He has already threatened to extend the Diet session until August, if need be, so he can pass the security and postal bills.
Officials said the Postal Service continues to lose $25 million a day as it waits for Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the postal system.
Hundreds of thousands of letters -- perhaps millions -- had passed through the postal system since the anthrax mailings, and might now be contaminated with small amounts of anthrax that, if the theory held, might be lethal under certain conditions.
But 80percentt of her mail was bulk mail, and some of the bulk mail that went to her town, Oxford, passed through the postal center in Trenton that processed the highly contaminated letters sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy.
Those misfires make many people wonder how much stock to put in the latest assurance from health officials that the danger of infection from mail is slight even though tens of thousands of letters may have been contaminated as they passed through the postal system.
Consider two fabulous letters that hang in the show, one that actually passed through the postal system and another that noodles with time, voice, space and stance.
One resident of her community is known to have received an envelope from which B. anthracis spores were isolated that was likely to have become cross-contaminated as it passed through the postal system, although no one in that household became ill (2).
Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general, said Congress should pass a postal overhaul bill that will give the service the flexibility it needs.
Under the law passed in 2006, the postal service must pay at least $5.5 billion a year into a retiree health benefit fund, a steep "prefunding" requirement that doesn't apply to normal corporations.
