The Wall Street Journal on the AT&T and Time Warner Merger, Feb. 26:

Someone pass the smelling salts. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday issued another rebuke to the Justice Department in its quest to block the AT&T -Time Warner merger and unanimously affirmed the trial judge’s ruling. As a legal matter this is a stone-cold knockout.

Justice sued to enjoin the merger in November 2017, arguing it would increase the leverage of Time Warner networks in carriage-fee negotiations with other distributors. AT&T, which owns DirecTV, would supposedly suffer less pain if negotiations deadlocked and Time Warner channels went dark since it might lure customers from other distributors. If carriage fees went up, non-AT&T customers might wind up paying more.

We won’t rehash the reams of evidence to the contrary, but suffice to say the government’s theory ignores the competitive nature of fast-evolving media markets, as federal Judge Richard Leon detailed last June. “Generic statements that vertical integration ‘can'” lead to “‘an unfair advantage over its rivals’ do not come close to answering the question before the Court,” Judge Leon noted in a biting 127-page opinion.

The three-judge appellate panel comprised of two Democratic appointees largely agreed, notwithstanding some nits with Judge Leon’s legal diction. As is its custom, the D.C. Circuit judges reviewed the trial court ruling for “clearly erroneous” misstatement of facts, and they did identify misrepresentations by the government.

For instance, Judge Judith Rodgers noted the government ignored that Turner Broadcasting had “sent letters to approximately 1,000 distributors ‘irrevocably offering’ to engage in ‘baseball style’ arbitration at any time within a seven-year period.” This would prevent an AT&T monopoly over content. The government’s models also did not take into account long-term network contracts, “which would constrain Turner Broadcasting’s ability to raise content prices for distributors,” she wrote.

We repeatedly advised Justice to drop the suit, and the Trump Administration should be glad the D.C. Circuit’s liberals didn’t take up the opportunity to rewrite antitrust law along European lines as some on the left urged. Rather than suffer another humiliation at the Supreme Court, the antitrust cops should drop the case and consider why they lost so thoroughly.

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The New York Daily News on Central Park construction, Feb. 26:

So eager is Mayor de Blasio to destroy the cherished tradition of Central Park carriage horses, he’s doing it the Robert Moses way: bringing in the bulldozers and running roughshod over landmarks laws, not to mention fair play.

The mayor, who failed to outright ban the horses and failed again to move them into a mythical Central Park stable — neither plan could pass City Council muster — has now forced the Department of Transportation to do his bidding through the rule-making process. He’s uprooting the carriage hackline from 59th St., where it been since the Civil War, and putting it inside the park, out of sight from most potential customers.

The move is obviously designed to devastate the little industry and its good union jobs. So carriage operators sued. Manhattan state Supreme Justice Arthur Engoron wrongly denied their initial claim, failing to consider the impact of the banishment on people, not to mention horses.

Rather than wait for a scheduled motion to reargue before the same judge, let alone an appeal to a higher court, the DOT is ripping up historic Belgian block paving stones on a park drive median.

Even more troubling than his legal arrogance is the fact that de Blasio broke city law by altering the protected park without prior approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Nor did he let any of the five Community Boards abutting the park weigh in.

The same guy who used to blast Mayor Bloomberg for tuning out community concerns is wearing bigger blinders now.