Jesse Watters Was Just Making Hilarious Joke About Deflating Woman's Tires, Why Didn't You Laugh?

A whole week ago, Wonkette had a story about how Fox News creep Jesse Watters confessed on live TV that one of his moves when he was trying to woo his now-wife, who was married at the time, was when he let the air out of her tires so she'd have to get in his car instead. And now they're married! The Aristocrats!

No really, he just said this stuff out loud on TV.

This was largely unprompted. None of his cohosts had asked, "Hey, what's a time you acted really rapey," or anything like that. It was a conversation about environmentalists deflating SUV tires. And Watters was like OH! OH! OH! I HAVE STORY ABOUT "DEFLATE TIRES!"

By the way, this happened on April 11, and it was days later before anybody reported on it. We guess it was just de rigueur for Fox News? Or maybe everybody was busy calling the cops?

Well now, here at the end of April, Watters is saying actually when he said he let the air out of a woman's tires so she'd have to get in his car instead, it was a joke. Wocka wocka!



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With Time, Little Leaguers Will Understand Gunshots Just Sound Of Freedom

Dozens of gunshots interrupted a Dixie Youth League baseball game in North Charleston, South Carolina, Monday evening, with little kids and parents running for cover or throwing themselves to the ground as the sound of nearby gunfire rang out. The video, thank Crom, is not graphic because despite all the gunfire, no one was wounded. It's still terrifying to see, with confused kids running for cover, kids and adults crawling on the grass to stay low, and people calling for their children:


youtu.be

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GOP Terrified Trump Might Get Twitter Back Before Midterms, F*ck F*ck F*ck F*ck F*ck!

If you're not a straight white cis guy and you use Twitter, you have every reason to worry that Elon Musk is unleashing the Nazi trolls on Twitter in the name of "free speech." And if you give a shit about the truth, or about preserving American democracy, you are probably right to worry about what happens next, especially if Musk decides to hand Donald Trump back his fascist Big Lying megaphone.

NAZIS UNLEASHED! RIP Twitter Or Long Live Twitter Or Something Who Knows

But did you know you are not alone in being worried about what happens next? Republicans in DC, they are also very skeered!

Politico Playbook reports this morning that the GOP is totally freaking out behind closed doors right now, worried Musk will indeed let Trump back on, and thereby complete fuck them for the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. Wouldn't that be sad?

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Well Of Course Republicans Want To Institutionalize Bullying. It's What They Love.

A little over a week ago, the Florida Department of Education announced it had rejected 54 mathematics textbooks that had been submitted for use in the state's schools, because they allegedly included "critical race theory" or other topics that were supposedly "prohibited" under Florida law. Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that the textbook publishers had tried get away with sneaking all sorts of terrible things into the textbooks, including "indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students," although neither his office nor the state Education department actually provided any examples.

Asked for details on what was in the rejected textbooks, the state punted. First, DeSantis's spokesperson Christina Pushaw presented an example of a worksheet from Missouri in 2022 that had nothing to do with the Florida textbooks. For its part, the Department of Education offered examples of supposedly verboten materials that had been "provided to the department by the public" — in other words, stuff Floridians objected to in other texts, but which also were not from the textbooks that were actually rejected.

Read More: DeSantis Spox Finally Explains What She Thinks Critical Race Theory Is

Finally, though, the New York Times was able to review 21 of the books that Florida rejected (free Times linky), as provided by publishers, and it made some reasonable guesses about what may have been the reasons for rejecting the books. Big surprise: The Times found "little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory." The closest thing, if you squint funny, might be a McGraw Hill pre-algebra textbook that included mini-biographies of several mathematicians in history, many of whom were women or people of color. Shocking! We suppose it's also possible there was incredibly scandalous stuff in the 33 books the Times didn't review, which undoubtedly included problems like "1619 + 1492 = Pervasive White Guilt."

What the Times did find, however, were some examples of another forbidden concept in Florida schools, social-emotional learning (SEL), which has become another target of the Right, because unlike critical race theory, it really exists, and pushes a horrifying socialist agenda of "[helping] students develop mind-sets that can support academic success."

Yes, really.

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Class War

Thank God America's Richest  Investors Did OK During The Pandemic!

$1.5 trillion in additional wealth is 'OK,' isn't it?

The pandemic, we're told, was just a terrible time for US businesses, especially small businesses like restaurants and places that depended on tourism. Airlines certainly took a hit, for a time. But quite a few of America's biggest corporations actually made out quite well, with huge benefits for their investors, a new Brookings study fnds. The study looked at 22 big American corporations that did reasonably well during the pandemic, like Amazon, Disney, FedEx, Home Depot, McDonald’s, and Target, among others.

Turns out that the 22 corporations studied generated a whopping $1.5 trillion in additional wealth for their shareholders, which must also have been welcome news to the companies' employees, too, because as we all know, when corporations do well, their workers do, too! That's just basic eco ... oh, wait, maybe that might have been true in olden times, but in reality, most employees saw very little improvement in their pay, although many did at least get the additional risk of working during the pandemic and getting yelled at by customers who refused to wear masks.

The Brookings executive summary summarizes who needs to be executed (with votes):

In general, worker pay is still far too low, compared to either a living wage or company financial performance; shareholders reaped tremendous rewards while workers shared only minimally in company success; and executives and shareholders were mostly insulated from losses that workers bore.

Here's a fun little table, noting that shareholder earnings increased 57 times as much as the gains made by the workers who made those fabulous profits possible:



Clearly, the smart move during the pandemic would have been to quit your job, become a member of the investor class, and watch the profits roll in. We wonder why so few minimum-wage workers chose that option.

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White Nonsense

Ben Shapiro: Elon Musk Doesn’t Need Liberal Twitter Staff Or Liberal Twitter Users ... Just This Ashtray

And maybe this paddle game and remote control ...

Elon Musk is all set to acquire Twitter, which it seems pleases no one who actually works at Twitter. Ben Shapiro — an evil ventriloquist dummy that came to life — declared yesterday that Musk should just fire everyone at the company because they’re all liberal. That should reinforce Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech!

I’m not sharing video of that twerp, but here’s what he said:

Musk needs to come in and he needs to fire everyone. I mean, everyone! Twitter has hundreds, if not thousands of employees.

There’s been studies done of the donations, the political donations of the people working at Twitter. 98.7% of all donations from the people working at Twitter went to Democrats in the last election.

Forgive me for stating the obvious here but Ben Shapiro is bone-dead stupid. I last worked in corporate management a decade ago, but I still think it matters whether a corporation employs “hundreds” or “thousands” of people. That’s the sort of minor fact you’d want to confirm before proposing mass layoffs.

PREVIOUSLY: Nothing Makes Ben Shapiro Madder Than Capitalism Working For Poor People


Twitter has about 7,000 employees. It’s actually a relatively small company compared to Facebook, which employs 71,970 full-time employees as of December 2021. (Facebook hired 10,000 people just in 2020.) Twitter is based in California, which is an at-will employment state. Musk can fire all the employees he wants but he can’t do so for unlawful reasons. That includes an employee’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and yes their political beliefs and affiliation. Someday Harvard Law is going to demand its diploma back.

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WonkTV

Uh Oh, Almost Forgot Your White House Press Briefing!

Live on WonkTV!

But then we didn't.

Good story, us!

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