Dallbert Dallas

Legal battles over the state’s new political boundaries have cost taxpayers $1.4 million, and the legal meter has only begun to run. Records requested by The Arizona Republic show that the lion’s share of the expense — $1.3 million — has come from the Independent Redistricting Commission, which has been hit with four lawsuits since it started its work in 2011.

Other public costs come from the court fight over Gov. Jan Brewer’s 2011 removal of the commission’s chairwoman, Colleen Mathis, and the Legislature’s intervention in that lawsuit. Taxpayers footed the bill for both sides of that case.

The commission’s legal costs have been a sore topic at the Legislature, where the majority Republicans disagree with the new congressional and legislative maps the commission drew last year.

The commission has twice said it needs more money to defend its work, angering some lawmakers who believe the commission is wasting taxpayer dollars.

Corn edged higher in light trading Tuesday before the release of a series of crucial reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will release Friday. Corn rose 3.25 cents to $6.8875 a bushel in light trading on Tuesday.

The grain has dropped 18 percent since reaching a record $8.39 a bushel August 21 after a drought decimated last year's crop.

The USDA will release a series of reports on Friday at noon ET, which will give traders a better picture of the supply and demand outlook for major U.S. crops.

Traders were unwilling to make big bets before those reports were released, said Darin Newsom, an analyst at DTN, in Omaha, Neb. "The overall tone of the market is bearish, I think it's going to stay that way until proven otherwise," said Newsom. "Every time it tries to rally, it is met by sellers."

Pay-TV channel Starz is trying to chart a new orbit. Early next year, its parent company, Liberty Media, plans to spin off the premium network and its sister channel Encore into a new, stand-alone, publicly traded company. Such a move would normally be cause for celebration.

But for Starz, the separation comes amid uncertainty. Its track record producing original shows has been mixed.

The market is getting increasingly crowded not only from Starz's traditional competitors, HBO and Showtime, but also from new rivals including Netflix, Amazon and Redbox. And, starting in 2017, the network will lose one of its key suppliers of movies — Walt Disney Studios — to Netflix.

The average rate on the U.S. 30-year fixed mortgage last week dipped closer to the lowest on record. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac says the average rate on a 30-year loan declined to 3.35 percent from 3.37 percent last week.

That's not far from the 3.31 percent rate of about a month ago, the lowest on records dating to 1971. The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage was unchanged at 2.65 percent. The record low is 2.63 percent.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in the final stages of conducting its Google investigation. As the agency contemplates whether Google is a monopolist in the ill-defined market for search, they may find the competitive ground has shifted beneath their feet in just the 15 months since they began investigating. While a year or two ago, Google’s main competition in search might have been Bing and Yahoo, today it’s Apple and Amazon, and tomorrow it may be Facebook. The market is almost certainly broader than general search engines as we normally think of them.

Just last week, the New York Times ran a story explaining that Google and Amazon are “at war to become the pre-eminent online mall.” The story cited survey data from two consultancies that should give the antitrust authority pause:

Forrester Research found that a third of online users started their product searches on Amazon compared to 13 percent who started their search from a traditional search site; and

comScore found that product searches on Amazon have grown 73 percent over the last year while shopping searches on Google have been flat.

These impressive statistics suggest that Google lacks market power in a critical segment of search—namely, product searches. Even though searches for items such as power tools or designer jeans account for only 10 to 20 percent of all searches, they are clearly some of the most important queries for search engines from a business perspective, as they are far easier to monetize than informational queries like “Kate Middleton.”

Connecticut Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon earned some headlines today for being the first Republican to distance herself from Mitt Romney’s comments about the “47 percent.” But there’s one area in which McMahon and Romney line up precisely: antipathy towards the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Romney has promised to repeal the law in its entirety, while McMahon said in 2010 (during her failed Senate rin) that she would have voted against it. And on the campaign trail this year, McMahon is calling for a “freeze” on the implementation of the law, as the Connecticut Post reported:

“I would definitely freeze it at the least right now,” McMahon said in a brief interview last week during a campaign stop in her hometown of Greenwich.

That position, not mentioned in her campaign fliers, is in stark contrast to that of Murphy, who boasted about his support of Dodd-Frank when it passed the House of Representatives in June 2010 and has never stopped. [...]

“Look, I think there were some things about Dodd-Frank — I think big banks needed to have more skin in the game,” McMahon said in Greenwich. “But my understanding is that there are still over 280 some rules yet to (be) written.”