Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Fox News headline is attention-getting: FBI snares an American heir indicted for allegedly bankrolling anti-cop, pro-Hamas communist revolution . So too is the lede: “The Justice Department and FBI have a new communist financier in their crosshairs for alleged financial crimes: James "Fergie" Cox Chambers Jr., the estranged bad-boy heir to the Cox cable empire.” Spanish police, we learn, “… detained Chambers on the luxury island of Ibiza, in response to an international arrest warrant, according to sources. Chambers is allegedly wanted for money laundering and providing support to Hamas, following years of financing anti-Israel and anti-West organizations and protests. The transnational network he helped fund and support is kicking in to cast him as a victim of the Trump administration's ‘fascism,’ while critics are cheering the arrest as long overdue.”   Where else but on a “luxury island” should one expect to find a billionaire bad boy? And “Fergie” has been...

“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold – lest the marrow of your bones runs cold,” an English Fairytale reminds the bold hero of the tale. That is excellent advice for politicians who wish to succeed in attaining and holding office.   In primary elections, we find, bold politicians may be as bold as they wish.  General elections, however, are horses of a different color.   In a general election, the election deciders are far less narrow-minded than are the more energetic electors in primaries because the election field is wider. The danger always is that bold primary messaging may leech into general elections and undermine the gent who has proposed the abolition of police departments and prisons. The wiser, more Machiavellian option is to draw a veil of ambiguity around the abolition of police departments in primary elections and then – after you have been elected to office -- abolish the police department.   Kevin Rennie -- once a moderate Republican legislator in Con...

Graham In The Wisdom of Father Brown ,   G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”   Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly and unexpectedly of a ruptured aorta, brought on according to a preliminary post-mortem by hardened arteries, never had that problem.   By most accounts following his death, both from Republicans and Democrats, Graham was able to traverse the usual mine-sown partisan political ground without loss of limb or humor.   His relationship with Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is a case in point.   The two – one an anti-Trump Democrat, the other a pro-Trump Republican -- have frequently traveled to Ukraine during that country’s darkest hours.   Both set their faces against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absurd notion that Ukraine “is not even a country” shortly before invading the country and dragging piec...

Elliot, Lamont “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” --  Mark Twain   In the opinion of most political commentators in the state, including reporters, Lamont is a moderate Democrat.   A dispassionate answer to the question might be: It depends what you mean by “moderate. That goalpost has been moved leftward by New England Democrats within the past few decades, most severely within the political lifespan of Lamont.   The governor was first brought to public notice when he defeated incumbent U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 2006,   twenty years ago. Although Lamont gained the endorsement of the state’s Democrat Party and won the primary, he lost to Lieberman in the general election.   Four years later in 2010, Lamont ran for governor on a platform promoting balanced budgets, job creation and economic com...

Sanders and Platner Graham Platner, running for the U.S. Senate against Susan Collins in Maine, has lost considerable support among establishment Democrats in the face of allegations that were known long before they disembarked from the Platner bandwagon.   On July 7 Politico  reported, “ More than half of the Senate Democratic caucus has called for Graham Platner to drop out of the Maine Senate race, less than 24 hours after POLITICO reported that a woman the oysterman once dated had accused him of sexual assault… Most Democrats previously stuck by Platner even as his beleaguered campaign battled scandal after scandal in recent months. By Tuesday, the tide had turned firmly against Platner, with 38 of the Senate’s 47 Democratic senators calling for him to drop out as of early Tuesday afternoon.”   What was the straw the broke the donkey’s back?   It was not the “Nazi” tattoo Platner proudly sported throughout his questionable assignations. Correcting som...

The Homeric Odyssey, the world’s most justly celebrated homecoming story, is a fable about the salvation of more than Odysseus. The recent film The Odyssey may save Hollywood as well. People, all of whom are story-swapping creatures, still yearn for captivating narratives, and Hollywood has been drifting away from captivating narratives for decades, part of the reason it has lost a good portion of its audience. Casablanca , staring Humphry Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was captivating; the cartoonish Toy Story, the nation’s first entirely computer-animated feature film, was merely entertaining and novel.   Literary scholars are still disputing whether The Odyssey attributed to Homer, a blind poet, was written by a single hand or whether it was a product of multiple narratives, much like the books of the Bible.   And, of course, scientifically minded historians hope to clear up any confusion through a discovery of historical facts. A movie soon to be available, The Odyssey , i...