Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Lamont and Gillett In proving foresight may be vain/The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley – Robert Burns   At a minimum, the Connecticut Freedom of Information (FOI) law and its Commission, responsible for enforcing the FOI law, have been entrusted by the state legislature to assure an open political process and to guard against insufferable political effronteries to the law.   In brief, the law stipulates that politicians and administrators of the public’s business cannot do anything they like all the time; there are limits to the nearly limitless arrogance of Connecticut’s one-party state, always verging, as is common in one-party states the world over, on the razor’s   edge of imperious arrogance.   In an age in which politicians wish to conduct the public’s business privately and off the record, the internet and legal propinquity threaten to spoil the best laid plans of mice and men.   That is exactly what happened whe...

News on debates – indeed, news about any subject – is always after-event reporting. Every observant reporter and columnist knows that a modern debate, federal or state, and a report on a debate are two different events.   Most scholars agree that widespread coverage of the Lincoln/Douglas debates – note the plural – was broadly “fair” precisely because newspapers at the time were partisan. Carrying on a tradition since the first raucous presidential debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the two principal combatants in the Lincoln Douglas debates could rely on a party committed media. To put it in rude terms, Lincoln had his media and Douglas his.   There were seven Lincoln Douglas debates impartially disbursed throughout Illinois. The media at the time was stenographic. Debates were reported nearly in full, but the Republican media touched up Lincoln’s remarks while leaving Douglas’ remarks as they were. The Democrat media did the same. When modern scholars a...

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past – George Orwell   The quote most often deployed in defense of the sentiment – “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” -- has been misattributed, Reuter’s fact checkers tell us, to Edmond Burke. A cynic might say, “Well, if Burke didn’t say it, he should have.”   Scouring Burke’s texts, the fact checkers have concluded Burke may have said something similar, but no cigar. This is what Burke said: “No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”   For anyone who has spent much time wandering through the dim corridors of politics, The ...

Part of the reason Connecticut’s overtaxed residents are suffering from an affordability crisis is that they are also suffering from an energy shortage. If the supply of energy were sufficient to meet the demand for energy, the price of energy would be lower. All Connecticut legislators who have even a nodding understanding of the law of supply and demand – called a “law” because   economic laws are and should be both predictable and inescapable – should have known before they went gaga over a promising new and untested energy source, turbine windmills, that   energy affordability is directly related to all   Connecticut businesses.   If you don’t have sufficient energy production, all goods and services become more expensive, and if the assets of those who purchase the byproducts of energy -- all goods and services produced in the United States – do not increase commensurately, their affordability quotient will be reduced. To put it in the simplest terms possibl...

Imitation, the wits tell us, is the sincerest form of flattery – when the imitation is sincere. When Democrats repeat in reverse the policies and political rhetoric of President Donald Trump, they come not to flatter Trump, but to bury him.   Perhaps the most important question for Democrats right now is: Why has their unabating anti-Trump rhetoric failed so miserably to dethrone Trump in the public’s estimation? We know all the anti-Trump chatter – and the many impeachments, and the many suits, three attempted assassinations and the usual anti-Trump sour-pudding one finds in many of the Associated Press reports -- has not in the least dented Trump’s own estimation of himself.   Most people put this down to his self-celebratory egomania, an offshoot of what they suppose is his tendency towards authoritarianism or Caesarism.   Given the 250-year-old republican constitutional order that American Democratic Socialists (ADS) hope to repeal, Caesarism, as it is current...

  AG Willim Tong The problem with the META settlement is that, unlike a trial, it settles none of the crucial questions surrounding the settlement. In fact, a settlement might properly be defined as a clever strategic device designed to prevent a clear discussion of the issues that prompted the settlement. Henry Kissinger is reported to have said the United States rarely settles its most pressing problems; instead, it “amicably bids them goodbye.”   This goodbye bid will cost the redundantly rich META CEO Mark Zuckerberg about $17 billion, pocket change for him. At least he will not have to suffer the nuisance of a trial or lean overmuch on the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In his recent non-testimony before the U.S. Congress, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci repeatedly hobbled on that crutch, boring to tea...