How is this fucking legal!!!!! "Something stinks. Astoria is one of my favorites on the Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% vote-by-mail state. So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Oregon Senator @SenJeffMerkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, “The timing of these issues is especially concerning.” Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 armed private security guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago. Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious human rights abuses.” The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the Postal Service seems to be supervising them. He described the result as “private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.” In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month." Trump Is Building an Election Trap, and Millions of Americans May Not See It Until It's Too Late open.substack.com/pub/thomha…