Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of getting hammered.

If you are new here this week, via my substack in kstack.com or via Barry Weiss's honestly, where I guest

hosted this week. Thank you for visiting. Let me tell you a little bit about us. We are a morning

show for any hour, especially happy hour. We try to cover the news without freaking you out. And we are

often over-caffeinated and underprepared and I am joined. I'm Mary Catherine

Ham. I am joined as always by my co-host, Vic Mattis of the Washington Free Beacon. How are you doing,

Vic? Hello, Mary Catherine. I'm doing fine. Not much going on. My father is here for the week. I brought

him down from New Jersey. It's great having a doctor in the house. Nice. Is there a doctor in a house? There

literally is. Well, I told my family, I said if you feel, if you don't feel well, if you have a

headache, something's wrong. Now's the time to speak up. Don't tell me next week that you have like,

you need an appendectomy. Next week, not helping. That's it. That's it. So other than that, doing fine. But how are you? I'm all right. By the way, I have a medic in the house and that is a very useful thing. For kid injuries and stuff. It's like, do we need to go to the ER? And I can get a yes or no without going much further than my own home. I enjoy that. Okay. My father tends to be very dismissive, by the way. Like, I don't know, it's fine. Don't worry. I'll go away. See, that's the kind of doctor I'm into. That's what I'm looking for. I have a couple things going on. Just a couple. To our loyal getting hammered listeners, the originals, the hammerheads. I have been keeping secrets from you. I apologize. It's been a it's been a whole

couple of months over here. So I have two announcements, one professional, one personal. Should we do

the professional one first? Your call. Okay. So if you are subscribed to the substack, you will have

seen it, mkhammer.substack.com. You will have seen my post about my, my employment. I get asked by a lot of people

these days, are you still on the TV? Because I used to see you on the TV. And I say to them,

ah, not really, not really, sometimes, very rarely. And it came to my attention why that was the case a couple months ago, and I wrote about it. So

something people need to understand that understandably they don't, because they're not in the

cable news world. When you have a job like mine where you comment on TV and you are doing it

professionally, you are often signed with a network. And when you're signed with a network, you're a contract employee.

I'm not a full-time employee.

You're a contract employee who gets called in to do this job.

You get paid to do that job, and you are exclusive to one network.

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