Posted on 12/21/2008 11:26:20 AM PST by Sub-Driver
WH accuses Times of 'gross negligence' By: Mike Allen December 21, 2008 02:12 PM EST
The White House on Sunday issued a blistering 500-word response to a scathing 5,000 word article on the front page of Sunday's New York Times that says President Bush and his style and philosophy of governing played a direct role in the mortgage meltdown that's crippling the nation's economy.
The response accused the nation's largest Sunday paper of "gross negligence."
"The Times' 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in an e-mailed statement.
The article was part of the newspaper's "The Reckoning Series" about the nation's market implosion, and was headlined, "‘Ownership society’: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire."
"Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, 'faced with the prospect of a global meltdown' with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed," says the article by Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton. "There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials. From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
The Liberals PRAVDA has spoken and anyone that dares to question them will be re-educated by the Obama mania media...
We knew this was coming yesterday. Naturally, the white house is on the defensive instead of attacking the real perpetrators of this crisis: the incoming majority party.
The times is an absurd embarrasment to journalism and a stain on humanity.
"New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae"
By STEPHEN LABATON Published: September 11, 2003 The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry. ... ... Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing. ''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63
bump for blatant lies
Nice find, The people at the Free Republic Rock
Ummmm...read the second-to-last paragraph. Dems are blamed.
This article is a good example of corrupt and twisted journalism. Of course, all of us want clean air, clean water and economic success for everyone! However to twist that into condoning the stealth socialism carried out by the Democrats is outrageous at best, more like criminal and irresponsible journalism.
What a shame. Perhaps now President Bush has an inkling about how our Marines think.
bttt
Should Congress Be ‘Perp-Walked’?
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=307667278225125
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/30/2008
Justice: A federal grand jury in New York is probing the accounting shenanigans at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It’s about time, and we hope it doesn’t end there.
Remember the early 2000s, when companies such as WorldCom, Enron, Tyco and Xerox suddenly and spectacularly were revealed to have been cooking their books?
Remember the glee expressed by Washington politicians, especially Democrats, as they watched CEOs and their underlings get perp-walked out of their buildings and into federal custody?
Enron became the poster child for corporate misdeeds. In the accounting crisis of 2002, CEO Ken Lay was one of the most loathed human beings on Earth. And no, that’s not an exaggeration.
Here was California Attorney General William Lockyer, one of many Democrats on the national scene who gloated at the downfall of the Enron chief and others: “I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’”
Lockyer wasn’t the only one swept up in a spiteful prosecutorial frenzy. Sure, some of the prosecutions were deserved. But some were excessive, part of a corporate witch hunt.
As noted in a 2003 study by Kathleen Brickey, a Washington University law professor, the Justice Department brought 50 major fraud prosecutions from March 2002 to August 2003. An estimated 90 corporate officers were involved. That’s a lot of prosecutions.
Basically, any major-company CEO whose stock price fell sharply could be sued or charged with a crime and sent to prison.
Democrats wasted no time calling this a “GOP” scandal, tarring any Republican official with charges of corruption for taking so much as a dollar from any of the companies. Never mind that Democrats were also prominent on the political gift lists.
Fanning the fire were news media highlighting Republican ties to scandal-plagued firms while all but ignoring Democrat links.
In the end, what emerged from this atmosphere of retribution and attack was Sarbanes-Oxley the toxic corporate regulatory law that has arguably destroyed more wealth than anything WorldCom, Tyco or Enron ever did.
We mention all this because we now have an opportunity, thanks to the New York grand jury, to probe perhaps the greatest financial crime ever one that dwarfs Enron in size and scope.
Yes, we’re talking Fannie and Freddie.
Here’s how James B. Lockhart III, head of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, described the two companies back in 2006, before the meltdown occurred:
“The result of (Fannie’s and Freddie’s) rapid growth unconstrained by market forces and a weak regulator was years of mismanagement, flagrant earnings manipulation, and systems-and-controls problems. Managements of both companies were forced out, earnings were misstated by an estimated $16 billion, fines exceeding one-half billion dollars were imposed, and remedial costs will exceed $2 billion.”
Yet Congress did nothing.
Fannie and Freddie continued to enjoy a virtual monopoly of the housing finance market, holding nearly half the nation’s $12 trillion in mortgage assets in 2007.
And what happened to Fannie’s and Freddie’s top executives, almost all with deep ties to the Democratic Party?
Did they get perp-walked to prison like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Tyco’s Dennis Koslowski, Adelphia’s John Rigas, ImClone’s Sam Waksal, or any of the others who did time for corporate misdeeds in the early 2000s?
No.
Jim Johnson, former Walter Mondale aide, became head of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search committee.
Franklin Raines, who headed Fannie from 1998 to 2004, the years of its worst excesses, pocketed nearly $100 million in pay and bonuses from Fannie. He, too, became an adviser to Obama.
Other Fannie-Freddie alumni did equally well. Rep. Rahm Emanuel has been front and center in crafting a new rescue bill.
Ex-Clinton Justice official Jamie Gorelick [remember “The Gorelick Wall” ? ] careens from career catastrophe to catastrophe, and still gets top jobs.
It pays to have ties.
Meanwhile, as previously documented, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd repeatedly thwarted reforms. Yet today they stand front-and-center as Democrats try to “fix” a problem they created.
As such, any investigation into Fannie and Freddie must include Congress, both current and past.
There’s lots of evidence that the two mortgage giants had become little more than taxpayer-guaranteed front companies for Democrats, who used them to reward supporters with cheap loans and to provide jobs for out-of-work politicians.
it gets old.
Time for McCain to Name Names By C. Edmund Wright October 01, 2008
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/time_for_mccain_to_name_names.html
I’m sure your brand of self loathinng vocalization helps a whole lot as well.
For a long time I tried to ignore the obvious fascism of the Left. in fact, I have scoffed at others for believing it. But this article is blatant evidence that this country has been taken over by fascism.
What George W. Bush should have done from DAY ONE is thrown those assholes under the bus and refuse them access if they were going to do nothing but trash him with a unending pack of lies.
He should have taken no prisoners with the leftist press and they would have had to have played fairly or be shut out of the White House for eight years.
When you fight back hard, people have to adjust or be run over.
That part is correct, the rest is BS. It is sort of like don't blame, I wasn't here the past eight years.
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