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...
by Bob Barr | Feb 16, 2026 | Uncategorized |
Daily CallerThe one remarkably consistent concern on the minds of American consumers can be summed up in one word: prices. It is even driving congressional debates this year, as lawmakers face mounting pressure to show that they understand what constituents’ families face every time they swipe a card at the checkout counter.One of the least discussed aspects of this multi-faceted, supply-and-demand problem — more than charges of “corporate greed” — is regulation. Most specifically, anger at the Biden administration’s policies that targeted the very market efficiencies that tend to keep prices down.Perhaps nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in former President Joe Biden’s antitrust policy.Under the previous administration, federal regulators increasingly treated scale and efficiency not as consumer benefits (which they are), but as suspect behavior requiring government intervention. Thus, discounts realized from buying in bulk were reframed as “unfair.” The result of this mindset was an antitrust agenda that, if fully realized, would have pushed everyday costs even higher.For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations shared a basic antitrust principle: enforcement should protect competition, not individual competitors. The metric was simple — do consumers benefit through lower prices, greater choice, and innovation? This consumer-focused barometer helped keep antitrust focused on real harms rather than political preferences.That consensus fractured under Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Led by its uber-liberal Chair, Lina Khan, the agency revived a long-dormant New Deal statute, the “Robinson-Patman Act,” and weaponized it to attack routine volume discounts.The law, written in the 1930s, was dusted off not to stop collusion or monopoly pricing (which was its original purpose), but to challenge price differences that often reflect ordinary cost savings. This marked a significant expansion...
by Bob Barr | Mar 27, 2025 | Uncategorized |
They’re Lying To You About The...
by Bob Barr | Feb 6, 2025 | Uncategorized |
The HillA January 2025 report by Unusual Whales, a financial data platform for retail traders, revealed how members of Congress once again beat average market returns last year. Not surprisingly, debate has resurfaced in Washington about whether it is time to pass legislation, such as that proposed by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), to ban stock trading by elected representatives. Ossoff has championed this issue in one form or another since first being elected to the Senate in 2020, and its current, bipartisan permutation, the Ending Trading and Holdings In Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, reflects a principle with which I and a large majority of the American electorate agree. However, as former presidential candidate Ross Perot famously opined, “the devil is in the details.” By any reasoned standard, government officials profiting from the regulations and laws they help enact constitutes a serious ethical issue. The magnitude of this problem was revealed starkly last September, when it was reported that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband sold 2,000 shares of Visa stock for $500,000 just weeks before the Justice Department sued the company’s debit card business in a lawsuit many legal experts consider unjustified. The actions by Mr. Pelosi ignited increased public concern that officials may be using their positions, and the inside information they obtain as a result, to influence the market for their own benefit. It is not just Pelosi’s husband who appears to be a beneficiary of such maneuvering. The new Unusual Whales report shows that in 2024 one member of Congress gained an eye-popping 149 percent in stock trades — more than 124 percent greater than the S&P 500’s 2024 benchmark. While this report highlights the significance of this potential conflict of interest problem, an outright ban on members trading stocks...
by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2024 | Uncategorized |
By Bob Barr and Jason AltmireWashington ExaminerWith the Supreme Court recently expressing clear disapproval of many of the Federal Trade Commission‘s operating procedures, Congress must aggressively steer this key regulatory agency back to its original mission of protecting consumers. When we served in Congress, we relied on the FTC’s challenges to artificial monopolies and predatory business activities to conduct our own legislative business. Its work and guidance helped us construct fair regulatory frameworks that worked for businesses and consumers alike, regardless of how wealthy, poor, big, or small they were and irrespective of how politically well-connected they might or might not have been. Today, however, the FTC is placing its political policy agenda above the rule of law and the interests of the consumers it is charged with protecting.It would be unfair and wasteful for people to wait years, or even decades, for challenges to further regulatory abuses by the FTC and other agencies to reach and be decided by the courts. The ball is in Congress’s court.Congress still oversees the FTC, and the federal legislative body has an obligation to step in and reform the regulatory agency it created more than a century ago. Most importantly, Congress must roll back the FTC’s new enforcement policies and operational standards — standards that the commission itself has admitted do not necessarily represent the interests of consumers. The real problem started two years ago, when the FTC rescinded its antitrust enforcement policy that properly had kept its actions “guided by the public policy underlying the antitrust laws, namely, the promotion of the consumer welfare.” Sadly, in 2022, the commission, under the leadership of Chairwoman Lina Khan, replaced that consumer-centric enforcement policy...
