By Patrick Appel
Matt Cooper grudgingly accepts the housing bill:
It's not a great bill. The conservatives are right that there's a lot of pork in it. And it doesn't fix Fannie and Freddie in the long term, even if it provides more regulation. But the bill should help ease stress in the housing markets and, more importantly, if it hadn't passed the guy on the ledge might have jumped. The consequences of not coming up with some kind of housing bill would have been far worse. Yes, the housing bill leaves the taxpayers on the hook for a Fannie and Freddie bailout, but that was true before the mess anyway.