Tim Fernholz recounts the history of the housing rescue plan:
Behind the plan is an unlikely trio of officials. [Sheila] Bair, a Republican and former counsel to Bob Dole, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan all pitched in to craft a plan the administration hopes will shore up the housing markets and help the 9 million homeowners in danger of defaulting on their mortgage. But it's been a long and occasionally contentious two-year process. What began as an internal revolt against the Bush administration's lack of policy response to the economic crisis has become a government-wide strategy that finally addresses the default-ridden mortgage market at the crisis' heart.
Mark Schmitt argues that Obama must find a way to change both democracy and capitalism:
[T]he old politics and the old capitalism lie in ruins; their assumptions cannot be salvaged. He has already come some way in changing the culture of politics, including acting with respect toward those whose party was defeated in the last election. Though Obama has frustrated some progressive Democrats who see him as caving to the enemy, this is his attempt to defuse the winner-take-all culture of Karl Rove-era politics. To do the same in the economy, he'll have to create an alternative to this particular form of capitalist culture. Obama will have to build institutions that foster a new culture, one still driven by the quest for growth, innovation, and profit but where the returns are more broadly shared and where stewardship and sustainability are valued more than today's share price.
And Sarah Posner looks at the state of abstinence-only education programs and the way they are funded:
Even if abstinence-only funding is eliminated from the federal budget, other federal programs may still be dispersing funds to abstinence programs, William Smith said. The lack of transparency in the Bush faith-based initiative, which Obama has pledged to remedy, makes it difficult to trace whether grants from other programs are used at the state level to promote abstinence-only education. The first step in reform, Smith said, would be to examine whether grantees under abstinence-only programs were also getting money from other programs through the faith-based initiatives and diverting it to promote abstinence-only education.
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--The Editors
