Who Is To Blame?

From a NY times article (September 1999) we see the Democrats responsible for pressuring Fannie Mase to ease restrictions on mortgages:

"Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. .." (more here)

Then we see this article about how the Bush administration in September 2003, proposed "significant regulatory overhaul" on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

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.
The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.
The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates. (more here)

Who opposed it? Well, it says here:

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.

Here's the real kicker:

''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.''

But go ahead and put them in the White House. Obama's leading financial advisors have a history with these failed institutions and his Democrat buddies are now in charge of Congress. God help us.

Biden's Big Lie

From littlegreenfootballs.com:
In tonight’s debate, Joe Biden claimed that Barack Obama never said he would meet unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.That was a blatant, shameless lie, with the video to prove it...

read more digg story


And here are 13 more ...

Obama’s Fishy $200 Million

Previously posted here Newsmax this from the American Spectator:
FUNNY MONEYAn auditor for the Federal Election Commission is attempting to have his bosses seek a formal investigation into the collection by the Obama for President campaign of more than $200 million in potentially illegal political donations, including millions of dollars of illegal, foreign donations, and has sought a request for assistance from the Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the analyst's requests have largely been ignored. "I can't get anyone to move. I believe we are looking at a hijacking of our political system that makes the Clinton and Gore fundraising scandals pale in comparison. And no one here wants to touch it."...

..."The question has always been, if you buy a $25 t-shirt and you go back to that purchaser eight or nine times with email appeals for $200 or $500 donations, and you have people donating like that all the time, at what point does the campaign bother to check if the FEC limit has been exceeded?" says a former Clinton campaign fundraiser. "There are enough of us from the 1992 and 1996 and 2000 races around to know that many of these kinds of violations never get caught until after the election has been won or lost. In this case, there is no way the Obama campaign will be held accountable before Election Day, unless someone raises holy hell."... (more)

Time to raise some hell, folks...

EXCLUSIVE: Pelosi paid husband with PAC funds

From the Washington Times:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she supported banning last year.
Financial Leasing Services Inc. (FLS), owned by Paul F. Pelosi, has received $99,000 in rent, utilities and accounting fees from the speaker's "PAC to the Future" over the PAC's nine-year history. (more)

Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign

Oh... THAT kind of change...
From NewsMax:
More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose.
And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate.

And then there are the overseas donations — at least, the ones that we know about.
The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.
More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.
But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France.
Until recently, the Obama Web site allowed a contributor to select the country where he resided from the entire membership of the United Nations, including such friendly places as North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Unlike McCain’s or Sen. Hillary Clinton’s online donation pages, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just recently. Clinton’s presidential campaign required U.S. citizens living abroad to actually fax a copy of their passport before a donation would be accepted. (more)

College Op-Ed: Obama As My Personal Jesus - A Catholic Blog: Religion, Politics, Current Events, Humor, and more.

Good stuff over at CMR as usual summed up nicely with this:

"But a country that looks to its politicians for truth, rather than policy answers is one that is barreling down the road towards dictatorship."

Welcome to Election 2008- May we get the leader we need and not the one we deserve..

Creative Minority Report: College Op-Ed: Obama As My Personal Jesus -

Obama Launches "False" Attack Ads Claiming McCain Opposes Embryo Research

From Lifesite:
...The Obama spots were denounced as false by factcheck.org, a nonpartisan, non-profit "consumer advocate" program for voters of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania that "aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." Factcheck.org says that McCain has supported research using human embryos since 2001 and has not changed his position.
Factcheck.org found that while Obama's claims were false, two spots from the McCain-Palin campaign and Republican National Committee, describing McCain's support for the research are "largely accurate." The only criticism Factcheck.org made of the McCain spots was that it would tend to lead voters to believe that Sarah Palin shares her running mate's position. "That's not true," they said, "but we find that to be a minor flaw compared with the misrepresentation in Obama's ad." ... (more)

ACORN, Obama, and the Mortgage Mess

A must read over at Townhall:
...amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.
ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and "direct action" that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn't get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we're in. ...
ACORN does many things under the umbrella of "community organizing." They agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare workers (that is, those welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration efforts (always for Democrats, of course). Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren't especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the "worst case of election fraud in our state's history."...
...ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff -- the very people who would later descend on Chicago's banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge,...
( on whose board he sat with the terrorist William Ayers).

Obama was not just sympathetic -- he was an ACORN fellow traveler. ...(more)

Time for McCain to Name Names

There was some hint today that the McCain campaign has every intention doing just that as soon as a bail out/rescue package is passed. Playing politics with a crisis is no good but if the crisis is "solved" or at least forestalled then they can get back to the nuts and bolts..
From American Thinker:
...McCain himself eloquently and correctly pointed out problems with Fannie and Freddie back in 2005 and 2006, only to have the reforms he wanted defeated by Democrats in Congress. President Bush was with McCain on these issues. Obama meanwhile, garnering more Fannie Mae contributions in two years than all other senators not named Chris Dodd in the last nine, has been on the wrong side of these issues. This is a slam dunk waiting for McCain simply to take advantage of it.
Recently he has been out rambling on about government spending, CEO pay and earmarks. Yawn. None of this is pertinent unless you point out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Democrat earmarks and that the worst CEO pay abuse in recent memory is Franklin Raines' incentive compensation from Fannie triggered by fraudulent accounting. McCain did not bother to point any of that out of course. We must not "assign blame.'
The simple fact is this: if the Democrats do not get their deserved blame for this economic situation, Republicans will experience a bloodbath on Election Day. The way our elections work, it is up to McCain to make that happen. The fact that he seems not to understand it is why many conservatives loathed the idea of a McCain nomination to begin with...(more)

An Open Door to a Carbon Tax?

WHAT!!!???
From AmSpec Blog:
From the bailout bill (PDF):SEC. 116. CERTAIN INCOME AND GAINS RELATING TO INDUSTRIAL SOURCE CARBON DIOXIDE TREATED AS QUALIFYING INCOME FOR PUBLICLY TRADED PARTNERSHIPS....(more)

You Tube pulls a popular anti-Democrat video off the web

American Thinker:
The 9:59 video entitled "Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis" played four different songs under a fast moving video sequence that very clearly tied Democrats like Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Barack Obama to policies and corruption related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It cleverly showed how the "affordable mortgage" programs sent an economic virus through the entire economy and showed Republican efforts to intervene and regulate being blocked.
For Obama and all congressional Democrats, it was a devastating video. (more here)

But you can still see it over at DrBulldog