We Can And Must Do Better

by Brian Maloney, June 25th, 2009 at 11:37am

Yes, if you’re a talk radio host, it’s great to have knuckleheads like Barney Frank and John Kerry nearby. But for the rest of us, their antics continue to reinforce negative views many Americans hold of Massachusetts and its citizens.

— Frank has actually gone back to advocating the very lending practices that caused the housing meltdown now playing in a global economy near you. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development.

Fannie and Freddie have restricted loans to condo buyers in these situations because they represent a red flag that the developments — many of which were planned and built at the height of the housing bubble — may face financial trouble down the road. But never mind all that. Messrs. Frank and Weiner think, in all their wisdom and years of experience underwriting mortgages, that the new rules “may be too onerous.”

[...]

Fannie and Freddie have already lost tens of billions of dollars betting on the mortgage market — with that bill being handed to taxpayers. They face still more losses going forward, because in the wake of their nationalization last year their new “mission” has become to do whatever it takes to prop up the housing market. The last thing they need is lawmakers like Mr. Frank, who did so much to lay the groundwork for their collapse, telling them to play faster and looser with their lending standards.

— Maintaining his mean-spirited reputation, Kerry has made another “botched joke”, this time about Sarah Palin:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. John Kerry must have been channeling his inner Letterman yesterday.

The Bay State senator was telling a group of business and civic leaders in town at his invitation about the “bizarre’’ tale of how South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had “disappeared for four days’’ and claimed to be hiking along the Appalachian Trail, but no one was really certain of his whereabouts.

“Too bad,’’ Kerry said, “if a governor had to go missing it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin.’’

When Kerry and Frank make fools of themselves, we all look silly by extension. After all, Bay State voters continue to send these twits back to Washington. Why can’t we do better than this?

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