I’m still wading through your emails about postal delivery in your regions and zip codes. It’s remarkable to me how widespread the disruptions are. Postal routes only being delivered to certain days a week, letters or small packages that would normally take 2-4 days taking two weeks and longer. I know that letters and parcels are lost all or delayed all the time out of the tens of billions of items of USPS handles every year. There’s a whole system for reporting and tracking them down. But for each of us individually I feel like it’s actually pretty uncommon. Significant delays now appear to be quite common, as we’ve seen in the news coverage.

Please keep your updates coming. Remember, please include your zip code. We should take advantage of the preexisting districtization of the whole country in numerical codes. One more thing, news reports in local media are just as helpful. We’re all seeing the same national AP stories and stories in the national media. But reports in local media are even more important for us. So please send us what you’re seeing.

I’ve written at various points about my dark view of most police unions in the country. Much of that dark view has been shaped by Pat Lynch, the head of the main NYPD police union. Lynch is almost a caricature of the municipal police union chief: intemperate, often contemptuous to civilian control, drenched in grievance. Yesterday, Lynch went to President Trump’s Bedminster resort where the President is spending the weekend and delivered the union’s endorsement for Trump, apparently the first time in living memory the union has endorsed for President.

Like any good manipulator, President Trump has been signaling for weeks that he plans to be very mad about the election. The preemptive complaints about mail-in voting, the race-baiting, the showy displays meant to signal law-and-order — he’s building a sturdy base narrative to stand on when things don’t go his way in November.

For anyone watching from a distance, this sabotage of the US Postal Service thing is for real. There’s really no question. We know this to be true from too many different directions, not the least of which is the President telling us it’s true. Some of the changes are things corporate lobbyist friends have likely wanted to do for ages – a different vision of managerial efficiency, sloughing off non-economic services. But even when that is taken into account these changes are being done in a way that – at a minimum – maximizes near-term disruption.

If that weren’t enough we are clearly seeing widespread delays in many parts of the country. If causing delays is not the goal then, given the impending election, you’d think there would be some course correction. But that’s not happening. It’s full speed ahead. There’s no course correction or adjustment because nothing is going wrong. This is the plan.

This week David and Kate and I talk Biden, Harris, the upcoming debates as well as the House GOP’s new QAnon Caucus. Watch after the jump.

Here’s something to look forward to as we attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that COVID-19 is still very much our reality: Reading the contents of pen pals President Trump and Kim Jong Un’s letters to one another.

These things are so transparent that it is hard to know what to say beyond the obvious. But I wanted to note that based on yesterday’s evidence, Donald Trump’s and the Trump campaign’s central attack line against Kamala Harris is that she is “disrespectful.”

A Trump campaign email that went out last yesterday called her “the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful, MOST LIBERAL of anyone in the U.S. Senate.” In his afternoon press briefing President Trump used the word three times. He said Harris was “very disrespectful to Joe Biden” and then said it’s “hard to pick somebody that’s that disrespectful.” Later he attacked her ‘disrespectful’ behavior toward Brent Kavanaugh. “I thought it was terrible for our nation. I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate.”

A brief follow up to yesterday’s post about the possibility of widespread immunity or resistance to COVID among those who have never been exposed to it. Carl Bergstrom – who is a professor at the University of Washington and a good Twitter follow for COVID – has an important caution or caveat on this hypothesis. If it’s true that say 50% of people started with COVID immunity, then that means that it’s dramatically more infectious than we thought.