Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

    “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session ” -- Gideon J. Tucker   For very good reasons, the above quote has been misattributed to political scourge Mark Twain . Connecticut’s legislative session will close June 4. Until that time, Connecticut taxpayers would be wise to guard their life liberty and property from greedy neo-progressives in the General Assembly.   It was Twain who reminded us, “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”   Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror tells us, “The Senate Democratic majority passed a bill Wednesday that would provide jobless benefits to strikers in Connecticut, defying Gov. Ned Lamont’s expected veto should the measure pass the House and reach his desk…The bill would provide unemployment insurance to strikers after two weeks out of work, similar to the policies of the only two states with jobless benefits for strikers, New York and New Jersey....

You’ve asked me half a dozen questions and begged me to be brief in my responses, pointing out that brevity is the soul of wit. That is true, except in those cases in which brevity is witless. Mark Twain, never witless, tells us: Say the truth always; that way you don’t have to remember what you’ve said. Elsewhere he says that telling the truth will astonish your friends and disappoint your enemies.   Your first question touched on foreign policy. How do we construct a rational foreign policy?   The answer is deceptively simple. A rational foreign policy should be rooted in sound principles and a just appreciation of friends and enemies. The leaders of some foreign policy players – Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Iran’s most recent fundamentalist Ayatollah – have successfully defined themselves as America’s enemies. U.S. foreign policy should be adjusted to reflect such foreign policy preferences.   You ask: How can the Republican Party in Con...

Connecticut’s Trust Act, written and endorsed by left leaning legislators in the state’s General Assembly who do not trust ICE, has now been expanded by the state’s partisan legislature, according to the Hartford Courant .   The lede to the Courant story reads “With federal agents arresting immigrants nationwide on a constant basis, Connecticut lawmakers voted Wednesday to strengthen the current law to maintain the independence of state and municipal police. The controversial Connecticut Trust Act blocks local police from making an arrest that is based only on a request by federal agents in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agency.”   The controversial act is meant to serve as a barrier between ICE and the police authority everywhere in Connecticut. What we are witnessing here is a clash of mandates. The federal authority is mandated to detain, for questioning or deportation, migrants who have illegally entered the country and are for that reason of interes...

Defending a move by majority Democrats in the Connecticut General Assembly to deal with prospective Medicaid cost increases, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven let the cat out of the bag.   “In his wrap-up speech,” the Hartford Courant tells us, “Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said the Medicaid funding was a ‘crisis’ that needed to be resolved in straightforward fashion. ‘We know there is a national problem in Medicaid that more and more people are relying on Medicaid [emphasis mine] ,’ Looney said on the Senate floor. ‘They often rely on Medicaid-paid aides if they are fortunate enough to live at home. This is a current problem. … The federal impact is coming, and we will probably have to deal with that in the fall.’”   More and more people are relying on Medicaid principally because President Barack Obama was successful in extending the reach of a Medicaid program that initially was designed to cover catastro...

The Biden-Media Autopsy   Several indicators suggest that the Democrat Party, following President Donald Trump’s dramatic and undisputed assent to the presidency, is slowly emerging from a monkish political seclusion.   Months after the election decks had been cleared, Democrat strategist Sawyer Hackett let loose, according to an Associated Press (AP) report reprinted in the Hartford Courant, with the following thunderbolt: “The stench of [former President] Joe Biden still lingers on the Democrat Party. We have to do the hard work fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”   AP noted in its story, “Biden: Dem’s Unwanted Distraction,” that a “core controversy… has emerged following the publication of Original Sin , a book written by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thomson of Axios. The book “questions Biden’s decision to run for a second term despite voters, including Democrats, telling pollsters that ...

I last wrote about my cousin Abdul Raman four years ago.   Tuesday, October 26, 2021   Thinking of Abdul Raman (AKA Raymond Mandirola), my cousin from Medina who visited us here some years ago.   “You’ve already lost,” he said to me during a meal.   “How so?”   “Demography is king, and we, in this one respect, are out-producing you.   The replacement birthrate, demographers tell us, is two and a half children per family. Italy falls well below the mark, other European nations as well. Some years ago, the Pope encouraged Italians to have more children. He was roundly derided in the press -- how un-modern! In the United States, family production is going the way of the birthrate. That is not true in Islamic countries.”   The current fertility rate for Italy in 2021 is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020. In the United States, the fertility rate has dropped from a post-World War II high of 3.8 births per woman at the...