After tearing down the East Wing,
Hark the herald angels sing.
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Last week, on Friday, I mailed a book to a relative in a neighboring state. I sent it priority mail from my local post office well before the afternoon mail is scheduled to be dispatched. USPS gave me an expected delivery date of Tuesday.

I suspected it might take longer, but checked the tracking number on Wednesday. It was still “in transit.” On Thursday afternoon, I checked again. Still in transit, but projected to be delivered by 9:00 P.M. on Friday. On Friday, it finally arrived in mid-afternoon.

These days, over ninety percent of our mail consists of political or charitable solicitations, advertising circulars, and catalogues from companies and merchandizers we’ve never used. The remaining ten percent consists of periodic bills and magazines to which we’ve subscribed (since I read them in bits at times and places where it’s not feasible or convenient to read electronic copies). We now also get Amazon package deliveries on Sunday… from USPS.

So why does it take more than a week for USPS to deliver priority mail to a town on a paved state highway less than five hundred miles away?

A reader recently sent me a book to be autographed and included return postage and a label. I signed the book and took it to the post office to send it. The clerk informed me that the zip code didn’t match the reader’s address. Since I was fairly certain that the reader knew her own address, I told the clerk to send it (priority mail) to the address on the label. When I checked to see if it had been delivered, the tracking software told me it was “delivered to the original sender,” if a day later than projected. Since it didn’t come back to me, I thought it was delivered to the reader, which was confirmed later by the recipient.

When we moved to Cedar City, the mail was processed here. About fifteen years ago, the Post Office decided to process the local mail in Provo, some two hundred miles to the north. Around five years ago, they switched to processing Cedar City’s mail to Las Vegas, so a bill from a company in Cedar City makes a four-hundred-mile circuit to be delivered across town. I have a hard time believing that this is cost-effective.

It’s also caused problems with voting, because voting in Utah is by mail, and that means you can’t mail your ballot as late as the day before election because it might not be stamped (in Las Vegas) until after the election. It might not even meet the deadline if you mailed it the Saturday before, according to some reports.

But Amazon packages get here in two-three days.

So… tell me, what’s the priority for the Post Office?

With gala twenties parties at Mar-a-lago
Can a Crash be far to go?
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?

Trump rages on about needing to stop drug trafficking, and his Department of Defense/War keeps sinking boats and small ships leaving Venezuela, claiming that they’re drug traffickers.

So why did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who has been serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking and who accepted millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers connected to the notorious Sinaloa Cartel?

But the pardon of Hernández was scarcely the first pardon of high-profile drug traffickers. Others pardoned include Ross Ulbricht, creator of the dark web marketplace Silk Road a major conduit for anonymous drug trafficking, who had been serving multiple life sentences, and who received a full pardon in January 2025; Larry Hoover, the leader of the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples, who was serving multiple life sentences for crimes linked to his role in a violent, multi-state drug trafficking operation received a grant clemency from Trump in May 2025; Michael Harris (Harry O)the co-founder of Death Row Records, had his sentence for cocaine offenses commuted by Trump in his first term and was fully pardoned in 2025 after endorsing Trump in the 2024 election.

It “might” have something to so with Sunday’s Honduran election, since Trump wrote on Truth Social on administration would be “very supportive” of Nasry “Tito” Asfura’s government if Asfura won. Trump then announced he would be “granting a Full and Complete Pardon” to Hernández. And followed up his words by pardoning him.

But when the ongoing election vote-counting results shifted to favor the centrist candidate, Trump vowed there would be “hell to pay” and immediately claimed “election fraud,” because, of course, any election that doesn’t go the way he wants must be fraudulent.

The situation so far – pardons for convicted drug kingpins and heads of state bought by drug money, but total destruction for boats merely suspected of carrying drugs, and apparently a tight election see-sawing back and forth between the Trump-backed conservative and the moderate centrist candidate while Trump continues efforts to sway the results of the ballot-boxes.

With friends like Victor, Xi, and Vlad
How could Donald be so bad?
Who’s the chump?
You… or Donald Trump?