In 1979, the financial health of the thrift industry was again challenged by a return of high interest rates and inflation, sparked this time by a doubling of oil prices. Because the sudden nature of these changes threatened to cause hundreds of S&L failures, Congress finally acted on deregulating the thrift industry. It passed two laws, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. The deregulation not only allowed thrifts to offer a wider array of savings products, but also significantly expanded their lending authority. These changes were intended to allow S&Ls to "grow" out of their problems, and as such represented the first time that the government explicitly sought to increase S&L profits as opposed to promoting housing and homeownership. Other changes in thrift oversight included authorizing the use of more lenient accounting rules to report their financial condition, and the elimination of restrictions on the minimum numbers of S&L stockholders. Such policies, combined with an overall decline in regulatory oversight (known as forbearance), would later be cited as factors in the later collapse of the thrift industry. [3]

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Tax Reform Act of 1986

By enacting 26 U.S.C. § 469 (relating to limitations on deductions for passive activity losses and limitations on passive activity credits) to remove many tax shelters, especially for real estate investments, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 significantly decreased the value of many such investments which had been held more for their tax-advantaged status than for their inherent profitability. This contributed to the end of the real estate boom of the early to mid '80s and facilitated the Savings and Loan crisis. Prior to 1986, much real estate investment was done by passive investors. It was common for syndicates of investors to pool their resources in order to invest in property, commercial or residential. They would then hire management companies to run the operation. TRA 86 reduced the value of these investments by limiting the extent to which losses associated with them could be deducted from the investor's gross income. This, in turn, encouraged the holders of loss-generating properties to try and unload them, which contributed further to the problem of sinking real estate values. This turmoil and repositioning in real estate markets was not caused by changes in market conditions.[citation needed]

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So, Carter can be blamed for the law in 1980, but not 1982 or 1986, and the 'cure' to allow the S&Ls to 'grow' their way out of their problems was worse than the disease.

As for Barney Frank, he and his fellow Democrats weren't responsible for the Presidents' inability to recruit Republicans to his cause, but then in PPJ land, only the ranking member of a faction with a minority of both Houses of Congress could be the root cause of the problem.

Bubbles can be definitively identified only in hindsight after a market correction,[23]  which in the U.S. housing market began in 2005-2006.[24][25][26][27][28][29]  Former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said "We had a bubble in housing",[30][31]  and also said in the wake of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007, "I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006."[32]

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But, you know better than Alan Greenspan, who doesn't blame Barney Franks:

Another important consequence of the dot-com crash and the subsequent 2001-2002 recession was that the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates to historically low levels, from about 6.5% to just 1%. Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted that the housing bubble was "fundamentally engendered by the decline in real long-term interest rates."

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Risky mortgage products and lax lending standards

The recent use of subprime mortgages, adjustable rate mortgages, interest-only mortgages, and stated income loans (a subset of "Alt-A" loans, where the borrower did not have to provide documentation to substantiate the income stated on the application; these loans were also called "no doc" loans) and, somewhat pejoratively, as "liar loans") to finance home purchases described above have raised concerns about the quality of these loans should interest rates rise again or the borrower is unable to pay the mortgage.[22][63][64][65] In many areas, particularly in those with most appreciation, non-standard loans went from almost unheard of to prevalent. For example, 80% of all mortgages initiated in San Diego region in 2004 were adjustable-rate, and 47% were interest only.

Gersh, I didn't know Barney Frank had that much influence in San Diego.  :-)

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Three times as much as to Ann Richards, but Bush says that Ken Lay was an Ann Richards supporter, are you going to believe him or the lying contribution records?

And if everything between Kenny Boy and GWB was above board, why did Bush seek to minimize their connection?

And you sneer at people who want to see Obama's birth certificate...

No, I sneer at people who don't believe it was released in the first place, along with folks on the other side of the aisle:

Pres. Barack Obama has a birthday coming up, a week from Tuesday. We hope he takes the day off--or even the whole week, the briefest of respites from his busy schedule of truncating our liberties while exhausting both the public coffers and our patience. The president's birthday comes to mind because we recently spent some time looking at a photograph of his birth certificate, being held by Joe Miller of Factcheck.org, who took the time to examine it. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. Baby Barack's birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.

Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama's place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job conducted with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. We've seen everything under the sun blamed on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and Rosie O'Donnell has given us much mirth with her metallurgical expertise, while Andrew Sullivan has beclowned himself and tarnished the good name of The Atlantic with his investigation into the "real" parentage of Trig Palin. Most notable, the Iraq War summoned the craziness in a big way, and there are those who still shudder over their espressos at the mention of the Carlyle Group. And there is a fair amount of crossover between those fixated on Obama's birth certificate and the 9/11 "truthers" -- lawyer Phil Berg, for instance, is a player in both worlds. There is nothing that President Obama's coterie would enjoy more than to see the responsible Right become a mirror image of
the loopy Left circa 2003.

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But, I know, NRO is in the can for the One.

From Snopes.com:

In October 2008, and again in July 2009, Hawaiian officials reported that they had personally verified that Barack Obama's original birth certificate was in the Hawaii State Department's files:
State officials say there's no doubt Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

"I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen."

Fukino says that no state official, including Gov. Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's certificate be handled differently from any other.

She says state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest in it.

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I think all that teabagging each other must do something to the frontal lobes after a while.