October 27, 2026

RIP: Susan Saint James, Emmy-winning actress of McMillan and Wife and Kate and Allie, dies at 80.

People magazine, citing a representative for the actor, said Saint James died Monday after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

“She never met a stranger,” her family said in a statement to People. “Every person she met became the most important person in the room at that moment, from a fellow board member to the clerk at the shoe store, who usually walked away knowing her entire life story.”

Born Susan Jane Miller on Aug. 14, 1946, in Los Angeles, she was raised in the northern Illinois city of Rockford, where her father had transferred for work. She began modeling as a teenager in Paris.

At 20, she moved back to Los Angeles and landed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios. She made her television debut in the 1966 movie “Fame is the Name of the Game” with Tony Franciosa.

She got another break when it became a series called “The Name of the Game” in 1968, with rotating lead characters played by Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack. Saint James provided the show continuity in her role as Peggy Maxwell, a research assistant who worked for all three men. She won an Emmy Award for the part in 1969.

Before “The Name of the Game,” Saint James had a recurring role in the crime-caper series “It Takes a Thief” starring Robert Wagner. Her other early TV credits included “Ironside,” “McCloud” and “Alias Smith and Jones.”

Saint James had a supporting role in the 1968 movie “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows” starring Rosalind Russell and Stella Stevens.

Sharon Gles’s bio lists her as being signed to an exclusive contract at Universal in 1972 where she “remained under contract for the next decade, until the studio ended all talent contracts in 1981. Gless was held until 1982, earmarking her as the last contract player in the history of Hollywood.” Saint James was also one of the last Hollywood actors to be under an exclusive contract, explaining her appearances in numerous Universal productions throughout the late 1960s and ‘70s, before marrying NBC executive (and Saturday Night Live co-creator) Dick Ebersol in 1981, and going on to co-star with SNL alum Jane Curtin in Kate & Allie in the 1980s.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

ORWELL NOTED 80 YEARS AGO THAT WOMEN — PARTICULARLY YOUNG WOMEN — MAKE FOR FINE IDEOLOGICAL ENFORCERS:

Posted at 11:56 am by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Anti-Trump Left Has Descended Into A Persistent Hallucinatory State.

If you doubt that, go read the opinion pages of The New York Times, the agenda-setting newsletter of the government and nonprofit class. You couldn’t possibly do better than to start with Nicholas Kristof’s Oct. 24 column about Mean Orange Man, the journalistic equivalent of a street crazy babbling to himself on a bus bench. The theme of the essay is American norms. Trump is a deviation; Kristof is fighting for things that are normal.

To borrow from Mary McCarthy: Every word is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Pick any paragraph. Here’s one: “Norms of self-restraint historically made the system work. Presidents did not try to crush law firms or universities, nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people. Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.”

Every word is insane and overwrought, but “nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people” is very special. There have never been armed federal officers in American cities before? Federal agents never shot anyone until Mean Orange Trump?

Do NYT readers believe this stuff, or do they just play along?

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

THOSE CLIMATE NARRATIVES DON’T MAINTAIN THEMSELVES, YOU KNOW:

Posted at 10:23 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: ICE plan to buy robot dogs spurs protest from hundreds of Boston Dynamics employees. “The ICE contract covers the purchase of four Boston Dynamics Spot robots that were modified by Radeco to be marketed as a robot platform named Cerberus. The contract describes these Cerberus robots as being intended to ‘detect radiation, toxic gas leaks and explosive threats in urban environments or disaster zones,’ along with enabling other remote observation and inspection missions.”

Do these people even realize what they’re protesting? Or does the word “ICE” activate their NPC script?

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

YEP:

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Modern Democrats Really Should Swap Out the Donkey for a Swastika. “There are only two ways to look at this. Either the paste-eating idiots on the left have never pondered the real consequences of the U.S. not having any friends of democracy in the Middle East, or they have.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

FIRST AMENDMENT STORY: Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” is still read today among constitutional law folks, so his explanation of the purpose of the First Amendment is VIP. Somebody should share this with the ACLU.

Posted at 8:51 am by Mark Tapscott

SOMEONE PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO ELON AND POTUS: Dutch government to cut 16 percent of workforce as part of AI efficiency push.

No job is secure from the advent of artificial intelligence’s rapid growth. In a lengthy post detailing how the Dutch government plans to improve efficiency, it announced that it would get rid of 25,000 full time jobs over the span of a few years as part of cost-cutting measures. As part of that effort, the government is also planning to lean on AI to contribute to productivity.

According to the Dutch government, the goal is to cut back 900 million euros, or around $1 billion, in costs by 2027, with that estimate rising to 3.5 billion euros, or approximately $3.9 billion, by 2035. The post detailed that not all government agencies will be affected, with police and defense being excluded.

It’s unclear how the government plans to deploy AI to reduce costs, but the post read that the Dutch cabinet will “come up with goals and savings plans for deploying AI to work more productively,” in the first quarter of 2027. The country’s state secretary, Eric van der Burg wrote in a letter to the Dutch parliament that this overall effort was part of a push to make the government “simpler, smart and smaller.”

DOGE helped shrink the federal workforce to its lowest level in 60 years, but there’s always room for AI-enhanced improvement.

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

DEMOCRATS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Is This the Most Antisemitic Ad to Ever Air for a Senate Race?

We’ve heard them say it before: we’re not antisemitic; we’re just critical of Israel. We don’t hate Jews; we’re just opposed to the Benjamin Netanyahu government. Yeah, the problem is that, factually, that was untrue, and only morons or the obtuse believed it. You can be critical of the Netanyahu government, but when blood money and ‘dirty Jew’ overtures ooze from the talking points, we know what’s going on. Some of us remember high school history and the propaganda a certain national socialist party in Germany distributed in the 1930s.

The latest ad from Rebellion PAC, which supports Abdul El-Sayed, shows a couple shopping for groceries but unable to buy certain items, like eggs, because that money is going to Israel. The Israelis are to blame for the rise in the cost of living.

The ghosts of Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, and FDR smile.

Related: Abe Greenwald writes, “Meet the Press Secretary:”

If Abdul El-Sayed wins his U.S. Senate race in Michigan on November 3, I hope he has the good manners to send a thank-you gift to a woman who has selflessly prioritized his fortunes over her own in order to get him over the finish line: MSNBC’s Kristen Welker.

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Welker interviewed El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers. In so doing, she invented a new political product: the live attack ad.

The bias that was on display wasn’t particularly striking, not anymore. We’ve already seen the lengths to which liberal media will go to protect their favorite Democrats and defame Republican villains. Whatever you call an industry that promoted Joe Biden’s razor-sharp mind, you can’t call it objective.

What was astounding here is Welker’s equal combo of unbridled chutzpah and low self-esteem.

We’ve long said, “Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense,” but Welker certainly makes her thumb on the scale glaringly obvious:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STOCKED UP ON AMMO:

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green