Mostly Monday Reads: Meathead

“No big surprise to MAGA. Things are getting interesting.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

These posts get more challenging to write each day. This year has been tough on everyone.  I haven’t thought about weekends spent watching TV sitcoms with a limited choice of three channels in a while. My only TV is still sitting in its box, untouched. That about sums up my relationship with the old-school way of getting news and entertainment. I’d rather play my guitar or piano, create another watercolor of an old New Orleans building, or walk my dog than stay glued to it the way I did as a kid. However, I grew up in an area where there was not much else to do than join the family to stare into fake realities.

I will admit to spending way too much time on my cellphone or computer now. I can find many better things out there with a virtual library and the chance to interact with friends all over the world.  It’s so damn cold out there now that I rushed the walk to sit here and stare at another sort’ve screen. The one that lets me read magazines and newspapers without getting black ink all over my fingers.

Of course, my entire family watched All in the Family. I admit that The Mary Tyler Moore Show was my favorite, and when I briefly moved to Minneapolis, I had to throw my hat in the air and visit the house on Lake Harriet that was used to style the set. Dick Van Dyke turned 100 this week. Rob Reiner and his wife lost their lives. This year has been full of days I’d rather forget. Family violence is all too common. We still don’t do well helping people with mental health and drug issues. Here’s the headline from USA Today. “Rob Reiner, wife Michele Singer’s son in custody – Live updates.”

An arrest has been made in the killing of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer.

Their son, Nick Reiner, has been taken into police custody and is being held on $4 million bail, according to Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department records views by USA TODAY. The acclaimed Hollywood director and actor was killed alongside Singer in their California home Sunday night, according to Variety and TMZ.

Their deaths continue to be under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department after the couple was found dead in their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. In a press conference on Sunday night, the LAPD said the robbery-homicide division will continue to investigate through the night and expect to release more information in the morning.

Authorities confirmed that “many family members” will be interviewed in the course of their work and that they were obtaining a search warrant to conduct a full crime scene investigation. They did not comment on the injuries sustained by Reiner and Singer.

USA TODAY was unable to reach a representative for Reiner at the time of publication.

The L.A. Times has background on Nick Reiner. “What we know about Nick Reiner, who struggled with addiction and shared his recovery with the world.”

Nick Reiner spent years struggling with addiction and with help from his father, Hollywood legend Rob Reiner, told his story to the world.

On Monday, Nick was booked into the L.A. County jail on suspicion of murder, hours after Reiner and his wife were found dead inside their Brentwood home.

Nick cycled in and out of rehab centers and experienced bouts of homelessness as a teenager.

He had gotten clean by 2015, when he worked with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about addiction and recovery. Rob Reiner directed and Nick co-wrote the film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs.

Many aspects of the movie were inspired by Nick’s relationship with his father — including a line where the father character tells his son, “I’d rather you hate me and you be alive.” Nick said in a 2016 interview with AOL that he “didn’t bond a lot” with his father while he was growing up.

Nick gave an interview about “Being Charlie” alongside his family at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015, saying that his decision to quit heroin was driven by a practical realization.

“I got sick of doing that,” he told The Times. “I come from a nice family. I’m not supposed to be out there on the streets and in homeless shelters doing all these … things.”

During the interview, Rob said he regretted valuing the advice of counselors over the voice of his son.

“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he said. “We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”

Michele added: “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”

Nick talked about the many different rehab centers and programs he tried without success. In 2016, he told People magazine that he lived on the streets because he refused to go to the rehab facilities his parents recommended.

“If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programs they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless,” he said.

He told the magazine that he could have died on the streets.

“It’s all luck,” he said. “You roll the dice and you hope you make it.”

It’s remarkable to me that we frequently discuss the American Dream, yet it seems we lack a clear understanding of what that means. We’ve been shaped by SitComs, schools, political parties, and many other things that have left us in the dark about the very nature of our lives. Perhaps it is time to find some better ways.

I’ll keep this post brief today. Most days, I struggle to make sense of things. That’s been the reality of 2025. The reality of 2025 is also one filled with friends locked in their homes and neighbors struggling to protect themselves from our own government. I’m going to take a few days to just bake bread and sit down in front of a TV, not my own, and see if the offerings have improved. Fortunately for me, I’ve found the films of Guillermo del Toro on my last such adventure. I’m hoping to discover more. The documentary about him is also a solid watch. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually watched something without wanting to grab my cell phone instead. That’s a far road from the sixteen-year-old me and the TV console in our family room. Being with friends always brings a good end to a bad year.

So, one more read about today’s media. This is from Dr. Paul Krugman. “MAGA, the Broligarchs and the Media, This isn’t just about business; it’s about democracy.”  Be sure to refer to the chart as you read.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix. But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.

Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.

First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.

Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:

[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.

Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.

As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”

But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.

Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:

In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.

Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition thatfaced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.

Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project,which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”

Have a good week!

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?

TRIGGER WARNING!

Really hate to add this, but this is what Trump had to say today. What an asshole!