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Conservative radio hosts repeat discredited claim that Obama has not produced valid U.S. birth certificate

Rehashing a long-debunked claim, conservative radio hosts Michael Savage, Rick Roberts and Chris Baker each asserted that Sen. Barack Obama has not produced a valid birth certificate proving that he was born in the United States and is therefore eligible to run for president. In broadcasts between October 8 and 10, Roberts, Baker and Savage said, respectively, that Obama's birth certificate "hasn't ... been produced"; that there "has never been a real birth certificate presented" by Obama; and that the birth certificate "that was produced is a forgery." In fact, the Obama campaign posted a copy of Obama's birth certificate on its "Fight the Smears" website, and reportedly provided the original document to the nonpartisan watchdog group FactCheck.org, whose staff concluded in an August 21 post that it "meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship." Further, a Hawaiian Health Department official confirmed to PolitiFact.com that Obama's birth certificate is authentic. Indeed, even the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com reported in an August 23 article that a "WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic," as Media Matters for America has documented. On the October 9 broadcast of his Minneapolis-based radio show, Baker discussed a lawsuit filed in August by Philip J. Berg, who baselessly charged that Obama was born in Kenya. Baker stated that "when you really start looking into this, there apparently has never been a real birth certificate presented. There's been a certificate, but it's not a birth certificate. ... Just get the damn birth certificate presented and let's move on with our lives." Savage and guest host Roberts repeatedly questioned Obama's citizenship on the October 8, October 9 and October 10 broadcasts of the nationally syndicated Savage Nation. For instance, Savage falsely claimed that Obama's birth certificate "does not exist, they can't find it in the Hawaii government. It's never been produced. The one that was produced is a forgery." Roberts stated, "[Y]ou're running for the president of the United States, OK? Show them the birth certificate and say, 'OK, here's my birth certificate, get out of my face.' Why hasn't it been produced? Why?" Additionally, while baselessly stating that Obama has not proven his U.S. citizenship, Savage revived other falsehoods about Obama. He falsely suggested that Obama is a Muslim, stating: "How could he not be Muslim if he has a Muslim name? How could he not be Muslim if his father and grandfather were Muslims? How is that possible, when he has no known birth certificate?" Savage also claimed that Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation, "went over to Kenya to investigate [Obama's] relatives in Kenya, and he was arrested by the Muslim leader of Kenya because Mr. Corsi uncovered the true birthplace, I believe, of Hussein Obama and the connections that exist between Barack Hussein Obama and this Muslim leader ... " However, Media Matters has documented that while Corsi recently baselessly claimed that he "came out of Kenya" with "documents" proving that Obama "made a pact with this radical leftist politician Odinga," the only "documents" Corsi has thus far provided -- purported emails listing the contact in his Senate office to work with Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga -- do not establish that Obama "made a pact" with Odinga, and they "appear not to have been written by a native English speaker," as the Politico's Ben Smith has noted. Media Matters has also noted that PolitiFact.com wrote on August 20 that Corsi's claim that Obama "openly supported" Odinga during his 2006 bid for the presidency of Kenya is "false," as PolitiFact "scour[ed] the public record for evidence that Obama supported Odinga" and concluded that "Obama has remained neutral in Kenyan politics." Also, contrary to Savage's claim that the "leader" of Kenya is a Muslim, neither Odinga nor Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki are Muslim, according to news reports. On October 8, Roberts also said: "[I]f you look at some of his policies and his guidelines and certain political agendas and even more than that, certain social agendas at the outset, you know, the similarities are staggering between Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama." From the October 8 broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation: SAVAGE: So here we are, here we are, here we are, here we are. We're getting ready for the communist takeover of America with a noncitizen at the helm -- I love it. He won't even produce a birth certificate. Don't you love that? Something as basic as Obama's birth certificate now is an issue. I mean, if he's got nothing to hide, show it to me. Doesn't exist. It does not exist, they can't find it in the Hawaii government. It's never been produced. The one that was produced is a forgery. Go to my website, read the story. Who's proposing this notion? Not me. It's a Democrat. A leading Democrat from Pennsylvania is suing the Obama campaign, claiming he's not a citizen. [...] RICK ROBERTS (guest host): Yeah, he needs to remember, Pete, not that I could tell McCain anything, but it is my opinion. He needs to remember he's fighting not only for a job, he's fighting for this country. Once again, maybe that's too much to ask in one lifetime of any one man, given everything he's gone through. But you're absolutely spot on. Barack Obama is the most dangerous -- and I've said this before and people take exception with it -- but if you look, and I'm not Ph.D. in world history, but I can read -- if you look at world history and you look at Germany when Adolf Hitler was not initially but shortly after he first came on the scene and started making his rise to power as a community organizer, and you look at all the people he surround himself -- himself with, and if you look at some of his policies and his guidelines and certain political agendas and even more than that, certain social agendas at the outset, you know, the similarities are staggering between Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. You know, sorry, that's the way I feel. I can read and I can look and I can compare and contrast and what I see -- the early, early days of Adolf Hitler and the very early days in this presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the similarities are absolutely staggering. Now, people say you -- you just don't like black men. It has nothing to do with his race, his theology, his point of origin -- which is in question, by the way. You heard Michael talking about that. There is some question, some question as to whether he's even a U.S. citizen and, sorry, that's something you kinda have to have to run for president. And I thought to myself, wouldn't that be something? We'd get a week away from the presidency and all of a sudden we find out he's actually born in Kenya and then taken to Hawaii where a duplicate birth certificate was produced. That -- that -- I don't know -- that'd be great -- that's a TV movie right there. From the October 9 broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation: SAVAGE: McCain is a genuine war hero. He's suffered for this country. He didn't crack, he has honor, he comes from a great family. We can trust him on national security, we cannot trust him on almost anything else. And that's the problem here. If he was clearly to be trusted on the economy, and to be trusted on the borders, and to be trusted on the onslaught of illegal aliens, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, would we? But we know we can't trust him on those other things. However, the other guy is so off the map, so far off the ken, out of the ken of reality. Obama is an unknown man, may not be a citizen, surrounded by radicals, surrounded by terrorists, that we have no choice. [...] SAVAGE: As far as this election goes, I vote for McCain on national security issues only, one reason only, which is I trust him with not selling the country down the river to the Islamofascists. I cannot and will not trust the unknown entity called Obama. I will not turn the country over to him. I understand that McCain comes from -- his father and his grandfather, both very, very good American men, both admirals. That's good enough for me. A military family to me is platinum, it is platinum as far as I am concerned. I have no faith in McCain on any other issue. But if I have nothing else, I'll even take that sad old hack. I will never vote for a man who nobody knows who he is. I will never vote for a man who did nothing for his country. I will never vote for a man who creates groups like ACORN, which are registering the dead and unknown. I will never work for a man who has a birth certificate nobody can find. In other words, if you vote for Obama, you're insane. [...] SAVAGE: Here's another article from the Grand Rapids Press on my website. PBS anchor declares Obama a pseudo -- Obama pseudo controversies really hide racism. Characterizing Obama as Muslim, quote, "is a way to confer otherness on him for those people who are uncomfortable saying they're against him because he's black," says -- says a red diaper doper baby vermin from PBS. Again, it's always the white communists who are stirring up blacks against whites and whites against black. Every time you investigate, you see it's a white liberal or a person who wants a race war in the country, who works for PBS, who will not acknowledge that there are real controversies about Obama. How could he not be Muslim if he has a Muslim name? How could he not be Muslim if his father and grandfather were Muslims? How is that possible, when he has no known birth certificate? [...] SAVAGE: How about his relatives in Kenya? Mr. [Jerome] Corsi went over to Kenya to investigate his relatives in Kenya, and he was arrested by the Muslim leader of Kenya because Mr. Corsi uncovered the true birthplace, I believe, of Hussein Obama and the connections that exist between Barack Hussein Obama and this Muslim leader, and what this Muslim leader said he would do after this election. And yet McCain says, "Why should I care about this?" Well, as you well know, Obama's first father left him and his mother, and he was a Muslim. And Obama's mother then remarried with her new husband, who was again a Muslim. And yet we're not supposed to say the M-word. Now, as I said to you, I am a believer in all five of the world's religions. As long as they're peace-loving and are pro-American, as far as I'm concerned, all religions are equal. However, what you consider the fact that not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists happen to be Muslim, and that the 19 hijackers that destroyed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were Muslim, mainly from Saudi Arabia, we have a very real obligation to remember that. Never mind that we've been told not to remember it by the -- both party candidates. Never mind that PBS, which should be defunded, tries to embarrass you every time your remember reality. I remember reality. So the mother remarries and goes to Indonesia with a new husband who is also a Muslim. Barack Hussein Obama is enrolled and reported on the rolls of the Islamic Muslim school he attended under the name Barry Soetoro, S-O-E-T-O-R-O. And when Obama's mother remarried, this new Muslim husband adopted Obama and his name was changed to Barry Mohammed Soetoro legally, through the court system not in America but the court system in Indonesia. However, if you do extensive research, there are no court filings or petitions to the courts of the states of Hawaii and Illinois where this Barack Hussein Obama has his name legally changed to Barry Mohammed Soetoro, so therefore, that there is no court order allowing a name change -- name change, Barrack Hussein Obama, that he's been using, it is an illegal alias for many years. And so, therefore, it's a valid question. There are websites out there that have been filed in federal courts in Philadelphia where a Democrat attorney had to file a federal lawsuit to obtain a simple copy of this alias, Barack Hussein Obama's birth certificate. When in reality, under the Freedom of Information Act, any request made my any citizen to the senator should have been answered and the documents supplied. Especially since this person is not only a federal employee working in a federal agency as a senator but he's preparing under our Constitution which requires birth on U.S. soil, and instead of complying with his request, Barack Hussein Obama, or Hussein, sent his SA to Philadelphia to fight a simple request to show a valid birth certificate. There are websites you can go to read the writ for the attorney and the rationale that Hussein's and the entire DC attorneys gave the federal judge to dismiss this lawsuit. They said that if only one person requested it, it is not a valid issue in clear violation of the actual meaning of the Freedom of Information Act where anyone, anyone by themselves may request any document relating to presidential candidates or even sitting presidents, which includes senators. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we do not even know where Hussein Obama was born, we cannot find a legal birth certificate for him. I believe we are watching one of the greatest frauds in the history of this country unfolding before our eyes, at the same time that the gangsters of Wall Street are melting down our economy. This man may melt down our country altogether. [...] ROBERTS: The question was asked earlier today by many people in the lamestream media outlets: Is Barack Obama stealing the vote or is it a right-wing conspiracy, another smear? Another smear? Tell me the first smear. Tell me the first smear. Is any of this resonating with the American people? Is -- are the American people getting any of this? I'll tell you, probably not, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. First of all, the birth certificate issue. The birth certificate issue. You know the story goes his father moved to Kenya, his mother followed, she was pregnant with him, she didn't like the way Muslim men treated the women, she wanted to go back to Hawaii, she was too far along in her pregnancy, they said, "No, you can't fly." She had the baby in Kenya, then got on a plane with the child back to Hawaii and got a registry of birth. You know, if that's not an issue, if that's not a problem -- you're running for the president of the United States, OK? Show them the birth certificate and say, "OK, here's my birth certificate, get out of my face." Why hasn't it been produced? Why? From the October 10 broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation: SAVAGE: We're taking a gamble on Barack Hussein Obama. It doesn't matter that he doesn't have a birth certificate. It doesn't matter that he may not be an American citizen. Doesn't matter that he sat in a church for 20 years where a preacher preached the most vile hatred you could imagine -- hatred toward whites, hatred toward America, because that's when he was younger. It doesn't matter that he associates with known terrorists who plotted blowing up the Pentagon and said they didn't do enough -- that doesn't matter because the important thing is that he's a young man who speaks well and can bring about change. From the October 9 broadcast of KTLK's The Chris Baker Show: BAKER: According to an investigation by Philip Berg, who has quite a extensive -- he was an assistant attorney general of Pennsylvania, if I'm not mistaken -- I could be, whatever. Assistant attorney general somewhere, which is certainly more attorney general school than I've ever had. So there. Anyway, he says Barack Obama is not a citizen, and now as I've kept up with this story -- and again, just kinda flying around the outside, because when I heard it I thought, "OK, yeah, great, this is what we need, right?" but now when you really start looking into this, there apparently has never been a real birth certificate presented. There's been a certificate, but it's not a birth certificate. And according to Philip Berg, Barack Obama was born in Kenya. And he presents a pretty -- pretty strong case, and I don't know if he's right and I don't know if he's wrong. But I do know that this is an incredibly important issue for a couple of -- a couple of huge reasons. One, I do not want to go through -- if Barack Obama wins the election, I do not want to go into a Barack Obama presidency with a bunch of people running around saying "He's illegitimate. He's not my president. He was selected, not elected. He's not even a citizen. He's not even certified. This whole thing is a fraud" -- I don't need that, OK? I don't need that distraction because the things like this distract us from policy. Now the second part of this is, it's only building suspicion. Now, as I've read about this story, I've read that the Democrat [sic] Party's trying to delay this, they want to keep it out of the courts until after the election -- and listen, here's the deal. Just get the damn birth certificate presented and let's move on with our lives.

Champions League: Atlético Madrid must play Liverpool at neutral venue after racism ban from Uefa

Liverpool's Champions League opponents Atlético Madrid have been hit with a three-match ban for crowd racism

The Last Lynching: Ted Koppel documentary on Discovery tonight

Discovery Channel premeres a documentary tonight with Ted Koppel about three Americans whose lives were profoundly affected by white supremacist terrorism. The most recent invident: a 1981 lynching in Mobile, Alabama in which a 19-year-old black man was killed by two members of the Ku Klux Klan. Here's the thing that really amazes me, looking at the details on this program tonight: Barack Obama, the first black presidential candidate nominated by a major American political party, is almost exactly the same age as that young man killed in that "last lynching." They were born some months apart. The point being: our nation's bad old days weren't all that long ago -- if we can even say they're past tense at all. Trailer above, and snip from the program description: This year, however, each [victim of racial violence profiled in this program] was directly involved in naming Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party?s nominee for president. "Barack Obama's nomination doesn't mean the end of racism any more than Sarah Palin's nomination signals the end of sexism or gender bias in America. But what giant steps forward! The Last Lynching offers a look at how far we've come on the racial front, and how recent some of the worst days of racial violence really were," explained Koppel. Koppel and his team of producers take viewers into the lives of these three: Congressman Robert Filner who, as an 18-year-old Freedom Rider, was thrown into Mississippi?s Parchman Prison; Florida schoolteacher Lizzie Jenkins who recalls tales of her grandfather watching the lynching of five African Americans in 1916; and Congressman Artur Davis who as a law student worked to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for "The Last Lynching," which took place in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. The program airs today, Monday, Oct. 13, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Program preview (Discovery). Here's the Wikipedia entry on that 1981 murder. Here's the NYT review of the Discovery documentary: In the Bad Old Days, Not So Very Long Ago. The NPR program Tell Me More has an audio piece up about the documentary here....

About those lynch mobs on the campaign trail.

Above, a roadside sign in West Plains, Missouri about the democratic presidential candidate. (Source: Caricature prompts racism allegations: News-Leader.com, via Racist Obama Billboard Causes Outrage: Current). See also: "Obama Bin Lyin'" sign at McCain rally. Here's another example, and here's another. And below, a snip from Frank Rich in the NYT today: [W]hat has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama ?launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.? He is ?palling around with terrorists? (note the plural noun). Obama is ?not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.? Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops. By the time McCain asks the crowd ?Who is the real Barack Obama?? it?s no surprise that someone cries out ?Terrorist!? The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama?s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers?s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today. That?s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. ?Barack Obama?s friend tried to kill my family? was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 ? when Obama was 8. We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed ?patriotic? martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands. And a few grafs down, a reference to something we blogged about here on Boing Boing a couple of weeks ago: No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin?s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago?s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was ?regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.? In the ?60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: ?Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.? The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama (New York Times) Previously on Boing Boing: American Fascist Writer Westbrook Pegler...

Football Weekly: round-up of Saturday's World Cup qualifiers

Wembley boo-boys, the worst misses of all time and racism at the Bernabéu are all on the agenda

Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis

Conservative and other media figures, echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans, have attempted to deflect blame for the financial crisis onto proponents of the expansion of affordable housing and legislation and institutions created to effect that expansion. Newsweek senior editor Daniel Gross wrote in an October 7 Slate commentary: On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks -- which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities -- to make more efforts to do so. Recent attacks have turned personal, with conservative media -- along with congressional Republicans and Sen. John McCain -- targeting Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) directly as a purported culprit in the financial crisis, falsely representing his decades-long advocacy of increased affordable housing as advocacy of lax oversight over Fannie and Freddie. The attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods and, in the case of CRA and attacks on minority lending, have taken on a racial tinge. MYTH: The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act forced lenders into irresponsible lending In a September 28 Boston Globe column, Jeff Jacoby asserted: The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites. The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to 'meet the credit needs' of 'low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.' Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans." Jacoby is not alone in his reference to "minority" lending. On the September 18 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto asked Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), "[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership ... Are you totally without culpability here?" Cavuto later said, "I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.' " But the suggestion that the financial crisis was caused by banks lending irresponsibly to comply with the CRA is widely discredited. According to housing experts, a large number of subprime loans were not made under the CRA, which applies only to depository institutions. A study released earlier this year by a law firm specializing in CRA compliance estimated that in the 15 most populous metropolitan areas, 84.3 percent of subprime loans in 2006 were made by financial institutions not governed by the CRA. Moreover, Janet Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated in a March 2008 speech that "studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households" [emphasis added]. In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr stated: Despite the fact that CRA appears to have increased bank and thrift lending in low- and moderate-income communities, such institutions are not the only ones operating in these areas. In fact, with new and lower-cost sources of funding available from the secondary market through securitization, and with advances in financial technology, subprime lending exploded in the late 1990s, reaching over $600 billion and 20% of all originations by 2005. More than half of subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies not subject to comprehensive federal supervision; another 30 percent of such originations were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts, which are not subject to routine examination or supervision, and the remaining 20 percent were made by banks and thrifts. Although reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret the evidence, my own judgment is that the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight. The housing crisis we face today, driven by serious problems in the subprime lending, suggests that our system of home mortgage regulation, including CRA, is seriously deficient. We need to fill what my friend, the late Federal Reserve Board Governor Ned Gramlich aptly termed, "the giant hole in the supervisory safety net." Banks and thrifts are subject to comprehensive federal regulation and supervision; their affiliates far less so; and independent mortgage companies, not at all. Moreover, many market-based systems designed to ensure sound practices in this sector-broker reputational risk, lender oversight of brokers, investor oversight of lenders, rating agency oversight of securitizations, and so on -- simply did not work. Conflicts of interest, lax regulation, and "boom times" covered up the extent of the abuses -- at least for a while, at least for those not directly affected by abusive practices. But no more. Others who have advanced this or similar claims include guest Jonathan Hoenig during the September 25 edition of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, radio host Laura Ingraham during the September 25 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and a September 25 Investor's Business Daily editorial claiming that the CRA "forced banks to make many more subprime loans." MYTH: Excessive lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the financial crisis On the October 9 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, San Diego radio host Roger Hedgecock claimed that "[w]e have a situation where today HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] was talking about 5 million illegal alien home mortgage loans that have gone bad." Radio host Joe Madison responded, "You see, this really angers me, because I'm sitting here ... and wondering, how is it that people who are illegal get loans when people in my community who are legal have a difficulty getting loans, and if they do get them, they're often from predators?" Neither Hedgecock nor Madison cited a source for the purported HUD statistic. On October 9, the Drudge Report linked to an article on the Phoenix radio station KFYI website under the headline, "HUD: Five Million Fraudulent Mortgages Held by Illegals..." However, according to an October 9 Phoenix Business Journal article posted at 3:15 pm MT (more than an hour before Lou Dobbs Tonight aired), HUD "says there is no basis to news reports that more than 5 million bad mortgages are held by illegal immigrants" and "a HUD spokesman said ... his agency has no data showing the number of illegal immigrants holding foreclosed or bad mortgages." Other media figures advancing the claim that lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the mortgage crisis include syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who wrote in her September 24 column that "there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: How illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. MYTH: Congressional Democrats, led by Barney Frank, opposed strengthening oversight over Fannie and Freddie In a September 18 column, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that Frank "sat by as mortgage brokers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made bad loans" and asserted that "[i]nstead of demanding responsible business practices from Fannie and Freddie, Frank continued to pound the table to extend even more credit to 'low income' families." In fact, Frank did not "s[i]t by." Frank's efforts to enhance regulatory oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac include: In 2005, Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, worked with committee chairman Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) on the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, which would have established the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to replace the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) as overseer of the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After voting for the bill in committee, Frank voted against final passage of the bill on the House floor, stating that he was doing so because an amendment to the bill on the House floor imposed restrictions on the kinds of nonprofit organizations that could receive funding under the bill. In early 2007, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank sponsored H.R. 1427, a bill to create the FHFA, granting that agency "general supervisory and regulatory authority over" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and directing it to reform the companies' business practices and regulate their exposure to credit and market risk. Among other things, Frank's legislation, titled the "Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007," directed the FHFA director to "ensure" that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "operate[] in a safe and sound manner, including maintenance of adequate capital and internal controls" and to establish standards for "management of credit and counterparty risk" and "management of market risk." The FHFA was eventually created after Congress incorporated provisions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said were "similar" to those of H.R. 1427 into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the president signed into law on July 30. Some in the conservative media have taken the charge further, suggesting that in the 1990s, Frank allowed his relationship with Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses to affect his responsibility as a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee to conduct oversight over Fannie Mae. For example, in an October 3 article, Fox News deputy Washington Managing editor Bill Sammon asserted, in a charge he later echoed on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, "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." In his article, however, Sammon cited only two sources: an anonymous Republican congressional staffer and Dan Gainor, who, Sammon did not note, is an employee of the conservative Media Research Center. Moreover, Sammon misrepresented Frank's record by reporting in his article that Frank "spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations" on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sammon did not note in his article or during an October 6 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor that in the early 1990s, while Frank's Democratic Party still held the majority in Congress, and while Moses was at Fannie Mae, Frank supported bills to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and create a government regulatory agency that would supervise and have authority over some aspects of the company: On September 30, 1991, Frank voted for a bill to create a new regulatory agency to oversee Fannie and Freddie that would have "[r]equire[d] the [agency's] Director to establish by regulation a risk-based capital test for the enterprises," "[r]equire[d] the Director to establish risk-based capital levels for each enterprise according to statutory guidelines," "[e]stablishe[d] minimum capital levels, critical capital levels, and enforcement levels," and "[s]et[] forth mandatory supervisory actions for the enterprises at various capital levels, including mandatory conservatorship." In October 1992, Frank voted for the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, creating OFHEO, which was tasked with "ensur[ing] that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the enterprises) and their affiliates are adequately capitalized and operating safely." As with the bill Frank voted for in September 1991, the new law gave OFHEO authority to set, monitor, and enforce risk-based capital requirements for Fannie and Freddie. Neal Boortz also advanced this claim about Frank and his former partner during the October 8 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show. On October 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that "[a] conservative political organization will begin airing nationwide TV advertisements Wednesday that criticize congressional Democrats for their ties to mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae." MYTH: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess" In a September 19 Huffington Post blog post, Center for American Progress senior fellow David Abramowitz wrote: "There must be a Republican playbook circulating widely with a chapter entitled, 'What to say if asked who's to blame for the foreclosure mess.' Because an awful lot of Republican candidates are all suddenly yelling 'Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae' whenever plunging home prices and the housing crisis comes up. [...] So their plan seems to be to chant Fannie Mae often and loudly enough, and hope the public will get confused about who really caused this huge national calamity. It is always a good political story to just blame a bad guy who has something to do with the same topic. Indeed, during the September 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, host Brit Hume said, "Many financial analysts are saying that if mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been effectively regulated years ago, the supercharged subprime mortgage meltdown that led to the current financial mess would either never have happened or would have been nowhere near as severe." But rebutting the suggestion that the subprime mortgage purchasing activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess," economist Dean Baker recently stated: Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded. In short, while Fannie and Freddie were completely irresponsible in their lending practices, the claim that they were responsible for the financial disaster is absurd on its face -- kind of like the claim that the earth is flat. Indeed, in a 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission filing (available here) covering its activities in 2004, Fannie Mae stated: "We did not participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages in 2004 and 2005." In the report, Fannie Mae also noted the growth of subprime lending and reported, "These trends and our decision not to participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages contributed to a significant loss in our share of new single-family mortgage-related securities issuances to private-label issuers during this period." Gross wrote in Slate that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were an "integral part" of a "culture of stupid, reckless lending." But, he wrote, they are not the primary culprits in the current financial crisis. He wrote: Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them-frequently using borrowed capital. As an example, he noted that the following happened during testimony by Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis." From Fuld's testimony: MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MYTH: Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has significantly more ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than does John McCain's In articles about the presidential candidates' responses to the economic crisis, the Associated Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post reported that the McCain campaign criticized Sen. Barack Obama for, in the words of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs." But those articles did not note that several senior McCain campaign aides have served as lobbyists for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or both. According to a Media Matters for America search of the Senate Office of Public Records' Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, they include: Political adviser Charlie Black, who lobbied for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004; National finance co-chairman Wayne Berman, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2008 and for Freddie Mac in 2004; Congressional liaison John Green, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2007 and for Freddie Mac in 2003; Arthur Culvahouse, who reportedly headed McCain's vice-presidential search team, lobbied for Fannie Mae in 1999, 2003, and 2004; and William E. Timmons Sr., who reportedly "has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition," lobbied for Freddie Mac from 2000 to 2008. Additionally, several media outlets have reported that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis previously served as president of the Homeownership Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group whose founding members included Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Media Matters has noted. MYTH: Democrats sought to divert funding in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to ACORN On the September 29 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, host Lou Dobbs claimed: "ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from a government bailout of Wall Street." Dobbs added later: "This is a straightforward deal for ACORN and other groups, left-wing groups, set up by the Democratic leadership of Congress. They're not interested in the bailout per se. They want to spread this out, and many people believe that this bailout in part is dear to the Democratic leadership because they want to advance a social agenda here as much as much as an economic bailout of Wall Street." Numerous other media figures also reported the false claim that Democrats were trying to steer money to ACORN. In fact, neither the draft proposal nor the final version of the bill contained any language mentioning ACORN. Those making the false claim were misrepresenting a provision -- since removed -- that would have directed 20 percent of any profits realized on troubled assets purchased under the plan into two previously established funds: the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund, which, under the law authorizing them, distribute funds through state block grants and through competitive application processes, respectively. On the October 9 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund similarly made the false claim that ACORN "almost got a slush fund in the housing bailout bill a few weeks ago." MYTH: Former President Clinton has blamed Democrats for the financial crisis In a September 30 post on Time.com's Swampland blog, Washington bureau chief Jay Carney claimed that comments former President Bill Clinton made during a September 25 interview on ABC's Good Morning America that were subsequently featured in a McCain campaign ad "could undercut Democratic arguments that Bush and the Republicans are primarily responsible" for the financial crisis. During that interview, Clinton said, "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." But in reporting on the ad, Carney failed to point out that in the very same interview, Clinton also said, "I think the biggest mistake, by the way, that contributed to the current circumstance that almost nobody talks about, is the repeal after decades of something called the uptick rule, which allowed the hedge funds, heavily leveraged, and others to just drive down the market without any kind of automatic stoppers." In a separate interview aired that day with Matt Lauer, co-host of NBC's Today, Clinton stated of the financial situation: "[T]his thing really took off when the SEC, under this administration, exercised less oversight and they got rid of something called the uptick rule, which enabled betting down on housing stocks to go crazy." The uptick rule, which was created in 1938, was a securities trading rule that regulated market short selling, the act of selling a stock that an investor does not own (but borrows from a broker or someone else) in anticipation that the stock's price will decrease. After a June 13, 2007, decision that became effective July 3, 2007, the SEC issued a final rule that repealed the uptick rule. From C-SPAN's October 6 coverage of the House Oversight Reform Committee: MICA: Again, you -- when you opened your statement, you said that Lehman Brothers -- and it was around for what, 150 years -- dealt in some pretty hard assets and some secure investments. You've been around a while. What turned the corner for you to get into some of the more speculative ventures, like subprime and some of the other, again, riskier investments? FULD: As I said in my verbal testimony, our participation in the mortgage-related businesses was clearly a natural for us, given our dominance in fixed income. That was something that went back a number of years. And even as I listened, as I say, to the panel before me, they correctly pointed out that this was a goal of the government to provide funding and mortgages to a number of people that typically would not or could not have received a mortgage. MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MICA: OK, but their collapse -- did that help precipitate any problems with your firm? FULD: It certainly set the stage for an environment, as I talked about loss of confidence and credit-crisis mentality that permeated our market, clearly set the stage for investors losing confidence, counterparties asking for additional collateral, and clearly an environment that lost liquidity -- MICA: I notice you -- FULD : -- which is the lifeblood of the capital market system.

Boortz: "[I]f there is a scoundrel in this housing crisis, it would be Barney Frank ... whose lover was working with Fannie Mae, pushing out these subprime mortgages"

On the October 8 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Neal Boortz baselessly suggested that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), whom he referred to as a "scoundrel," allowed his relationship in the 1990s with Herb Moses, a Fannie Mae official at the time, to improperly influence his conduct as a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which was responsible for oversight of Fannie Mae. Boortz claimed that Frank "was protecting Fannie Mae for about seven or eight years in the 1990s because his lover, his boyfriend was working for Fannie Mae, pushing out these subprime mortgage packages. So, Barney Frank -- Barney Frank's in the Congress of the United States protecting Fannie Mae. His boyfriend is at Fannie Mae pushing out these subprime mortgages. They get home at night, and in between boxing tonsils and swapping spit, the boyfriend said, 'Thank you, Barney, for saving my job.' " Boortz later said, "[I]f there is a scoundrel in this housing crisis, it would be Barney Frank, whose boyfriend, whose lover was working with Fannie Mae, pushing out these subprime mortgages while Barney Frank was defending Fannie Mae in the Congress of the United States." Boortz provided no evidence to support his suggestion that Frank allowed his personal ties to Moses to affect his behavior on the Financial Services Committee. In fact, Frank repeatedly took action over the years, including when Moses was at Fannie Mae, to strengthen oversight over the corporation. Boortz's attack echoed a reported strategy on the part of Republicans to try to deflect blame for the financial crisis onto Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, and proponents of the expansion of affordable housing. Newsweek senior editor Daniel Gross wrote in an October 7 Slate commentary: On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks -- which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities -- to make more efforts to do so. Media Matters for America has rebutted attacks on the CRA, noting that a large percentage of subprime mortgages were not made under the CRA, and noting comments made by Janet Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in a March speech in which she said that "studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households" [emphasis added]. Media Matters has also noted evidence showing that Fannie Mae was not a leader, but a follower, in the subprime lending market. But most important, undermining Boortz's baseless charge are actions Frank has taken over the years to strengthen oversight of Fannie and Freddie. In the early 1990s, when Democrats held the majority in Congress before the Republican takeover in 1995, Frank supported bills to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and create a government regulatory agency that would supervise and have authority over some aspects of the company in 1991 and 1992. Moses was employed by Fannie Mae at that time. Moreover, in 2005, when Frank was the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, he worked with committee chairman Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) on the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, which would have established the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to oversee the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After voting for the bill in committee, Frank voted against final passage of the bill on the House floor, stating that he was doing so because an amendment to the bill on the House floor imposed restrictions on the kinds of nonprofit organizations that could receive funding under the bill. In early 2007, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank sponsored H.R. 1427, a bill to create the FHFA, granting that agency "general supervisory and regulatory authority over" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and directing it to reform the two companies' business practices and regulate their exposure to credit and market risk. The FHFA was eventually created after Congress incorporated provisions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said were "similar" to those of H.R. 1427 into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the president signed into law on July 30. From the October 8 edition of Cox Radio Syndication's The Neal Boortz Show: BOORTZ: You know, now, who is one of the biggest culprits in our financial crisis today? It's Barney Frank. Barney Frank, who for 18 years or more has been working overtime to protect Fannie Mae. He was protecting Fannie Mae for about seven or eight years in the 1990s because his lover, his boyfriend was working for Fannie Mae, pushing out these subprime mortgage packages. So, Barney Frank -- Barney Frank's in the Congress of the United States protecting Fannie Mae. His boyfriend is at Fannie Mae pushing out these subprime mortgages. They get home at night, and in between boxing tonsils and swapping spit, the boyfriend said, "Thank you, Barney, for saving my job." "No problem." [...] BOORTZ: Representative Barney Frank, who has been at the middle of the problems out there -- been at the middle with the problems with the subprime mortgages and making all of these loans to people who could not afford them -- now says that Republican criticism of Democrats over the housing crisis is racially motivated. The last refuge of scoundrels. And if there is a scoundrel in this housing crisis, it would be Barney Frank, whose boyfriend, whose lover was working with Fannie Mae, pushing out these subprime mortgages while Barney Frank was defending Fannie Mae in the Congress of the United States. Barney Frank feels really vulnerable right now because he knows the American people are starting to understand his complicity. They're starting to understand. So he goes to that last refuge. "Yup, the Republicans are guilty of racism for attacking me and my Democrat friends on the nation's housing crisis because a lot of these subprime mortgages were made to black people." Isn't that nice?

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