Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning – Abbie Hoffman Governor Ned Lamont sat down with Hearst Media in mid-July and bared his breast. “Lamont said,” Hearst reported , “that he is running not only to defend the state’s existing [gun] laws, but to propose a new range of regulations on so-called ghost guns, assault weapons and the carrying of firearms in public.” The problem with laws is that any single law extended infinitely in one direction sooner or later bumps up against another countervailing law. The most efficient way to end gun violence, for instance, would be to end legal gun possession, but the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes that prospect forbiddingly unlikely. Of course, it is always theoretically possible to repeal the Second Amendment , regarded by the founders of the country as the palladium of liberty . At the time the Bill of Rights w...

Perhaps someone in Connecticut’s General Assembly should propose a law forbidding legislators and state officials from misusing the expression “common sense” and its derivatives. “The nation’s highest court,” a Hartford paper reported in late June, “overturned a New York law that dates back to 1913 and says that applicants need to show ‘proper cause’ that they need a gun for self-defense in order to obtain a license that they could carry the concealed weapon in public. “But the court ruled 6-3 that the New York law ‘violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.’” The ruling produced a spate of objections from Connecticut politicians in which the expression “common sense” and its derivatives were painfully iterated by so called “gun control advocates.” William Tong, Connecticut’s Attorney General advised that Connecticut gun restriction laws, different than those...

Blumenthal A reporter asked U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal a question he had some difficulty answering. CTMirror captured the rare moment: “An unintended consequence of Blumenthal’s consistent advocacy for Congress to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, is that it underscores nothing has happened on the issue since the Democrat’s election to the U.S. Senate nearly a dozen years ago. “It raises a question: At what point does advocacy without results become a liability?” Blumenthal answered, “There’s nothing more important to seniors, there’s nothing more important to American consumers, than lowering prescription drug prices and stopping the astronomical rise in costs of health care.” A picture underscored the answer. Blumenthal was shown in the middle of a cluster of senior citizens, most dressed in red AARP jerseys, bearing signs reading “Fair RX Prices now.” The caption beneath the picture read, “Sen. Richard Blumenthal arrives with AARP volunteers for a press conferenc...

Michael Ross   Following a school shooting in Texas, eerily similar to the  Sandy Hook slaughter  of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been out on the political stump pedaling their solutions to mass murders. Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, we find from a  news report , “has been pushing for gun restrictions earlier this year, but the recent legislative session expired in early May without action.” The report quotes him: “… there are so many illegal guns on the street right now. I’d like to think we could have done a better job here in Connecticut and send a message far afield, especially when it comes to those ghost guns.” Was Lamont suggesting that the elimination of ghost guns would have prevented the most recent slaughter of the innocents in Texas? Was he suggesting that black-market gunrunners would cease and desist their already illegal activities should the national legislature pass gun l...

Logan   It may be a trifle more difficult this coming election season for Democrats to hold on to an all Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation. Former State Senator George Logan may be on the Republican ticket next year, and voters in Connecticut’s 5 th  District may no longer be comfortable with postmodern progressives in the U.S. Congress. Logan was the only Black member of the state Senate’s GOP caucus during his two term tenure. He is an engineer and a business man who, as CTMirror noted, “does not shrink from identity politics.” He hopes to unseat “U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, a political novice in 2018 when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Connecticut and one of the first two in New England.” Within the past few elections, Democrats have stumbled badly in Connecticut’s 5 th U.S. Congressional District. A 2014 piece in Connecticut Commentary, Taking the Fifth , surveyed the pratfalls: “The FBI intervention began when the struggle f...

  Smith It would make a fine obituary. From the New Haven Independent : “Dayshon Smith, a 28-year-old local boxer nicknamed ‘Superfreak’ for his power and reach in the ring, was shot and killed amid gunfire in the Hill Saturday after a large party on Rosette Street turned deadly, leaving five others hospitalized.” Brian Clark, who runs the  Ring One boxing gym on Congress Avenue , turned out for the rain-soaked press conference following the shooting to speak up on behalf of his former boxing student. “Smith had a job working with disadvantaged youth, Clark said, and no criminal record. He said Smith had a daughter whom he adored and spent much time with. “’He worked. Had a real job. A real legit job,’ Clark said. ‘He was a good father. He was doing the right things.’” “And, Clark said, Smith was a tremendous boxer.” An email released by New Haven police ticks off the victims of the shootout. While Smith died, five other victims survived. They included “a 27-year-o...

So then, you’re a progressive young or old populist Turk. Got some questions for you. How many times in the last year have you 1) washed your hands; 2) kissed your wife or partner, unprotected by a Coronavirus mask; 3) taken a bus or train to work; 4) given up a raise so that your employer might have sufficient profits to train or hire a new, non-white, non-privileged worker; 5) volunteered at a Planned Parenthood abortion factory that specializes in selling to doctors baby parts harvested from late term abortions; 6) gotten a part time job   to defray the costs of your very expensive, ivy league, white privileged, education; 7) laid a curse on a progressive politician for raising taxes on the working poor; 8) protested tolling, which disproportionally impacts non-privileged, black and Latina, underpaid “indentured servants” who work to make life tolerable for white, rich, privileged women living in Fairfield’s Gold Coast and married to obscenely wealthy hedge fund managers; 9) h...

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont traveled to New York the other day to convince Wall Street Journal editorial writers that his state is in the grip of a turn-around, thanks to the Lamont administration. The business oriented WSJ is not at all the same media gang that covers the Lamont administration at home. Most Connecticut news outlets are willing to allow Lamont a loose tether; not so the WSJ, which has been critical of the direction of the state for the past few decades.

For decades, the Connecticut General Assembly has been parceling out its constitutional powers to various political entities such as unions. Constitutionally, the legislative branch of our government, the House and Senate in Connecticut’s General Assembly, are supposed to have dominion over getting and spending. This means that every dollar collected and disbursed by state government should be the province of elected General Assembly members. In most states, the salaries and benefits of unionized state employees are determined by legislatures – and NOT through contractual obligations presented to the legislature by governors colluding with union chiefs to benefit an undemocratic hegemony that such contracts tend to support and enforce. In addition to depleting the constitutional authority of the General Assembly, such contracts as have been arranged between Connecticut’s governors and unions throw dispute resolutions into the state’s third branch of government, the court syste...

Documents just released years after a shooter murdered his mother, 20 students, 6 teachers and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been made available to Connecticut politicians and the general public in answer to a legal action brought by a persistent Hartford Courant. The documents had been carefully tucked away for five years and clearly point to the social and mental deficiencies of the shooter. All reports should have been released soon after the shooter’s suicide, because none of the information contained therein could have prejudiced any legal action. It is impossible to put a dead mass-shooter on trial for murder. In the absence of the necessary data unearthed above, a public trial of sorts, some of it sprinkled with absurd speculations, was conducted entirely in the mass media, and eventually one of the weapons used in the mass slaughter, an AR15 semi-automatic rifle , was pronounced guilty and banned in Connecticut.

Most left of center commentators lost interest in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis Maryland soon after it became obvious that there was little to no connection to Trumpian rhetoric slighting the “fake news” media. For any number of good reasons, media face time procured by the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, was minimal. Moments after the shooting, Murphy issued a dog-eared, often repeated refrain:  “I’m sick and tired of this. My colleagues have accepted horrific mass violence and made the deliberate choice to do nothing about it. If politicians wanted to reduce gun violence, they would do their jobs and pass laws that we know would make a difference.”

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” The saying was attributed to President Harry Truman by a playwright, but just because Truman may not have coined the phrase does not make it any the less true. Washington DC can be a cutthroat corner of the world. This is not to say that all well-mannered pols have cashed in their chips and left the casino in the hands of brutes. Some U.S. Senators still feel that politics should not be a murderous affair. If you do catch your enemy in a compromising position, it would be prudent to leave open a back door through which he might escape with his honor intact. Your enemy will appreciate the graceful gesture and, perhaps in some future encounter, pause and consider before he draws the knife across your throat”  

Stories like this open a window into sealed rooms in which the usual favorable campaign propaganda is produced by the truckload. This one, which ran in the Washington Post , is not good news for U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty, most recently seen bobbing her head in assent to a vigorous attack on the National Rifle Association (NRA) by a teenage rabble rouser in Washington DC. The Post story begins with a knock-out lede: “The threat from Rep. Elizabeth Esty’s chief of staff arrived in a voice mail. “’You better f-----g reply to me or I will f-----g kill you,’ Tony Baker said in the May 5, 2016, recording left for Anna Kain, a former Esty aide Baker had once dated.”

President Donald Trump recently called to the White House one of his most acerbic critics, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, to chat about gun control and school safety; the two are not at all the same thing. Murphy could hardly refuse. Trump wanted Murphy to shape, in concert with others, a national package that might help to prevent the slaughter of innocents in schools and also the victims of gun violence in our large cities, the nation’s shooting galleries, a “comprehensive” reform of gun laws that would ameliorate conditions in cities such as Chicago, former President Barack Obama’s abandoned haunt, and school kids left at the mercy of gun toting mass murderers. Murphy and his confederate in the congress, Connecticut Senator Dick Blumenthal, had persistently denounced Trump as “eccentric,” and touched with madness, accusations laundered through Connecticut’s media that have been temporarily shelved now that the madman is making cooing gestures in Murphy’s direction; for, really...

In a recent editorial , the Hartford Courant notes, “U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has a well-oiled speech on the issue [of gun bans].  Considering his 14-hour filibuster after the Orlando shooting in the summer of 2016, he’s got his points together. And every time there’s another mass shooting, he drags them out again, as he did on Tuesday.” Murphy has had a good deal of practice fulminating at the U.S. Senate podium; most recently he accused his fellow legislators of being complicit in the murder of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. “This scourge of school shootings,” Murphy said, “only happens here [in the United States].  It only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction.  We  [his fellow Senators] are responsible for a level of mass atrocities that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

There may be only three or four ways to win an election, but there are a dozen ways to lose one. There seems to be a general agreement among thoughtful Republicans that Tom Foley, the Republican nominee for governor in 2010 and 2014, lost to Dannel Malloy because his campaigns lacked what might loosely be called the social angle. Both campaigns left voters wondering what might be the difference between the Democrat and Republican candidates. Oz Griebel entered a primary against Foley for governor in 2010 and lost, possibly because Republicans were unable to distinguish between Foley and Griebel. Foley, as it turned out, was richer; his ties to conservatives in his party were not the ties that bind. The Foley 2010 campaign was businesslike rather than conservative on economic issues; even then Connecticut was sloshing around in alligator infested, muddy waters. And Foley was AWOL on social issues. His was the usual losing Republican campaign. On the economy, Foley pla...

Sir James George Frazier, author of “The Golden Bough,” an examination of pre-literate, pre-Christian social mores among primitives, tells the story of a ritualistic punishment involving a murder. The foul deed was done with a knife. The village elders gather together in a hut and call witnesses to give testimony. First the presumed murderer is closely interrogated, then the family of the victim. Last of all, the knife is called to testify. Closely examined, it is pronounced guilty and suitably punished by the elders, who execute the weapon by throwing it in the river. Scapegoats are sometimes used for the same purpose; they are guilt receptacles that receive blood-guilt and are afterwards destroyed.

Almost immediately after a gunman entered a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and mowed down the congregation with what the media refers to imprecisely as “an assault weapon” – what weapon used in the commission of a mass murder is not an assault weapon? -- Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut unscrolled their pitch: 1) assault weapons are murderous, 2) prayer is pointless and 3) send campaign cash our way. Prescinded from their analysis was the nub of the matter – the truth which, like the devil, lies in the details.

Chief Justice of Connecticut’s Supreme Court Chase Rogers is retiring after 11 years. There are murmurs at the State Capital that Associate Justice Andrew McDonald might fill the vacancy. When all vacancies are filled, Governor Dannel Malloy will have appointed 6 of 7 Justices to the Court. McDonald, the youngest Justice on the court, was the lame-duck Governor's Chief Legal Counsel before he was appointed to  the Court by Malloy in 2013. McDonald had been with the Governor since Malloy’s salad days as Mayor of Stamford. Malloy’s Chief Counsels and political staff have been particularly favored during his administration. Luke Bronin, presently Mayor of Hartford, a city teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and in need of frequent cash transfusions from the state, also had served as Chief Counsel to Malloy.

Fact Check recently examined a proposition put forward by U. S. Senator Chris Murphy who, according to some of his gun toting critics, will not rest content until he has repealed the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolished the National Rifle Association (NRA), and confiscated every "assault weapon" – assault guns, assault knives and, especially prominent just now in Europe, assault vans – from sea to shining sea. “What we know, Murphy said, "is that states that have tougher gun laws, that keep criminals from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence." Fact Check found that while Murphy was entitled to make up his own mind on assault weapons, he was not entitled to make up his own facts, and the Junior Senator from Connecticut was given three Pinocchios.