Postal Service

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.

Updated with comments from Harris and Bartlett. In a rare intra-delegation, across-the-aisle nudge, Sen.Barbara A. Mikulskion Tuesday called on the state's two Republican lawmakers in Washington to support a Senate version of an overhaul of theU.S. Postal Servicethat would save a pair of mail sorting facilities that just happen to be located in the lawmakers' districts. The move instantly put Republican Reps. Andy Harris and Roscoe Bartlett on defense, forcing them to either support the bipartisan Senate version of the postal legislation -- which is not popular with Republican House leaders -- or acknowledge that the Postal Service must be allowed to trim costs and close plants, even if the cuts are made in their own districts.

Key senators reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to save a mail processing center considered significant to the Eastern Shore economy but left the fate of more than a dozen post offices in the Baltimore region uncertain as they considered a sweeping bill to overhaul theU.S. Postal Service. The underlying bipartisan legislation, which is poised for a vote in the Senate Wednesday, would allow the cash-strapped mail service to inch closer to ending Saturday delivery after a two-year waiting period and also restructure the way it pays retiree health benefits - potentially saving the agency billions of dollars a year.

Your article on cost cutting at the Postal Service is an ominous indication of the progress of the far-right campaign to destroy the U.S. Post Office, which has served our nation since its beginning and is enshrined in Article I of our Constitution ("Postal Service cost-cutting may deliver blow to Easton," March 10). Contrary to the lies being propagated by those who would leave us at the mercy of FedEx and other private competitors, the USPS is not broke and has not used any taxpayer money since 1971.

The only way to reach Supai, Ariz. (population 208), is to hike or helicopter eight miles to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. TheU.S. Postal Servicedelivers mail and supplies there three days a week - by mule. Although the country's steepest canyon may be no match for the American mail carrier, our postal system does face a gaping threat from a huge hole of another kind: After several years of modest surpluses, the postal service lost $25.4 billion between 2007 and 2011, plunging $13 billion into debt.

Kathie Jones loses more than patience when the mail is late. She also loses customers. As the owner of a small business that prepares bulk mail for delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, Jones hears complaints every time a church newsletter or a political ad she sends arrives late — even if the delays are not her fault. If mail is lost, she has to start projects over, sometimes eating the cost. So Jones is understandably wary about a Postal Service proposal to close the last mail-sorting hub on the Eastern Shore, located a few hundred feet from the Easton Municipal Airport.

Reps. Roscoe G. Bartlett and Chris Van Hollen are planning to take service members past and present to President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address Tuesday evening. Bartlett, a Western Maryland Republican, and Van Hollen, a Montgomery County Democrat, are among some two dozen lawmakers participating in the bipartisan effort organized by the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and the House National Guard and Reserve Components Caucus to help focus attention on veterans' needs.

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.

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

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.