Postal

Think for a moment of a rabbit.Not just any rabbit. Think of a tall, gray rabbit who wears white gloves and walks around on his hind legs. He is a cocky creature who chomps a carrot the way W. C. Fields bit into his cigars: confidently. He opens every encounter with these smart-alecky words:"What's up, Doc?"Now imagine this cheeky rabbit on a 32-cent U.S. States postage stamp. Does that thought cheer you? Does it make you sick? Do you ask yourself what kind of abomination the U.S. Postal Service will contrive next?

The U.S. Postal Service issued an illustration of a bank swallow by Maryland artist Matt Frey Friday as a stamped envelope, the second in a four-part series of swallows by Frey commissioned by the organization. The bird is the smallest swallow in North America, and adorns the seventh stamped envelope issued by the Post Office this year. A Baltimore native, Frey graduated from Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts with a degree in illustration in 1996. He has done illustrations for Discover Magazine, National Geographic Magazine and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, among others.

It was bound to happen. As soon as Postmaster General Marvin Runyon announced a sweeping cut of 42,000 postal supervisors, the union representing supervisors rushed to Congress threatening court action. Even worse, members of Congress took up the union's cause.Postal prices cannot be stabilized unless the Postal Service's gigantic bureaucracy is sharply reduced. Wages and benefits account for over 80 cents of every dollar spent. The postal empire of 600,000 employees is just too big and cumbersome.

In Korea, back in the 1950s, a new commander arrived for the small military installation in Ulsan where I was stationed. One of his first acts was to issue a general order which read, "No stupid action will be taken by any member of this command. " As a mere major, he had no authority to issue general orders, but that's beside the point. We need a similar rule for the U.S. Congress with respect to the U.S. Postal Service. If you check the Constitution, you will find that Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 says that Congress has the power "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads.

Once again, the U.S. Postal Service finds itself in a fiscal bind not of its own making. It is running a $1.6 billion deficit due to the manipulations of Congress and an ill-advised decision by the commission that sets postal rates.Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank wanted to bring the agency's $48 billion budget into balance through a 30-cent rate for first-class mail and lesser increases for other categories. But he was rebuffed by the independent Postal Rate Commission, which devised its own plan -- 29 cents for first-class and a whopping 25 percent hike in third-class bulk mail.

There's something about donating food that makes it an enormously effective form of charity. Perhaps it speaks to a basic human need to share one's larder, or perhaps it's simply easier than other forms of giving. Whatever the reason, this week's Postal Service campaign for area food banks is a stunning success.In just two days, area residents left 375,000 pounds of canned, boxed, bottled and plastic wrapped foodstuffs near their mailboxes. Neighborhood letter carriers, the critical link in this chain of caring, are hauling donations back to their post offices where they are boxed and trucked to the Maryland Food Bank.

Even the postmaster general is laughing at the ludicrous decision by the Postal Rate Commission to impose a new first-class postage rate on Feb. 3 of 29 cents, instead of the requested 30 cents. It is bad enough that postal costs rise so quickly that prices must be hiked every few years. But to settle on the odd-ball figure of 29 cents simply creates a new irritant for the American consumer.Why 29 cents? As Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank noted, all it will do is prove a boon for the copper mines, since billions of pennies will be needed to provide change when customers purchase their stamps.

What's going on here? Why is the largest group of business postal users linking arms with the postmaster general in support of a 3-cent increase in first-class mail? Why would businesses that stand to see their postal costs rise 10 or 15 percent cheer the decision to approve this higher rate?And why is the postmaster patting himself on the back for this 32-cent proposal?Because the situation could be a lot worse. The requested increase (it still must be adopted by the independent Postal Rate Commission)

Anthony Frank soon will leave his job as postmaster general after having brought the world's largest company, kicking and screaming, into the era of automation. He did his job well, but the United States Postal Service remains mired in excessive red tape and too many customer complaints. Everyone, it seems, has a grudge against the post office.Yet given the assignment, Mr. Frank and his army of 750,000 workers do amazingly well. Every day, they must sort and deliver 525 million letters to 118 million mail boxes.

During his four years as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Marvin T. Runyon Jr. earned the nickname "Carvin' Marvin" for hacking away at the federally owned electric utility's vast bureaucracy. By the time he was finished, 14,000 of TVA's 35,000 workers had been discharged. Now that the 70-year-old Mr. Runyon has been named postmaster general, does the same fate await the U.S. Postal Service?Mr. Runyon may not be the postal hatchet man that some fear. For one thing, the groundwork has already been laid for a gradual downsizing of the huge postal bureaucracy (work force: 750,000)

At the Dundalk Post Office this week, news that the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service would stop delivering mail on Saturdays beginning in August was greeted with a mix of apathy and understanding. Twenty-four-year-old Jordan Gillis said he wasn't surprised by the announcement. "It'll just be something that people will adjust to," said Gillis, who was running errands Wednesday for the Dundalk Music Center, where he teaches guitar. Paul Tomczewski, 75, said the announcement seemed to be a sign of a wider issue with government finances.

I recently had an unnerving experience at a post office. I hasten to add that it did not occur at the Roland Park Post Office, our home branch, where we walk daily to pick up mail. On Saturday errands, I stopped at another post office to mail some letters, a book and two small packages that I had already stamped. The book is what caused the problem. I have used a media rate to send books for years. Books are a central part of my life. I am a writer and a reader. I have friends who are writers, whose books I often send as gifts.

Once as much of a test of a civilian government's effectiveness as collecting the garbage and keeping the peace in the streets, the delivery of packages and letters via a government postal service has undergone tremendous changes since the days when Benjamin Franklin got the unenviable task of being the nation's first postmaster general. In the United States, it became evident nearly a century ago that there was money to be made by delivering packages more quickly and reliably than the U.S. Postal Service.

James A. Buck gladly accepted the package at his Parkville office from the deliveryman wearing a UPS uniform. But minutes later, police swooped in to arrest Buck, 54, and seized the parcel, which had contained three pounds of marijuana he sent to himself from California, according to court records. Buck pleaded guilty to a possession charge, though he said in a recent interview that the drugs were for medicinal use. Buck's case and search warrants unsealed last week offer a glimpse into a long-standing — and growing — smuggling practice: mailing drugs from California to Maryland.

A former postal worker admitted Friday that she stole mail and the money inside those envelopes at a Linthicum postal facility, victimizing more than 250 people, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore. Dorothy Jean Gibson, 56, of Windsor Mill, who worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 13 years, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to theft of mail by a postal employee, officials said. When sentenced Jan. 11, Gibson could receive a maximum sentence of five years in prison plus three years of supervised release, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

Dr. Georgina Y. Goodwin, a retired anesthesiologist and Postal Service medical director who was an activist for the addicted, died of congestive heart failure Sept. 27 at her residence at St. Elizabeth Hall in Timonium. She was 87. She was born three months' premature at her parents' home in Queens, N.Y. Friends said that at her birth, she weighed 1 pound, 11 ounces. A midwife carried her in a shoe box to a hospital, where she spent three months in an incubator. Her father was an oil company executive and her mother a concert pianist.

Now that we're paying three cents more to mail a letter -- a 10 percent increase -- is 32 cents too high? Compared with the price of postage in other industrialized nations, the new U.S. rate is cheap. In Germany, it costs 64 cents; in Japan, you'd be licking an 81-cent stamp.Compared with inflation, the price increase is also cheap. This is the first rate hike in four years -- the longest stretch of rate tranquillity in 24 years. The percentage increase is 10.3. Yet inflation amounted to 12.2 percent.

An Odenton man who tricked a mentally disabled Glen Burnie postal worker into giving him more than $250,000 over the course of three years pleaded guilty Wednesday to exploiting a vulnerable adult, according to Anne Arundel County prosecutors. Eugene Allen Hinson, Jr., 59, of the 1300 block of Tab St. in Odenton was sentenced by Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Paul Hackner to serve 18 months of a 10-year prison term, prosecutors said in a news release. Hackner also required Hinson to pay full restitution to Thomas "Tommy" Newberger, 50, who is mentally retarded and has worked various jobs at the U.S. Post Office in Glen Burnie for about 30 years, prosecutors said.