Out-of-control home mortgage finance practices are the origin of today's financial market tumult. Effective solutions to today's crises require stabilizing and rationalizing housing finance. Yet, amidst these dramatic market developments and rapid changes in the federal role in the mortgage market, there has been much heat but little light shed on the system of housing finance and the public purposes it must serve.

In cooperation with the Institute for Urban Research at the Wharton School of Business, the Center for American Progress is hosting a public forum on the past, present, and future of federal policy toward the mortgage markets.

"A Snow Mobile for George" is a rambunctious road trip that collects the stories of fishermen, cowboys and firemen who have to face the consequences of environmental de-regulation by the Bush Administration. Started by a question about the filmmaker's own used two-stroke snowmobile engine, this trip steadily reveals the political strategy and rationale behind a massive sell-off of public resources.

But if close ties between corporations and the Bush White House don't surprise you, the film's approach may. "A Snow Mobile for George" begins modestly as a one-man, one-machine road film that simply asks why rules to clean up a smoky off-road machine got shelved. With no presumption of guilt or blame, filmmaker Todd Darling tows his family snowmobile across the United States and persists in asking that question. The film's humble point of departure gives little hint as to its ultimate destination. What starts off as a personal quest gradually morphs as this journey takes the viewer to the sites of more serious environmental change.

The common thread among these stories is dispelling the myth of de-regulation - the notion that common citizens benefit when "the government gets off their back." In sometimes surprising ways, the film uncovers how the Administration worked efficiently to match up the goals of select industries with the political demands of the White House at the expense of the little guy.

The baby boomer generation's looming retirement and the requirement of college-level skills to compete in today's fast-changing economic landscape have recharged our public dialogue about postsecondary education. However, this dialogue focuses too much on making college affordable and not enough about making sure students finish their degrees.

These problems demand approaches for college access and success. In particular, the college access and degree completion challenges of out-of-school youth and working adults are miner's canaries. That is, they point to the innovations that are needed to make our system of postsecondary education student-focused and able to deliver custom learning experiences across agencies and institutions to yield student success.

Join the Center for American Progress as it releases two new papers that lay out policy recommendations for an innovation process that addresses the access, learning, and completion needs of disconnected youth and working adults.

The Center for American Progress and the Cato Institute invite you to a sneak preview of the forthcoming documentary "Advise & Dissent." A bipartisan discussion about judicial selection and current politics will follow the screening.

A feature documentary now in post-production, "Advise & Dissent" unveils the politics and personalities behind the recent—and coming—battles over the Supreme Court. With unprecedented access to Senators Specter and Leahy and leading advocates on both sides, the film charts a roller-coaster ride through the Roberts, Miers, and Alito confirmations. This documentary lays bare the collision of justice and politics that is re-shaping America's future.

Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester spent 25 years investigating tough cases in Ocean County, New Jersey, protecting the rights of victims and putting her life on the line. She had no reason to expect that in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that her final battle for justice would be for the woman she loved.

The documentary film "Freeheld" chronicles Laurel's struggle to transfer her earned pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree. With less than six months to live, Laurel refuses to back down when her elected officials - the Ocean County Freeholders - deny her request to leave her pension to Stacie, an automatic option for heterosexual married couples. The film is structured chronologically, following both the escalation of Laurel's battle with the Freeholders and the decline of her health as cancer spreads to her brain.

"REBORN" chronicles the first official year of public school in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The centerpiece is the charter school movement's effort to radically transform education for the city's mostly African-American public school children, many of whom would still be attending some of the worst-performing schools in the nation. In post-Katrina New Orleans, principals and teachers are now readjusting to a wholly new educational model; likewise, families and communities are responding to the new responsibilities that come with finding their voices in the ways their children are educated.

During this crucial period, one question remains: How will stakeholders use their newfound power? Shot between July 2006 and June 2007, "REBORN" addresses this question by tracking the hopes and challenges of four public charter schools in New Orleans.

The Harlem Children's Zone is America's most ambitious and closely watched effort to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. HCZ aims to create a "conveyor belt" for Harlem's poor children, a series of rich and effective supports-from a "Baby College" for parents, to an all-day pre-kindergarten and extended-day charter schools, to health clinics and community centers, all the way to help in succeeding in college. Together, these efforts aim to give poor children the stimulation and the opportunities that most kids growing up in middle-class neighborhoods receive from birth. This year, HCZ will serve 8,000 children living in the 97 block Zone. The initiative has been featured on 60 Minutes, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and in the New York Times Magazine.

Policymakers have long talked about the lessons of HCZ for anti-poverty policy nationwide, and now there are proposals to replicate the HCZ model nationally. This panel brings together Geoffrey Canada, HCZ's President and Chief Executive Officer; Roland Fryer, a Harvard economics professor and the founder of Harvard's new Education Innovation Laboratory, a major effort to identify and evaluate promising approaches to closing the achievement gap; and Paul Tough, a New York Times Magazine editor and the author of the new book, Whatever It Takes, a critically acclaimed look at HCZ in the broader context of American poverty and education policy. They will talk about HCZ's experience to date and its implications for national policy.

Copies of Whatever it Takes will be available for purchase.

Told that their child's teacher would be absent for two-thirds of the school year, most parents would be very, very concerned, and with good reason. Substitute teachers tend to lack the skills and knowledge needed to foster academic achievement, and researchers have begun to document the negative impact of teacher absence on student achievement. Although few parents have to grapple with this kind of news, the average student's career from kindergarten through 12th grade includes the equivalent of two-thirds of a school year spent in classrooms where the regular teacher is absent. Fractured exposure to teacher absence may allay parents’ concerns, but policymakers should still be concerned about the financial, productivity, and equity dimensions of teacher absence.

Join us for a lively discussion of a new report from the Center for American Progress. The report by Raegen Miller offers new analyses of data on teacher absence as well as policy recommendations for all levels of government. This event will feature comments from experts with important vantage points on the under-discussed issue of teacher absence.

This presentation, jointly sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and The Opportunity Agenda, will feature Human Rights at Home: A Domestic Policy Blueprint for the New Administration, authored by Professor Catherine Powell and to be released by the American Constitution Society.

The Blueprint lays out a series of recommendations for ensuring that the next administration will honor the United States' commitment to human rights not only overseas, but at home, in U.S. domestic policy. It points to the relevance of human rights principles to domestic issues such as: inequalities in access to housing, education, jobs, and health care; the application of the death penalty; lengthy immigration detentions; and Guantanamo Bay policies.

The panel, featuring prominent human rights experts, will discuss the Blueprint's recommendations and its implications, and will also present new polling data on how the public and U.S. policymakers view human rights.

Concern about the state of the American health care system has reached a slow boil. Health care consistently ranks among the top three issues that the American public wants policy makers to address, and it is increasingly intertwined with growing worries about economic insecurity.

High costs, gap-ridden coverage, and sporadic quality are the health care problems that most concern Americans. Yet most of the policy discussion is focused on the issue of coverage. To ensure that the other problems are not forgotten, the Center for American Progress and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession partnered to develop the book, The Health Care Delivery System: A Blueprint for Reform, which offers recommendations and pathways to systemically promote efficiency, quality, patient-centeredness, and other characteristics of a high-performing health system. Its blueprint includes the vision for how different parts of the system should be structured and should function. It also proposes specific policies that the next administration and Congress could adopt to set change in motion over the next five years.

This event and book will ensure that when the opportunity presents itself, the next administration will be ready with grounded policies that are more than patches and can serve as pathways toward the high-performing health system that is not just possible, but essential, to better health and a prospering economy.