Year-End Leftovers

Yes Virginia, They Still Want to Kill Us
The attempt appeared to underscore the continuing determination of Muslim militants to kill Americans more than eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks. (NYT, 12/27/2009)

Rahm-bo: First Bloodletting
As the saying goes, politics can make strange bedfellows. Well, conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is teaming up with liberal blogger Jane Hamsher in calling for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to resign. They've sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder saying Emanuel's time on the board of directors at the government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac from 2000 to 2001 may have given him some knowledge of alleged financial irregularities. The unlikely duo claim Emanuel and the White House are stonewalling, writing: "A 2003 report by Freddie Mac's regulator indicated that Freddie Mac executives had informed the board of their intention to misstate the earnings to insure their own bonuses during the time Mr. Emanuel was a director." (Brett Baier, Political Grapevine, Fox News 12/24/2009)

The Education of Olympia
The bill Democrats approved on Christmas Eve was drafted "in the shadows, without transparency, just to garner the necessary 60 votes and nothing more," as Mrs. Snowe put it in a statement on Sunday. (WSJ, 12/26/2009)

The Penny Pincher
This week brought a more troubling incident. Harry Reid's Senate had just secured its 60th vote for Mr. Obama's health-care reform. Whatever one's view, its trillion-dollar-plus cost is an agreed given. Days earlier the public saw Congress vote to raise the debt ceiling by almost $290 billion to make room for the needs of the $800 billion stimulus bill, the unprecedented $3.5 trillion budget, and the House's approval Dec. 16 of a new $154 billion jobs bill. Amid this President Obama said Monday: "We can't continue to spend . . . as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money." (Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 12/24/2009)

Unholy Alliance
Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups—if that's not redundant—are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under "nuisance" laws. A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse. (WSJ, 12/28/2009)

Good Question
A U.S. government that has barred the phrase "war on terror" has nonetheless acknowledged that a failed Christmas day bomb attack on an airliner was a terrorist attempt. Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House? (WSJ, 12/28/2009)

Fat Cat Pat
It was equally outrageous to read in the Decemver 16, 2009, Wall Street Journal that Vermont's Senator Patrick Leahy, along with four other senators, similarly exploited taxpayer funds to treat himself and his wife to a trip to England. According to the story, Leahy spent four days on our dime at the Danesfield House Hotel & Spa at $340-a-night. The state business Leahy was supposedly tending to in order to justify this junket included a riverboat trip down the Thames and a private tour of Windsor Castle. (VTGOP, 12/21/2009)