Obviously, this plays out really different based on your class background or the type of relationship you are in, but consistently, both in my experience, the experience of my peers and others, the majority of house work falls on the shoulders of women. It is the assumed default position, that if it isn't done, than guess who is going to end up doing it.

Who is expected to do what in the household is extremely political and it isn't just a matter of convenience or someone whining more than the other. It is based on a historical division of labor that is the crux of the nation. Furthermore, when middle class women do not have the time to clean their houses, who do they hire to clean them? So still, today, the majority of house cleaning is done by women and mostly women of color. 

Paulson said this week, "The blueprint is about structure and responsibilities, not the regulations each entity would write." What those regulations actually say, and how competent the regulators are in enforcing them, are obviously critical.

New curbs are needed on mortgage lending; on off-balance-sheet risk; on the opacity of new financial instruments. The blueprint has nothing to offer on any of this. And even if you accept the plan for what it is, it has another big gap. The authority of its prudential regulator is confined to institutions that benefit from "explicit government guarantees" -- meaning deposit-taking banks. But the government's safety net is not confined to firms with explicit guarantees. In emergencies, it deems other institutions (such as Bear Stearns) too important to fail.

Ingenious as markets may be, an exaggerated cycle of credit-driven boom followed by panic-induced bust is neither desirable nor necessary. Better financial regulation can help to attenuate the ups and downs. It is a matter not of more regulation or less, but of making the rules smarter. How to do that is a discussion that has barely even begun. 

In recent weeks, the purported success of the surge strategy has been called into question, due to the rise of sectarian fighting with the Mahdi militia of Moqtada al-Sadr (an army also known as JAM) clashing with the Iraqi military. Before those battles occurred, Petraeus himself noted that the overall decline in violence (which in late 2007 dipped to 2005 levels) had not been accompanied by success on the political front: "No one feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation." And on Tuesday, senior Army and Marines Corps leaders told Congress that the surge of troops in Iraq has placed unsustainable stress on the U.S. military and rendered it less able to handle other conflicts. Yet Petraeus is not expected to provide Congress with testimony that will inconvenience the Bush administration or undermine its arguments for staying the course in Iraq. And there's no telling if members of Congress—including Democrats—will give Petraeus a more thorough grilling than he received in September, given that most members of Congress appear to have concluded that the House and the Senate cannot do much to slow or reverse Bush's war in Iraq.