You probably heard last week that Paramount is buying Warner Brothers Discovery in a $110 billion merger that will reshape, in large measure, American entertainment media. Paramount was bought several months ago by Skydance, the movie studio which has produced the Mission: Impossible movies, Top Gun: Maverick and a host of others.

Skydance is more or less the only movie studio left which consistently makes money on their intellectual property. Skydance is helmed by David Ellison, who is the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The money this company has is virtually inexhaustible, which was how they were able to first buy Paramount, the company which owns the Paramount Plus streaming service and CBS, among other things, and was in a sizable financial hole, but now Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns HBO, Cinemax, the HBO Max streaming app and a host of cable channels including CNN.

It was not expected that Paramount would buy Warner Brothers Discovery. What was expected was that Netflix would buy that company and take the media business in a very different direction.

We could take a big dive into the import of Paramount’s acquisition, but perhaps that’s for another time. What’s interesting here is that Netflix’s bid for Warner Brothers lost a great deal of steam when one of Netflix’s board members – former Obama administration hack Susan Rice, who’s been involved in nefarious political activity going back even before she went on a host of news shows to lie to the American people and claim that the Benghazi disaster was the reaction to a YouTube video making fun of the prophet Mohammed – popped off in a video statement threatening reprisals against Republicans and Trump supporters when Democrats regain power.

Netflix’s bid for Warner Brothers was already problematic in Washington. When Rice popped off as she did, as a board member and representative of the company, there was simply no way it was going to work.

And on Wednesday, Sen. John Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate to throw mud in Rice’s eye.

So far as we can tell, Susan Rice is still on Netflix’s board. How much longer that remains the case is a good question.

And with Paramount taking over Warner Brothers, it’s expected that Paramount Plus and HBO Max will combine to create a streaming service with considerably more to offer than Netflix  does, which could well signal the end of market dominance for the company paying Susan Rice more than $300,000 a year just to sit on its board.