by Bob Barr | Aug 25, 2026 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerDemocrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, believe it or not, has a valid point: should the country’s biggest real estate players be allowed to prevent American citizens from simply looking at which homes are even for sale? It’s hard enough to find an affordable home on the market today — should the available inventory now sit behind a paywall, too?Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation today for potential homebuyers.The nation’s largest brokerage, Compass, and the dominant multiple listing service (MLS) in the Chicago area — Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) — are working in cahoots to wall off listings behind a private, pay-to-see network.If lawmakers don’t step in, it will be only a matter of time before the practice spreads to listings nationwide.Warren sent a letter demanding answers, with a deadline of Aug. 21. As of this writing, and to no surprise, there has been no public indication that either company has responded. Wisconsin Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, sent a similar letter in July with an Aug. 5 deadline, asking Compass and MRED to brief subcommittee staff by that date; however, Compass never confirmed it would do so.The ball is now in the Trump administration’s hands — specifically the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission — to do something.For decades, MLS databases have been the shared bulletin board of the real estate world, and have worked like this: A real estate agent posts a house on the board, other agents immediately see it, and it soon appears on Zillow, Redfin, and other sites. Without this open-source board, it is virtually impossible for potential homebuyers to know what’s for sale.In...
by Bob Barr | Mar 17, 2026 | Uncategorized |
Washington ExaminerFar-left Democrats are trying to mask their partisan outrage after Warner Bros.-Discovery (WBD) rejected Netflix’s acquisition bid and accepted an offer from Paramount, a media company owned by Trump ally David Ellison.Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and a dozen House Democrats recently signed a letter to the Treasury and Justice Departments to express their “substantial concerns” that the deal violates antitrust law. According to excerpts from the letter published by Semafor, the lawmakers worry the deal would produce “significant horizontal and vertical overlap in theatrical distribution, premium streaming, and first-window licensing markets, and would likely reduce competition among studios for movies.”These “concerns” are fake. If Warren and Blumenthal were so worried about the anticompetitive effects of market concentration, they would have spent the last few months, when Netflix was the top contender to buy WBD, raising similar objections. In fact, they should have been raising them even more loudly. Antitrust experts largely agree that Paramount’s bid was far less legally problematic than Netflix’s. Netflix is already the country’s largest streaming service with a market share of around 20%. Letting the company acquire WBD’s HBO Max would boost that share to roughly 35%, well above the threshold at which courts consider mergers presumptively illegal.The combined streaming share of HBO Max and Paramount+, on the other hand, is around 22%. By creating a strong new competitor for Netflix, this deal will “stabilize streaming prices, increase competition, and drive new investments in infrastructure, programming, customer convenience, and [user experience] design,” one analysis found.And yet, this cabal of Democrats has consistently attacked Paramount while almost entirely ignoring Netflix.Warren and Blumenthal made their real motives...
by Bob Barr | Mar 16, 2026 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
TownhallEvery night we spend on this earth is a gift from God. But some nights are more special than others. Among the more special nights in my life are those spent in the company of Dave Keene, a friend and colleague of many years.Dave and I would visit, of course, during meetings of the NRA Board of Directors, where we both served for several years; those days were capped off usually by a good dinner, a cigar, and a bit of bourbon. They were the high points of whatever events had brought us together.But nights (and days) spent with Dave at his cabin on the banks of a tributary of the Missouri River (I think) were the truly special times.Dave was an avid and expert fly fisherman, and his cabin in Montana was the perfect venue from which he would enjoy this avocation. I was anything but an expert fly fisherman; most probably the worst Dave had ever tried to instruct. Whenever we headed out in his flatboat, usually in the early morning but sometimes late afternoon, Dave would patiently instruct me on the mechanics of fly fishing. He then would spend the next several hours tying replacement flies on my fishing line, as I would invariably lose the last one in the tree branches on the riverbank. No matter. The hours lazily drifting down the river provided the perfect opportunity for me to pepper Dave with questions about everything from current political goings on, to his work at the epicenter of the birth of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s (Dave was but a few years older than...
