Free Republic

<p>We now know that liberal community organizers, like what Barack Hussein Obama claims as his bonafides and “experience”, go into low income areas of this nation, which have been devastated by the social welfare programs foisted on this nation at the expense of the hard working citizens, and they push, propose, and get passed legislation and initiatives that further pilfer the public largess by providing low interest, sub-prime loans to these poor souls who could never afford normal loans, and who, as soon as the terms of their new loans kick in, raising the interest rates and payments, cannot afford these loan schemes and shams either.</p>

Puke. Unscrupulous borrower Chris Dodd and Dingy Harry Reid are holding a blame-McCain press conference. After stomping his feet up and down and baiting McCain to take a position on the bailout, Reid is now lambasting McCain for going to Washington and getting involved. Thank God for the House Republicans. Call yours up and thank them today and urge them to keep looking out for us.

Fox News dug up some old video of marble-mouth himself telling Alan Greenspan that he was full of it when he warned of dire financial consequences if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not reined in. Throw in numerous appeals by President Bush and John McCain to fix the system, lest we have a mortgage meltdown, and when the smoke from this week’s Wall Street rescue mission clears, we can look back and point directly at Barney Frank and his Senate counterpart, Chris Dodd, as the culprits in this mess. The problem is that these doofuses are in on...

As a member and later chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd shoulders a good deal of the blame for the collapse of the national housing market, the subprime-mortgage-market meltdown and the latest convulsions on Wall Street. Reams of legislation he has written or advocated affecting the housing, lending, insurance and securities industries have drained hundreds of billions out of the economy, ballooned the federal debt, cost tens of thousands of people their jobs and driven hundreds of thousands of homeowners into foreclosure, bankruptcy or both. For his efforts, Sen. Dodd has been rewarded in the 2008...

Alexander Pope’s original quote was, of course, “all’s fair in love and war,” meaning you can get away with anything in those two areas. Now, as we all know, the entire economy of the United States is threatened with collapse because of supposed “errors and outright fraud on Wall Street.” Let’s step back a bit. The crisis began with the financial collapse and federal take-over of the two “private” organizations which insured and/or bundled and marketed a major part of all home mortgages in the US. These two organizations had gone along for decades, serving the public one mortgage at...

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? WHERE’S THE CLAMMORING FOR DISMISSALS? WHERE ARE THE INVESTIGATIONS BY CONGRESS?Remember Enron? When all the bad news came out about Enron, the media was clammoring for resignations, interviews, trashing the CEOs, etc.On the opposite of the spectrum we now have Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Where is the outrage over what these CEOs did? Where are the investigations by Congressional Committees?I see a very different picture here. What about all of you?It is 180 degrees different and I want to know why. Why was McCain’s bill in 2005 on Fannie Mae/Fannie Mac not passed?We need Bill McCollum’s...

Blame Rests With Dodd Sen. Christopher Dodd's tiresome tactic of affecting outrage when his integrity is questioned is getting stale. Typical is his questioning the oversight of the Bush administration in relation to the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac debacle [Commentary, Sept. 14, "Rein In Fannie, Freddie? Not Dodd"]. Despite numerous warnings, over a number of years, about the weakness in Fannie and Freddie's capital structure, our senator, chairman of the Senate banking committee, did nothing. He, of course, did have the time to collect more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from Freddie and Fannie and managed to get himself a sweetheart...

ABC's Sunlen Miller reports: Since yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama has spoken on the phone with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Ralph Emmanuel, former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton about the economic situation and the plan for dealing with it.

In early June 2008, Americans learned of a VIP loan program provided to influential politicians by Countrywide Mortgage at the direction of its chairman Angelo Mozilo – and that one of the so-called ‘Friends of Angelo” was none other than Jim Johnson, a former CEO at Fannie Mae who had just been tapped to head Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting committee. Countrywide Friends Got Good Loans Countrywide Financial Corp. makes mortgage loans through a vast network of offices, brokers and call centers. But a few customers have gotten their loans a special way: through Countrywide Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo. These...

The Talk Shows Sunday, September 21st, 2008 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chair of the American Red Cross. MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Paulson; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Paulson; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.THIS WEEK (ABC): Paulson; Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.LATE EDITION (CNN) : Douglas Holtz Eakin, adviser to John McCain; Austan Goolsbee, adviser to Barack Obama; former Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.; Gene Sperling,...

Taxpayers face a tab of as much as $200 billion for a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the formerly semi-autonomous mortgage finance clearinghouses. And Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: "I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years." We will save the senator some trouble. Here is what we saw firsthand at the White House from late 2002 through 2007: Starting in 2002, White House and Treasury Department economic policy staffers, with support from...

There is no one explanation of what went wrong with the financial markets. Simply put, it is a case of many people deciding that age old rules need not be followed anymore – combined with breathtaking corruption. Both political parties share some blame in some stupid things that happened, although the Democrats seem to be well in the lead as far as corruption and stupidity goes. Let’s trace some history.

Congressional Leaders Were Stunned by Warnings By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN WASHINGTON — It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first. Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “When you listened to him describe it you gulped,"...

Lehman Brothers collapse is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago. Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs. A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 is Barack Obama. Now remember, he's only been in the Senate four years, but he's still managed to grab the No. 2...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd was spitting nails Tuesday at the Bush administration, blaming its deregulatory philosophy for fostering abuses that have put financial markets in crisis. "It's important to note that these events that we talked about are not natural disasters. They happened, in my view, because of mismanagement and deregulation that occurred on basically an eight-year-old coffee break by the administration," Dodd said during a press conference in the U.S. Capitol. The Connecticut senator briefed reporters Tuesday on what steps he is taking to address what he described as a deepening economic crisis that at...

FEDERAL HOUSING ENTERPRISE REGULATORY REFORM ACT OF 2005 (Bill pdf ) The United States SenateMay 25, 2006Statement by John McCainSen. John McCain [R-AZ]: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case...

This cycle, with Democrats in control, they've reversed course, giving the party 56 percent of their total $1.1 million in contributions. Similarly, Freddie Mac has given 53 percent of its $555,700 in contributions to Democrats this cycle, compared to the 44 percent it gave during 2006. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also strategically given more contributions to lawmakers currently sitting on committees that primarily regulate their industry. Fifteen of the 25 lawmakers who have received the most from the two companies combined since the 1990 election sit on either the House Financial Services Committee; the Senate Banking, Housing &...

In July, federal authorities indicted Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, on corruption charges on the grounds that Alaska's Prince of Earmarks concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts and improvements to his Alaska home provided by a powerful oil services company. Also this summer, amid the mortgage meltdown, newspapers reported that a number of senators -- including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; and Barack Obama, D.-Ill. -- were the beneficiaries of sweetheart home loans. In June, the Senate Ethics Committee began an initial look into Dodd's and Conrad's discounted Countrywide Financial VIP loans, as is...

In July, federal authorities indicted Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, on corruption charges on the grounds that Alaska's Prince of Earmarks concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts and improvements to his Alaska home provided by a powerful oil services company. Also this summer, amid the mortgage meltdown, newspapers reported that a number of senators -- including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; and Barack Obama, D.-Ill. -- were the beneficiaries of sweetheart home loans. In June, the Senate Ethics Committee began an initial look into Dodd's and Conrad's discounted Countrywide Financial VIP loans, as is...

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted to extend the temporary rules it put in place to restrict short-selling of a handful of financial stocks. The SEC commissioners didn't take additional steps opposed by Wall Street to expand the number of stocks affected by the rules or make them permanent. The temporary rules were set to expire Tuesday, and the SEC extended the order on the 19 stocks until Aug. 12. It won't be extended beyond then. In a short sale, a trader sells borrowed stock in a bet the price will decline and the stock can be profitably repurchased at...