David Dayen

My latest @ The Prospect on the not-so-surprising victory of James Talarico.

‘We’re in it’: Democrats won’t rule out giving Trump more money for Middle East war Democrats will have to balance a desire to criticize Trump’s offensive in Iran with pressure to support funding to defend the nation now at war.

We can draw on the last war authorization in 2002 to say that any Democrat with pretensions of running for president who votes to fund war in Iran will never win the nomination
www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

‘TrumpRx’ Is Another Pretend Solution for High Drug Prices - The American Prospect The proposed government website will just refer people to the drug companies, which use direct-to-consumer pricing to distract from continued high profits.

From last October
prospect.org/2025/10/02/2...

A month in, TrumpRx falls short of president’s grand promises Trump wants to focus on his efforts to lower drug prices, but the TrumpRx website is falling short of his promises.

We told you Trump Rx was going to suck the day it was announced. Now it's been launched, there are barely any drugs on the platform, and most of them are cheaper elsewhere and only help a narrow group of people.
www.statnews.com/2026/03/05/t...

Wealthy Dubai residents race back to UAE to avoid tax bills Some risk spending too few days in the emirate and too many in the UK

Tax exiles stuck in London desperately trying to get *back* to Dubai to avoid becoming tax resident in the UK? Just great stuff. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

How Data Centers Became a Casualty of War Three facilities have suffered damage in drone strikes, and analysts say such installations are increasingly at risk.

Data centers as critical infrastructure: Three Amazon facilities in the Middle East have already been targeted
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Behind Rakhi Israni's empty rhetoric is a record of cutting checks to far-right extremists. Israni claims she’s running as a Democrat when she’s really running as a fraud.

This is the point. If your vaunted trillion-dollar military can't get through a few days of airstrikes because you've consolidated the industrial base so badly, then you don't have a trillion-dollar military, you just have contractors in No. Virginia getting rich

Can Congress Stop Mad King Trump’s Mad War on Iran? With Republicans in charge, probably not.

"It is the blackest of ironies that a “war for oil,” as many anti-war protestors (somewhat inaccurately) claimed Bush’s invasion was about, would be a marked improvement over what Trump is doing." prospect.org/2026/03/04/i...

These are new districts, in most cases no incumbents

Here are 4 districts the TX GOP gerrymandered to gain seats in November, with the Dem and GOP primary vote. Dems outvoted GOPs in every one of them.

Dummymander? Maybe.
If Texas emerges from the midterms with only an R+1 that's hysterical

Republicans have 1.838 million votes in the primary with 78% of votes in

Isn't the bigger story in TX-Sen that the Dems got about the same amount of votes as the Republicans and the Dems have more votes left to count?

The war in Iran is already hugely expensive Aircraft carriers and stealth bombers are expensive to use.

did a little back of the envelope math for how much all this shit is costing. on the order of $1-2 billion per day just in direct spending, maybe 10 times that much in indirect effects

wow -- Tillis goes ballistic on Noem, telling her "what we've seen is a disaster under your leadership"

CA Dem Party chair Rusty Hicks kind of downplays the potential for a Democratic lockout in the primary for governor but then says this:
cadem.org/open-letter-...

I had to punch you because my friend was about to punch you and you might have punched back and hit me by accident.
#JustWar

Warner Bros. Discovery had 35,000 employees in 2024, and Paramount had about 18,600. We’ve already seen the new leadership at Paramount get rid of some of its most creative executives to install its own team. But they’d have to cull something like half the merged company, and still somehow make the same revenue, to meet that deleveraging target. Here’s why this matters. Obviously tens of thousands of job losses is a tragedy. There will also almost certainly be a lower output of television and film than if the two companies had remained separate. That means fewer slots, fewer bids, and weakened bargaining power for creators. This rises to the level of an antitrust problem, along the lines of the argument the Biden Justice Department successfully made to block the Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House merger in 2022. If the result of a Paramount merger is that fewer people can get their movies made and their pay is reduced as well, that impact of competition is sufficient to block the deal. So this private equity–style play isn’t just hazardous to workers, both those in entertainment production and distribution (kiss movie theaters goodbye if the deal goes through, as they won’t have enough content to remain viable, and what movies they get will probably accompany lower fees from the consolidated studios). It is so dangerous from a competition standpoint that there’s a legitimate case to be made to stop it.

That also is an argument to stop the deal. In antitrust terms, burning half the jobs from a combined studio will mean less output, and lower rates for producers, writers, actors, et al. That is evidence of monopolization.
prospect.org/2026/03/02/p...

Paramount-Warner Would Create a Hollywood Jobs Apocalypse - The American Prospect The deal comes complete with so much debt that it would almost certainly lead to mass job loss. That could prove to be an argument against the deal in court, too.

I'm off this week and I wrote this before we got our war on this weekend.
The Paramount-Warner merger is actually a private equity takeover. The amount of leverage used in the purchase rivals the PE deals for Toys "R" Us and Nabisco. Those ended with mass layoffs, and this will too—by design.

What You Won’t See at the Live Nation–Ticketmaster Trial - The American Prospect A Biden-appointed judge substantially narrowed the government’s bid to break up the music monopoly, and suppressed a few topics we’d really like to see play out on the stand.

I wasn't sure it would happen, but the Live Nation monopolization trial begins today in New York.
Unfortunately, a lot of the case was been put off limits by a Biden-appointed judge last week. Moe Tkacik explains.
prospect.org/2026/03/02/j...

Iraq, Iran, Irate - The American Prospect Devoid of reasons, creatures of impulse, our presidents apparently can’t help themselves from blowing up someplace in the Middle East, no matter how many times it ends in bloody disaster.

"Decapitations may just be a form of upward mobility for the regime’s surviving elites, now that there are unfilled slots above them." Harold Meyerson on Iran.
prospect.org/2026/03/02/i...

A Message from Commissioner Nida Allam | Nida for NC YouTube video by Nida Allam

Here's the first Iran-themed ad of the cycle. Nida Allam's primary challenge to Rep. Valerie Foushee is tomorrow. She talks about her opponent's funding from military contractors and AI firms.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdSu...

I didn't actually say I was, despite the literalists here

Mark Carney is a former bank executive who flattered the world with a pretty speech but is as committed to the corrupt consensus that created the conditions for Trump as anyone

I'm told that SNL used this last night

The regime that dragged us into their war for supremacy in the Middle East also just staked Paramount in their takeover of Warner Bros. to purchase our media

Trump admin briefing that Iran planned missile attacks on US positions in region which this attack preempted is the most insulting, laughable lie I’ve heard in my career, and I’ve heard a lot of them. It isn’t remotely credible and frankly reeks of desperation reaching for any justification.

Bored of Peace

Because it takes more than saying "I sue you." You need evidence and witnesses and economic analysis. And state enforcers may not have all the data about the deal in hand. It's going to be very difficult.

As I noted, David Ellison went to the Democratic Attorney General Association last week; he knows this is a vulnerability, and Bonta wasn't the only one questioning him. That's why Ellison and his minion Makan Delrahim are trying to speed up closing the deal before anyone can challenge it.

I think this quote really nails a reason I think Lander is better than Goldman. Dan might be a great prosecutor, he knows the inside game, but he has absolutely zero outside game, and this moment requires a firm handle on both.