How do fads like this spring up? I sigh, and give you what’s below which I just picked up on Daily Kos Elections. And that means you get a bonus — upcoming election and NFL playoff news to digest along with your Tide Pod snack:
• Where Are They Now?: New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski and former GOP Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle are both trying to stop teenagers from eating Tide Pods. No, that’s not from some game of Mad Libs, this is the reality we live in.
You may have heard of the Tide Pod Challenge, where teenagers are biting into toxic laundry detergent pods. Tide understandably does not want to be associated with a craze that’s sending participants to the hospital, and they recruited Gronkowski to remind viewers that they should “[u]se Tide Pods for washing not eating.” So what’s this have to do with Buerkle, who narrowly won a Syracuse-area seat in 2010 in a shocker during the tea party wave and lost it two years later?
In 2013, even as Buerkle was considering another bout against Democrat Dan Maffei, Obama appointed Buerkle to a seat on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Buerkle has been acting chair since early 2017, and Trump picked her to lead the commission full time. Florida’s Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in particular was not happy with Buerkle, who opposes government standards to limit carbon monoxide emissions in portable power generators, and he grilled her on the issue at her September confirmation hearing. Buerkle’s nomination cleared the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation along party lines but never made it to the full Senate, and Trump had to renominate her this month. However, Buerkle remains acting chair, and the commission has been reviewing how to make Tide Pods tougher to puncture.
We here at Daily Kos Elections are no fans of Buerkle, who was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative in the House, and whose nomination to lead the commission was met with plenty of justifiable anger from consumer watchdog groups. But she’s right on this one: Don’t eat Tide Pods.