Barney Frank, The Fat Fox Guarding the Hen House

More Fun Facts from OpenSecrets.org, This time from Massachusetts' 4th Congressional District Race featuring 30 year incumbent, Barney Frank vs. newcomer Sean Bielat.

Below you'll see that the people sending the most money to Frank are those who work in and/around the very same industry he regulates.

The counter-intuitive truth about regulations is that they most help those who are the richest players in the regulated industry. How's that work? Because the cost of compliance acts as a barrier to entrance to start-ups.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure Barney doesn't really want his liberal constituents understanding who pulls his strings.

Top Industries

2010 Race: Massachusetts District 04

Most members of Congress get the bulk of their campaign contributions from two main sources: the industries that make up the economic base of their home district and the Washington-based interest groups that pay more attention to the member's committee assignments in Congress. In addition, most Democrats receive substantial sums from labor unions.

From this table, you can get a flavor of which are the top industries giving to the candidates running for Congress in your district. Do the industries match your local economy, or are they more Washington-based? If the latter, the candidate may have divided loyalties on issues where the interests of their cash constituents conflict with those of the voters who elected them.

Barney Frank (D)

Industry	Total
Securities & Investment	$251,958
Insurance	$227,449
Real Estate	$213,750
Lawyers/Law Firms	$170,714
Retired	$123,771
Misc Finance	$102,750
Democratic/Liberal	$71,837
Commercial Banks	$70,800
Casinos/Gambling	$61,400
Lobbyists	$56,800
Accountants	$42,950
Business Services	$35,750
General Contractors	$30,350
Misc Unions	$27,500
Finance/Credit Companies	$24,000
Health Professionals	$23,080
Misc Manufacturing & Distributing	$22,900
Education	$22,150
Printing & Publishing	$21,700
Hospitals/Nursing Homes	$21,190

Sean D. Bielat (R)

Industry	Total
Retired	$46,750
Securities & Investment	$35,600
Lawyers/Law Firms	$21,826
Misc Finance	$12,850
Real Estate	$11,950
Misc Business	$10,500
Health Professionals	$7,050
TV/Movies/Music	$6,800
Commercial Banks	$6,450
Civil Servants/Public Officials	$6,150
Business Services	$6,150
Computers/Internet	$3,500
Printing & Publishing	$3,400
Accountants	$3,100
Education	$2,500
Insurance	$2,500
Chemical & Related Manufacturing	$2,250
Misc Manufacturing & Distributing	$2,000
Oil & Gas	$1,750
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products	$1,650

One more reason to Money Bomb Sean Bielat....

Barney Frank, the nauseatingly fat and ugly congressperp ostensibly representing the people residing in Massachusetts' 4th Congressional District - and a primary contributor to the economic collapse of 2008 - has been a very hypocritical little piglet (but then there's nothing new about that when it comes to Frank):

Here's the juice:

Rival blasts Barney Frank’s swanky free jet ride

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, immersed in one of the toughest political fights of his career, took a free private jet to the Virgin Islands courtesy of a Maine congresswoman’s billionaire fiance — whose company received a $200 million federal bailout, the Herald has learned.

Frank, who’s facing feisty Republican challenger Sean Bielat, flew to the tropical paradise for a vacation in 2009 on a $25 million jet owned by Paloma Partners honcho S. Donald Sussman, the fiance of U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). Paloma Securities — a subsidiary of Sussman’s Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund — received $200 million in 2009 as part of the $180 billion federal bailout of troubled insurance giant AIG, records show.

Frank, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said his partner, Jim Ready, lives in Pingree’s district and the couples are “personal friends.”

“She and I have become friendly and they invited us to the Virgin Islands and I checked with House ethics (officials) and they gave it the OK,” Frank said. “It was purely personal.”

Republican National Committee spokesman Parish Braden said: “Barney Frank’s acceptance of a lavish gift from a hedge fund manager, an industry he is responsible for regulating, is a troubling conflict of interest that raises serious questions about his judgment.”

Bielat added: “Typical. Barney keeps showing how career politicians work — they use our dollars for their favors. It may be legal, but it’s wrong and that’s why we need a change.”

Frank called the GOP criticism “nonsense” and said he has backed legislation to crack down on hedge funds.

“I’ve never talked with him about any favorable treatment,” he said of Sussman. “I voted to raise his taxes. That’s one of the most backwards things I’ve ever heard. I’ve taken the anti-hedge fund position.”

Frank, who voted for the bailout in October 2008, took the trip around Christmas 2009. He reported the trip in required House financial filings and valued the flight at $1,500. He originally listed the trip vaguely as “first class round trip travel by private aircraft” in a congressional filing in May. In July, he amended the report to show he traveled from Portland, Maine, to the Virgin Islands. He called the discrepancy a “clerical error.”

Sussman, a huge Democratic campaign donor with homes in Maine and Connecticut, lives in St. John, Virgin Islands. Spokespersons for Sussman and Pingree declined to comment. Pingree also is facing criticism from the Maine GOP for using Sussman’s jet.

h/t to Christopher Fountain, my nearby neighbor in Greenwich where Sussman keeps a "cottage."

MONEY BOMB SEAN BIELAT HERE

Cross Post from For What its Worth - Two Barneys in One!

The post that follows is my entirely shameless (but credited) theft of content from my blogging friend Christopher Fountain who writes "For What its Worth"

We’re in the best of hands

From Best of the Web, this:

Two Barneys in One!

• “We have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about homeownership and its role in the economy. Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity–homeownership, homes–where there is not the degree of leverage that we’ve seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality, people building fiberoptic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you’re not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for homeownership.“–Rep. Barney Frank,June 27, 2005
  
  
  
• “One of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, and even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that. I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with homeownership. I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing. My efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing. I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership, and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that.”–Rep. Barney Frank, “Power Lunch,” CNBC, May 21, 2010

Blame Barney for Fannie Mae's $7 Trillion in Liabilities

From Chris Fountain at For What its Worth comes this "surprising " news.

Gee, thanks a lot Barney.

Fannie Mae – “we’re even more bankrupt than we’ve admitted”

$7 trillion in liabilities, oh, taxpayer – that’s half the US debt. This one you really can blame on Barney “Fannie Mae is in no danger” Frank. This should be fun.

From ZeroHedge:

The bankruptcy of America is getting borderline hilarious, even as stock capitalization surges by about $1 trillion based on funny money to be printed by the ECB with the Fed’s assistance. In the second coming of moral hazard, one piece of news that some may have missed is Fannie Mae’s earlier announcement that the mortgage lender is now more bankrupt than ever before – the firm lost $13.1 billion in net income on $3 billion in revenue. “The first-quarter loss resulted in a net worth deficit of $8.4 billion as of March 31, 2010, taking into account a $3.3 billion reduction in our deficit related to the adoption of new accounting standards, as well as unrealized gains on available-forsale securities during the first quarter. The Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has therefore asked Treasury to provide us $8.4 billion on or prior to June 30, 2010.” Additionally, the Fed backstopped entity also announced that “there is uncertainty regarding future of business after conservatorship terminated and expect this uncertainty to continue.” But since in America asset prices have not reflected fundamentals in over a year, nobody gives a rat’s ass. And the political whores in DC feel like beating up anyone who even dares to mention this particular $7 trillion dollar question mark which is equivalent to 50% of total US debt, so expect no reform to happen here, just like nothing happened with HFT, until the markets hits 1 quadrillion or zero. For all intents and purposes, the two outcomes are equivalent.

DEMOCRAT DEMENTIA: COAKLEY FLOUNDERS, BUSH TO BLAME

UPDATE: James, penning The Reaganite Republican, has a great round-up on bloggers covering the Brown v. Coakley race.

Fully a year after George Bush left office, Democrats continue to play pin the blame on Bush for all that ails us now. And the Democrat base, as represented by retired school teacher Rosemary Kverek, continues to exhibit its propensity for very poor reasoning (as well as basic math) skills on precisely who's at fault for the economic morass in which we find ourselves today. Not to be out-shined by former teacher Ms. Kverek in the blame game, Ted Kennedy's son, Patrick (D-RI) appears to think that the Democrats should spend even more time blaming Bush and the Republicans for Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's collusive criminality with the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac Ponzi scheme. From Hotline OnCall, comes this piece:

After Obama Rally, Dems Pin Blame On Bush

By Felicia Sonmez

As audience members streamed out of Pres. Obama's rally on behalf of AG Martha CoakleyGeorge W. Bush. (D) here tonight, the consensus was that the fault for Coakley's now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person --

"People are upset because there's so many problems," Rosemary Kverek, 70, a retired Charleston schoolteacher said as tonight's rally wrapped up. "But the problems came from the previous administration. So we're blaming poor Obama, who's working 36 hours a day ... to solve these problems that he inherited."

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by "George Bush and his cronies" are not so easily solved.

"If you think there's magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown," Kennedy said. "If you don't, if you know that it takes eight years for George Bush and his cronies to put our country into this hole ... then you know we have a lot of digging to do, but some work needs to be done and this president's in the process of doing it and we need to get Marcia Coakley to help him to do that."

(Curiously, Kennedy mentioned Coakley repeatedly during his remarks to reporters, each time referring to her as "Marcia," not "Martha.")

More Kennedy: "One thing the Democrats have done wrong? We haven't kept the focus on this disaster on the Republicans who brought it upon us. We've tried too hard to do that right thing, and that's to fix it, as opposed to spend more of our time and energy pointing the finger at who got us [here] in the first place."

Blaming their problems on Bush does carry a risk for Dems, however -- with their sights so firmly focused on the past, Brown's campaign has managed to wrest the "change" mantle from them.

Meanwhile, even as Kennedy took on both Bush and Brown head-on, some attendees were more muted in their criticism of Brown.

"I mean, he is handsome," Christine DiPitro, 61, of Malden, said of Brown.

"He does appeal to the regular guy with his truck, but that's about all."

As the Democrat Leadership Plans to Cripple America with Cap and Trade, the Rest of the World Seems to be Coming to its Senses

From the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel comes this gem on the massive global shift in opinion on "Climate Change" based on evidence that the whole Al Bore putsch on "Global Warming" is rooted in deeply flawed science. Even so, Waxman, Markey, Frank, Pelosi and "Mr. Transparency" himself, the Great and Powerful BOZ, continue to ram "climate change" legislation through against both the compelling evidence debunking the validty of the "science" upon which they rely and the clear wishes of the American people.

___________

The Climate Change Climate Change

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

To read the whole of Ms. Stassel's compelling piece click here

See Left Coast Rebel's excellent related discussion here

See also, GetLiberty.org's piece here

Barney, Anthony, Fannie & Freddie: Un Menage a Quatre...

From Reuters comes the following story about that irrepressible oink, Barney Frank (D. Mass) and his New York colleague, Anthony Weiner (gag) who are once again after Fanny Mae & Freddie Mac to loosen their credit standards. Kinda makes one wonder just how much cash the Condo developers' lobbyists have dumped into these two Congressmen's 2010 campaign warchests.

Fannie, Freddie asked to relax condo loan rules: report

(Reuters) - Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, the Wall Street Journal said.

In March, Fannie Mae ... said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70 percent of the units have been sold, up from 51 percent, the paper said. Freddie Mac ... is due to implement similar policies next month, the paper said.

In a letter to the CEO's of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold "may be too onerous" and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments, according to the paper.

The legislators asked the companies to "make appropriate adjustments" to their underwriting standards for condos, the paper added.

In an interview with the paper, Weiner said the rules have "had a real chill on the ability to get these condos sold," at a time when prices of condos have fallen enough to attract potential buyers.

In addition to the 70 percent sales threshold, Fannie Mae will also not purchase mortgages in buildings where 15 percent of owners are delinquent on condo association dues or where one owner has more than 10 percent of units, as the firm sees these as signals that a building could run into financial trouble, the paper added. Both Fannie and Freddie are preparing a response to the lawmakers, according to the paper.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters.

(Reporting by Chakradhar Adusumilli in Bangalore; editing by Simon Jessop)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

_______________

BTW: It should be noted that Barney was a recent winner of Citizen's Against Government Waste's "Porker of the Month" Award (March 2009). To read CAGW's highly entertaining tribute to the rotund and nearly incomprehensible congressman representing Massachusetts' 4th Congressional District, click here. I promise, it's worth your time.

_______________

Life is short, periodic levity is essential, to that end I provide below (courtesy of YouTube) the brilliant Paul Shanklin's Barney Frank song spoof: "Banking Queen" to the tune of ABBA's "Dancing Queen." Enjoy!

Three Duplicitous Rebublicans Earn Porker(s) of the Month Award from C.A.G.W.

Reps. Hunter, Jenkins, Lance are CAGW’s April Porkers of the Month

Washington, D.C. - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today named freshmen Representatives Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), and Leonard Lance (R-N.J.) as its April 2009 Porkers of the Month. The three members of Congress broke their signed earmark reform campaign pledges with CAGW’s lobbying arm, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW).

“Every year members of Congress betray the taxpayers’ trust by bloating the budget with earmarks, but this betrayal is particularly acute because these three representatives broke their signed campaign pledges just a few months after being sworn into the 111th Congress,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz.

Specifically, the three pledged “not to request any earmarked funding or targeted tax benefit that does not serve a federal interest and/or have a federal nexus.” Contrary to this pledge, all three requested multiple earmarks in the FY 2010 appropriations bills that violated that plank of the ten-point pledge. The earmark requests are listed on the members’ websites, as required by recently passed earmark reforms.

To read all of CAGW's commemorative dedication to these Republican scalawags, click here.

________________

That irrepressible slob Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), was the deserving winner of CAGW's March "Porker of the Month" prize. Congratulations Barney, YOU CERTAINLY EARNED IT!!!