Month: March 2021

How much of this sort of thing went on all over the government?

Two whistleblowers assert that a Justice Department official improperly injected politics into the hiring process during his waning days in the Trump administration, according to a new filing obtained by NPR.

The whistleblowers accuse Jeffrey Bossert Clark of conducting a “sham” process and elevating a person who volunteered to defend a controversial Trump policy on abortion access, even though the person had far less experience than other finalists for the job in the Civil Division, they said in a Wednesday letter to House and Senate lawmakers and the Justice Department’s inspector general. Clark was then the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Civil Division.

Clark drew nationwide attention this year after The New York Times reported he had discussed a way to unseat the acting attorney general, take the job for himself and advance then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results before the congressional certification of electoral votes in January.

The scandal figured in Trump’s second impeachment trial — and it renewed concerns about partisan political influence on Justice Department operations.Article continues after sponsor message

The whistleblowers said that Clark’s participation in the hiring process for an assistant director of the Civil Division was unusual and that he engaged in “perfunctory” 15-minute interviews with two more highly qualified finalists for the post. Their letter said Clark had “used a timer” in the meetings and was not “particularly engaged.”

Clark announced his decision two days before he left the Justice Department in January. Two other officials in the Civil Division said they did not believe the hiring decision was motivated by politics, the letter said. But the whistleblowers disagreed.

“What set the successful appointee apart from the other candidates was that the appointee — unlike the others — had volunteered and was part of the DOJ litigation team defending a controversial Trump administration policy,” according to their letter. That policy barred pregnant, unaccompanied minors in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. A court later determined the policy was unconstitutional.

Of course.

It was clear that Clark is an extremist the minute it became known that he willingly intervenes on Trump’s behalf even beyond where Bill Barr was willing to go. It makes perfect sense that he would plant some right wing ideologues in the department before he left. And they probably aren’t the only ones.

This is a particularly acute problem for the DOJ but I suspect it happened at other agencies as well, like the Pentagon, HHS and Department of Energy. I think this sort of thing happened in the past but the Trump people are dangerous saboteurs. Each of the new cabinet members must do a full audit of these departments.

David Graham in the Atlantic discusses the idea that the Republican Party may be on the verge of a real schism or crack-up. I think it would be incredibly healthy for our democracy if it were but he throws cold water on that idea:

This is a bleak era in American politics, but it has been a golden age for scholars of the Federalists and the Whigs, whose knowledge of party collapse is suddenly in demand with pundits and reporters. The problem with these historical analogies is that they don’t account for the radically different character of party politics in contemporary America.

As Jelani Cobb noted in a thoughtful New Yorker examination of party collapse this week, the Whigs, Federalists, and old Democratic-Republicans are only the largest and most successful American political parties to go extinct. “What we refer to as the two-party system has collapsed twice before,” he writes. “The Democratic and the Republican Parties have endured as long as they have because they have significantly altered their identities to remain viable; in a sense, each has come to represent what it once reviled.”

The Federalists relegated themselves to electoral obsolescence, handing one-party rule to the Democratic-Republicans, but the American system—first-past-the-post elections and (predominantly, and later statutorily) single-member districts—more or less demands two parties. The Democratic-Republicans split, producing a new two-party system, with Democrats and Whigs. Then the Whigs fractured over slavery, with some of them creating the Republican Party. Since Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860, the Democratic and Republican duopoly has been only fitfully and weakly challenged.

Jamelle Bouie, in The New York Times, introduces some reasons to be skeptical that the collapse of either the Federalists or the Whigs is an apt comparison, parsing the specific historical context for each collapse. But the best reason to doubt a Republican collapse comes from looking not at the past but at the present. Previous party collapses have occurred when parties have splintered, and there’s no sign that that’s happening in today’s GOP, because modern political parties are much harder to break apart than their historical antecedents were…

One reason there is less schism is that the parties have fundamentally changed in nature. Parties today are nationalized, ideologically uniform, and financially wealthy, bolstered by internal and external infrastructure that manages to hold the parties together no matter what forces push them apart. The centralized nature of the parties made Trump’s takeover of the GOP possible and almost inevitable, but also decreased the chances of a split afterward.

He discusses all the structural advantages the Republicans enjoy — the electoral college, the senate, gerrymandering etc. and the fact that Democrats are concentrated in certain states and cities. And the ideological sorting is a huge change. There used to be conservaives and liberals in both parties but that is no longer true.

This, I thought, was a particularly interesting observation that I haven’t seen others discuss. It’s important:

Beyond matters of policy and ideology, politics has become an industry unto itself. Enormous sums of money flow through both party apparatuses and outside groups, and politicians and operatives gather under the same banners. The Republican Governors Association includes everyone from Hogan to the devoted Trump disciple Kristi Noem of South Dakota. The National Republican Congressional Committee backs both Jamie Herrera Beutler, who spoke out in favor of impeaching Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is Marjorie Taylor Greene. GOP politicians hire the same strategists and pollsters, read the same outlets, and attend the same events at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and CPAC.

This structure doesn’t make parties static; it just makes them less likely to splinter and more likely to transform themselves in order to remain electorally viable. That’s how the Democratic Party of segregation and the Solid South became the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It also points to some of the possibilities for the Republican Party. As Cobb writes, the GOP could continue to use voter-suppression laws, combined with its structural advantages, to remain a powerful party even without the ability to win majority national support. The Democratic analyst David Shor worries that Republicans could continue to peel off the votes of ideologically conservative minority voters, a process that would be very detrimental to Democrats. The GOP could also continue to strike the dubious populist pose—more cultural than material—that Trump did.

Any of these approaches (or some combination of them) would produce a Republican Party in a generation or even a decade different from the one we know now. Fifteen years ago, Hugh Hewitt was forecasting permanent Republican dominance. Now, perhaps wised-up from that misfire, he writes, “In American politics, renewal and comebacks are never far away.” Luckily for him, that applies as much to the pundits who keep telling us a party is on the verge of obsolescence as it does to the parties themselves.

I think in the short term Republicans are going to stick with their culture war strategy and use whatever levers they can find to win power from the minority. Who knows how long that will last? But it’s vitally important the Democrats do everything in their power to stop them. They are on a fascist trajectory. And that’s a “different” Republican party we do not want to see in power.

One thing about shameless people is that they have no pride either. This is just pathetic.

*And by the way, SadSack Trump didn’t bother to reveal that he had received his “beautiful shot” before he left he White House until this month. He didn’t seem so excited about it then and for good reason. His vaccine plan was a mess.

He wouldn’t even participate in this:

Zach Carter, the author of “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” writes about the economic lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic as we head into the second year of the crisis. It shows, once again, that the right is helpless in times of economic stress because it’s ideology — to the extent it even exists anymore — simply cannot handle any crisis. Free markets work for their wealthy patrons in good times but when the system crashes, they have nothing to offer because their laissez faire philosophy can’t protect their own voters, sometimes not even the wealthy ones. In a natural disaster like the one we are currently experiencing, they are completely useless.

Here’s some of Carter’s analysis:

There has been no economic disaster like the coronavirus crash in American history. By the metrics that matter most, the U.S. government’s response to the crisis has been catastrophic: The number of lives lost to the virus in this country — more than 500,000 — far surpasses the number of U.S. soldiers killed in World War II and may yet eclipse the number killed in the Civil War.

But by many other measures of social well-being, we have fared surprisingly well. Americans’ cumulative after-tax personal income was actually higher by November 2020 than it was before the pandemic. Total economic output, measured in real G.D.P., fell last year, but by only 3.5 percent — a bad year over all, but nowhere near the depths of the Great Depression. There has been no cascade of bank failures, no run on the dollar. By the end of the year, the stock market had even recouped its losses from last spring.

How did so much go so wrong and yet so right?

Over the past year, we have been relearning the lessons of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1937, Keynes wrote that serious economics was not a realm for “pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-paneled board room and a nicely regulated market.” The real world is messy, the future uncertain. And the genius of profit-maximizing entrepreneurs does not automatically arise to provide solutions when calamity strikes. For Keynes, the economy was not a self-sustaining engine of prosperity — it was something that societies created to meet social needs and that had to be actively managed to function properly.

An economic crisis demands a confluence of coordination, expertise and judgment that governments alone can provide. If the government gets out of the way, everything falls apart. And when the government gets out of the way for decades, it can transform a manageable emergency into a national calamity.

This is the story of so much of what went wrong last year. Doctors and nurses were left without basic protective equipment because the United States lacked the manufacturing capacity to produce it. Efforts to track and contain the virus were delayed by bottlenecks in test production and shortages of supplementary equipment like swabs. Once tests could be administered, a nationwide scarcity of test-processing equipment prolonged the delivery of test results.

The reason: More than a decade into a hospital-closure crisis, the United States faced a shortage of beds and medical facilities necessary to manage an emergency. Hospitals overrun with Covid-19 patients turned away ambulances. Vaccine distribution, while steadily improving, has been hampered by shortages of both staffing and supplies. The poverty of local government infrastructure has disgraced the rollout further: Websites crash, phone lines are busy, parking lots are full.

These are not only public health failures but economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. And the often-toxic incompetence of American political leadership has obscured the structural causes of this failure.

The United States once maintained a robust commitment to public investment in things like spaceflight, medical research, the interstate highway system and the development of the internet, backed by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Staying at the cutting edge is expensive: Between 1965 and 1980, federal expenditures on scientific research, physical capital and education regularly amounted to about 2.5 percent of G.D.P., more than $500 billion today.

But that number plummeted in the 1980s. By Mr. Trump’s first year in office, Washington was spending less than 1.5 percent of G.D.P. on public investment, according to an analysis of Office of Management and Budget data from the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank. Before the pandemic, this plunge meant bridge collapses, Amtrak derailments and other disasters that Americans had come to see as inevitabilities. During the pandemic, that same chronic underinvestment invited mass death. Even the typically conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent years lobbying unsuccessfully for major increases in federal infrastructure spending.

Yet despite this persistent inability to mobilize resources, the U.S. government proved reasonably adept at summoning and allocating money. The Federal Reserve sustained the financial system and big business. Congress salvaged thousands of small businesses with its $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, while preserving the finances of millions of Americans by boosting unemployment benefits and writing checks to households.

Of course, expanded unemployment aid should have kept flowing through the final five months of last year. And aid to state and local governments to fight the pandemic was insufficient. But where the problem was a shortage of money, the government delivered. Cash constraints have not hindered its rescue efforts, at $5 trillion and counting. Even the loudest moderates of Joe Biden’s Democratic Party did not balk at the $1.9 trillion cost of the Covid-19 relief bill he signed into law Wednesday night.

Before the crisis, leading economists and think tank experts predicted the opposite. For decades, many repeatedly warned that the federal government’s ragged finances would undermine its response to unexpected disaster. This theme animated a December 2010 report issued by a bipartisan presidential commission on deficit reduction: Rising national debt could invite a 2008-style meltdown and would starve the government “of the resources needed to respond to future crises.”

Congress never did take the commission up on its plan. And the past year has exposed its impoverished thinking: The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

As a result of these developments, the economics profession is today experiencing a sea change in attitudes about the relative merits and dangers of deficits. This is rightly understood as a Keynesian shift — but there is more to Keynes than deficits: He was, above all, a thinker for an age of crisis. No one could predict the future, but maintaining state-of-the-art information, transportation and medical infrastructure through sustained public investment could prevent a problem from becoming a calamity. So, too, is understanding that the economy is something that serves society rather than the other way around.

Over the past year, the American government spent big to stave off immediate economic ruin. This year, it must show the same financial commitment to the future.

If there is one small, hopeful consequence of this disaster, this is it.

The right didn’t expend much energy on the COVID Relief bill for a variety of reasons which I discussed yesterday. But they will pull out every stop to obstruct the Voting Rights bills and they are already pushing disinformation.

Here’s Sean Hannity:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): This is the bill that would allow felons to vote, that would allow automatic registration to vote, that would allow and institutionalize mail-in ballots in perpetuity. This is the one that would unconstitutionally usurp the authority written into our Constitution for state legislatures to determine the time and manner of elections in their individual states, so I don’t think it’s going to be constitution[al].

…

Requires registration for those under 18, and states to carry out a plan to increase, you know — people, what are we going to have, 15-year-olds voting next? What’s the legal drinking age?

Prohibits the publication of “misleading information about elections” a federal crime to communicate or cause to be communicated information that is knowingly false. Well, that could affect them — because every two years they say that Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, now transphobic, and want dirty air and water and want to kill grandma. That might apply to them.

That’s as crazy as it gets. Media Matters helpfully did a fact check:

While the U.S. Constitution gives initial authority to states to determine the “times, places and manner of holding elections” for Congress, that same exact section then adds: “but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” For example: This is how the national Election Day is set in federal law, rather than every state voting on different days.

The actual text of H.R. 1, which would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to register to vote, is meant to ensure that they will be registered by the time they are 18 years old and in time for Election Day. The bill also makes clear that this language has “no effect on state voting age requirements” and does not require a state to permit a person to actually vote while still under 18.

In addition, the House had specifically defeated a proposal to lower the voting age to 16, thus preserving the threshold at 18 years old.

Hannity’s other charge, saying that bill’s language criminalizing “misleading information about elections” could be used against campaign rhetoric about one’s opponents, is also false. The bill’s relevant language deals with forbidding misinformation that would “impede or prevent another person from exercising the right to vote,” such as false information having to do with “the time or place of holding any election,” or “the qualifications for or restrictions on voter eligibility.”

In short, that section is meant to stop voter intimidation — not to criminalize protected speech against a political opponent.

In addition, the bill would set a nationwide standard of restoring voting rights for felons once they are no longer in prison — which is already the law in 18 states, including red states such as Indiana and Utah.

You may think that Hannity’s rant sounds so ridiculous that even his delusional audience won’t buy it. But they will. Recall that they believed the Affordable care Act featured “death panels” that would decide who would live or die. And that was before they had their minds polluted with kooky garbage like Pizzagate and QAnon.

There will be no persuading the right. Democrats are going to have to ignore this lunacy and spend all their time pushing the real information to the rest of the country. And they have to be prepared to do everything they can to ensure passage of these bills. It’s going to be a bare-knuckled brawl — even Trump is getting in on this. But they have no choice. The Republicans are on a crusade to brazenly suppress the vote wherever they can and the Democrats have to do whatever they can to stop them or they will entrench minority rule for the foreseeable future.

This GOP is batshit insane and I honestly don’t know if we’ll make it with these nuts in charge. Look what happened under our years of Trump.

Technology Review offers a cautionary tale not only for software developers but for designer/engineer/scientists/lawmakers of any kind. Our creations have a way of getting out of control, as Dr. Frankenstein discovered and as hundreds of movies have cemented in our collective subconscious. We just repeatedly fail to let little details like that get in the way of making a buck.

“How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation” chronicles the struggle by Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, to rein in a technology that works best when it is not reined in. In fact, that is not merely its design but its foundational intention:

Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.

In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price.

“When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who collaborates with Facebook to understand image- and video-based misinformation on the platform.

“They always do just enough to be able to put the press release out. But with a few exceptions, I don’t think it’s actually translated into better policies. They’re never really dealing with the fundamental problems.”

Because the fundamental problem is not the design of the software, but design of the public corporation. Growth is its raison d’etre. Growing engagement is Facebook’s DNA. It is financial markets’ DNA. Corporate America’s DNA. There is no algorithm for fixing that. It’s baked into the business model. That little bit of technology is so ubiquitous as to be invisible.

If the business model results in “full-blown genocide” against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, well, whoops.

It’s not that Candela and his Responsible AI team don’t want to solve the problem of online radicalization and make the world a better place. It’s that everything they try conflicts with Zuckerberg’s prime directive and the company’s DNA and gets shut down.

“It seems like the ‘responsible AI’ framing is completely subjective to what a company decides it wants to care about. It’s like, ‘We’ll make up the terms and then we’ll follow them,’” says Ellery Roberts Biddle, the editorial director of Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit that studies the impact of tech companies on human rights. “I don’t even understand what they mean when they talk about fairness. Do they think it’s fair to recommend that people join extremist groups, like the ones that stormed the Capitol? If everyone gets the recommendation, does that mean it was fair?”

“We’re at a place where there’s one genocide [Myanmar] that the UN has, with a lot of evidence, been able to specifically point to Facebook and to the way that the platform promotes content,” Biddle adds. “How much higher can the stakes get?”

To further illustrate, there is a one-page science-fiction short story from 1954 that is hard to forget: “Answer” by Fredric Brown.

Dwan Ev has just completed the final assembly of a galaxy-sized computer, “the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets” would create a “supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.”

An associate has the honor of asking the monster machine its first question:

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Wonder how many likes it would get today? Because that’s all we count.

The Gray Lady retains its share of dysfunction — its misleading headlines, its reflexive both-sidesism — but sometimes still gets many things right, especially months-long investigative work. This morning the Editorial Board has decided (rightly) the legislative filibuster must go.

The election reforms contained in H.R. 1 mean to restore democracy to this supposed democracy must not be stopped by its antidemocratic features, especially not by accreted customs not written into the U.S. Constitution.

Where good legislation goes to die

The U.S. Senate by design already undermines the one-person, one-vote principle. Power is already disproportionately distributed in favor of states with the smallest populations. The body’s hoary customs simply power-up that undemocratic lean. In particular, the legislative filibuster which is itself broken:

Bipartisan cooperation and debate should be at the heart of the legislative process, but there is little evidence that the filibuster facilitates either. The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.

That’s one reason the framers of the Constitution didn’t include a supermajority requirement for the Senate to pass legislation. They had watched how such a requirement under the Articles of Confederation had prevented the government from doing almost anything. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Supermajority requirements would serve “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

The practice that once allowed senators from the Jim Crow South to circumscribe the rights of Black citizens again protects those who would keep them under white thumbs under cover of law.

The Editorial Board recognizes the system already contains a “redundancy” of “veto points and countermajoritarian tools, including a bicameral legislature, a Supreme Court and a presidential veto.” The filibuster simply adds another that is custom not law.

There are multiple reviews of the filibuster’s historical evolution and the Times adds its own. But the reason to roll it back are less about process than principle, especially in a time when revanchist forces in dozens of states that “have passed hundreds of voting restrictions” in recent years “are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.”

We have in our midst a large minority of Americans who, to use current parlance, are Americans in name only. They wave their flags and sing the national anthem, but the country to which they pledge allegiance bears little resemblance to the one mapped out in their pocket constitutions. If H.R. 1 fails in the Senate, “Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule.” Readers do not need the New York Times to tell them so.

Democracy is “under siege” around the planet according to Freedom House’s 2021 report, including in the U.S. The costs of denying that are not unlike the human costs of COVID-19 denial, just perhaps more slow-rolling. The bitter irony in the land of the free is that those who boast the most of their love of country are the ones slowly killing this democratic republic. Only maliciously and jealously, not by accident like Lonesome Lenny.

The Board concludes:

The perverse result of all this is that it is now easier to block a piece of legislation, which could be repealed in the next Congress, than it is to block a federal judge seeking a lifetime appointment. Any intellectual justification for the filibuster has been gutted by the fact that it doesn’t apply anymore to many important issues before the Senate.

The point of H.R. 1 is not to help Democrats. It is to rebuild and reinforce the crumbling foundations of American self-government and abolish voter restrictions erected for explicitly partisan gain — a federal law that would protect all voters. If the choice is between saving the filibuster and saving democracy, it should be an easy call.

The filibuster must go, the Board repeats, while recommending no path to do so. It may be that the only expedient “treatment” is a set of rule changes that at least alleviate the symptoms of minority rule. Let H.R. 1 help with the rest.

Somehow, I doubt it. Trump voters (aka Republicans) value one thing above all else: own the libs and fight even (especially) when you’re wrong.

This guy has been a total ass throughout the pandemic but I actually think it’s going to work for him:

Allies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who organized a controversial vaccine distribution event that targeted wealthy and predominantly white areas in Manatee County discussed in text messages how the event might boost the Republican governor’s re-election hopes.

Manatee County Commission Chair Vanessa Baugh and Republican donor Rex Jensen, who organized pop-up vaccination sites in two affluent areas of the county, discussed how the event could aid DeSantis politically, the Bradenton Herald first reported.

“Gov said he might show up,” Jensen, a developer in the ritzy Lakewood Ranch area, wrote in a text message to Baugh on February 9. “Should try to see if that would help him get exposure here.”

“Excellent point. After all, 22 is right around the corner,” Baugh replied, referring to the upcoming gubernatorial election.

“Yup,” Jensen agreed, adding that the campus where the Lakewood Ranch pop-up site would be held “could have a nice setup for him.”

“Absolutely,” Baugh replied, adding: “This can be huge for him.”

DeSantis, who is expected to run for re-election next year but has yet to formally announce his plans, has denied providing any special access to vaccines and insisted the sites were set up in wealthier areas of the county to boost vaccination rates for seniors.

But the texts also suggest that DeSantis’ aides played a role in developing a list of VIPs who would be vaccinated during the governor’s visit. Baugh, who is under investigation by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office and faces an ethics probe following complaints that she abused her position, put her own name and Jensen’s on the list.

You would think this is a bad thing, like Cuomo and the nursing homes stats. But I think it actually will work for him. He does what he wants. That’s what they love about him.

I hope I’m wrong. This nasty piece of work is Donald Trump’s true political heir and he’s not nearly as stupid as his mentor.

March 27, 2020: House passes 2 trillion covid relief bill under Trump with bipartisan support:

March 10, 2021: House passes 1.9 trillion covid relief bill under Biden:

Don’t worry, they’re circling back to Pepe LePew and the muppets any minute now.

But note the numbers on that screen last March. Look at where we are today:

Fox no longer features the COVID numbers on their screen. For good reason. It’s really bad.

This is where they are in the bubble these days:

Republican commentator Erick Erickson on Tuesday predicted that come next year, “more voters will remember Seuss when they vote than the COVID plan.” 

While that assertion remains in question, the latest poll’s findings suggest that the most recent front in the culture war is registering with the conservative base.

They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel:

Guys, what are we outraged about today? pic.twitter.com/uIfDmwBir2

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 10, 2021

As you know, these products are formulated differently depending on what kind of skin or hair the person has — “dry”, “oily”, “normal” etc. The story is that their marketing folks found the word “normal” to be off-putting to their customers, so they’ve decided to change it. They are in the business of selling a product and they want to please their customers. That’s all there is to it.

Personally, this designation of “normal” in skin and hair products has always baffled me a little bit. I don’t think anyone really knows what it means except that maybe a person has a perception of her own skin and hair as not being … abnormal? How can anyone know that? It’s very imprecise and I would guess that this will actually help customers determine which product will work for them. And if it is more inclusive-feeling to people in society to retire the concept of “normal” that’s fine too.

Getting upset about this is so stupid I can hardly keep from banging my head against the wall in despair over how low our society has sunk that half the people in it are this mindless. Good lord.