Earlier this week I got an e-mail from Tom Winter, my old boss at Human Events, about a new financial threat from the U.S. Postal Service that jeopardized the publication’s existence. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, knowing that Winter hated writing these types of letters. But I figured it must be serious. Human Events named its fundraising drive “The Postal Relief Project.” Here’s how Winter put it:

It’s been many years since I’ve written a letter like this, but a crisis unlike any other in our 63-year history - one that threatens our very existence - forces me to ask for your help.

Just recently, the federal government’s taxpayer-subsidized mail-delivery monopoly, aka the United States Postal Service, hit us with a one-two punch of postal-rate and fee increases that have driven up our delivery costs by over 20 percent.

First, our per-copy postal rate will rise 16.86 percent. Second, we’re being hit with a brand-new “container fee” (don’t ask ¬ñ it’s absurd) that will hike our total increase to 20.3 percent.

To put it in dollars and cents: it will now cost us an extra $120,000 per year to deliver HUMAN EVENTS ¬ñ a staggering sum for us that we simply can’t afford.

Turns out Human Events isn’t the only publication feeling threatened by the U.S. Postal Service. Intrepid reporter Patrick Gavin reports today on Fishbowl DC that liberal magazine The Nation is making a similar appeal (with the support of Free Press). There’s nothing like the right and left working together to topple the Post Office.