mailbox in Burbank, Ca., is locked so people will be unable to vote in the upcoming election.

The mailbox is indeed locked. He has created a frenzy, with people shrieking, "It's Trump. We knew it all along. He's suppressing the vote, trying to steal the election."

The picture Chapman posted is from 2016, when USPS boxes in Burbank were locked due to a surge in postal theft.

Twitter recently branded a President Trump tweet about mail-in voter fraud as something that should be fact-checked.

As of last night, Twitter has not even challenged the 2016 picture of the locked mailbox nor the activist's claim, even though it had 20,000 retweets and 39,000 likes within hours of its posting.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.