News item: U.S. Postal Service provides rural residents new options for keeping their local post offices open.

View: Excellent news. Now patrons can decide if reduced window hours or other measures can maintain postal service. Keeping open these offices will also maintain communities, neighborliness and pride of place.

A list of local offices that might be affected includes Grimstead, New Point, Onemo and Schley, all targeted earlier this year for possible closure.

But that is not all. The list also names many other offices that may be forced to change: Achilles, Bena, Dutton, Foster, Gwynn, Hallieford, Hudgins, Moon, Ordinary, Port Haywood, Susan, Ware Neck, Wicomico and Woods Cross Roads.

Residents owe it to themselves and their communities to keep up with the news and to express themselves to their representatives in Congress.

News item: Virginia Department of Transportation considers $1 monthly fee for E-ZPass customers.

View: No doubt, E-ZPass speeds crossings on the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge and the many additional highway toll facilities that use this system. Is it worth $12 extra a year to have one?

In the first place, there was no moral or financial imperative to assess a toll on the Coleman Bridge for its widening in the mid-1990s, especially as other bridges were replaced in Virginia during the same time period with no tolls (think about the two magnificent new crossings of the

Mattaponi and Pamunkey rivers at West Point). Also, the original Coleman toll, assessed from 1952-76, probably paid for that two-lane bridge several times over and that ought to have been a credit for today’s bridge users.

But, state powers-that-were assessed the unjust toll and have since raised it. And those of us who must use the bridge, and who enjoy the commuter rate, must use the E-ZPass. And possibly pay an extra fee for the privilege.

Commuters are being asked to foot the bill once again for Virginia’s battered roads and bridges.

News item: Virginia Sen. Jim Webb will introduce legislation to require Congressional approval before the President can take military action for “humanitarian interventions” a la Libya.

“Year by year, skirmish by skirmish, the role of the Congress in determining where the U.S. military would operate, and when the awesome power of our weapons systems would be unleashed, has diminished,” Webb said. “We have now reached the point that the unprecedented—and quite frankly contorted—Constitutional logic used by the Administration to intervene in Libya on the basis of what can most kindly be called a United National standard of ‘humanitarian intervention’ was not even subject to a full debate or a vote on the Senate floor.”

View: Webb is right. But presidents have used many twists and turns of logic in past decades to use American troops without full Congressional approval and are unlikely to give ground easily.