Nerd Alert: A Mixtape With Too Much Detail

The Mueller indictment kicked the week off pretty decisively, immersing everyone in mountains of legal documents and their subsequent parsing. So we decided to roll with it. Herewith, a bunch of nerdy goodness to fuel your weekend arguments.“The agreement… specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”I honestly don’t know what to do with this 'bombshell' excerpt from Donna Brazile's new book. I was a Bernie supporter, so the overall finding is infuriating. But Brazile’s supposed outrage about it took an awfully long time to manifest itself.“Only a small percentage (6.5 percent) of the nearly 122 million households in the bottom three quintiles will actually face a tax increase.... More than 97 million (80 percent) will receive a tax cut.”A nitty detail overlooked in an analysis of the tax reform bill caused Democrats to jump on an erroneous bandwagon.“At its center is a proposal to permanently cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent — a change that is estimated to reduce federal revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade alone.”More detail on the tax plan, from the New York Times“Powell’s immediate predecessors, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, were true academics who pushed the Fed to be technocratic and transparent. Following in the academic tradition, they encouraged and were comfortable with dissent among the other governors and regional Fed presidents. This was a big departure from Alan Greenspan, who ran a cult-of-personality Fed...It’s hard to predict what Powell’s intellectual persuasion is, but he appears to be a consensus-builder rather than a domineering Greenspan type of chair. His monetary-policy preferences also seem to follow Yellen’s, so his non-economist background may set him apart more clearly when it comes to bank regulation.”An only slightly wonky look at Jerome Powell, the (likely) next chairman of the Federal Reserve“The Wire’s Clay Davis was the subject of a grand jury, over corruption claims, in series five, but basically charmed his way out of indictment. Fortunately for Mueller, no one in Trump’s circle is remotely charming.”The Guardian helps us better understand the Mueller investigation by analogizing it to American television.“To be the victim of sexual assault is to fall down a rabbit hole into a reality shaped by collective delusion: specifically, the delusion that powerful or popular or ordinary-seeming men who do good work in the world cannot also be abusers or predators. To suggest otherwise is to appear insane. You question yourself. Even before anyone calls you a liar — which they will — you’re wondering if you’ve overreacted. Surely he couldn’t be like that. Not him. Anyway, it would be insanity to go against someone with so much clout. The girls who do that are sick in the head. At least, that was what we used to think.”An involved, sometimes repetitive, but very astute analysis of mental acuteness in a post-Weinstein world“Heart of Texas, a Russian-controlled Facebook group that promoted Texas secession, leaned into an image of the state as a land of guns and barbecue and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. One of their ads on Facebook announced a noon rally on May 21, 2016 to “Stop Islamification of Texas.” A separate Russian-sponsored group, United Muslims of America, advertised a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally for the same place and time.”The deeper you dig into the Russian manipulation of Facebook, the angrier you'll become. They played us very hard and very effectively. Now go wash all that off with a nice long bath in some funny, ‘wholesome’(?) tweets.