Companies Elon Musk invests in tend to do exceedingly well. That’s one reason Paramount is now weighing an equity check from Musk as it swallows Warner Bros. Discovery. That should not surprise anyone. David Ellison is Paramount’s CEO. He’s putting together a group of outside investors to share the bill. His father, Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, already guaranteed more than $40 billion of the Warner Bros. deal and has backed Musk at Tesla and X. Asking Musk to take a piece is the obvious call. It would also be good for a film industry that needs a broader center of gravity. Hollywood needs this. The business turned divisive, and a wider appeal protects the jobs tied to making movies and reporting the news. A Musk check would spread the load off Larry Ellison and put a builder inside a company that just became a studio-and-news giant. That helps balance the industry. Anyone who actually cares about film workers should want that. Washington will scream because CNN and CBS sit in that stack. Let them. The money has to come from somewhere. The old gatekeepers lost the last fight over who owns the microphone. An investor who already runs a platform the public uses every day is not a shock. Other players are welcome to write their own checks. Competition is good. Musk in Paramount would be good for the film business if the money goes into making and distributing movies instead of protecting a club. David Ellison should make the ask. The industry has been lecturing the country while raising prices. A builder with skin in the game is an upgrade. Efficiency and profit are what pay better jobs. The only people opposed to Musk taking a stake in Paramount are the people who care more about the politics than the jobs.

I’m honestly not surprised to see The View making Lindsay Clancy the victim and treating Patrick Clancy like he broke a vow because he left her after what she did. Sara Haines asked Tuesday how the marital love ended so quickly and cited sickness and in health. Lindsay Clancy killed their three children. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. Staying married to her after that would’ve been grossly irresponsible. Patrick is still alive. He’s the one who found his kids, testified, and even said he believes mental illness was involved and that he forgave Lindsay. He forgave her to keep his sanity and move forward. That doesn’t mean he should share a house with the person who ended his children’s lives. Leaving was the only sane move. Then Sunny Hostin made it worse. On the same show Tuesday she bragged that she was the holdout juror who talked 11 other jurors off a guilty verdict in the Daniel Rakowitz case. Rakowitz murdered Monika Beerle. Hostin helped send him to a psych ward instead of a prison cell and called that a different type of prison. She said that’s how much she believes in the insanity defense. What Hostin and The View didn’t say is that people also use insanity as a strategy to dodge maximum punishment. The View skipped Cora, Dawson, and Callan. They skipped Patrick Clancy, who lost his kids. They skipped Monika Beerle, who lost her life. They turned the victims into a footnote and the perpetrators into the story. That’s grotesque. The dehumanization The View sells every day is some of the ugliest product on television. The show should’ve been cancelled a long time ago. That it’s still on the air says more about the network and audience that keeps it there than it does about the hosts.

Kamala Harris went to Detroit yesterday, treated English as optional, and said an attack on DEI is an attack on maternal care. Then she called cleaning noncitizens off the voter rolls cheating. That’s the kind of insanity the Democrat Party is still rolling with, and worse. Harris still hasn’t decided if she’s running in 2028. She told the audience that ’28 won’t matter if Democrats don’t get through ’26. If that’s the case, she should do something useful and stop talking like every policy disagreement is a death sentence for mothers and an assault on democracy. Removing people who aren’t citizens from the rolls is the law, and DEI is not obstetrics. It’s discrimination. Harris is campaigning with Abdul El-Sayed and keeping the 2028 door cracked so the party can’t move on from her mess. The word salad is the point. If she can’t say “women” or “citizens” without a detour, she doesn’t get another turn. America already sat through this and walked out. She lost by millions. America needs a Democrat Party that’s sane and brings real ideas. Competition is healthy. What we’re getting from Harris and her extremist crowd isn’t competition. It’s the opposite of sanity.

Bill Burr is treating the murder of a health-care CEO like a product review. This is seriously messed up. Luigi Mangione shot a man in the street. Burr’s complaint is that the companies didn’t sit down and ask what they did to “make” a killer do it. That’s backwards and disrespectful to the victim. A CEO is not the president. He’s also not a piñata. Burr mocked the companies for taking their faces off the internet and hiring security. That’s the minimum after someone gets gunned down for doing a job Burr doesn’t like. You don’t owe a shooter a listening session. You owe him a courtroom. Health insurance is a mess. People get denied and bills wreck families. That’s a fight for law, markets, and votes. The solution is more competition in insurance and care so quality rises and prices fall. It’s not a justification for putting a bullet in a stranger outside a hotel. Burr talking like the corpse should’ve been the one to reflect is how Burr’s garbage keeps getting laundered as comedy. It’s not funny. It’s the opposite. If the standard is “maybe examine what you’re doing,” start with the shooter who decided murder was the play and then move to the people who defend him. Burr can roast corporations all day. He lost the plot when he made the victim the bad guy.

It’s not nearly enough that Harvey Weinstein just got 15 years in New York for sexually assaulting Miriam Haley in 2006. The people in Hollywood who knew and still took the meetings, the money, and the prestige are at fault too. They need to face accountability. Today’s sentence came after an overturned conviction, two mistrials, and years of delay. Weinstein is 74, with cancer and the rest of it. Fifteen years means he dies in a cell. That’s where he belongs. Haley had to testify twice. She said the process felt like she was the one on trial. She got belittled on the stand and harassed online. The DA asked for 20 years and said Weinstein hasn’t shown an ounce of remorse. The judge gave him 15. California still has to resentence him on the Los Angeles case. Hollywood spent a decade pretending this was a surprise. It wasn’t. Weinstein ran that town. The courtroom finally did what the industry refused to do. New York closed its chapter today. Haley shouldn’t have had to walk through it twice to get there. The people who protected Weinstein never paid a price. They still owe one.

In the most unsurprising news ever: Disney is raising prices again to shove people into the ad tier. Disney+ Premium and Hulu Premium both jump from $18.99 to $21.49 a month. The no-ads bundle goes from $19.99 to $21.99. The cheap-with-ads plans only go up fifty cents, from $11.99 to $12.49, and the with-ads bundle stays parked at $12.99. That’s the tell. Pay a lot more to skip ads, or sit through commercials for almost the same money you were already paying. This is the fourth hike in four years. The ad-free Disney+ tier was $10.99 in 2023. It has almost doubled. Same week they hiked ESPN Unlimited from $29.99 to $31.99. Same day Toy Story 5 lands on Disney+. Families already pay for the parks, the merch, and three apps that used to be one cable bill. Disney lectures the country about values and treats the living room like an ATM. Streamflation isn’t a glitch. It’s the model. Cancel or eat it. Disney already did the math, and they’re counting on you to take the bill.

I don’t really care that Curtis Sliwa is predictably promoting a drag show mocking Melania Trump, so long as children don’t attend. I care that Sliwa helped tank the greatest city on Earth, one I called home for many years. He refused to drop out of the 2025 mayor’s race and endorse Andrew Cuomo. Zohran Mamdani won. Sliwa finished with 7 percent. That split is why New York City is stuck with the mayor it has. Sliwa knew the math. Donald Trump, local Republicans, and donors told him to get out so Cuomo could run one-on-one against Mamdani. Sliwa said no. He said he’d rather lose than help Cuomo. I didn’t want Cuomo as mayor either, but he would’ve been a lot better for the city despite his flaws. Sliwa got what he wanted. New Yorkers got the misery. The city is now being bailed out while it spends billions on services for illegal migrants. Crime, costs, and the migrant load didn’t appear out of nowhere. Sliwa stayed in a race he couldn’t win and locked in that result. A drag show isn’t the story. Adults can watch what they want. The story is that Curtis Sliwa split the anti-Mamdani vote and left New York City with a socialist mayor. Shame on Sliwa.

American culture still has a pulse when a song about Texas sets a new record. Ella Langley just took the all-time Billboard Hot 100 record from Mariah Carey. “Choosin’ Texas” is number one for a 23rd week, passing “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Last night Ella Langley posted from her backyard and said it doesn’t feel like a real thing. It’s real. As entertainment has turned more political and anti-America, a straight country song about Texas just sat on top of the main singles chart for 23 weeks. That’s pride showing up in the numbers. The song came out last October. It first hit number one in February, dropped off, then climbed back and held. Country radio, streams, and pop crossover all kept it there. Mariah Carey’s Christmas single had 22 weeks at number one. Ella Langley now has 23. This isn’t a holiday novelty and it isn’t a TikTok fluke. Ella Langley wrote a straight country ballad with Miranda Lambert and two other writers and the whole country bought it. Country music just beat the Queen of Christmas on the main singles chart. That’s the story. Mariah Carey can take a run at it again in December. Until then the record belongs to Ella Langley.

New York is in trouble. Kathy Hochul leads Bruce Blakeman 50-41 in the new Siena poll of likely New York voters. That’s a 9-point race in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one. Hochul is underperforming. She still looks poised to win, and that’s terrible for New Yorkers. Hochul has wasted countless billions bailing out New York City and funding services for migrants who shouldn’t even be in the United States. She keeps taxes high on Americans while failing to deliver the infrastructure my state desperately needs. Four years ago in this same September window, Siena had Hochul up 54-37 on Lee Zeldin. She won that election by 6 points. Bruce Blakeman is already closer than Zeldin was with six weeks left. It’s still not enough. Hochul still owns New York City, 61-27. The downstate suburbs are 48-46. Upstate is Blakeman 47-44. Independents are with Blakeman 44-39. August Siena was 49-39. The lead barely moved. New York is not a swing state. A single-digit governor’s race here means Hochul’s record on crime, costs, and migrants is landing with voters who used to shrug. Blakeman still has to close the gap. Hochul has not put this away, but time is running out for Republicans to save the Empire State. That’s why so many people keep leaving for other states. Siena, Sept. 11–17, N=1,144 likely voters, ±3.9.

A surprise music set by Justin Bieber at a Los Angeles park known for drugs, the homeless, and trash is a better show of character than another arena show or anything Mayor Bass has ever done to help. Bieber visited MacArthur Park on Tuesday and displayed true charity. He showed up, played, and left. Gestures like these are what being human is all about. Well done, Bieber. He ran through new and unreleased songs, including “SPEED DEMON,” “ALL I CAN TAKE,” and “Yukon.” This wasn’t a photo op. He doesn’t need one. It was a man trying to help people enjoy their day a little more. A lot of rich celebrities talk about helping. Not many actually show up and do the work. I don’t care what you think about Bieber. What he did Tuesday was more than local government has done for the people stuck at that park. Given the options Los Angeles has for mayor, the city won’t be saved if people wait on City Hall. It’s up to Angelenos like Bieber to do it themselves.

The trash is taking itself out at CNN. Kara Swisher said Tuesday she’s leaving as soon as her contract allows now that Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is cleared. Good. That tells you what CNN was. If you can’t work under a new boss, it was never about the news. It was about the narrative. A network that spent years lecturing the country doesn’t get to cry when new owners show up. Swisher said it on Pivot. She asked her agent to cut her loose. The deal runs through December 31. She said she thought about a licensing workaround, then decided she doesn’t want to work for the Ellisons at all. She called them terrible media owners and said she’d rather work for Rupert Murdoch. California dropped the lawsuit blocking the $111 billion merger on Monday. Paramount agreed to more U.S. film releases and an editorial board for CNN and CBS appointed by the new owners. Swisher called that board dingbat nonsense. The old CNN was partisan garbage and everyone knows it. A new board is an upgrade. Swisher isn’t walking because the cameras stopped working. She’s walking because the people who used to run the story lost the building. That’s the confession. Let her go.

Rosie O’Donnell tried to use Epstein victims as tools to run a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! attacking President Trump. ABC saw what she was doing, and it wasn’t funny. It was activism. So they wisely killed the segment. She said today the network blocked her “Epstein reveal” on her last guest-host night in August. She still shot eight women herself and posted it on Instagram on September 3. Kimmel already wrecked the hour with politics. ABC didn’t want it worse. Survivors deserve a court, a committee, or a straight interview. They don’t exist to give a guest host a closing monologue. Putting them on Kimmel was going to land as a swipe at Trump, not as reporting. Late-night is not a prosecutor’s office. ABC owns the rundown. O’Donnell doesn’t. She got the clip out on her own page. That doesn’t make the network the villain. It makes the network a company that already watched Kimmel run the audience off and didn’t want one more campaign stop in the last slot. If the files matter, try them in court. Don’t dress a political attack as courage and then yell when a comedy show says no. ABC said no. That’s the job. Keep the victims out of the ratings fight.

We just learned Mamdani’s own lawyer officially banned Signal and WhatsApp for city work on January 15, and the mayor’s communications shop used Signal anyway. Mamdani’s staff ignored a written order from the chief counsel and ran a nearly 200-person influencer army off an app the city said not to touch. Makes me wonder what other rules they’re breaking. Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem put it in the memo: no Signal, no WhatsApp, keep the records. Emilia Rowland, director of New Media and Cultural Communications, kept feeding talking points through the banned channel. Some of those creators have been paid by city agencies. Rowland is on a city salary. The public pays for the work. The public doesn’t get the messages. That’s outrageous. Transparency is the floor for anything government does with taxpayer dollars. Today is the City Council hearing on this. Rowland was invited. She didn’t show. She acts like she’s above accountability. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. If tax dollars pay Mamdani’s communications staff and their proxies, every message is a public record. Encrypted chats exist to hide those messages. Records law exists so you can see them. This is a blatant violation of public trust. Shut the Signal chat down. Publish what they still have. Fire the people who treated a written order like a suggestion. A mayor who lectures Washington about transparency doesn’t get a secret pipeline on New York’s dime.

The United Nations is a room that talks. President Trump used it today to talk about force, not feelings. He told the General Assembly he has a choice on Iran: a deal that lets them rebuild, or he annihilates the Islamic Republic so they never get another shot at it. That’s not UN language. That’s why he was elected. Trump said he thinks a deal comes after the November midterms because Tehran is waiting to see if Congress ties his hands. That should embarrass the people in this country who treat a loss for Trump like a win for America. Iran isn’t waiting on a resolution. It’s waiting on our election. That’s also why Congress didn’t move to secure our elections. Many Republicans in Congress don’t want to carry out Trump’s agenda and are willing to lose the majority to make sure he doesn’t get his way. MAGA never won control. The GOP did. That’s a huge difference. Trump also said the Ukraine war will end faster than people think. He said the United States is leading China on what he now calls super intelligence, and that he won’t let American troops sit in an anti-American show trial. The UN exists to lecture the country that pays for it. Trump showed up and told them the lecture is over. His strength is still there and so is his resolve. He’ll do what it takes to win for America. Period. A speech at the UN doesn’t end a war. Using the tools does. Trump already signed the Russia and Iran sanctions bill. Greenland security is locked. The next test is whether he uses the leverage or waits for a Congress that would rather stall him than finish the job. The audience in New York heard the warning. Tehran and Washington both need to see the follow-through. This is Trump’s test.

Lionel Richie needs to take as much time as it takes to get better. We’ve been losing too many music legends lately. They need to take care of themselves first. He’s 77, he just had a procedure for atrial fibrillation, and the stage can wait. Pray for him. His representative said Tuesday the doctor called the procedure a success and that Lionel is doing well but needs time off. Three dates on the Sing a Song All Night Long tour with Earth, Wind & Fire are canceled: Saturday in San Francisco, Sept. 30 in Chicago, and Oct. 2 in Columbus. This is his third hospital stay since June. He cut a show short in St. Paul. He went to the ICU in St. Louis after another concert. The pattern is clear, and it’s concerning. Take all the time you need, Lionel. Your healing means more than keeping a schedule. The fans will be there when you’re ready. A full house is not worth another scare. The work of a lifetime already proved who you are. Get well, and get back on stage when you’re ready.

Fentanyl took Hayden Panettiere, and calling that a flaw of her character is a lie. She was a 36-year-old victim of the crisis. The Greenville County Coroner said Tuesday she died Aug. 16 in Greenville, South Carolina, of the toxic effects of fentanyl and other drugs, ruled an accident, with no trauma and no foul play. Fame did not save her. She needed help for years. She had already told the public she was fighting mental health and addiction. First responders couldn’t bring her back. Treat the traffickers and the poisoned supply as the crime, not the person who did not survive it. Hayden’s name is on the report today. Thousands of people without a famous name are in the same pile. Treat this like the emergency it is. Don’t let Hayden’s death be in vain. Raise the penalties for trafficking and distributing fentanyl until the people selling it are held to account for the harm they cause. And listen to the people around you who are struggling and need help.

California is pricing Hollywood out of Hollywood, then acting shocked when the shows leave. This isn’t a threat. It’s already happening. American Idol is moving Season 25 to Atlanta. Shark Tank already left Culver City for Tyler Perry Studios in Georgia. The Masked Singer is going to New Jersey. America’s Got Talent is now looking at Georgia or Nashville for Season 22. The reason is simple: cheaper production, including lower taxes. This ties in indirectly to the Paramount–Warner merger settled yesterday. Gov. Gavin Newsom and AG Rob Bonta bent the knee, or California would’ve lost a huge production company and many thousands of jobs. David Ellison said he’d start moving Paramount out of California if they kept blocking the merger past Oct. 1. Newsom took that seriously. The deal keeps the Melrose and Burbank lots and adds at least $1.5 billion in extra U.S. film spend. Bonta had called the exit talk blackmail. Then he signed. That says it all. Those unscripted TV moves and the Paramount settlement are not the same contract. They are the same pattern. Georgia and New Jersey pay reality TV well with tax incentives. California lectures, then bargains when a studio puts jobs and an exit on the table. If the Golden State wants the work, cut the cost of shooting here. Don’t wait until the next company packs the trucks. Protect workers by giving companies a reason to stay. That’s true for California and for the country. Lower corporate taxes keep the jobs from leaving America. Incentives work.

Women of all ages are increasingly finding independent wealth in America. I don’t hear a lot of feminists applauding that but they should if they actually care about freeing women instead of controlling them. Case in point: Donna Mills was Abby on Knots Landing in the 80s. The 85-year-old has already made many six figures on OnlyFans in less than a month. This is not an endorsement of the platform. It is a fact about what Hollywood does to women when they age. The industry stops writing checks. Mills pivoted and it paid. She says the content is suggestive, not explicit. She also says fans ask for odd videos and she plans to deliver some. That’s her call. It’s legal. People are paying. Independence at 85 is still independence. I hope more women keep finding ways to get paid on their own terms. I’d prefer to see them find a wholesome version if they can. But the point is she is not waiting for a network to decide she still matters. Taking initiative can pay in ways you never imagined.

My opinion of Jelly Roll just fell again. I saw that on Thursday he cried about dignity and tried to sound like the peacemaker after he had on Monday called Trump a fat pig. Jelly Roll should’ve just owned his joke. Crying is not an undo button. The fan base he insulted was already gone. The tears did not bring them back. Crying made him look like a man who wanted the cheap laugh and then regretted the fallout. If he wanted to mock Trump, fine. Do it knowing fans will leave. If he had also aimed at Biden or another prominent Democrat, the Trump hit might have landed as equal-opportunity. But he only punched one side, then didn’t like the result. Jelly Roll is scrambling now because he does not seem to know who he wants to be. That is how you get stuck on both sides of the fence. Pick a side. People admire conviction more than perpetual second-guessing. I lost a lot of my liberal friends in advertising when I came out as a Trump supporter. I never doubted the call. I never tried to keep quiet to keep “friends.” It’s fine to change your mind when the facts change. But it’s not fine to backtrack just to keep a crowd that’s not worth keeping. Do that and you lose the crowd and your own self-respect. Don’t be like Jelly Roll. Be yourself. That is what people actually admire. It is also how Trump won the presidency twice.

The Malcolm X assassination files should already be public. A 61-year-old murder record is not a state secret. Keeping it locked this long means the government still thinks it owns the story. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna just posted on X asking for those files to be released. She already correctly forced JFK, RFK, and MLK records into the open. This one should not be the exception. If those cases deserved sunlight, this one does too. Two of the three men convicted in the Malcolm X case, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, were cleared in 2021 after a review found the FBI and NYPD withheld evidence that likely would have acquitted them. They each served more than 20 years. Islam died before his name was cleared. Malcolm X’s daughters are still in court against the FBI, CIA, and NYPD, arguing those agencies hid records and never finished identifying everyone involved. That is not a footnote. That is a government that buried the files and let the wrong men rot. I want to see the documents. I do not need another theory from the internet. I need the record. If the files are clean, put them out. If they are not, the country has a right to see why the paperwork stayed sealed. Secret files do not age into honesty. Luna is right to push for more sunlight. Transparency is not a favor the government gets to grant when it feels like it. It is the bare minimum after a man is murdered and the official story still has holes in it 61 years later.