We've had three big stories this week, each showing how the right plays the scandal game better than the left. Of the three, one is a non-scandal (Benghazi), one is a minor scandal with the potential to turn into more (IRS),1 and one is an honest-to-God scandal right now (AP). Republicans don't bother with such fine distinctions though, and that's why they are better at playing it than Democrats: when they get something they can run with, they do. Read below the fold...
Yves Smith and Bill Black have a post this morning describing the potential problems with the Brown/Vitter bill. There's a lot of detail and I won't try to summarize it, but there are two points I wanted to highlight.
The first is the concept of tight coupling. Basically, a bunch of extremely interconnected small institutions can pose as much systemic risk as a handful of behemoths, so a reform that turns the latter into the former is esentially a cosmetic one. The second is the concept of systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs. SDIs are institutions that are large enough on their own to trigger a cascade of failures if they themselves fail.
So there are two characteristics to be concerned with here: tight coupling and dangerous size. Why not tweak the nomenclature a bit to include both of those? We could call these institutions Systemically Tight and Dangerous, or STDs. That seems a bit more colorful and descriptive than SDIs, don't you think?
If it catches on, we could even end up with the bonus fun of seeing legislators try to come up with a bill title that's an acronym for penicillin. Read below the fold...
It can be difficult to write about activism in an open-ended effort like the one against fracking. It isn't like a campaign where all the activity is geared toward election day, at which point everyone will know who won and who lost. It's different even from an issue like the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a single (continent-spanning) contiguous piece of infrastructure, and which will ultimately get a definitive yes or no.
Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern. Read below the fold...
This might be a live take in the studio. Listen for the astonished "holy SHIT!" right before the end.
I wonder if I'd have recognized a great performance like that in the moment. I like to think I would, but I suspect not. I'm a slow listener; it usually takes a few listens for me to get it.
Big KRIT might be my favorite rapper for the hooks, and a good hook is enough to fulfill Dick Clark's necesssary and sufficient conditions for great music ("it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it"). Lupe puts together some pretty great hooks too, though. And when he matches them with his best topical lyrics like above and here, I think he's not just the best rapper but maybe the most important artist in Americn popular music. Disclosure: he also makes the kind of authority hating statements (more) that are dear to my heart. Read below the fold...
The response to the bank failures in Cyprus has ostensibly been about cracking down on money laundering, but the action being taken will take down the country's economy with it.
