Rove falsely claimed Frank "was one of the more prominent opponents of [housing] reform in 2004 and 2005"

NICEGUYEDDIE, You  are 100% correct in that last post. That explains the RIGHT WING mindset.

You broke the code!

Left to there own devices privet industry would have us working for less than $1 a day working 80 hour 7 day weeks.  The enviornment would be worthless our natural resorces would be all but gone.  Private industry and helping do not work because profit is all they think about.  Regulations are for the General Welfare and are thus legal and need per the Constitution.

Heck not the exact oppisate they would not know the truth if it was in their face.

he wont talk otherwise, and then he will lie anyway, and the immunity will be rescinded and he will go to jail

aspects of socialism do not equate Communism (England, France ect.). So I have no idea why proudconservative is so willing to start living by the communist lifestyle by calling people on the board comrades if s/he dislikes communism so as much as s/he lets on. 

Looks like someone took your advice Hurricane. Proudcons off topic parody was removed. 

The only thing worse than a terrible comedian is one who thinks that if they keep repeating the same lame crap it will somehow get better.

It hasn't worked for the tax cutters and it ain't working for Proud.

steve52 and alien,

It looks to me like it is you two are the only one's referring to Frank's orientation and physical limitations. 

It is also interesting to note that the Time mag list that you refer to also says that Bush did try to reregulate Fannie and Freddie but he failed to move Congress. Initially Barnie was the ranking dem on the Rep controlled banking committee and later the head of the committee and he defended Fannie and Freddie right to the bitter end. It is also notable that the article claims that all of the deregulation that Bush gets blamed for actually happened during Clinton's tenure in the White House. Good article indeed, it can be found on line, I would suggest everyone read it. While you refer to the repub scapegoating Franks, the article can also be used to point out that the dems are scapegoating Bush by virtue of the deregulation occuring during the Clinton years.

Karl Rove with his head full of rocks

Popping up like a jack-in-the-box

Blame--just fill in the blank--

Clinton, Pelosi or Frank

He should go directly to jail, not to Faux.

Skeptical, are reading your reply to RHarrisonScoot, I can only say that you are being, well, you, skeptical. RHarrisonScoot thinks he is writing on some run-of-the-mill blog where he can use his, someone elses words and get away with it. Hopefully, he will answer the questions, engage ion discussion and not live up to the name Scoot.

Facts (Frank's recorded comments) don't cease to exist because you choose to ignore them. Do your own homework. I did mine. Clue: National Archives.

Stop trying to pass this off on poor people.  People foreclosing on their homes could never bring the economy to its knees.  However, the greediness of Wall Street can.

The legislation you cite in your post, HR 1852, was never voted on by the Senate, never went to the president's desk, and thus, NEVER BECOME LAW. 

So remind us how legislation that doesn't pass can "push" lenders to do anything?

Bush championed "The Ownership Society."

On another thread on this topic, AA, I showed you where Bush killed legislation that would have regulated this area, it was not even from a website like Rove.com. Here it is again:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html?em

Here are some quotes from the article:

"Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency."

"As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn; as recently as February, for example, Mr. Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”

"There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them.”

"“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.

“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

"Part of economic security,” Mr. Bush declared that day, “is owning your own home.”

(Bush) "And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view. "

"This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.”

"Among the Republican Party’s top 10 donors in 2004 was Roland Arnall. He founded Ameriquest, then the nation’s largest lender in the subprime market, which focuses on less creditworthy borrowers. In July 2005, the company agreed to set aside $325 million to settle allegations in 30 states that it had preyed on borrowers with hidden fees and ballooning payments. It was an early signal that deceptive lending practices, which would later set off a wave of foreclosures, were widespread."

And look at this from Rove:

"It was an opportunity to address the risky subprime lending practices head on. But that was never seriously discussed. More senior aides, like Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political strategist, were wary of overly regulating an industry that, Mr. Rove said in an interview, provided “a valuable service to people who could not otherwise get credit.” While he had some concerns about the industry’s practices, he said, “it did provide an opportunity for people, a lot of whom are still in their houses today.”

And this: "

Mr. Falcon’s report outlined a worst-case situation in which Fannie and Freddie could default on debt, setting off “contagious illiquidity in the market” — in other words, a financial meltdown. He also raised red flags about the companies’ soaring use of derivatives, the complex financial instruments that economic experts now blame for spreading the housing collapse.

Today, the White House cites that report — and its subsequent effort to better regulate Fannie and Freddie — as evidence that it foresaw the crisis and tried to avert it. Bush officials recently wrote up a talking points memo headlined “G.S.E.’s — We Told You So.”

But the back story is more complicated. To begin with, on the day Mr. Falcon issued his report, the White House tried to fire him.

Before you knock Raines: "At the time, Fannie and Freddie were allies in the president’s quest to drive up homeownership rates; Franklin D. Raines, then Fannie’s chief executive, has fond memories of visiting Mr. Bush in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One to a housing event. “They loved us,” he said."

"His (Falcon's) warnings were buried in the next day’s news coverage, trumped by the White House announcement that Mr. Bush would replace Mr. Falcon, a Democrat appointed by Bill Clinton, with Mark C. Brickell, a leader in the derivatives industry that Mr. Falcon’s report had flagged.

Oxley: "Michael G. Oxley, an Ohio Republican and then-chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, had produced what Mr. Snow viewed as “a pretty darned good bill,” a watered-down version of what the president sought. But at the urging of Mr. Card and the White House economics team, the president decided to hold out for a tougher bill in the Senate."

"The problem with those guys at the White House, they had all the answers and they didn’t think they had to listen to anyone, including the Treasury secretary,” Mr. Oxley said in a recent interview. “They were driving the ideological train. He was in the caboose, and they were in the engine room.”

"Mr. Snow, for one, calls Mr. Oxley “a hero,” adding, “He saw the need to move. It didn’t get done. And it’s too bad, because I think if it had, I think we could well have avoided a big contributor to the current crisis.”

More quotes in next post

The fundamental problem with the mortgage crisis is Sub Prime Loans from the Wall Street investment banks.  Fannie & Freddie had to lower standards to keep up with wall street.  Their market share was down to less than 40% by 2006.  In fact the Fannie/Freddie loans had a much higher performance than the wall street subprime because they were using 30 year fixed products with tighter controls of DTI ratios.

Pleae read the following article and report for a major law firm that represents and advises banks.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis

 http://www.traigerlaw.com/publications/traiger_hinckley_llp_cra_foreclosure_study_1-7-08.pdf

Please also watch "House of Cards".  It spells out exactly how the subprime mess exploded.

AA -

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that your own citation does not support your argument. Let's look at the same paragraph with different bold type:

"zero and lower down payment loans for borrowers that can afford mortgage payments, but lack the cash for a required down payment."  It also "more than doubled" funding to counsel "subprime homebuyers and borrowers late on mortgage loan payments" and directed the FHA "to provide mortgage loans to higher risk (but qualified) borrowers, without authorizing unnecessary fee hikes on such borrowers." It also raised "FHA single family loan limits, which now bar loans above 95% of the median home price in each local area and shut FHA out of higher cost home market"

So first, how that involved loans to people who could not afford them is beyond me - and, I'd suggest, anyone else capable of understanding basic English. But taking the four points in order:

1. When I was buying my first house (this goes back over 30 years), it was common knowledge even then that the biggest barrier to home ownership for a lot of people was not being able to afford the mortage but having the up-front cash for the down payment. The more housing values appreciate, the bigger that barrier becomes. Even that long ago, 10% down and even 5% down mortgages were appearing for just that reason.

2. The counseling is for people already late on their payments. What alternative would you suggest for them? How about debtors' prison?

3. The intent was to bar the use of "unnecessary fee hikes," not to force anyone to extend credit to unqualified people. (You do know what the world "qualified" means, yes?)

4. Again, as housing values appreciate, the down payment barrier looms higher and higher for more and more people. The FHA program was originally intended for lower-income (i.e., "higher risk," there is absolutely nothing new about federal support for "higher risk" mortgages) people who would, naturally, be buying lower-cost housing (with accompanying lower mortgage payments). But with the housing bubble inflating prices, even middle-income people were facing a wall. Raising the limit on the value of housing that an FHA loan can cover would extend that plan to such middle-income people. Which means not only was that proposal a middle-class benefit, but since the crisis has been caused largely by defaults among middle- and upper-income people, passing it might have (yes, might have) eased the crisis by getting some people into FHA loans rather than the riskier instruments they wound up going for.

You are so far off base it is laughable.  "Democrats pushed the lenders for years into granting loans to people who should never have gotten them, which in turn precipitated the houseing meltdown."  I am sure you are referring to the CRA.  That has been proven to have virtually nothing to do with the subprime meltdown.  Democrats did not push lenders to get the loans to people that could not afford them.  According to the Fed president "Our own experience with the CRA over 30 years and recent analysis of available data, including inof on subprime loan performance, runs counter to the arguement that CRA was at the root of or otherwise contributed in any other substantive way to the current mortgage difficulties".

This attempt to blame this mess on poor people and the politicians that were looking out for them is sickening.  As Time magazine, CNBC's "House of Cards" and any respected independent analyst that knows about the crisis will point out, the root of the problem lies in the sub prime mortgages that were packaged and sold to wall street and abroad between 2004-2007.  These are the toxic assets that far and away have the worst perfomrance and have nothing to do with Fannie/Freddie.

Larry,

However those quotes do tell us exactly the mindset of Frank and how far off base he was in his defense of government manipulation of the housing markets.

trying to make some point or just stupid

Skep -

I think our self-confessed hate-monger, who appears to be so divorced from normal behavior that they think being a hate-monger is admirable or at least clever, is trying to imagine (as the result of an earlier mention of his having a speech impediment) the way they think Barney Frank speaks.

However, since Frank does not stutter, it means this sociopath is not only a slime bucket but an ignorant one as well. So given the choices, I think I'll have to go with "stupid" as the answer to your question.

Wall Street greediness brought us to the brink, not poor people.

You follow it through-  If there were no such thing as the derivitives market then banks and mortgage companies would not have lowered their standards to the point at which a signature was considered the only important qualification.  Further if the housing bubble had not burst people would have been able to refinance unrealistic mortgages.  Further still if dishonest ratings were not given to the derivitive bonds they would not have churned up such a feeding frenzy in the market that led the collapse of the housing bubble to have a ripple effect far out of proportion to the real values of mortgages being defaulted on.  There are lots and lots of bad actors here but for you it always seems to come back to blaming Barney Frank and low income borrowers.

You are absolutely right, but what is said is 2003 is important because it sets a context to the thinking and influence at the time that led to poor choices by both parties.  There is no doubt the Rep. failed, but it was not all in their hands.  Do you think for one minute, any republican or democrat would halt a housing market that was on fire bundled with new loans that gave the largest home ownership this country has ever known?  Any policy to slow down or restrict loans would immediately impact low quality borrowers and any party responsible would be chastised.  For the banks, same thing, any policy to cut back would either bring great criticism by the media, revolt by shareholders, or changes in management to continue irresponsible behavior.    In a market where the poor are winning, the rich are winning, the politicians are winning, and the shareholders are winning, not one of our two party politicians had the guts to stop or change the course.  Lets think about this, we had the highest home appreciation ever bundled with the highest home ownership ever?  Anyone see a problem with this and yet both sides did very little to change the course.  Maybe Reb. had more to blame since they were in power, but you can't dismiss the roles of the democrats.   Our politicians failed (democrats and republicans), plain and simple.  We should set differences aside and get rid of the politicians that can't make tough choices.  Obama may prove to be good change, but how many incumbents won re-election.  That is where the voters failed.    For those that want context of things said by Barney Frank here you go: The entire hearing for GSE regulation can be found here (obsurd things said by both parties):  http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=108_house_hearings&docid=f:92231.wais   Barney Frank's entire statement:  I appreciate hearing from the two Cabinet secretaries, but
I would say at the outset that before we move on any
legislation, I would hope we would have some additional
hearings. And, in particular, I think it is important that the
variety of groups in our country who care about housing be
invited, because that is my major focus here, as it has been
during my service on this committee.
    I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the
legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a
crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored
enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting
problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being
dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this
point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury.
    I must say we have an interesting example of self-
fulfilling prophecy. Some of the critics of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac say that the problem is that the Federal Government
is obligated to bail out people who might lose money in
connection with them. I do not believe that we have any such
obligation. And as I said, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy by
some people.
    So let me make it clear, I am a strong supporter of the
role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play in housing, but
nobody who invests in them should come looking to me for a
nickel–nor anybody else in the Federal Government. And if
investors take some comfort and want to lend them a little
money and less interest rates, because they like this set of
affiliations, good, because housing will benefit. But there is
no guarantee, there is no explicit guarantee, there is no
implicit guarantee, there is no wink-and-nod guarantee. Invest,
and you are on your own.
    Now, we have got a system that I think has worked very well
to help housing. The high cost of housing is one of the great
social bombs of this country. I would rank it second to the
inadequacy of our health delivery system as a problem that
afflicts many, many Americans. We have gotten recent reports
about the difficulty here.
    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role
in helping make housing more affordable, both in general
through leveraging the mortgage market, and in particular, they
have a mission that this Congress has given them in return for
some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to
focus on affordable housing, and that is what I am concerned
about here. I believe that we, as the Federal Government, have
probably done too little rather than too much to push them to
meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable
goals. I worry frankly that there is a tension here.
    The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of
safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the
possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which
I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally
sound financially and withstand some of the disastrous
scenarios. And even if there were a problem, the Federal
Government doesn’t bail them out. But the more pressure there
is there, then the less I think we see in terms of affordable
housing.
    I want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue as government
sponsored enterprises with some beneficial arrangement with the
Federal Government in return for which we get both the general
lowering of housing costs and some specific attention to low-
income housing. In particular, I am concerned right now that
there has been–and it has been raised by Fannie Mae, it has
been raised by one of the rating agencies that have been
critical of the Federal Home Loan Bank–manufactured housing.
    Manufactured housing is a very important housing resource
for low- and moderate-income people. You talk about increasing
homeownership among low- and moderate-income people, and
disproportionately, if you look at the increases in
homeownership, it has come with their ability to get
manufactured housing; and I do not want to see Fannie and
Freddie pushed in the direction of being tougher on
manufactured housing. And many of us will be in touch with
Secretary Martinez to see how we can improve this.
    I have talked to my colleagues in the Congressional Black
Caucus, and the Blue Dogs. This is a very important and, I
think, somewhat underrated form of housing. I think we now see
pressure on it that is generated in part by exaggerated fears
of a financial crisis.
    So I am prepared to look at possibilities here, but in
particular–and this is the major point I want to make; I saw
this in the letter from the homebuilders–I do not want to see
any lessening of our commitment to getting low-income housing.
    And here is my concern: If you move the regulator to
Treasury and you leave HUD with the mission, I am not sure that
it isn’t “mission impossible,” or at least implausible. What
is HUD going to do, yell at them? I mean, if all the regulatory
authority and all the clout is over in Treasury, what is left
in HUD? And I noticed that the homebuilders raised that.
    So my threshold question is, if you move this regulator to
Treasury, if you bifurcate in terms of the Cabinet departments
the responsibility for the low-income housing mission,
including manufactured housing–very important to me, as I
said–and other forms of housing, if you bifurcate that, what
real strength is there left behind the mission if most of the
regulation and most of the teeth–I guess if you put all the
teeth from Treasury, having HUD gum them into doing more low-
income housing doesn’t strike me as the ideal situation.
    And that is why I say, Mr. Chairman, in closing, that as we
proceed on this, I would hope we would have a day when groups,
a range of groups that are concerned with housing, could
specifically address that. Thank you.

There is no denying the fact that Barney Frank has opposed reregulation since the early days of the Bush administration, you can find many utube videos to support this fact, go look. He is not the only cause but one of the many causes. However Barney Frank and Christopher  Dodd do not have the honesty to admit their culpability, even in the face of incontrovertible proof ,they will deny it. Go to utube and search for Pelosi, Frank, Fannie Mae, clueless. watch that video, it will shed some light on the situation. A problem this large is not caused by one person, that is ridiculous, it was started by well intentioned policies during the Clinton years and supported by the dems AND some reps. But the reps did try to reregulate and it was unanimously opposed by the dems. Barney was defending Fannie right up to Sept of 08, just as the roof was falling in. http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=5122   You might want to check out this article also. Remamber, it takes a right wing and a left wing to fly.