U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung made the comment December 6 during oral argument in the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing effort to block Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, the biggest U.S. maker of video games. (Hat tip to Josh Sisco at Politico Pro.) The FTC claimed that the merger threatened to substantially reduce competition

Blawgletter said, in the first blush of astonishment at AT&T's plan to buy T-Mobile, that we felt in our gut the deal would never go through.

But now we read that left-leaning groups like the NAACP, NEA, AFL-CIO, and GLAAD support the merger. Will wonders never cease?

No one, we suspect, would accuse any of those outfits of

Why do we have antitrust laws?

The Supreme Court has called them "the Magna Carta of free enterprise", United States v. Topco Assocs., Inc., 405 U.S. 596, 610 (1972), and the Sherman Act "a comprehensive charter of economic liberty", Northern Pac. R.R. Co. v. United States, 356 U.S. 1, 4 (1958).

Sounds great. But