Unlike many of my fellow liberals, I don’t consider the post office to be the very sinew upon which our nation rests. On the other hand, it is important and it’s worth running properly.

Now, there are plenty of reasonable disagreements about how the post office should be run, but there’s one issue that seems almost indisputable to me: it should be able to set postage rates that allow it to break even. Unfortunately, federal law allows the price of first class stamps to rise only at the rate of inflation, and that’s plainly not enough in an era of email, Instagram, and falling volumes of first class mail. The German post office surveys European postage rates every few years, and here’s how we compare:

I think we can all agree that four bucks to send a letter in Denmark seems fairly outlandish, but we can also agree that the current US rate of 55 cents is pretty obviously an outlier too. We have economies of scale, to be sure, but we also have a far bigger landmass to cover than any European country.

This is the fundamental problem with the Postal Service. Congress wants to look good, so they pass a law keeping postage rates down. Then, when the Postal Service runs deficit after deficit, they swoop in and insist that it’s because they’re run inefficiently. After all, it couldn’t possibly be Congress’s fault, could it?

It could be and it is. The Postal Regulatory Commission has been trying to get the inflation rule changed for some time, but so far they’ve had no luck. Apparently no one in Congress wants to be known as the person who voted to increase the price of a stamp.

When it comes to packages, the Postal Service has competition and therefore sets rates that allow it to compete. That keeps package rates reasonable. However, there’s no similar competitive pressure on letters since the Postal Service has a monopoly on first class mail. This means there really does need to be some kind of oversight on first class postage rates in order to prevent us from turning into Denmark. The problem is that a simpleminded inflation rule is about the worst possible oversight you can imagine. It needs to change, and if it does, guess what? Suddenly the USPS would be in perfectly good shape even if first class postage remained lower than practically any country in Europe. If we really value the Postal Service, this would be the single best way to show it.

Andrej Sokolow/DPA via ZUMA

Some of you may be wondering why President Trump seems to have it in for the Postal Service. It’s a short story:

• Trump hates the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos.
• Trump tweeted about this once and Bezos responded with a joke. Trump can’t stand jokes at his expense, so he hates Bezos.
• Bezos is CEO of Amazon, therefore Trump hates Amazon.
• The Postal Service delivers some of Amazon’s packages. As a matter of revenge, Trump wants them to raise the rates they charge Amazon.
• They have refused to do so, therefore Trump hates the Postal Service.

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to it. Trump has been waiting five years for an opportunity to take revenge on the Postal Service, and the current ruckus over vote-by-mail has given him his chance. He’s pretending that it’s all about ballot fraud and inefficient management and so forth, but it’s really about the fact that Bezos—who is considerably richer than Trump—once made a modest joke about Trump and the Postal Service got caught in the crossfire.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s how the United States of America is governed these days.

In my COVID-19 chart roundup this morning you may have noticed a tiny uptick in Italy’s mortality numbers. I thought about mentioning it, but decided to wait a few days to see if it was just a blip. Apparently it’s not:

With daily coronavirus case numbers rising, Italy on Monday imposed its first new restrictions on daily life since coming out of lockdown nearly four months ago, ordering the closure of nightclubs and mandating mask-wearing, even outdoors, in areas with nightlife….Although the Italian restrictions are modest, they amount to a test of whether a country can keep the virus at bay without resorting to the blunt-force lockdown strategy used earlier in the pandemic. Italy’s government is specifically targeting nightclubs and evening socializing as cases are increasingly detected among the young.

Sure enough, case counts have been rising for the past several weeks:

The number of new daily cases has nearly tripled since early July. This is an early test of whether countries can ever come out of lockdown and remain safe until we have an effective vaccine. It’s not looking good so far.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Kevin Drum

Now we’re talking:

Spurred by fears that President Trump is trying to eviscerate the U.S. Postal Service to help him win reelection, Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday abruptly summoned the House back to Washington this week to pass a bill aimed at rolling back administration cutbacks that could cripple widespread mail-in voting. Congressional Democrats also called on the recently appointed postmaster general to testify Aug. 24 at an emergency hearing by a House committee about cost-cutting moves that led to steep slowdowns in mail service in much of the country over the last three months.

This is an area where good politics and good policy come together. The Postal Service really does need higher funding, especially this year, and this is a very popular position since practically everyone loves the post office. It’s hard to imagine Republicans being willing to take a beating over this for months on end, especially since it’s unlikely to actually make a big difference in the election results anyway. Donald Trump is too stupid to know this, but most Republican leaders know it perfectly well.

I woke up at 6 today. 6 pm, that is. These crash days are really getting out of hand.

Anyway, this means I missed an entire day, so let’s see what happened here in Orange County while I was snoozing. It’s Sunday, so there can’t be much going—

A group of women have been dubbed ‘a wild pack of Karens’ after they staged an anti-mask rally outside a California supermarket….The women became enraged by the fact that they were unable to shop without wearing face masks, with one even accusing Mother’s Market of committing ‘war crimes’.

….‘The citizens of United States are being denied access to food. This is a war crime! This is crimes against humanity happening right now at Mother’s Market & Kitchen in Costa Mesa!’ the narrator continues.

Maybe I should just go back to sleep. Somebody wake me up in a hundred years, OK?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Chad Wolf, the guy currently pretending to be head of Homeland Security even though his appointment was illegal.Pool/Abaca via ZUMA

Donald Trump loves to fill vacant positions by simply appointing acting officials, thus bypassing the Senate confirmation process that he finds so annoying. Unfortunately for him, that’s not always legal:

The top two officials at the Department of Homeland Security are serving unlawfully in their roles, the Government Accountability Office said Friday, dealing a rebuke to President Trump’s affinity for filling senior executive roles in his administration with “acting” leaders who lack Senate confirmation.

Good for the GAO, but how many divisions do they have? This is a president who’s deliberately wrecking the post office to gain a partisan advantage over Democrats. He sent domestic troops to Portland to create chaos that would help sell his law-and-order campaign theme. He’s pulled the birther card against Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, and now Kamala Harris. He had protesters near the White House gassed so he could do a photo op. He pardons his pals even if they’ve committed crimes so obvious that even Bill Barr calls their prosecution righteous. He retweets lunatic QAnon conspiracies. He tried to get a foreign leader to open a criminal investigation of a political opponent. He has relentlessly tried to undermine the census. And he’s done all this stuff without a peep of protest from anyone in the Republican Party.

So what are the odds that anyone will try to make him obey the law now? About zero, I think.

The COVID-19 charts were up late today, but there was a good reason: I stayed up all night hoping to do some Milky Way photography, and then slept in until 11 after I got home. So how did I do?

Badly. The whole trip was a complete bust. I tried a new spot on Palomar Mountain and there was just too much light there. Also, the sky was cloudy despite my astro-app telling me the sky would be clear. And even if it had been clear, it just wasn’t a good night for viewing. I could barely even see the Milky Way, let alone photograph it.

So instead I switched gears and took pictures of the clouds. My original goal had been to take multiple shots of the Milky Way and stitch them together, thus getting a single image that showed it from end to end. Instead, I did this for the sky as I found it. This one is eight frames stitched together:

This picture has a certain charm, but it’s very long and thin, which wasn’t my intention. I did take a series of pictures with the camera pointed higher, but I somehow screwed up the middle batch and this was enough to cause Photoshop to choke when it tried to merge them. So the bottom series of photos is all I have.

A few miles away I took this picture of a cityscape. Unfortunately, I don’t really know just what city this is. Judging from the position of Venus, my best guess is Warner Springs:

This is three photos stitched together. I took a second series with a different exposure to get a better rendition of the cityscape, but for some reason Photoshop wouldn’t merge them. They were nearly identical to the first set, so I don’t know what happened.

One of these days I need to get a better idea of what the Photomerge function needs to work properly. It almost randomly seems to work on some sets of images and choke on others. When it fails, I always check the images to see if there’s plenty of overlap, and there always is. So what’s up?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.