Tag: USPS

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News Blog News Feature

Three Dead at USPS Facility, Shooter Died of “Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound”

Credit: Google Maps

Three United States Postal Service (USPS) employees were killed at a Memphis facility Tuesday, one dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. 

The shooting happened at a USPS inspection facility at the East/Lamar Carrier Annex in Orange Mound at the corner of Park and Pendleton, according to Susan Link, a postal inspector in Memphis. 

“Three employees are deceased and there is no ongoing threat,” Link said during a brief news conference Tuesday afternoon. 

Lisa-Anne Culp, Public Affairs Officer with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Memphis office, said ”the shooter was one of the three employees deceased of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound and the investigation is ongoing.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Kustoff Defends Postal Changes

The U.S. Postal Service cannot “continue to act like Blockbusters in a Netflix world.” So said 8th District U.S. Representative David Kustoff in a Zoom address to the Rotary Club of Memphis. The matter came up in relation to concerns about the effect of reductions of postal services on mail-in ballots.

Speaking from his local office in Ridgeway Loop, Kustoff said those reductions reflected ongoing social changes — mainly the drastic reduction in first-class mail caused by the cyber-revolution — and had begun under President Obama. “The Postal Service will have to adapt,” he said.

On another matter, Kustoff took note of the fact that there has been no congressional follow-up to the original COVID-related stimulus payments and said that the window for passing another stimulus bill had, for practical purposes, shrunk to the dimensions of the next three weeks.

Congressman David Kustoff

Members of Congress stand ready to return to Washington to vote for a solution as soon as one is agreed to by the two parties, he said, but, “once we hit October, everybody will be in their districts and involved with campaigns.”

• COVID-19 has clearly affected the way running for office has proceeded, locally. Certain races that usually involve a significant amount of public appearances or door-to-door contacts are more than usually dependent on social media, mailouts, phone banks, and — not least — polls.

Much polling is, of course, carried out by disinterested parties and seeks genuine opinion sampling. But increasingly candidates invest in polling, including “push polls” that are phrased so as to insinuate various points of views, for or against. And there are “benchmark” polls, designed to elicit public attitudes on various issues so as to guide the campaign strategy of a given candidate.

Two polls that were dropped last week indicate the range. One, arriving in people’s message boxes, is entitled “The Voter Survey,” and, despite its generalized name, is not so anodyne as all that, including as it does several leading questions that “push” in the direction of some candidates as against others.

The other poll, on Facebook, asks a wide variety of questions about various candidates and offices, and, to the degree that it deals with positions, phrases those positions more or less fairly. It, like the other poll, seems to focus ultimately on the state House District 83 race between incumbent Republican Mark White and Democratic challenger Jerri Green — indicating that the District 83 race is considered up for grabs. More on these two polls anon.

• The Shelby County Commission is scheduled to meet next in committee on September 9th, and, if all goes as County Mayor Lee Harris has indicated, they’ll finally have a budget book from the administration to pore over. Uncertainty over the final shape of the 2020-21 budget has vexed the last several meetings of the commission, and the budget book, which has been firmly promised for delivery on September 8th by Deputy Mayor Dwan Gillom, could go far toward resolving several issues or opening up new questions. Or both.

In recent meetings, the commission has been asked to lift a freeze on new hiring for several departments, both in the purview of elected officials and elsewhere. Those departments seeking relief from the freeze have pointed out that the proposed new positions would remain within fiscal limits voted on earlier. The commission has agreed to lift the freeze in one or two instances but in other cases has held judgment, pending receipt of the budget book.

Budget issues have been complicated by disagreements between the commission and the administration over an abundance of matters — ranging from the actual status and amount of funds on hand to the matter of authority over revising specific allocations. The original budget proposal submitted by Harris for the new fiscal year was rejected by the commission, which, after a lengthy series of meetings, proposed and voted on a different sort of budget altogether. In several areas, implementation of the budget has awaited the final details in the aforesaid administration budget book.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Winter is Coming, Grasshopper

CREDIT: Bruce VanWyngarden

I have a one-legged grasshopper. Well, I don’t actually have him, but he lives in our yard and he’s quite a specimen — a good three inches long, with a lime-green torso and a bright yellow stripe running down his back. I first spotted him munching on a canna lily blossom about three weeks ago. He didn’t move, even as I got within a few inches to take some photos.

It was then I noticed he was missing his right rear leg — you know, one of the two big ones grasshoppers use to jump. It didn’t seem to bother him much, though, and after posing for a few more shots, he launched himself and flew away.

Bruce VanWyngarden

I figured a one-legged grasshopper probably didn’t have much of a future, but he kept hanging around. A week later, I saw him in the black-eyed Susans, and a few days after that, climbing around on the butterfly bush. Yesterday, as I began to water the tomatoes, he popped out and flew right at my head. Cheeky monkey.

I’ve grown a little attached to this guy. Or girl. Something nipped off his leg, but he hasn’t let it mess up his summer. Which, let’s be honest here, is basically all the time on the planet he’s going to get.

We’re all living a bit like that grasshopper, aren’t we? We’re all missing something. Big chunks of our lives have disappeared, and we keep having to adapt — to change the way we travel, eat, go to school, go to the store, go to work, and vote.

That last item is about to become the most important one on the list. In the last presidential election, 33 million Americans voted by mail. You didn’t hear much about it because it was no big deal. It’s been happening for many election cycles. Residents of 35 states are able to vote by mail as a matter of course. As are military personnel or anyone (by absentee ballot) who will be away from their voting precinct on Election Day. Now, with the COVID crisis, nine more states are allowing vote-by-mail for citizens who fear going to the polls in person, though in many states, a mail-in ballot needs to be requested.

It’s fair to say that millions more Americans will vote by mail in 2020 than did in 2016. It’s also fair to say that the Trump administration is doing its best to make it more difficult to vote by mail by knee-capping the U.S. Postal Service — removing sorting machines and eliminating employee overtime in the midst of a pandemic, and two months before a critical election. Meanwhile, the president is openly working to delegitimize the election results in advance.

Here’s a nightmare scenario: On election night, millions of mail-in ballots are not counted by the end of the day, meaning final results for many states aren’t known immediately, though we will know who’s leading. But it’s quite possible there could be a few days where we don’t know the absolute final results of the election in several states. We might have a pretty good idea who won, but not with total certainty.

Those days will likely be a horror show. If he’s losing, Trump will declare the election a hoax; hell, he’s already doing that. He will summon his attorney general to instigate legal challenges to the results in as many states as possible. He will not concede. He will rally his base; he will stoke unrest; he will give a wink and a nod to white supremacists and QAnon wackos. He will incite chaos. Count on it. It’s what he does; it’s who he is.

Early voting in Tennessee runs from October 14th through October 29th. If there is any way you can get yourself to a polling place during those two weeks, I implore you to do it. The primary in-person voting process was extremely safe. Everyone was masked, distancing was enforced, wooden sticks were issued so that your finger didn’t have to touch a voting machine. Pens were given away so you could sign in without contacting something touched by another person. I would extend this advice to those living in other states, as well. Mask up, show up at a polling place, vote as if your life depends on it.

We are less than 70 days from what will be a very bumpy ride for democracy and justice and the American system of governance. It’s our moment to show courage, to speak truth to bullies and crooks, to make certain our votes are counted. There’s no room for complacency or apathy. We stop this now or it all falls apart.

The time for patience is past, Grasshopper. Winter is coming.