monopolies

A government monopoly over speech is worse than a private monopoly, because government can fall back on the police power of the state to perpetuate its monopoly.

Fox White Nationalist Tucker Carlson's biggest worry about the slaughter last week in New Zealand-- by a confessed Trump supporter-- was worry that social media might curtail "free speech" by blocking further broadcasting of live gun massacres.

Foolishly, the DCCC is trying to push freshman members from "Trump districts" rightward. These are mostly rural districts and the DCCC-- as usual-- is making a big mistake. Two such districts are in Iowa-- IA-01, whose population is 47.7% rural and IA-03, whose population is 21.1% rural.

The thriving economy Trump inherited from Obama was on autopilot. All he had ti do was not mess it up. The post-Bush recession Obama fixed and the economy he put in place kept chugging along for 2 years despite the trickledown ideology Team Trump started installing from day one. Too late to do anything to save it now. The trade war was meant to feel relatively painless 'til after the midterms. Mission accomplished.

Thursday, I listed 50 House seats that the Democrats should be working towards flipping in 2020. I listed them in order, based on how badly the Republican winner had done.

Andrew Cuomo's priorities (source)by Gaius Publius The world's leading monopolists, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, after much thought (or in fact, very little thought) have picked two cities for their new HQ2, their second national headquarters.

Blue America endorsed Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed for many reasons and he reconfirmed our faith in him this week with a stunning and common-sense new policy proposal to create a state-level public internet service provider for Michigan, similar to the proposal sta

If a billion-user, private, hugely profitable company were truly this powerful, what should be done about it?by Gaius PubliusThe revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have come and gone quickly, like a fiery auto crash into a ten-foot wall, the remains of which nevertheless disappear overnight — in this case replaced by the next Trump scandal to hit the news.


Many Republicans seem more aggressively opposed to Trump's protectionist plans-- the steel and aluminum tariffs-- than quite a few Democrats. Thursday night, Chris Hayes had iron worker and progressive candidate Randy Bryce and DEMOS Action president Heather McGee on his MSNBC show to discuss the tariffs. Bryce's Republican opponent, Paul Ryan, has come out against the tariffs. Bryce agreed that protecting American industry and jobs have the potential to be good policy-- but not the way Trump is going about it.

This week, the Open Markets Institute reported some good news, namely that the Federal Trade Commission may be about to "waken from it's anti-trust slumber." Hard to imagine.