Fannie & Freddie

[Honey Pot Hounds]

****Fannie, Freddie Mess Belongs At Dems' Doorstep****

Cut through the doubletalk that obscures the financial mess in Washington and on Wall Street, and these points are obvious to everyone paying attention:

* Congress used the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to force banks to make risky loans to "help" people buy houses they could not afford.
* As early as 2001, President Bush and Republicans warned that Freddie and Fannie's financial house was unstable and could wreak havoc on the economy.
* Fannie and Freddie spent more than $200 million lobbying Congress to ignore the problem.
* Subservient Democrats, like Barney Frank, dutifully declared that Freddie and Fannie were safe and sound and blocked reform.

No one can dispute that Freddie and Fannie were certainly unsound. So, who pays for Congress' failure to reform? Taxpayers, of course: up to $4 trillion in lost savings and investments plus more than $1 trillion in new government debt.

Now Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want us to believe that the financial fiasco is the fault of deregulation. Poppycock. In 1999, before George W. Bush took office, the New York Times' Steven Holmes reported that the Clinton administration was pressuring Fannie Mae to expand mortgage loans to "people with less-than-stellar credit ratings."...

In 2001, the Bush administration warned of "strong repercussions in the financial markets" if Fannie and Freddie encountered financial trouble. Treasury Secretary John Snow repeatedly warned that federal regulators didn't have enough authority to properly supervise Fannie and Freddie. As recently as August 2007, President Bush urged Congress "to get them reformed, get them streamlined, get them focused."

Democrats ignored those warnings... Last week, Associated Press reported that three years ago Freddie Mac even paid a consulting firm peel off enough GOP votes to kill a reform bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. "What we're dealing with is an astounding failure of management" that was "driven clearly by self interest and greed," Hagel said.

Given Democrats' complicity in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, it is utterly astounding that confused voters could actually reward them on Election Day.

---Mark Hillman, TownHall.com
October 27, 2008

[lowell robertson]

Come on, the same CEOs and officials that made bad loans and investments are the same ones who are now spending the 'bailout" money for company retreats, etc. No loses have come close to reaching the level of the cost of the war in Iraq for which every citizen in the U.S. will pay taxes all their lives just to pay interest on money borrowed from China, Japan and Arab nations. This is the same adminstration that "lost" semi-trailer loads of cash that was intended to encourage peace in Bagdad. The war has continued so that the Corp. that Mr. Cheney has a strong vested interest in can continue to make billions even tho the Corp. was awarded contracts without any competitive bidding. Who is corrupt??

[Pike Ridge Beagles]

Hey Lowel..keep drinking the Kool-Aid.
http://www.redcounty.com/sarasota/2008/ ... annie-mae/

[Honey Pot Hounds]

WE are winning the war....to drag our soldiers home now in defeat would be a dishonor to every soldier who has given his life to this mission. We need to finish the job so that our children and grandchildren don't have to go back and start all over from square one.