Thanks for the reply.

It’s impossible to argue who benefitted most from the steroid scandal since there will never be comprehensive data on who was using and even if there was such a thing there will never be a way to know just how much PEDs impacted each individual’s game.

Back on the actual topic, your measure of who benefited most is incomplete. Yes, FM/FM contributed more to Dem campaigns than they did to Republican ones. But if we’re considering who in Congress benefitted most from the crisis, we have to look at the personal investments of our representatives for an accurate measure

But much more to the point, the issue of who benefitted is pretty irrelevant and in any case entirely seperate from who is to blame for the issue. You seem to be confusing the two.

Even more to the point than that, I suggest you read my earlier reply in the comments section of this thread. The fact of the matter is that FM/FM were not even the most important factors leading to the financial crisis. This entire narrative put forth by the political right is a sham and a dishonest attempt to pin the crisis on Congressional Dems when the single greatest factor leading to our economic woes can actually be traced to the SEC.

And that’s why I’m so hard on Captain Ed. I’ve been an avid reader of Morrissey for years. The change in his approach since joining Hot Air is blatant and frankly insulting. He went from running easily the most thoughtful conservative blog I’d ever known to your standard partisan hack. He would never have advanced such easily debunked nonsense like this back in his Captain’s Quarters days. When he went to work for Malkin, the blogosphere lost one of it’s most valuable voices.

Primarily blaming elected Democrats for the crisis is like primarily blaming the NY Yankees for the baseball steroid scandal.

Yes, it. Much like the New Yorsk Yankees were the highest paid team and benefitted the most from the steroid era, tha Democrats in that vid were the highest paid by Fannie and Freddie and benefitted the most from it, including, as you know, Barack Obama. It’s actually a pretty good analogy, although not in the way you meant it to be.

You are 100% right that Republicans could have done this on their own at any time. It is a travesty that they didn’t. So yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. Many of the Republicans were voted out in 2004 and 2006. As nearly every Republican should have been in each of those elections, for forgetting their conservative values.

I’m still waiting for the Dems to accept their medicine though. I’m still waiting for Todd and Frank and Clay and Meeks to get voted out. And don’t get me started with the least intelligent congressperson ever, Maxine Waters.

And as for Barack Obama, the #2 recipient of Fannie and Freddie funds, we made him President. How’s that for holding him accountable for his actions?

Yes, flipping hurt. So did the sale of an estimated 5 million homes to illegal immigrants who somehow managed to secure mortgages. Roughly 50,000 of those homes sit abandoned today in my city of Phoenix. But at least the business leaders of our booming meth industry have plenty of choices for where to locate their labs.

Good post, except for those points. And I thought you were harsh on Morrissey.

Thank you for your comment. If my post is “missing the point” then so is much of the rabid right, such as Sean Hannity and Powerline and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, since this post is nothing more than a direct response to a specific set of false claims which are supported by the above distortion of facts. So I’m glad to see that you apparently also dismiss the disingenuous claims that Morrissey posted in the very widely read forum with which he is employed. I do wonder whether you are a person of strong enough character and integrity to tell him as much by commenting at his post on Hot Air. I guess we’ll see. You can find it the very first link above.

Regarding your other assertions, it is true that Clinton pushed for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for lower and middle income earners to obtain mortgages. And even Clinton has admitted that this is one of the early contributing factors to the current crisis. But that is only one of many factors. For example, it was during the Bush Administration’s 1st term and the Republican controlled 108th Congress when the SEC decided to allow qualifying broker-dealer firms (those with $5 billion or more in capital) to expand their debt-to-net capital ratio from 12 to 1 (the ratio that had been in place since 1975) to 40 to 1. What firms qualified for the new standard? Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Consider that timeline; it coincides with EXACTLY when sub prime market exploded.

Link: http://www.nysun.com/business/ex-sec-official-blames-agency-for-blow-up/86130/

According to McClatchy, the GOP-controlled congressional banking committees did not hold a single hearing regarding the SEC rule change. Also from that McClatchy article:

“Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who was the banking committee chairman when the SEC rule was adopted, received more than $152,000 in donations [from troubled broker-dealer firms and FM/FM -joe]. Jonathan Graffeo, a spokesman for Shelby, said that campaign donations “are not a factor in Sen. Shelby’s decision-making.”

Shelby said that Democrats blocked his attempts to rein in the roles of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and his push for a closer review of the SEC’s regulation of investment banks [that lie was dealt with in the primary portion of this post -joe]. He said the SEC rule left a staff of fewer than 20 overseeing trillions of dollars in assets.”

Link: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/244/v-print/story/53398.html

Moreover, the sub prime fallout was also not the sole fault of poor people getting into mortgages they couldn’t afford. Many, perhaps a majority of mortgages gone bad were the result of middle and higher income people participating in “property flipping” (where is the executive producer of “Flip this House” today, I wonder). Lots and lots of people were making money hand over fist in a game of real estate hot potato, and very few people were raising the alarm bells of stretching mortgage liquidity too thin and suffering a sub prime collapse at the time. Not House and Senate Republicans, not John McCain, not Democrats, not President Bush and certainly not the SEC.

Primarily blaming elected Democrats for the crisis is like primarily blaming the NY Yankees for the baseball steroid scandal. Half of the players on every team were taking steroids and everyone from the players union to the team managers and trainers to the franchise owners to the new generation fans who were captivated by all the home runs were all complacent.

There is plenty of blame to go around, from the current and previous Presidential Administrations to both parties in Congress to the SEC to predatory mortgage brokers to the Federal Reserve which kept interest rates low and credit too accessible (just wait until Visa and MasterCard have their day of reckoning) to Alan Greenspan who haphazardly encouraged Americans to take out ARMs to the broker-dealer firms that weren’t watching their own books to the buyers who failed to conduct their own debt management.