“Chairman Waxman’s refusal to hold hearings to examine their role says a lot about where the Democrats’ priorities lie.”

Democrats aimed their harshest attacks at deregulation and CEO pay, using former Lehman Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld as an example during a recess hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) also released internal documents showing Lehman’s compensation committee recommended $20 million in “special payments” to three departing executives on Sept. 11, four days before the firm filed for bankruptcy.

Republicans, for their part, launched a campaign to pin the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and attacked Waxman for not holding a hearing to dig into the now-nationalized mortgage giants.

Yesterday, McCain blasted Obama and the Democrats for the mess we are in.  How does the LA Times cover the story?  They pretended he never said anything about the economy!

All very good questions that we may never get a straight answer on!

As Todd Thurman at Heritage notes, the Sandlers are left-wing moguls who built “a mortgage company whose major product was subprime mortgages and they sold it to Wachovia for $24.2 billion in 2006. And what do the Sandlers do when they are not peddling subprime garbage? They are busy writing checks to leftist groups like the Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Yes that ACORN.”

The video has been pulled

Coincidental?

Sandler, 77, spoke to The Associated Press in the San Francisco office of his family’s charitable foundation the morning after NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” broadcast a skit deriding the Sandlers as predatory lenders who had duped unsophisticated borrowers and Wachovia, too. A caption shown on during the sketch skewered the Sandlers as “people who should be shot.”

Ed asks a good question: Was sub-prime lending ever a good idea? In this audio clip, Obama defends the idea of subprime lending just over a year ago:

Obama: Subprime lending started off as a good idea - helping Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to. Financial institutions created new financial instruments that could securitize these loans, slice them into finer and finer risk categories and spread them out among investors around the country and around the world.

As Ace said,  “On the plus side, we’re not the only ones this executive has been [deleted because you saw this joke coming six miles beyond the actual horizon, and I refuse to do the cheap stuff.].”

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank’s relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

House passes bailout bill…

The final vote, 263-171 in the House, capped two weeks of tumult in Congress and on Wall Street, punctuated by daily warnings that the country confronted the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression if lawmakers failed to act. There were 58 more votes for the measure than an earlier version that failed on Monday.

“We all know that we are in the midst of a financial crisis,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said shortly before casting his vote for a massive government intervention in private capital markets that was unthinkable only a month ago.

“And we know that if we do nothing, this crisis is likely to worsen and to put us into an economic slump like most of us have never seen,” he said.

An article that appeared in the September 30, 1999 issue of the New York Times written by Steven A. Holmes titled:

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending - 9/30/1999

“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.”

(emphasis mine)

And . . .

“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

He takes aim at everyone but my favorite section was Reid!

AP Clockwise from top left: Sen. Thomas Carper, Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Robert Bennett, Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Chris Dodd and Sen. Charles Schumer.

What They Said About Fan and Fred
House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 10, 2003:

Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.): I worry, frankly, that there’s 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 disaster scenarios. . . .

Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), speaking to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez:

Secretary Martinez, if it ain’t broke, why do you want to fix it? Have the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises] ever missed their housing goals?

Breaking: Senate Passes Rescue Bill

By a vote of 74-25, the Senate just approved the revised version of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue bill rejected Monday by the House.

The bill now heads to the House for a vote, likely on Friday. Some of the revisions included in the Senate bill were designed to win the support of House Republicans who voted against the first bill.

THE 400-PAGE BAILOUT?

Just think, when Paulson first sounded the alarm, it was only 3 pages!  And look,Senate ‘bailout bill’ demands insurance companies ‘provide coverage for mental health treatment’… MORE,‘Sweeteners’… ,,Obama: ‘We cannot fail’…,McCain calls revamped bill an improvement…

Politicians’ phones ringing off hook…
Shelby, Sessions to oppose new version…
Reid reveals: Major insurance company on verge of going bankrupt…
House foes soften…

Ed:

Hubbard notes that the Bush administration long supported reform at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He also tells viewers that the House managed to pass Fannie/Freddie reform when Republicans had the majority, but Chris Dodd killed it in the Senate Banking Committee. Dodd, Hubbard reminds us, took the most money from Fannie/Freddie sources, and had little incentive to press for tighter oversight.

Where was Dodd? Where was Frank? Where were the recipients of Fannie/Freddie money during the years in which Fannie Mae’s fraudulent business practices were exposed? They were in the pockets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and busy telling us that no problem existed — and that regulators who reported the irregularities were racists. They sold us out — and the media has let them off the hook.

We all know how well this will be received by the left, but Karl didn’t get to where he was by making stupid mistakes like Obama and Pelosi.  Watch this:

H/T to johnny dollar

Others Blogging:

• Hot Air
• “What was the Speaker thinking?” | The Sundries Shack
• Suspicious “no” votes: Naming names « WitSnapper | The Blog
• Bloodthirsty Liberal » Dumbest Person in America
• Bride of Rove » You need to listen to this
• Bail Tales 9.30.08 « Gunservatively!
• Patriots And The 1st Oinker « Mcnorman’s Weblog
• Karl Rove: Tellin’ It Like It Is « The Dude’s Blog
• It’s More Than Politics, It’s a Bad Bill. « The IUSB Vision Weblog
• Mark My Words

This has to be considered a shocker.  The bailout bill failed in the House, and it wasn’t especially close.  The final tally was 207-226, with Democrats supporting it 141-94, while Republicans opposed it 66-132.

Remember when: Democrats insist “nothing wrong” at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in 2004

Highlights of this eight-minute video:

Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke.  Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines.  [Raines would barely avoid prosecution for fraud.]