Postal Service

It's going to be more expensive to mail holiday greetings and birthday cards next year. But the U.S. Postal Service announced Tuesday that the price of a first-class stamp will increase to 45 cents starting on January 22, the first price increase in two years, according to Reuters. Prices for postcards will increase three pennies to 32 cents and letters to Canada and Mexico will increase to 85 cents. Sending a greeting to someone outside of North America increases to $1.05.

We average people vote but we don't get much respect from our government these days nor from some of our representatives. The government gives our taxpayer money and tax breaks to big companies and corporations that don't pay taxes and often don't pay their share of local government costs. Remember the companies with large water bills or the developers who get vacant property at bargain prices while ordinary people are losing their homes. Our representatives often do not allow ordinary people like us to know how they voted on certain issues.

Mail carriers will attempt to resume deliveries today, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Deliveries were canceled throughout Maryland on Saturday due to the snowy weather, said Postal Service spokewoman Freda Sauter. On Monday, "carriers will make every attempt to deliver as long as there's safe conditions," she said. Residents are asked to clear a path to their mailboxes to ensure it is visible and safe to access. Mail will not be delivered if carriers deem conditions to be unsafe, according to the postal service.

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.

Ever since Congress stupidly decided to make the U.S. Postal Service a quasi-private entity, the organization has been going steadily downhill. The arrangement has grossly inflated the ranks of upper and mid-level management, people who have nothing to do with the post office's actual mission of delivering the mail. On top of that, some upper management idiots decided to spend millions of dollars on changing the design of the Postal Service's logo and are now engaged in a massive TV advertising campaign to get people to ship more packages by USPS.

A foreign student I knew in college said he loved America for three reasons: our freedoms, the quality of our peanut butter and the excellence of our postal service. He thought it was cool that we could gather and protest anything we wanted to, whenever we wanted to. He thought the famous brands of peanut butter on the supermarket shelves were all good. And he was absolutely amazed that he could mail a letter from Connecticut on a Monday and have it reach almost anywhere in the country by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.

Most Americans are just an email, Tweet or Facebook update away from reaching someone else - or the entire world. And the trend is accelerating, as the number of email accounts alone is expected to grow by almost a billion worldwide from last year to 2014. Now, the U.S. Postal Service has practically conceded that it's being left in the digital dust. The Postal Service proposed Monday changing its first-class delivery standard so mail will arrive two to three days after it is shipped, rather than as early as overnight.

WASHINGTON - The Postal Service took the first formal step Wednesday toward cutting mail delivery to five days a week. The postal governing board agreed to ask the independent Postal Regulatory Commission for an opinion on dropping Saturday delivery. That request goes to the commission next week. Under the proposal, mail delivery to homes and businesses and mail collection from blue mailboxes would be limited to Monday through Friday. However, post offices that are now open on Saturdays would remain open, and Express Mail delivery service would still be available seven days a week.

Few institutions touch more Americans than the U.S. Postal Service, whose role is spelled out in the Constitution and which delivers to 150 million homes and businesses six days a week. Letter carriers get to know our communities, occasionally saving elderly residents who are ill, finding lost children and stopping crime. We annually conduct the nation's largest single-day food drive, replenishing food pantries in Baltimore and elsewhere. And yet, the misinformation circulating about the Postal Service is startling, such as the notion that in delivering the mail, the USPS has a massive imbalance between revenues and expenses.

Word that the cash-strapped Postal Service would stop delivering mail on Saturdays hit Lakesha Johnson hard. "I think that's terrible," the Baltimore woman said Wednesday outside the city's Main Post Office on East Fayette Street. "When they want to save money, it's always us who suffer. " But Don Seto said it wouldn't make much difference to him. "I pay bills online, I use email," said Seto, a biology professor who also uses the Internet to discuss research with colleagues, during a visit to the downtown Annapolis branch.

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.

The U.S. Postal Service last week announced it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays in an effort to curtail losses it has seen in recent years. The changes, set to begin Aug. 5, should save the agency $2 billion annually at a time when the Postal Service lost $15.9 billion in the last fiscal year, according to a statement by Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe posted on the agency's website. Congress has stunted attempts to change the delivery process in the past, and this time lawmakers in Washington confronted this decision with opposition as soon as it was announced.

Wanda Feagen pulled on her blue United States Postal Service coat and a pair of thick black gloves shortly after 10 a.m. Saturday, blinking against a hard wind and waiting for her mail delivery truck to fill up on gas. "Hoo hoo!" she said of the cold weather. Feagen had just set out from the Gwynn Oak post office after cataloging mail since the start of her day at 7:30 a.m., and was on her way to the rolling residential hills nearby to begin her regular weekend delivery route.

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.

Isn't it ironic that our government could afford to subsidize our involvement in Iraq to the tune of $12 billion per month, yet it cannot afford to subsidize the U.S. Postal Service, one of the best-operating federal agencies, at a fraction of that cost ("'Snail mail' could get slower under Postal Service plan," Dec. 6)? Donald T. Torres, Ellicott City

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.

John R. Cochran Jr., former Washington postmaster and a World War II veteran, died Wednesday of pneumonia at Stonegates Retirement Community in Greenville, Del. He was 87. The son of a dairyman and a teacher, John R. Cochran Jr. was born in Monkton and raised in Taylor, Harford County. After graduating in 1941 from Bel Air High School, he moved to Baltimore and went to work for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. Drafted into the Army Air Forces in 1943, Mr. Cochran served as a radio operator and turret gunner aboard B-24 bombers in Europe as a member of the 376th Bomb Group of the 514th Squadron.