September 4, 2026

SCHRÖDINGER’S ANCHORWOMAN: Statement From Maria Bartiromo’s Lawyer Contradicts Reports of Her Parting Ways With Fox.

On Friday morning, Maria Bartiromo’s attorney released a statement countering previously reported information regarding her employment status with Fox News:

For many years, Maria Bartiromo hosted three number one rated television shows on Fox channels. She has been, without question,  one of the hardest working journalists throughout her award winning career.

The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false. Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.

Bryan Freedman, Attorney for Maria Bartiromo

The Hollywood Reporter speculates:

It is not entirely clear what argument the attorney plans to make, though TV contracts are typically “pay to play,” meaning that talent is meant to get paid through the length of the deal, regardless of whether they are still used on-air. In previous high-profile exits, talent will negotiate a settlement with the channel, giving them less cash but allowing them to pursue opportunities elsewhere. In other cases, talent continue to take pay through the remainder of their deals.

A spokesperson for Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Freedman is known for negotiating high profile exits for his journalist clients. Cuomo filed a $125 million arbitration claim against CNN after being fired by the network for giving advice to his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The case has not yet been resolved. Lemon is said to have agreed to a multi-million settlement deal after parting ways with the network in 2023.

Stay tuned.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROGRESSIVE WOMEN ARE DANGERS TO THEMSELVES AND OTHERS:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

ROGER SIMON: Fauda Creator vs 180 Hollywood Jewish ‘Creatives.’

As a one-time Hollywood Jewish so-called creative, I had been drafting a response to the 170, now 180, Hollywood Jewish creatives who published an open letter in Variety excoriating those of us who may have accused actor Mark Ruffalo of antisemitism or of trafficking in it. (If you’re interested in the signers’ names, some are at the link. George Clooney joined in late, probably to make sure… well, you know.)

In so doing, this gaggle of entertainers—actors, directors, writers and other personnel. unsurprisingly, alas, declared real an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza as if it were as indisputable as anything in Euclid.

The whole exercise read to me like barely conscious self-promotion, a kind of job insurance for entertainment industry liberal and progressive professionals, and totally predictable. Its first appearance in a trade publication made it all the more so.

But I trashed what little I had written about it. I have long absented myself from that world. I didn’t want to sound bitter and mean. I see that I may already have.

Nevertheless, Tuesday morning, thanks to my friend Caroline Glick and British journalist Nicole Lampert, I found the following comments from a London conference held by Tel Aviv University that expressed pretty much what I thought, but from someone with more solid bona fides.

That someone is Avi Ischaroff, co-creator of the highly regarded Israeli television series Fauda.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

STANLEY KUBRICK’S DAUGHTER ADDRESSES “CONSPIRACY THEORY” ABOUT EYES WIDE SHUT’S “MISSING 20 MINUTES:”

“For context, my father always had his outtakes incinerated once a film was finished, specifically to prevent the studio from later re-editing his work or creating alternative versions.

Vivian continued, “There has been a lot of speculation that some 20 minutes were removed from Eyes Wide Shut after he died. This will be very disappointing to many people, but I certainly did not hear anything about a missing 20 minutes at the time, nor have I heard anything since that would confirm such a section ever existed.”

Well, okay. But I’d much rather see this original cut: Why you’ll never see the missing 17 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

2026, MAN: Fed Up With Flock. “If you’d asked me last year to guess what issues might be concerning the body politic in a midterm year, I might have answered ‘inflation, jobs growth, social justice madness, housing costs, and the Iran war.’ Not on my bingo card: Women cheering on a mother who confessed to killing her three children and the public uniting against Flock cameras, yet here we are.”

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORNING IN AMERICA: U.S. Adds a Whopping 162,000 Jobs in a Bright Spot for the Economy.

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, a much-stronger-than-expected result that suggested the labor market shook off its early-summer doldrums.

The numbers

The unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That leaves it at a historically low level that indicates the labor market remains generally healthy.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast the report would show the economy gained just 53,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was in line with their expectations.

What this means for jobs

The jump in jobs came in part from rebounds in restaurant and in local-education employment that many economists viewed as one-off factors. But the U.S. has added an average of 80,000 jobs a month so far this year, which compares with monthly growth of 10,000 jobs in 2025.

“We don’t have a problem in the labor market,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

Hiring had weakened considerably in June and July, and so the August job gains helped dispel concerns that the labor market had re-entered a period of cooling.

“Unexpectedly,” NPR adds: The U.S. unexpectedly added 162,000 jobs last month.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MISTRIAL:

Plus:

It’s a fair cop.

UPDATE: Such a fair cop:

Posted at 1:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FLASHBACK: Rural Trump Voters Already Live in the Safe, Tolerant Utopia Leftists Claim to Want.

Life in Rural America (where Republican Trump voters live and govern), is clean, safe, and racially tolerant. On the other hand, most of the places in America where life is dirty, polluted, dangerous, and violent, where people are plagued with racial hate and race riots, are cities populated by and governed by Democrats.

What’s more, if you remove Democrat-run cities from our national statistics, you will find an overall America that is overwhelmingly peaceful, safe, clean, and racially tolerant.

True. Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MICHIGAN DEMOCRATS? ‘F**k you..hurry up and die’: Swing-seat Democratic House candidate’s deleted tweets show far-left record.

William Lawrence, the Democratic nominee in one of the country’s most competitive House races in Michigan, deleted hundreds of old social media posts in which he embraced police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.

Other deleted posts show Lawrence writing “f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

Lawrence even wrote a song inspired by moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s resistance to Democrats’ climate agenda: “Our generation says f**k you for everything,” Lawrence wrote in lyrics he posted in December 2021. “Hurry up and die so that we can get started.”

Now of course he claims he was just “thinking out loud” on the internet.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

RESIST:

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green

COLD WAR II IS FOUGHT IN REALMS THAT DIDN’T EVEN EXIST DURING COLD WAR I: Open-Weight Diplomacy: How China’s AI Models Are Rerunning the Digital Silk Road.

China’s open-weight AI models are sparking debates that echo the concerns the telecom buildout raised: How does the majority world access an indispensable technology without surrendering sovereignty, or in other words, without trading access today for dependency tomorrow?

China’s playbook appears virtually identical to its telecom strategy. Its AI buildout involves many of the same companies, the same countries, and the same vocabulary as its broadband strategy. And open weights play the role subsidized equipment once did: They are the keystone to an indispensable new technology that one country can provide to another virtually for free to get a foot in the door, but they are also useless without the intricate, interconnected stack of other components that, conveniently, are far more expensive.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

“THE HIT JOB WAS ON THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE. REAGAN WAS IN THE WHITE HOUSE”:

Takeaway: “It’s time for a dissolution of the monasteries.”

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green