I’m on my way to watching a Cato defense-reform panel with Winslow Wheeler and Tom Ricks online because I’m running late, so I leave you to pore through two great offerings from the Washington Independent. First, Mary Kane, the economics reporter you really need to get to know, points out that the problem is much deeper than Jim Cramer and CNBC:

The most troubling and overlooked aspect of the foreclosure crisis has been the discriminatory and most likely illegal behavior of many lenders in targeting minorities for high-cost loans. The damage done will be felt for decades.

Steering minorities into abusive loans isn’t fodder for entertainment. It probably won’t be dissected and excerpted all over the Internet. It’s just exactly what it seems — a tragedy. And maybe someday it will get the attention it deserves.

And Dave Weigel, who has the conservative movement on lock, picks through the wreckage of the American Enterprise Institute:

Other AEI cutbacks that have drawn attention are explained as matters of organizational politics as much as by economics. Last year Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, all prominent neoconservatives, left the think tank in what journalist and historian Jacob Heilbrunn thought might be a “purge.” Ledeen said this week that his move from AEI to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies “had nothing to do with any cash issue.” But Ledeen’s Freedom Chair Endowment followed him from AEI to FDD, and some at AEI said that the organization had suffered a hit with the loss of Ledeen’s friends and funders. Muravchik said he was fired because of differences with AEI Vice President Danielle Pletka, but that he was offered a smaller severance package than he’d been offered when the possibility had been discussed before.

Those familiar with the funding of other conservative think tanks are not surprised that AEI is taking some hits. Carsten Walter, the director of membership for the Heritage Foundation, said the aggressive marketing and direct mail campaign of that think tank had made up for expected damage from skittish large donors and foundations. Since 2006, Heritage’s network of donors has expanded from 275,000 to roughly 415,000. Small-money donors who are angry at the new Democratic administration can show their might by supporting a conservative think tank. This sort of revenue stream isn’t available to AEI.