This is starting to get confusing! We told you this morning that Twitter had shut down the “fake Darrell Issa” account created by a postal employee to poke fun at millionaire career politician and self-appointed postal “watchdog” Darrell Issa.

This afternoon, perhaps to fill in the void left by the departure of the fake Darrell, the “real” Darrell started posting a slew of phony tweets:

Of course, you already know how much the “crisis” has cost the taxpayers- zero. The USPS doesn’t get “taxpayer dollars”, and hasn’t asked for any. So where does Darrell come up with the $15 billion on his “bailout clock”? Easy- it’s the amount of the deficit Congress forced the USPS to incur under PAEA. It isn’t taxpayer money. Calling it a bailout is like calling your home mortgage a “bank financed bailout”. Except your mortgage bought you a house to live in- the USPS just gets to loan the money back to the Treasury. And, of course, you presumably applied for your mortgage- Congress didn’t force it on you.

More importantly, Darrell’s little ticker ignores the fact that the USPS has an undisputed $42 billion in past USPS profits sitting in the PAEA mandated trust fund already. That’s in addition to an undisputed $6.9 billion in FERS overcharges- and it doesn’t include the $50-75 billion in CSRS overcharges attested to by independent auditors.

Darrell somehow manages to pretend that forcing the USPS to borrow billions of dollars so that it can then loan those billions back to the Treasury means that the USPS is “already costing” taxpayers billions of dollars.

That’s not an exaggeration- that’s an outright lie, and Darrell knows it.

Footnote: If you don’t find lying politicians loathesome enough, ponder this tweet Darrell posted later this afternoon:

Darrell Issa comparing himself to Steve Jobs- I’m speechless…

Twitter / @DarrellIssa: how much is #Postal Crisis ….

Yet another right wing newspaper editorial attacks postal workers, and blames them for postal service’s problems- from California’s North County Times:

The new $1.5 billion Flats Sequencing System being installed by the U.S. Postal Service at its Carmel Mountain distribution center is a modern marvel. The machine takes up 70,000 square feet, sorts 12,500 flats an hour and can read bar codes, printed words and even handwriting.

Better yet, it reduces the cost of sorting magazines, advertisements, newspapers, manila envelopes and the like by as much as 60 percent. Unfortunately, those total cost savings won’t be passed on to taxpayers any time soon.

In any other enterprise, automation would result in a reallocation of resources —- and, yes, work force reductions.

Instead, letter carriers will simply be moved to other parts of the operation because their union-negotiated contract forbids layoffs.

Did we mention the USPS had an $8.5 billion shortfall last year?

Did we mention that all but $500 million of last years postal deficit was the result of Congressional actions, and had nothing to do with postal workers?

Did we mention that letter carriers aren’t actually overstaffed, and are in fact working lots of overtime?

via EDITORIAL: Return to sender.

It’s getting to be a daily routine- another day, another commentator misstates the facts about the US Postal Service for political reasons.

Today it’s the turn of “G.W. Pomichter”, who bills himself as “a conservative political consultant and member of the Brevard (FL) Republican Executive Committee”. Here’s what G.W. had to say in Florida Today:

In fact, with emerging private sector competitors, the nation’s once premiere postal carrier lost more than $7 billion and spent nearly $5 billion on retiree health benefits alone.

Of course, that is not a “fact”. First of all, it was MORE than $5 billion- about $5.5 billion. And it didn’t go to “retiree health benefits”. It went to a congressionally mandated trust fund supposedly intended to finance future retiree health benefits, but which has been shown to be unnecessary. The real reason Congress wants the money is to artificially decrease the federal budget deficit.

But it gets better- G.W. goes on to claim that

The closure of the USPS would mean private carriers could thrive. More than 30,000 federally protected commercial sites would become available to private interests.

It’s a conservative article of faith that businesses everywhere are just itching to get into the mail delivery business- despite the fact that both FedEx and UPS use the postal service to deliver a large percentage of their package volume, a service that the USPS doesn’t have a monopoly on. (Click here to read about the right wing’s favorite “privatized” postal service) But the real howler is the idea that all those post office sites “would become available to private interests”. Yes, G.W., I’m sure most small towns in this country would just love to have yet another vacant storefront on their Main Street.

via Technology, large deficits outdate it Jan. 30 | floridatoday.com | FLORIDA TODAY.