Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“On Monday, the monopolization trial against Live Nation picked up where it left off a week earlier, with Jay Marciano, CEO of AEG Entertainment, the nation’s second-largest live concert promoter, under direct questioning. But there was a different lawyer in the lead plaintiff’s chair: Jeffrey Kessler, a superstar private litigator who successfully prosecuted cases against NASCAR and the NCAA, was seated in place of David Dahlquist, the Justice Department’s lead trial attorney. The reason for the swap is that DOJ settled their claims against Live Nation on March 9, and pressured many of the 39 states (and the District of Columbia) in the case, particularly the Republican ones, to go along with them. But in the end, only seven states did so …. The other 32 … failed to come to agreement after forced settlement talks from the judge.” (03/17/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/03/17/state-attorneys-general-feds-antitrust-live-nation-ticketmaster-warner-bros-paramount/

Source: CounterPunch
by Binoy Kampmark

“The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. The Middle East, where US President Donald Trump promised the ‘forever wars’ would end, promises an end to his beginning.” (03/17/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/17/the-growing-problems-of-operation-epic-fury/

Source: The Daily Economy
by John Phelan

“High-skilled workers tend to strengthen government budgets, while low-skilled immigration can add fiscal pressure. The composition of immigration matters as much as the number.” (03/17/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/can-immigration-address-americas-fiscal-nightmare-it-depends/

Source: Reason
by Damon Root

“The First Amendment states that the government ‘shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.’ But one prominent conservative [sic] judge, whose name has been mentioned as a potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, thinks that protection against government censorship may not apply to noncitizens in the United States. Is the judge right?” (for publication 04/26)

https://reason.com/2026/03/17/yes-the-first-amendment-protects-noncitizens/

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Tim Worstall

“Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year. Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. OK, so the value users gain from Facebook is $1k a year, there are 2 billion of them, that’s two thousand billion, or $2 trillion in value a year. Of which Zucks has 10%, that $200 billion. Pretty good deal for us, really. But that’s not right, not at all. For Zucks’ money is a one off capital sum, the consumer benefit is an annual one.” (03/17/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/entrepreneurial-capitalism-the-greatest-deal-in-all-of-history