Tue: Is the Mayor of Mar-a-Lago Weaseling in on the Don of C

The Plot to Silence Taylor Swift on Super Tuesday?

Facebook and Instagram have gone down in what appears to be a massive outage of parent company Meta's platforms.

People trying to log onto the websites and apps were finding error messages and were unable to refresh their feeds as normal.

Tracking website Downdetector indicated hundreds of thousands of reported outages for Facebook and Instagram, affecting multiple countries.

Meta has acknowledged the issues and says it is "working on this now."

Sexism is Alive and Well

Reporters on the ground in Super Tuesday states questioned voters about the reasoning behind their decisions in the primary and general elections — and some of their answers were eye-opening.

A North Carolina man gave MSNBC's Shaq Brewster a bluntly honest reason why he thought Nikki Haley is "not going to be a good president" — because of her gender.

"So, you never even considered her?" Brewster asked.

"No," the man said, shaking his head.

"Mainly because she's a woman?" said Brewster.

"Because she's female," the man said.

The reasoning has echoes of the 2016 election, when some gave the same reason why they couldn't support Hillary Clinton.

Rapper T.I., for example, said in late 2015 that he “can’t vote for the leader of the free world to be a woman,” because a woman president might make “rash decisions emotionally.”

"The Clinton campaign knows this," PBS' News Hour reported at the time. "Clinton spent significant time in the primaries courting white male voters — in particular white, mostly working-class men in the key Rust Belt and Midwestern swing states that usually decide presidential elections. And yet, despite all the effort, the results were abysmal."

The Constitution Means Whatever They Want it to Mean

Justice Amy Coney Barrett—alone among the Republican appointees in refusing to go along with their unilateral rewriting of the Fourteenth Amendment—wrote separately, and seemed to urge the media to avoid stating the obvious, that the justices were doing politics rather than law. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up,” Barrett wrote. “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

No.

The message Americans should take home from this case is that when Justice Samuel Alito says, “I do think the Constitution means something and that that meaning does not change,” what he means is that the Constitution changes to mean what he would like it to mean. They should take home the recognition that when Justice Neil Gorsuch says, “Suppose originalism does lead to a result you happen to dislike in this or that case. So what?” he would never allow such a thing to happen if he could avoid it. And they should understand that when Barrett herself says that the Constitution “doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it,” she is not telling the truth, but she would prefer you not point that out.

This case reveals originalism as practiced by the justices for the fraud it actually is: a framework for justifying the results that the jurists handpicked by the conservative legal movement wish to reach. Americans should keep that in mind the next time the justices invoke originalism to impose their austere, selective vision of liberty on a public they insist must remain gratefully silent.

They Already Charge an Arm and a Leg in Interest

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule Tuesday that will cut the typical credit card late fee to $8 from $32.

The financial regulator estimates the move will save American families $10 billion every year -- an average savings of $220 annually for more than 45 million people who are charged late fees when they don't pay their statements by the due date.

"Today's rule ends the era of big credit card companies hiding behind the excuse of inflation when they hike fees on borrowers and boost their own bottom lines," CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement.

I Am Sure Americans can Find Something Better to do with $18 Billion

Looking for Work?  Thinking About Using AI to Apply?  Think Again.  And Again.

I used resume spammers to apply for 120 jobs. Chaos ensued.

These days, applying for a job has turned into even more of a nightmare. In the current market, it's not uncommon for totally unremarkable jobs to attract thousands of applications. Employers are so overwhelmed by the flood of résumés that they're barely able to glance at most of them, let alone read them. The whole process has become an odds game: Job seekers submit their cover letters to hundreds of companies, struggling to stand out among the tsunami of applicants. Things have gotten so grim that LinkedIn no longer trumpets the number of people who have applied to openings on its job portal.

What's a Five-Letter Word for Losing Blood to the Brain? No, It's Not "Trump".

Will Shortz, the longtime crossword puzzle editor of the New York Times and NPR’s “puzzlemaster” for more than three decades, suffered a stroke last month and has spent the last several weeks rehabilitating.

Shortz revealed the injury in a recorded message aired on on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” on March 3. He has been absent from the show in recent weeks, and at the end today’s puzzle segment, “Weekend Edition Sunday” host Ayesha Rascoe shared an audio clip from Shortz to let fans know the situation.

“Hey guys, this is Will Shortz. Sorry I’ve been out the last few weeks. I had a stroke on Feb. 4 and have been in rehabilitation since then. but I am making progress,” Shortz said in the message (hear it at this link, at the 6:20 mark). “I’m looking forward to being back with new puzzles soon.”

Get Well, Will!