Untitled

Lillian Rizzo at CNBC:

Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery hit its first official roadblock when a judge granted a temporary restraining order on the merger as part of a lawsuit brought by state attorneys general. California District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed off on the order Monday after hearing arguments from both sides in an Oakland courtroom on Friday. The order puts a 14-day pause on anything moving forward with the merger. Last week, a group of state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit seeking to block the $110 billion acquisition due to antitrust concerns. The proposed deal would unite the storied film studios of Paramount and Warner Bros, the CBS broadcast network, a sprawling portfolio of pay TV networks that includes CNN, TNT, MTV and BET, and streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max, under one roof. In a statement Monday, a Paramount spokesperson said the company is “confident the evidence will demonstrate that the State AGs’ antitrust arguments are without merit as their alleged markets and claims of anticompetitive effects are without any basis in modern market realities.”   “This merger is lawful, pro-competitive, and will benefit consumers, creators, workers, and the entertainment industry. We will continue to vigorously defend the transaction and will look forward to the hearings on the substance of the State AGs’ action,” according to the statement.

Warner Bros. declined to comment. The lawsuit said the proposed deal would violate the Clayton Antitrust Act — a more than 100-year-old law that prohibits anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions. The lawsuit was brought by a group of states that also includes Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. In Monday’s order, Martínez-Olguín said the coalition of state attorneys general presented “compelling evidence that the combined firm resulting from the transaction will possess substantial market share in the wide-release theatrical distribution market.”

[...] The Paramount-WBD transaction has been under review by the European Union and the U.K., which provided a new provisional deadline of July 22. The Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice signed off on the tie-up in June, clearing it of federal concerns. It has also won approval from several global jurisdictions. Paramount has said it’s on track to close the deal by the end of September. If the transaction were to be delayed beyond then, Paramount could face additional costs, namely a so-called ticking fee that kicks in if it’s not closed after Sept. 30. The fee would be an additional 25 cents paid to WBD shareholders per quarter until closing — which would equal about $650 million in cash value per quarter. Paramount also agreed to a $7 billion breakup fee if the deal doesn’t move forward due to regulatory concerns.

Good news: the disastrous Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery merger has hit a temporary snag, thanks to Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granting the TRO.

See Also:

AP, via The Guardian: Judge orders pause on Paramount-Warner merger after challenge from 12 states

Rachel Leingang and Lauren Gambino at The Guardian:

Since Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats have chased candidates who exude an ever-elusive “authenticity”. For many on the left, the answer was Graham Platner, a military veteran turned oyster farmer with a gravelly voice and deep hostility toward the political establishment. Even as controversy after controversy emerged – racist, sexist, homophobic online posts; a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he later covered up; sexually explicit messages sent to other women while he was married; and allegations from former partners of toxic and threatening behavior, which he denied – Platner’s momentum didn’t slow. It was only after a woman accused Platner of rape – which he denies – that his political support collapsed. In the wake of his withdrawal, Democrats are asking themselves many questions, chief among them, who will replace him as their party’s nominee in the marquee Senate race? But the saga has also revived a deeper debate over whose flaws are forgivable – and whose are disqualifying.

“White men get to fail,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young, progressive candidates to run for office. “Women do not get to make mistakes. People of color do not get to make mistakes.” Litman said the argument was not that serious allegations should be treated differently because of a candidate’s identity, but that Platner had been granted an unusual degree of latitude to recover from earlier controversies that a female candidate or a candidate of color would probably not have been afforded. Litman said Platner was the “political equivalent of the Fyre fest guy or Adam Neuman” – high-profile men who continued to receive support for new ventures after spectacular failure. “It’s like there is inherent trust and faith in capabilities that they don’t have to prove,” she added.

Run for Something vets political candidates before offering their endorsement. As part of its endorsement application, Litman’s organization asks candidates to disclose what a background check might turn up, and what the opposition will find, Litman said. After going through the vetting process, women and people of color are more likely to “self-censor” or decide they would rather not run at all, Litman said, adding: “The thing that I keep coming back to is, who has permission to be authentic?” The result, according to candidates, strategists and scholars, is a political environment that often penalizes women and people of color more harshly than their white, male counterparts. “Folks who have been identified as hardscrabble, populist, left-of-center white guys get far more leeway than folks like me, Black progressives,” Chris Rabb, who won a closely watched Democratic primary in a deep-blue Pennsylvania House district, said last month on the Breaking Points podcast. “And that’s a double standard that is largely based on race.”

Despite a record of contemptible behavior, Platner continued to raise large sums of money from grassroots donors, pushed a sitting governor out of the primary and cruised to the Democratic nomination.

[...] When running for office, women, and particularly women of color, often start from a deficit, needing to prove not only that they are qualified but that they fit voters’ expectations of what leadership looks like, said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women in Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. “Who can best run authentically on all of their many identities are those whose identities are privileged across the board,” she said.

Dittmar pointed to research on how women decide whether to run in the first place. A 2008 survey of state legislators found women described their decision as “relationally embedded” – weighing how a campaign would affect their families, communities and careers – while men were more likely to run simply because they wanted the job.

Research has found that when women do run for office, they are more likely to face scrutiny over their personal lives. Women are held to a higher moral and ethical standard – a phenomenon the Barbara Lee Family Foundation called the “character pedestal”, in which voters expect women to be more honest and trustworthy than men. When women are accused of wrongdoing, “the fall from the pedestal is longer and harder”, Dittmar said, referencing the work of the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

As more women run for office, some see signs that political gender norms are changing, particularly since the 2016 presidential election, when the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became a defining issue of her campaign – immortalized by the “but her emails” political meme – even as Trump faced a long record of controversies, including multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.

On the left, voters are bucking convention and embracing a new crop of unabashedly progressive – and decidedly aggressive – candidates. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and the daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, succeeded in toppling a senior Democratic incumbent in a New York congressional primary despite scrutiny over social media posts she had deleted, but had been archived. In the posts, she frequently and profanely disparaged the Democratic party and its leaders, including Kamala Harris, questioned the origins of Covid-19 and criticized interracial relationships. As a first-time political candidate, Kat Abughazaleh spent months worrying that someone would unearth her “middle school livejournal fanfic account”.

Great article in The Guardian on why white men like Graham Platner are afforded many fuck-ups, while women and POC get far less latitude for mistakes.

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

Depending on when you read this, Trump may be bombing Iran, claiming a peace deal is imminent, threatening to commit more war crimes against the civilian population, teasing a ground invasion, or some combination thereof. Nothing, though, has really changed. Nearly five months out from Trump’s unprovoked and disastrous attack, the bottom line is that he’s lost the war but still can’t bring himself to admit it. So we’re trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of vacillating between belligerence and fake peace deals while gas prices spike, bombs fall, and people die.

Off to the side of that debacle, Trump last week reiterated that he wants to seize Greenland in his sweaty short-fingered appendages. Greenland, he blustered, “should be controlled by the United States, not Denmark.” He added, “that’s what hurt my relationship with NATO, because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark”— which is both nonsensical and a lie, inasmuch as Trump’s been attacking NATO for at least a decade. Trump’s gaseous blather about invading Greenland seems like a minor monstrosity compared to his actual murderous bombing of, and ongoing humiliation by, Iran. But they’re part of the same phenomenon — a foreign policy driven by ego, ignorance, and inflamed colonial malice, in which the US sees no allies and really no other sentient human beings, just territory to be won and glorious carnage to commit. The renewed threats against Greenland are serious because they signal once again how untrustworthy, erratic, selfish, and cruel US foreign policy has become. Neither allies, rivals, nor enemies can trust us. Which means everyone, definitely including us, is poorer, less secure, and less safe.

Threatening allies has costs

Trump first began braying about buying Greenland in his first term. Why he became fixated on it is a bit unclear, but the obsession seems to have started after Puerto Rican officials and the media criticized Trump for his (failed, racist) response to Hurricane Maria. In a snit, Trump began to talk about trading Puerto Rico to Denmark for its autonomous territory Greenland. His rationale, according to former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, was that “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.” Why does Trump want Greenland in particular? He’s floated a range of nonsensical rationales over the years, from security to mineral wealth. Recently his administration has even argued that Greenland’s fisheries could save the Red Lobster seafood chain. All of these explanations are nonsense. Greenland is (or was) an ally and already works with us on security; it has little in the way of minerals we need. And Red Lobster’s problems have nothing to do with Greenland, for christ’s sake. The truth seems to be that Trump wants to seize Greenland because it looks enormous on maps and he thinks it is cool to put his name on big things.

[...]

It’s not good when everyone hates you

Trump would insist that forcing Europe and Canada to pay more for defense is somehow in our interest. But the fact is that alienating allies and neighbors hurts us too, in a whole range of ways. First, fighting your allies is expensive. Trump’s trade wars — which again, have been fueled in part by his efforts to bully NATO — are estimated to have cost the US some $317 billion. More, when people in foreign countries see you as a danger and enemy, they make travel plans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, now that Trump is insulting and attacking Canadians and Europeans, US tourism has cratered. The industry dropped $16.6 billion in 2025 and is heading for another $21 billion drop in 2026. Part of that is because of Trump’s horrific nativist border policies which have led to the arrest and torture of some tourists. But part of it is simply that people like Canadians — a huge part of the US tourism market — simply don’t want to spend money in a country that is actively threatening them. Second, when you bully your allies over and over, they no longer have much incentive to help you on issues of mutual security. In fact, they have reason to believe that your security is not mutual and that they are better off when you are weaker than when you are stronger. You can see this in Iran. After Trump blundered into the war and Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, very serious NYT foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman argued that NATO should bail him out. Friedman pointed out, correctly, that for NATO “to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz … would keep the world’s most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability.”

So so easy to buy your “false positive” results from the fda when you donate a million or two to Republican pacs.

3rd U.S. Service Member Killed Amid Escalating U.S.-Iran Attacks, Andy Burnham Becomes U.K. Prime Minister: Live Updates