Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning” -- Rahm Emanuel   No one has yet cried fire in the crowded theatre, but there is no question that mainstream Democrats smell smoke.   Fire alarms have been pulled by legacy Democrats whose cries are becoming both desperate and shrill. Not only did President Donald Trump win his election by a majority that, he boasted, was “too big to fix,” he scooped up large chunks of what had been for decades the Democrat Party’s mainstay voting blocks.   Pretty much everybody – including Democrats who wish their party well – appear to agree that national and state Democrat Parties need to redraft what used to be called in the old days their “platform”, the manner in which national and state parties present themselves to voters. The well-worn Democrat Party “legacy” had not served the party well in the recently concluded national elections. ...

There are two kinds of corruption in our politics: hidden and revealed. Instances of corruption revealed are but the tiny tip of an iceberg.   If Connecticut’s one-party state could boast concerning its political victims, it might say it has successfully managed over the years to reduce revealed corruption by smothering it with a blanket of silence or, failing that, by moving corruption into the hidden column.   There are numerous ways of implanting corruption, an effort made much easier in an autocratic, one-party state. All one-party states are either autocracies – think Stalin or Mao – or political plutocracies, both systemically corrupt.   Democracy, as we misunderstand it here in the United States, is the chief victim of one-party states. The tumbril on the way to a political guillotine awaits all the beneficiaries of small “r” republican governance. If the halls of governance contain only one dispositive party for any length of time, corruption becomes i...

The copious tears of U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes may be premature.   Hayes, describing herself “a product of Connecticut’s public education system,” told CTMirror – the story in the publication has no personal byline -- “’Angry wasn’t the word,’ she said, to describe her feelings toward what she and many lawmakers across the country are calling an attack on public education. ‘I am not going to sit by and let us go back to a time where special education students were placed in the basement and not allowed to be educated alongside their non-disabled peers. I am not going to go back to a time where students came to school and didn’t get a hot meal or a book or computer or broadband — or all the things they needed to learn,” she said, her voice cracking, at a news conference in Hartford Monday.”   These retrenchments will occur if, Hayes supposes, the U.S. Department of Education is eliminated altogether, its functions being transferred to the Connecticut public educ...

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...

The LooneyDuff to Connecticut taxpayers: “Yes, we can spend our way to Prosperity”   The headline in the Hartford Courant – “ Lamont confronts spending cap ” -- was slightly and unintentionally misleading. Actually, Lamont is, and has been for his whole term in office, confronting Democrat gatekeepers in the General Assembly, two of whom, President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff, are arch progressives. House leader Matt Ridder is more cautious than Looney, whose largely urban district has been in Democrat hands for decades.   Perhaps operating under the false pretenses of British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously suggested that states needn’t worry overmuch about their national debt because “It is a debt we owe to ourselves,” Connecticut’s debt lovers have been in the business for decades of boosting the state’s accumulative deficit. Under the direction of dominant state Democrats, Connecticut has managed to compile...

It’s the New York Post , and so there are pictures. One shows Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy canoodling with “Courier Newsroom publisher Tara McGowan, 39, last Monday by the bar at the Red Hen, located just one mile north of Capitol Hill.”   The canoodle occurred one day or night prior to Murphy’s well-advertised absence from President Donald Trump’s recent Joint Address to Congress.   Murphy has said attendance at what was essentially a “campaign rally” involving the whole U.S. Congress – though Democrat congresspersons signaled their displeasure at the event by stonily sitting on their hands during the applause lines – was inconsistent with his dignity as a significant part of the permanent opposition to Trump.   Reaching for his moral Glock Murphy recently told the Hartford Courant that Democrat Party opposition to President Donald Trump should be unrelenting and unforgiving: “I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if Donald Trump is ...