Rain, snow, sleet, or hail, Illinois city gets no mail

You know there's Bushist waste going on when the price of a stamp soars year after year without respite while the U.S. Postal Service offers less and less delivery.

For the past 2 weeks, an entire swath of the city of Harvey, Illinois, has been without mail service of any sort. No pickup, no delivery, no anything. The post office's so-called reasoning is that the town is too crime-ridden.

Like that's supposed to halt the mail? Many of the city's residents are elderly and do not drive. Many others are too poor to get a car. They can't very well drive across town to the post office each day to pick up their mail.

America is full of dangerous neighborhoods, but that's never supposed to stop the mail.

To add insult to injury, the post office didn't even tell anyone when it decided to stop mail service in that area. So residents didn't even realize they had important mail held for them at the post office.

Now the postal service says it's going to put a cluster box at the edge of the neighborhood, forcing folks to travel blocks.

Meanwhile, an important post office in my area is about to face closure, reportedly because of budget cuts. Talk about spending more money to do less. That's Bushism.

The Republican Congress gave the postal service an annual automatic stamp rate hike so it can close down post offices and cut off delivery to entire neighborhoods?

One wonders what's going on here. Some high-ranking officials must be taking home postal service property or something, if it has to cut services despite rising stamp costs. The GAO ought to look into this.

This isn't a problem that'll go away anytime soon. Regime change doesn't mean Bush's patronage cronies will just be replaced. They'll still be gunking up the works years from now.

(Source: http://cbs2chicago.com/local/shooting.stops.mail.2.846703.html;
http://nky.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20081022/NEWS0103/810220392)