So what did you think they were going to do? ā¢
(nāth in a seriesā¦)
Once again, that olā Trump magic paid off in spades.
So much winning.
Little Beauregard is going to be in trouble with the boss againā¦ he was supposed to stop this.
If Hair Furor is true to form (and when has he not ever been), weāll get a huge tweet storm about fake news CNN, unfair coverage of his HISTORIC!! nothingburger summit and the Keebler elfās recusal ā NO COLLUSION!
I wonder how much AT&T stock is in the Judges portfolio,if not before, then tomorrow.
The rich get richer.
Fucking sucks that this is double-edged. On a substantive level, this is bad for consumers. On a political level, fuck you Trump and your abuse of power to carry out personal political vendettas in the marketplace.
Was this Judge Leon again? Love-hate relationship with that little conservative douche. He made some great rulings on the civilian surveillance state bullshit Dubya started if I remember correctly, but heās made some obviously conservative ideological decisions too.
Just in time for the net neutrality deregulation! Hooray!
Where have you been? Mighty Mouth, the master negotiator, bestower of farms, buyer of bridges, rosin-responsive rube, began attacking a CNN reporter as āfakeā shortly after the pseudo-summit ended.
Everything Trump touches dies, including his supine DOJ lackeys.
Pretty much undoes all the anti-trust regulations going back to Sherman.
Pretty soon, there will be no choice.
He rejected the governmentās argument that it would hurt competition in pay TV and cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars more to stream TV and movies.
Explain to me how the argument doesnāt stand. Or, failing that, how much does the judge get in lovely parting gifts for finding in favor
Itās a sad day when any court decision comes under scrutiny by the rabble.
Seems appropriateā¦
Barrett Strong - Money (Thatās What I Want)
I have to believe Trumpās politically motivated statements regarding CNN and his corrupt reasons for blocking this merger cast a cloud over the proceedings, just as with his travel ban. While there were legitimate reasons to block this merger, everything Trump involves himself with turns to shit. Hat tip to Rick Wilson.
Fresh roundā¦ once the ambien wears off.
Iām not a fan of Judge Leon by any means, but heās certainly not any Trumpalo, comliant Bushie, or even all that monolithic a corporatist tool. Heās more of an old-fashioned 1950s conservative, prone to opposing progressive laws and policies but actually quite aggressively Rule of Law (mostly in good ways) on a wide range of serious issues.
Eg. Leon was a serious thorn in the side of the GWB Adm on the issues bearing on Gitmo.
The POSITIVE side of this ruling, IMO, is that there seemed to be quite an effort to force the proposed merger partners into taking on the role of supplicants to the king, even proffering gifts (increasingly such are being treated as non-actionable bribes) to the Trump mob.
There are a number of potential negatives to this ruling, having to do mostly with amping up mediaās turn towards monopsony (a thing not quite like monopoly, tho nonetheless pernicious). But overturning Net Neutrality is likely to prove a far more intractable problem for America than this merger.
Not surprisingly, the position he played in college lacrosse is basically that of a hacker - the positionās very responsibility is to bother, hack, harass and obstruct the opposing goalie.
A fair read on Leon, he is a douch. That said, this ruling was totally predictable, DOJ had a ridiculously weak case, and Leon I am sure saw it as politically motivated, even if he did not let that be argued directly. DOJās argument was contrary to what they have said in anti-trust cases for the last 20 years. Why the sudden change?
Yes, bad for consumers, but not as bad as the FTC net neutrality decision, and hopefully this puts more pressure on that front.
The only real good I see out of this is that ATT is hopefully P.O.ed, and is unlikely to put pressure on CNN and the other media it just bought to be nice to TraitorTrump.
Again, part of the double-edged sword of this ruling: the newly merged media giant will be better positioned to secure a larger swath of the new Toll-based post-Net Neutrality internet, at least providing some assurance of a non-uniform voice, compared to Fox, Sinclair, Comcast and the rest of those monsters. The newly merged CNN-Warner will be rapaciously corporate, but thatās America, aināt it?
I have set a personal upper limit as to how much I am willing to be gouged by the telecoms or if the interwebs go to a cable like tiered programing. At that poing I will quit. I may have to go back to paper billing and banking but the library (hopefully) will be where I go. I prefer reading to TV but I do want my āgolden age of tvā programs.