San Francisco Chronicle

A whopping 44 percent of Mission District residents don't have low credit scores. They have NO credit scores. Without them, the only loans they can get are the loans no one wants - those with pricey interest rates and harsh terms. And if doors to affordable credit seemed closed to these consumers before the financial meltdown, they're slammed shut now.

A whopping 44 percent of Mission District residents don't have low credit scores. They have NO credit scores. Without them, the only loans they can get are the loans no one wants - those with pricey interest rates and harsh terms. And if doors to affordable credit seemed closed to these consumers before the financial meltdown, they're slammed shut now.

While 2008 will go down as a year of hope and change in American politics, the collapse of Wall Street and bursting of the housing bubble will probably mean that fear and anger take center stage in the 2010 elections. If so, the most coveted swing voters may soon be the Busted Boomers - individuals 50 and older who placed supreme faith in the financial markets and now find their long-held dreams of a comfortable retirement eviscerated.

"We have to drop the two-thirds rule," said Mark Paul, a senior scholar with the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute. "It's been a social science experiment for the past 75 years for the budget and the last 30 years for taxes, ...

... we can find ways to work with each other," said Steven Clemons, who directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. ...

As Congress struggles to decide how to proceed in crafting the economic stimulus bill, it needs to do more than develop a plan to pile trillions more on the national debt. Already, the federal deficit has grown by over half-a-trillion dollars as a result of government funds spent to try to rescue the economy - including money for the first stimulus package, taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the TARP rescue for the financial sector, and the costs of… more

The tanking economy is putting local governments in a double bind. As the ranks of the poor and jobless swell, authorities have dwindling funds to help them. Incredibly, officials in San Francisco and other cities can't even prioritize who to help because they don't know who their poorest citizens are. The problem lies with an obsolete federal measure of poverty that will only make hard times harder in San Francisco until it's changed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spearheaded just such a revolution in New York City, allowing… more

President George W. Bush's accomplishments on immigration reform fell well short of the comprehensive plan that he and others envisioned. Yet the Bush administration did more than any other in modern history to lay the groundwork for a much-needed immigrant integration policy. The Obama administration must now use that beginning to build a bolder immigrant integration policy - an immigrant policy that stands alongside our immigration policy.

What are you doing today? How would you like to be voting in runoff elections for the Board of Supervisors? That's what many would be doing if San Francisco hadn't voted in 2002 to replace the old December runoff system with an "instant runoff" system known as ranked choice voting.

Whether using ranked choice voting or December runoffs, the goal is the same: to elect officeholders with majority support from the public. But with ranked-choice voting, you accomplish this in one November election.

Cheney, Gellman told the New America Foundation today, brought Bush "to the very brink of being a one-term president." It was March of 2004, ...