Two titans of the “bottom-feeding TV news talking head” world were humbled yesterday, as Don Lemon (aka Donald Lemonade) and Tucker Carlson (aka the fascist lil bow-tied frozen food heir) were both fired from their respective “news” outlets. Lemon has been embroiled in several controversies at CNN of late, many pertaining to the sexist way he talks about women, while Carlson has basically been a walking controversy since he joined a fan club for a homophobic murderer back in college.
Donald Lemonade reacted as expected to being let go by his employer of 17 years, releasing an absolutely unhinged note wherein he references “larger issues at play”. Whatever he’s referring to, it’s definitely not worth using the strange blue text he chose. He probably should’ve gone the popular celebrity route of a typed Notes app apology.
Meanwhile, Carlson was one of the top hosts on the most watched cable news network, sadly playing an outsize role in conservative politics. Fox News’ overwhelmingly white audience openly embraced Carlson’s bigotry, and he regularly drew more than three million viewers a night, making his show one of if not the top-rated show on the network. His coverage of the 2020 election conspiracy theories was part of Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, which the network recently settled for a hefty fee of $787.5 million. It’s possible this costly settlement played a role in Carlson’s dismissal, but it’s hard to imagine that executives at Fox were fine with decades of his bold brand of bigotry but drew the line at him costing them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now the heir to the Swanson frozen foods empire will be forced into an early retirement, unless he pivots to running for public office, which he almost certainly will. Unfortunately for all of us, there’s a world in which he may soon become president frozen foods.
Side Items
Murderer Gets a New Job: One of the Louisville pigs who fired the fatal shot that killed Breonna Taylor has a new job in law enforcement in a county northeast of the city. The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed the hiring of Myles Cosgrove, who was fired from the Louisville Metro Police Department in January 2021 for violating use-of-force procedures and failing to use a body camera during the fatal raid on Taylor’s apartment. So we’ve established that being a murderous cop won’t keep you in jail, now we also know it won’t keep you out of a job for long
NYPD Overtime: The most overfunded police department in America is somehow still blowing past its bloated budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. The NYPD has already spent more than $500 million on officer overtime through February, exceeding its budget by more than $300 million. To be clear, that’s not the overall police budget, that’s the money set aside specifically for officer overtime. The fiscal year ends June 30, and the allotted overtime budget was $374 million. For context, that’s about 16 times what it would cost to keep New York’s public libraries open on weekends, which has been cop/mayor Eric Adams’ latest budget cut suggestion. Closing libraries to fund pigs is just slightly too on the nose
Greatest Actor of the 21st Century: I thoroughly enjoyed this article detailing the incredible variety of emotions that Glenn Howerton has been able to illustrate as Dennis Reynolds on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. The author writes, “It is quite simply preposterous what this man is able to do with just two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and some eyebrows. The range of expressions is almost intimidating in its range.” Setting aside the fact that the author wrote “range” twice in one sentence, anyone who has witnessed an episode of the comedy program would agree that Glenn is capable of emoting an unimaginable amount.