A short feature/performance.  Lionel Young played "St. Louis Blues" during an unplugged set at the Lindsay Street Hall the afternoon before the Bessie Smith Strut.  Click here to listen.

Hadden Sayers performed at the 2012 Bessie Smith Strut.  In this clip, he plays his song "Hippie Getaway," and then talks about his music and what Bessie Smith means to him.  Click here to listen.

At the 2012 Bessie Smith Strut, bluesman Joe Louis Walker dedicated a mostly-instrumental number to the women in the crowd.  Click here to listen.

The big story of this year's election campaign is big money. Since the Supreme Court, through its Citizens United ruling, has made it easier for corporations, unions and rich individuals to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, Republicans have seized the advantage.

Right now, an analysis by NPR finds that Republican allied groups are outspending their Democratic counterparts by 8 to 1.

Our use of the term "hedginess," coined by finance criminologist Bill Black, inspired commenter "Tim Myers" to engage in some neology of his own in order to prove his point:

"This portfolio morphed into something that, rather than protect the firm, created new and potentially larger risks. As a result, we have let a lot of people down, and we are sorry for it."

That's part of JPMorgan Chase President and CEO Jamie Dimon will tell the Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs tomorrow, when it looks into the botched trades that lost the bank $2 billion. Chase released Dimon's prepared remarks this afternoon.

The crowds came out by the thousands in Venezuela on Monday, flooding the streets of Caracas in red T-shirts just as the nation's populist government had promised.

Hugo Chavez — the country's 57-year-old, bigger-than-life leader — then took the stage. He had arrived in an open truck, minutes after registering as a candidate for the Oct. 7 election.

A Federal Reserve study showing that Americans lost wealth in the Great Recession turned up another, perhaps more surprising, result: Credit card debt fell sharply.

"The percentage of families using credit cards for borrowing dropped over the period; the median balance on their accounts fell 16.1 percent" between 2007 and 2010, the report concluded.

Federal authorities arrested seven people, today, in connection with what authorities say was a multi-million dollar money laundering operation run by Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas.

The scheme allegedly used the millions earned through the illicit drug trade to purchase, train, breed and race American quarter horses in the United States. The Department of Justice said 14 had been indicted; among them is Zetas leader Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales and his brothers Oscar Omar Treviño Morales and José Treviño-Morales.

Democrats knew that they would be disadvantaged under the new campaign finance rules created by the Supreme Court. But the disparity between the amount of money Republicans can raise in unlimited anonymous donations and what the Democrats have been able to raise is huge.