Blumenthal: Follow The Bouncing Dollars

A splendidly written and researched story in Sunday’s Harford Courant by Josh Kovner and Jon Lender, demonstrates that the state’s attorney’s general office has become a money operation more interested in cash than justice.
The story calls into question a case prosecuted by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, sometimes mentioned in press reports as a desirable Democratic candidate for governor or U.S. senator.

The owners of a Brookfield quarry, Rock Acquisition Limited Partnership, convinced their property had been undervalued by two appraisers, the last hired by Blumenthal, took their case to court and were fortunate enough to have the issue decided by Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Sheedy, who was attentive to the facts of the case.

Here are the facts:

1) The quarry owners questioned an appraisal of their property, taken by the state to allow the construction of a Route 7 highway bypass near Brookfield that opened last month. The owners thought their property was worth $20-$25 million. The state, which took the property though eminent domain, valued the 125 acre property at $4.1 million. The owners sued to recover the balance.

2) Enter Blumenthal, whose office shopped around for another appraiser, Kenneth Jones – who low-priced the property at $2.3 million, about one tenth of the value placed by the owner’s on their property and a savings for the state of $1.8 million. According to the Courant story, “Jones seemed to be just what officials desired when they hurriedly went expert-shopping in 2007 to defend the DOT's previous decisions in appraising the quarry.”

Assistant Attorney General Carol Young was pleased with the choice. She wrote in a September 2007 e-mail to Richard Allen, head of right-of-way acquisitions for the state DOT, “I think that he is the quarry expert that we need on this matter.”

Jones had valued a similar sized property in New Jersey at $47.5 million, although that property, unlike the undervalued Brookfield property, came outfitted with an illegal dump laced with asbestos debris.

3) At trial, Judge Sheedy, examining what the paper later called “the checkered background” of Jones -- handsomely paid $240,000 in fees and expenses for his defective appraisal -- fairly gagged, and Blumenthal lost the case. The state will now be forced to cough up $28 million to satisfy Rock Acquisition Limited Partnership, as well as the judge who, refreshingly, was committed to securing justice for one of Blumenthal’s victims and far less interested in making money for the state than Blumenthal’s greedy operatives.

This is not the first time that Blumenthal has used both the media and resources at his disposal to make money for Connecticut.

In the notorious Hoffman case, Blumenthal’s office submitted a fatally defective affidavit to a judge to secure an exparte attachment of assets. Among the assets he seized were those of the husband of the person he was prosecuting, and compelling evidence has been provided in that case to show that the husband’s business was not connected to his wife’s. In another case now wending its way through the courts, Blumenthal seized the business machinery of a wood pellet supplier by virtue of yet another defective affidavit. The affiant in that case, an inspector in Blumenthal’s office, later admitted in discovery that he was not a direct witness of any of the matters reported in his affidavit. And there is compelling sworn witness testimony in that case to show that the company sued by Blumenthal may have been subject to a shakedown initiated by the pellet company’s supplier. Blumenthal, in other words, may have prosecuted the wrong business. The distress caused by Blumenthal’s botched prosecution resulted in an attempted suicide by one of the company's partners, the seizure of whose business assets, accomplished by the defective affidavit, made it impossible for him to supply his customers with the promised goods he was frantically scrambling to buy from another resource.

Unfortunately, the media’s unquestioned acceptance of Blumenthal’s press releases – and, more importantly, its failure to report sufficiently on the after effects of his prosecutions – make the media Blumenthal’s principle enabler.

The Courant’s follow-up report on the questionable methods used by Blumenthal to secure easy convictions and negotiated settlements is a refreshing and hopeful sign that Blumenthal’s press release claims will in the future be subject to more careful and comprehensive media scrutiny.

Fedele's Chance

There is no log cabin in Lieutenant Governor Mike Fedele’s biography, but it’s an interesting read anyway: Born in Italy, Fedele came to the United States as a tot, worked hard and made good. He was plucked by Jodi Rell from the State House of Representatives to run as her Lieutenant Governor following the dark days of the John Rowland administration.

Fedele now is running for governor on the Republican Party ticket, and there are some perilous cliffs he must negotiate along the way.

The position of Lieutenant Governor is not the brightest spot in the political heavens. It is comparable on a state level to the Vice Presidential office, famously defined by John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, as being (a clean translation follows) “not worth a warm bucket of spit.”

Garner ran for the presidency and lost to Roosevelt but was chosen by the Democratic convention to share the ticket after he had released his pledged delegates to FDR.

Garner later opposed Roosevelt’s packing of the Supreme Court, stepping down as Vice President in January 1941 and bringing to a close a 46 year career. After his long run in public office, Garner settled in his home state of Texas. A good friend and political adviser to President Harry Truman, he devoted himself upon leaving office to his real estate business and fished a lot, which apparently was beneficial to his health: Garner died full of years at the ripe age of 98, establishing a record as the longest living Vice-President in U.S. history.

Fedele might have created more of a splash as Lieutenant Governor, but the political pool was immediately full with the addition of Lisa Moody as Gov. Rell’s chief aide.

As Lieutenant Governor, Fedele cannot help but find himself in a delicate position. It is generally supposed that the governor’s “lieutenant” ought to be loyal at all costs. Rell will finish out her term as a lame duck governor, which necessarily places Fedele squarely on the horns of a dilemma.

It is no secret in Republican quarters that Rell, in part because of the nature of her office, had not offered a stiff resistance to leading Democrats. Rell talked the talk when it was politically expedient for her to do so, but her behavior in office gives reason to doubt that she ever had been committed to any recognizable Republican program. She compromised on the matter of union pay and benefits, locking in expensive non-negotiable contracts well past the duration of her term. She blundered by refusing to sign a disastrously costly smoke and mirror budget, thinking that she could use her line item veto to expunge costly items, an unconstitutional option she was warned against by others of her advisors and the ever helpful lean and hungry Richard Blumenthal, the state’s highly partisan attorney general. Her chief of staff, Moody, was notorious for making deals with Democrats, a disposition that was apparently infectious.

Rell will ride off into the sunset at the end of the campaign season. Until that time, she will be hung like an albatross around Fedele’s neck by his opponents both within and outside his party. Lame duck governors do not usually inspire the kind of political loyalty most often connected to possible political favors. There will be no favors at the end of Rell’s run. And it will not be possible for Republicans gubernatorial hopefuls to run a principled and spirited campaign against Democratic contenders without muddying the shoes of the departing Republican governor.

The hero of every un-heroic politician, Yogi Berra, once advised, “When you reach a fork in the road, take it.”

Sometime during the campaign, Fedele will reach his fork in the road, and he will not be able to follow Berra’s advice.

At some point in the campaign, the Republican gubernatorial aspirant will be asked whether he will part ways with the Democratic legislative majority on the matter of spending and taxes. Or it will be pointed out that a Republican governor disposed to cut business taxes will be outnumbered by Democrats who during the last budget fandango proposed a crippling 30% increase in such taxes. These are forks in the campaign road. The fate of the state depends upon which route the next governor will take, and Republicans are not as fortunate as Democrats in such matters, because their solutions will be painful in the short run, beneficial in the long run.

For Republicans, one fork in the road points to the governor’s chair and a hard slog ahead. The other fork leads to success, a quick surrender, a fatal policy for the state and, for any future Republican governor who has not read the signs of the times, early retirement in the ruins with lots of fishing.

Say what? Who’s “Misleading And Deceptive?”

In the face of a current budget deficit of nearly half a billion dollars, Republicans are proposing what they have always proposed -- a modest cut in spending of 6.5%.

The Republicans also want to restore 84 million in cuts to municipalities as well as the half percentage point sales tax reduction that disappeared because Speaker of the House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams cleverly pegged the reduction to disappearing revenues. The tax would have remained in place if state revenues did not sink below a predictable level that caused its elimination.

The Republican proposal has caused the union bought Speaker of the State House of Representatives to reach for his adjectives. Speaker Chris Donovan denounced the Republican plan as “misleading and deceptive" – sort of like the budget he and President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams fashioned, which is now, only weeks after its passage through the Democratic dominated legislature, a half million dollars in the red.

In the new fiscal year, the state will face a multi-billion dollar budget gap, Christmas pudding to the Democrats, whose as yet unannounced plan is to cover the bulk of the coming deficit by increasing Connecticut’s new progressive income tax.

Gov. Jodi Rell, now a lame duck and free to display her true colors, objected to the Republican plan because it contained a $36 million cut in higher education spending that would deny the state $541 million in stimulus funny- money that the federal government is prepared to borrow from the Chinese government, whose economic program is decidedly more Friedmanesque than President Barrack Obama’s command economy.

Donovan was delighted, as always, to use Rell’s objection to frustrate Republican measures, the one constant in his too expensive leadership of the House.

Williams, Donovan’s co-partner in the Senate, was encouraged that more and more lawmakers were speaking out on cue “about the negative impacts Gov. Rell's proposed cuts would have on cities and towns. Unfortunately, while Republicans say they want to protect municipalities, their own plan would shift many costs to cities and towns, make mid-year property taxes more likely, and possibly compromise public safety.”

The Democratic leadership's concern for the public safety is touching, all the more so since the Judiciary committee co-chaired by the Catholic averse Michael Lawlor in the House and Andrew McDonald in the Senate, reinstated days before William’s announcement “an early release program for prison inmates that was curtailed after two parolees were charged with killing a woman and her two daughters in Cheshire in 2007,” according to an Associated Press story.

Lawlor said, according to the AP report, that the decision of his committee was “part of the state budget approved by lawmakers and supported by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Officials say it will save about $4 million a year by reducing the prison population.”

With a bow to public safety, leading Democrats in the legislature consistently have refused to pass a Republican inspired “three strikes and you’re out” law for violent offenders. When the Democratic dominated legislature rejected the effort while punctiliously passing a bill making it illegal for citizens to keep dangerous large primates as pets, Chris Powell, the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and a columnist for that paper, noted the logical inconsistencies of Democratic legislators and could not help but notice the similarity between chimps and chumps:

“Responding to the horrible incident in Stamford in February, the legislature outlawed making pets of large primates and other animals considered dangerous. But the legislature has yet to respond to the horrible incident in Cheshire two years ago, in which a woman and her two daughters were murdered, purportedly by two career criminals on parole. Not only did the legislature refuse again this year to pass a "three strikes" law or even a "20 strikes" law; it again declined to inquire into why the defendants in Connecticut's worst atrocity in living memory have not even been brought to trial after two years. Apparently it is enough that Connecticut is now a bit safer from rogue chimpanzees.”

As a point of interest, it may be noted that the “three strikes and you’re out” bill was blocked in the legislature after the founder of the Three Strikes Coalition, Sam Caligiuri, announced his bid to run for U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s seat.

Caligiuri, as well as Justin Bernier, an energetic and promising Republican, currently is running for the 5th district U.S. House seat held by U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy.

Tiger Woods Is Not Alone

The Billings Gazette  is reporting that “Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, was romantically involved with a former staffer when he recommended her earlier this year to become the next U.S. attorney for Montana…”

Baucus, a major proponant of health care legislation, and his former state director, Melodee Hanes, began their relationship, according to the paper, in the summer of 2008 after Baucus separated from his wife.

Baucus submitted Hanes’ name, along with five others, to a third party reviewer who submitted three names, including Hanes’, to the White House. President Barack Obama, possibly forewarned, chose Mike Cotter rather than Baucus’s girl friend for the position, which will supervise the prosecution of federal crimes committed in Montanba and its seven Indian reservations.

Roll Call, a Washington DC publication, reported that the Baucus-Hanes relationship nvegan in the summer of 2008, almost a year Baucus and his wife, Wanda, were divorced in April 2009. The two separated in March of 2008, according to the report, when Baucus began dating Hanes, who is also divorced and now lives with Baucus in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

There have been no reports that the former Mrs. Baucus took after the senator with a golf club upon hearing of his liason with Hanes while the senator was yet pledged by his marriage vows to abide with his wife till death do them part.

And there is no word as yet from U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd on the question: Will this hany-panky affect passage of the Health Care bill both he and Baucus have championed?

Fix The #!!**#!!"n Roof

Welcome to the Fairy tale.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, the guy who is chiefly responsible, along with U.S. Rep Barney Franks, for destroying the U.S. Housing market, is teaming up with Chris Donovan, Connecticut’s House Speaker, who put together a budget half a billion dollars in the red one month after it was passed, to convince outgoing Gov. Jodi Rell to pony up $25 million so that the state can receive from the Barack Obama administration, deeply in debt to the Chinese, part of a stimulus outlay to be used ferry unemployed people on a new and improved train line connecting Springfield and Hartford.

The Hartford Courant will do everything in its power to facilitate this madness.

In the meantime, Connecticut’s economic roof is leaking buckets. Even the noses of Dodd and Donovan are wet with roof tar. Bits of shingle are swimming in their soup. The batting from the attic is hanging from the gaping ceiling. The couch where they both snooze together is green with mold.

But nevermind the roof. What the state really needs is a new car – preferably an eco-friendly hybrid.

And buses, we need buses.

McMahon And The La La Bloggers

Progressives in the Democratic Party – there are progressives in the Republican Party as well, but the brigades are marching in opposite directions -- have for two decades been braiding the rope they plan to use to hang the rich, while leveling down the mini-millionaire peaks so that everyone in society can join a union and plunder unorganized workers.

Now comes Linda McMahon with a fist full of dollars, and what is their complaint?

They fear the Republican candidate for U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s seat may use her millions to escape hanging.

Here is an ardent progressive who comments on blogs under the handle “Anderson Scooper” -- sometimes referred to lovingly on the blog site “Connecticut Local Politics” as “Pooper Scooper” – lamenting Linda McMahon’s deep pockets:

“Linda is our opponent, not Rob [Simmons, also running for the U.S. Senate against Dodd]. Your side is desperate for a $50 Million GOTV operation, and if that means kissing WWE’s, Cappiello’s, and Mrs. Healy’s ass, your side will be happy to comply, even if it means embracing a DCCC and Rhambo (sic) approving RINO. Come convention time, Linda will have bought herself a lead in the polls, and that will be the only thing that matters. Except it won’t matter once Dodd retires in favor of Big Dick Blumenthal…”

Scooper imagines Attorney General Blumenthal will abandon his two decade’s old Hamlet act and throw his mailed fist into the ring, after the badly wounded Dodd finally comes to his senses and retires. Of such things are dreams made.

Quoting the left leaning Fairfield Weekly, another blogger, TheRealNixon, writes:

“The Fairfield Weekly just said: If we were Healy [the Republican Party Chairman], we’d also try to do away with the nearly unelectable McMahon. Her business is an embarrassment and she has no qualifications for governing. She doesn’t even vote. But you can’t flick aside someone with $30 million to spend on the race (and who’s been videotaped kicking a guy in the balls).

“Come on folks, Linda McMahon is an embarrassment. Just because the Dems. have comedian turned Senator Al Franken doesn’t mean we should nominate someone whose only experience solving problems is, as the Fairfield Weekly said, ‘kicking a guy in the balls.’”

The real Nixon would be abashed at TheRealNixon’s attempt to frustrate such behavior.


The real Dick Nixon, might have said: “First thing guy, if you must impersonate me, get the character right. Second, have you talked to any women lately? Have you talked to any Big Brother survivalists? Some in the Connecticut Republican Party were hoping against hope that outgoing Gov. Rell had the intestinal fortitude to kick the Democratic legislative leadership — you know who those guys are — in the balls. They richly deserved it. She didn’t. Maybe the next Republican governor will.”

And, the Real Dick Nixon would have added: “McMahon should use that clip in her advertisements: Send me to Congress -- this is what I’ll do.” Clip follows showing McMahon sending a prissy congressman-for-life to the mat with her foot.

Connecticut, people forget, is the state that sent P. T. Barnum of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame to their legislature. Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican for Fairfield, and served two terms. He also served as Mayor of Bridgeport was more successful in both ventures than many of the clowns presently running the three ring circus at the state Capitol today – which is not to say that U.S. Sen. McMahon will not simple turn into a shuttle cock after her first year in office in the U.S. Senate, the usual fate of the average congressional legislator, including Dodd.

But McMahon’s background, it should be admitted, perfectly suits her for the job at hand.

Axe The Tax Cut

Feeling the pinch, leading Democrats in the state legislature quickly settled on a means of bringing somewhat into balance a recently passed spending plan that Democratic State Comptroller Nancy Wyman asserted was about half a million short early in November, a few weeks after the legislature had passed the budget.

The ladies and gentlemen in the legislature cut tax relief out of the spending lard.

Wyman, of course, was too polite in her assessment of the budget, little more than a legislative Ponzi scheme designed to convince voters that the legislature, in tandem with the governor, had settled an annoying deficit. The budget itself -- a meandering $37.6 billion that disperses $18.64 billion this fiscal year and $18.93 billion in 2010-11 – was a chewing gum and string concoction that relied on one time revenue sources and disappearing savings.

Moody’s Investor Service took one look at the budget, shrieked at the choices made by the legislature to address budget gaps and an anticipated fiscal 2009 shortfall, and lowered Connecticut’s bond rating from stable to negative.

The Democratic dominated legislature’s sales tax cut has now been given a decent burial. From the very beginning, the tax cut – about half a percentage point – was tied to a predictable dip in state revenues. If revenue collections were to fall below a certain level, the cut was to be abandoned. Revenues fell. The tax relief was abandoned.

The sales tax, as we were told endlessly during Lowell Weicker’s successful effort to enact an income tax, is the most regressive of taxes; that is to say, it is a punitive tax hardest for the poorest in Connecticut to bear.

A sales tax cut, therefore, should be regarded a stimulus package for the little guy who is not too big to fail. Entrenched power brokers too big to fail can easily fend for themselves – usually by bribing a legislator with campaign contributions or by successfully seeking from their political patrons special exemptions not available to the little guy who will uncomplainingly pay sales taxes. Once again, the Democratic controlled legislature has repudiated those they traditionally claim to represent, demonstrating at the same time their loathing for stimulus packages that contain no earmarks.

The same legislature that attached a progressive feature to the income tax now has decided to ditch the estate tax cut. Who says you can’t get blood from corpses? Florida, which has neither a state income tax nor an estate tax, is likely to benefit most from the measure. From 2002 to 2006, 27,773 households moved from Connecticut to Florida.

Since the onset of the current recession, Connecticut has lost 85,400 jobs, a figure expected to rise to more than 100,000. Businesses are either fleeing the state or waiting for an opportunity to make a prosperous exit. State revenues are down because in Connecticut, and in much of the nation as well, state coffers are filled by precisely those tax “investors” that have seen their taxable income diminish in the current recession. This means that the addition of a progressive feature to Connecticut’s income tax will make this revenue source more not less volatile.

The day after Thanksgiving, the Hartford Business Journal reported that Connecticut’s unemployment insurance fund has become insolvent. But not to worry, the state will borrow nearly $1 billion from the federal government over the next two years so jobless residents can continue to collect unemployment checks. The federal government, in its turn, will squeeze its major creditors – China, for instance – for the necessary funds.

To summarize briefly: The pools of tax income in the state have so diminished that Connecticut is forced to borrow money from a federal government that continues to drive up spending while itself borrowing money from increasingly nervous and by no means amicable foreign lenders who have “invested” in a dollar the value of which continues to plummet.

None of Connecticut’s legislative ostriches, their heads comfortably buried in the sand, are eager to bite the bullet and cut spending. Perhaps the next governor will be able to summon enough courage to tell it like it is. But don’t bet the farm on it – or the diminishing dollar which, measured against the euro, has lost about half its value over the last ten years alone.

Some Chinks in Dodd’s Armor

A distinction may be made between the popularity of persons (non-transferable) and the popularity of positions and programs (transferable, sometimes).

President Barack Obama personality continues to resonate with many people, though there has been some slippage lately. His programs, largely radical, are iffier. Obama’s luster is not likely to rub off on Dodd; the disparities are too great. But there is no question Dodd has attached his fate to that of the Obama agenda: a highly regulated economy and the nationalization of heath care, to mention but two points.

Dodd’s fate is also connected to what might be called the wellness of his state; and, here again, the economic programs to which he has attached his political kite are doubtable, if not doubtful. Dodd has also shifted to the center in foreign policy, which is very odd in his case.

Dodd is not made of pro-war stuff – never has been. In economic policy, he has been in the past somewhat moderate. In the last few months, we have seen a paradigm shift in both these areas. Obama is now pursuing a Bush policy in Afghanistan, a part of the world that very well could be a quagmire for American troops. All these things are arguable since the fate of Afghanistan will depend upon facts on the ground that have yet to emerge.

What is not arguable is the paradigm shift on Dodd’s part: He has moved far to the left on domestic policy and to the center on current foreign policy.

Voters generally react negatively to sharp shifts and late conversions in politicians who have been in office a long time. In a politician of long standing, shifts of this kind are looked upon by the general public with a baleful eye and leave politicians open to damaging criticism from political opponents. These paradigm shifts place Dodd in a precarious position. He would be in even more trouble if Republicans could criticize him for his implicit support of the president’s “war of necessity” in Afghanistan.

Dodd was outspoken on the first Persian Gulf War, which he thought would be a quagmire resembling Vietnam. He was wrong. His anti-war posture was muted during Bush’s war in Iraq, until the president stumbled badly, at which point he and the loyal Democratic opposition in congress found their tongues.

In a statement in December 2007, Dodd pronounced the war in Iraq “a failure” and said clear bold action was necessary to end a war that had “made us less secure, more vulnerable and more isolated.” Dodd called for a “deadline to end the war tied to funding.” The time for giving Bush blank checks was over, Dodd said. He was strongly opposed to the Bush-Cheney troop surge. He advocated a surge in diplomacy, not troops, and agitated for a re-deployment to be completed within one year, by December 2008.

Obama won election on his promise to bring the troops out of Iraq shortly after he had become president. After much bumbling, Bush found his General Grant in General David Petraeus, and the general’s strategy has made the current troop withdrawals possible. The earlier withdrawals Dodd hankered after would have doomed the war effort in Iraq.

In the meanwhile, the eight-year Afghanistan war continues, and every argument used by progressives in their opposition to the war in Iraq applies as well to Afghanistan. Now that Obama is president, the anti-war opposition is in retreat among those members of congress who were only to happy to oppose Bush’s “war of choice.” It has been preserved, like a dried flower pressed in a bible, by Cindy Sheehan and a few other anti-war stalwarts.

The terrorist trials in New York are upcoming. Some commentators are suggesting that because the terrorists may not be able to find an unpolluted jury in New York, where the destruction of the Twin Towers are yet a vivid and painful memory, the trial should be moved to Connecticut. The terrorist trial featuring Kahlid Sheik Mohammed, the chief facilitator of 9/11 and the self confessed executioner of Daniel Pearl, may be viewed as a practical implementation of Dodd’s previous positions on how terrorists should be treated.

Dodd has long pressed for a Nuremberg stage upon which terrorists may be tried. The trials in New York even now are shaping up as classic show trials. Such was Nuremburg – with this difference: The German army had been defeated before the military tribunal commenced. Extremely mobile terrorists are still active, and a trial in a non-military court, in the course of which a terrorist who arranged the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York is to be invested with all the rights of a citizen of the United States, will be an invaluable recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. If the death penalty is imposed on Kahlid Sheik Mohammed during a non-military trial, it is likely that European countries that do not have the death penalty will not be willing to transfer for trial to the United States any terrorist taken in battle who may be executed for his “crimes.”

The final act of 9/11, which some consider certain to be a farce, still lies behind a drawn curtain. But few doubt that when it is brought on stage, it will affect the futures of politicians such as Dodd and others who have argued for the value of show trials in non-military courts for those whom previous presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln would have considered unlawful combatants falling outside the conventions of war. The British did not hesitate to execute without trial Connecticut’s hero Nathan Hale, and Washington four years later did the same to Major Andre, according him a military trial and hanging him because, as the military board said, he had been found guilty of being behind American lines "under a feigned name and in a disguised habit." The conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination were tried by the military and executed after Grant had accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.