Schoolhouse Rock civics refresher course

Last hour on CNN, anchor Rick Sanchez was trying to explain tonight's congressional gyrations with a video pen, drawing arrows to and from the House and Senate, over the Capitol building, like a football commentator diagramming a play.

It was ridiculous. He would have been better off just taking three minutes to show the Schoolhouse Rock classic, "I'm Just a Bill."



I have been watching and listening to a lot of media this week as I recovered from my illness. I think it was Peggy Noonan who said that the problem with the bailout package as it has been communicated so far is that our leaders are scaring us without educating us about what is going on. I rarely agree with her but I did on this one.

I have to admit that the more I details I learn about the bailout, the more confused I become about what I think is the best way forward. I don't want to bail out the derivatives created from bad debt but I might buy up actual loans and renegotiate the mortgages.

Washington D. C. is suffering a true karmic payback this week. Not only should they have seen this crisis coming from a long way down the road, but since when have we ever seen the government do back-flips like this to act quickly to get things done? They sure haven't done that for regular people as they lost jobs. They haven't gotten paid family leave passed like every other developed nation. They can't even pass Equal Pay legislation to outlaw wage discrimination. Even immediate crisis management like Hurricane Katrina was completely botched. But Wall Street--that really captures their attention. So now is any wonder that regular citizens don't feel motivated to bail out a financial system that seems irrelevant to their lives?

I understand that financial intervention is probably necessary, but it is a crying shame to think about what a $700 billion investment could have done for families, education, infrastructure, the environment...so, so many pressing needs that affect all of us. To real Moms and Dads balancing family budgets, it boggles the mind. We have every right to be angry at the slow-motion financial catastrophe that suddenly explodes into an urgent, rushed response.

A coherent explanation of our financial meltdown

It's just an atrocious day on Wall Street and the close of trading can't come soon enough.

The US House has failed to pass the bailout bill and the Dow is down over 600 points as I type.

I realized I do have something constructive to contribute to this situation. I can recommend that you listen to the This American Life episode called The Giant Pool of Money. This show was produced in conjunction with NPR News last May. It is the most coherent explanation I've heard of the origins of the bubbles that are now popping.

Even if you have never downloaded a show before, you can just listen to it through your computer--no iPod or CD burner necessary. It is definitely worth 55 minutes of your time and attention.

I am so angry at this situation. Unlike an earthquake or tornado, this was a completely predictable disaster given that the core of our financial systems were rotting from the inside out for years.

It is definitely a Mojo Mom topic because we and our children will be paying the consequences for years, one way or the other.

Infidelity isn't just about sex, it's about power

I've felt conflicted about writing about the John Edwards scandal. I supported the Edwarss '08 campaign, I have met them both, and I like Elizabeth a lot. I finally got my initial thoughts off my chest earlier this week. I don't want to get bogged down in the details of their situation, but reading the reaction to the news, I feel compelled to write once again.

One reaction to the news has been that the American people are too uptight about sex and we shouldn't be such Puritanical morality police. It seems to me that only men can afford to think that way. To me it's not just about sex but about power. The women I've talked to have all said "How could he do this to his wife, to risk what they have built together?" I am glad to see more female commentators such as Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post contributing their analyses, because it really does look different from our point of view.

Maybe not all women would agree with me on that, but this week I am revising the Mojo Mom chapter on financial and career planning. I have to get across the tricky message that each mother has to create her own safety net that will support her in the case of life's unexpected crises including unemployment, divorce, illness or death.

Not an easy topic to communicate! And in the context of the book I don't want to deliver it as a hammer blow, but rather a realistic, proactive heads-up that we each have to be ready to support ourselves and our families if necessary.

Marriage is an imperfect institution and yes, many marriages end. I have seen it up close and personal from the kid's point of view, as my parents and many of their cohorts divorced. But marriage is still the foundation that many of us have chosen to count on. When couples split up, men tend to do much better financially than women, who may end up with little support, no financial credit for the caregiving they've done for years, and primary responsiblity for the kids. The research documenting this effect is controversial, but even a corrective study said that women have an average 27 percent decline in their standard of living and that men have an average 10 percent increase in their standard of living after divorce. In my own experience, I saw that divorce was highly expensive and disruptive for both men and women, but often the wives were displaced homemakers who had to scramble to find a new job, while the husbands continued on established career paths. The wives has supported their husband's career paths in so many ways that yielded no reward once the marriage ended.

So if a wife cheats, she knows she may be pulling the rug out from under her own life--and obviously creating devastation for her husband and children--I don't mean to condone it in any way. But there is a power differential in many couples: when a husband cheats, he's throwing away her financial security for her. The Edwards affair illuminates this situation into high relief, as Elizabeth so obviously invested in and sacrificed for his ambitions for the benefit of the whole family. Yet he can throw it all away on a whim. This public explosion of a marriage we were invited to admire is a wake-up call for all married women: if it can happen to them, it could happen to me. It cuts through our blissful denial to remind us that we are potential members of a very angry First Wives Club.

Where does this land us? Back at page one of Feminism 101? Into a maze of policy reform to make sure that safety nets work in a way that makes sense in a modern world? Mothers & More reports that The minutes of the Social Security Council meetings held in the late 1930's reveal that Social Security was designed to discourage women from employment, to encourage men to work by linking benefits to income and years worked, and to send a message to women to stay married since their economic security was tied to being a dependent of a wage-earning husband.

I am still trying to process my feelings and thoughts and channel them productively, but honestly, for now I am just pissed.