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Putin, the Devil, and Why We Should Read Dostoyevsky

Putin We know that most politicians pursue hyperbole as an avocation, and some are better at this than others. It is generally agreed that President Donald Trump is a master of the art of persuasion by exaggeration. But he is not a lone practitioner. In a serious democracy, practitioners would receive a death sentence for misleading the public.   In every hyperbole, a staple of all comedy, a lie lies asleep in bed with a truth. To lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not. The only lie consistently reproved by our free – and increasingly thin and costly newspaper media – is hypocrisy. But there is a saving grace to hypocrisy which, we are told, is “the compliment vice pays to virtue.” To mislead is a vice, but the politician who gives himself over to hypocrisy hangs onto the truth with one hand while bidding it good-bye – hopefully, temporarily – with the other. The hypocrite is not morally deracinated. He knows that the exception he relies upon really does prove, rather t...
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Tong Takes a Bite out of FOI, His Cloak of Invisibility

Tong Fresh off a disaster in which one of his Assistant Attorneys  General, Seth Hollander, was referred by a judge to Connecticut’s Statewide Grievance Committee for having knowingly misled a court, Attorney General William Tong, all by his lonesome, is trying in a separate court filing to extend congressional immunity to Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission.   Mark Pazniokis of CTMirror puts it this way: “The office of Attorney General William Tong is asking a Connecticut court to rule for the first time in the 50-year history of the state Freedom of Information Act that all records relating to the “legitimate legislative activities” of the General Assembly are exempt from public disclosure.   “At issue is the meaning of the 55-word “speech or debate clause’ of the Connecticut Constitution. Like a similar provision in the U.S. Constitution, the clause creates a legislative privilege intended to protect legislators from arrest or other interference by ...
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The Weicker Effect and Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal Candidates

Weicker In any statewide contest between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut, the Republican Party would face, many have argued, odds that cannot easily be overcome.   Current numbers stand against Republicans, Registered Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans by a two-to-one majority.   Voters unaffiliated with either of Connecticut’s two major parties outnumber registered Democrats in Connecticut by a slight majority, and Democrats have for decades held major cities in Connecticut, the holy grail of power politics in the state. None of these fortifications are impregnable. To believe they are part of the permanent patrimony of the State Democrat Party is to yield to political despair and affirm the political superiority of hegemonic governance over that of a representative republic.   The enfeeblement of the state Republican Party begins with the political ascendancy of Senator Lowell Weicker. When Senator Weicker’s congressional ascendancy en...
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How Socialist Are The Socialists?

Mamdani The Trinity of American Socialism – Father Bernie Sanders, a Vermont socialist; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and gang, the second persona of the Trinity; and Mayor of New York City in waiting Zohran Mamdani – it is intimated by a breathless, neo-progressive Eastern Seaboard media, are together the new face of the born-again Democrat Party. Mamdani has been regarded by some as the indispensable spirit completing the leftist Trinity.   The new face of the Democrat Party in New York City recently met at the White House with arch nemesis, President Donald Trump, who was cordial enough to forbear calling Mamdani a communist.   There is nothing strange in all this. Trump has met cordially with President of Russian Vladimir Putin, a communist proto-Stalinist. Putin began his military barrage of Ukraine by asserting that Ukraine was not even a country, and he has been for years attempting to reduce the non-country, inoffensive to Russia, to rubble. President Xi Jinping of China --...
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PURA, Tong’s Role

Tong No one – least of all Connecticut Attorney General Willim Tong – should be surprised at Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik’s ruling in a long-delayed case before his court. In his ruling, according to the Hartford Courant, “Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik upheld every allegation two Avangrid gas subsidiaries made in lawsuits seeking to overturn year-old PURA rate decisions that not only denied the companies rate increases, but slashed then existing rates.”   Budzik’s ruling, tight and unequivocal, should be taught to prospective lawyers as a pristine example of what good lawyers may and may not do in defense of their clients. Hint: Remember, you are an officer of the court. At all costs, avoid misleading the court. If you fail to do so, you will do your client, your boss and your case irreparable harm on those occasions when the case is presented to a judge uncorrupted by political considerations.   Not only did Budzik decide the case rightly on its merits, h...
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Election Rhetoric, Connecticut’s One-Party State, and the Brushfires of Freedom

Lamont The title of a recent newspaper story reads, “Lamont’s bid for a third term could make him the longest serving governor since colonial era . ”   The colonial era, readers who have a nodding acquaintance with US history need not be reminded, was Connecticut’s pre-democracy era, a time when kings were kings and subjects were subject to the whimsey of monarchs.   The distinguishing characteristic of a monarchy, anyone associated with the “No Kings” movement would doubtless agree, is rule by a single executive – the king, his political court, and his political praetorian guard.   Thomas Jefferson, following in the intellectual footsteps of Voltaire, boldly declared himself an enemy of “every tyranny over the mind of man.” Jefferson kept a bust of Voltaire on his writing desk at Monticello. Modern journalists would do well to adopt Jefferson’s brash boast as their operative principle.   It is very much in doubt these days whether Jefferson’s offspring, the modern D...
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Caucus Politics in “The Land of Steady Habits”

Practical politics in Connecticut – that is, a politics of political action – is reserved only for in-office Democrat politicians. All others, including marginalized Republican political actors, are spectators of the sport, not participants. The entire Connecticut state Republican Party has been effectively benched for decades.   Democrats know that permitting Republicans in the state General Assembly to ventilate is harmless because, in a state in which a massive Democrat Party caucus determines political action, words alone do not give rise to political action.   Is this state of things a problem for our democracy?   The answer to that question is an unqualified “Yes!”   Partisan caucus politics is the opposite of democratic or republican politics.  In a vibrant two-party system, words that lead to political action are politically convincing because political action produces public consequences that cannot be distorted by otherwise convincing partisan politica...
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