Portside

The House and Senate passed a “CROmnibus” spending bill packed with giveaways to Wall Street, big banks and big corporations and then quit town. Congress failed to take what the unions representing postal workers identify as the most necessary immediate step to aid the postal service: initiation of “a one-year moratorium on a reduction in service standards and plant closings.”

How Obama can save USPS and ding check-cashing joints.

“Mike the mailman" is friends with everybody, and serves as a sort of unofficial message board for our neighborhood. He recently had surgery after tearing two muscles in his shoulder, and I visited him at his house in Ypsilanti—a lower-income foil to collegiate Ann Arbor—to ask about his convalescence, his job, and the future of the postal service in America.