Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Homeschooling “Equivalency” Bill   Studies have shown that some alternatives to public schooling – private schooling, Catholic schooling, charter schooling, and homeschooling – provide their graduates with superior educations. The Amistad Academy in Connecticut, Connecticut Commentary noted, was such an institution.   Nationally, some public education facilities have been failing for quite some time to provide an adequate education, most especially in urban environments or in suburban poverty pockets, where the traditional family structure – mom, dad and children – has eroded over the years. All four alternative educational facilities have been viewed for decades as pedagogical replacement centers for parents dissatisfied with the quality of education provided by public schools. Were this not the case, the number of alternative education facilities would have diminished rather than increased during the past three decades.   Much to the dismay of public ed...

Fazio Ryan Fazio – running on the Republican ticket for governor of Connecticut against (four) possible primary opponents and Governor Ned Lamont, who occasionally presents himself as moderate on economic issues and a neo-progressive on cultural issues – was regrettably late for a meeting in Tolland, Connecticut, as was this longtime political commentator.   The weather, trying its best to move into spring, was not obliging, and the roads were clogged with traffic, delaying Fazio, who was coming from downstate. I was late because I had gone to The Radial Coffee Company in Vernon rather than Tolland, 10 miles distant.   Barbara Broadrick, the co-owner along with her husband of Radial, was in a commiserating mood. We both like dogs.   “It’s only about 11 minutes from here.”   She and her husband had started the company a few years ago. Business was brisk and plentiful enough to allow its owners to have opened multiple outlets. The service space was rem...

"No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session” -- Gideon John Tucker   All neo-progressive Democrats in Connecticut understand perfectly the progressivity principle. The principle was most clearly stated by Karl Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program — “ From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”   An old wise woman once expressed perfectly the spirit of neo-progressivism politicians when she told her teenage son, this intended as a criticism, “So, what you mean is: What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine too.”   Neo-progressivism is the political means by which socialistic retributive economic justice is achieved. This principle was very much front and center in a recent discussion among Democrat Party leaders.   If taxes are to be redistributed from millionaires to those less economically endowed, then it is obvious that the redistributors should take care NOT to apply tax cuts or c...

    If a state-imposed regulation increases the cost of homeschooling in all state municipalities, which organ of government – the state or the municipality – should absorb the costs?   Should a state tax credit be given to homeschooling parents?   A parent who chooses to homeschool his children is not relieved of the tax paid for public education. In effect, he or she is paying twice to educate his child: once for an anonymous child who receives the benefit of the public school tax dollars that his child is not receiving, and again for the additional costs of homeschooling.   And the costs added to homeschooling by Senate President Pro Tempore Looney’s imperative reforms, according to a March 15 th story in the Hartford Courant – “Looney: We have to keep moving” -- is sizeable. Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said, the Courant noted, “that 1,800 children left public schools for homeschooling in the last fiscal year, along with anothe...

Brownson Orestes Brownson, (1803-1876), went through the political and religious enthusiasms of his day like a hot knife through butter. His forward motion progress came to an abrupt halt when, friendless afterwards, he formerly joined the Catholic Church. Some scholars theorize that Brownson was in his day America’s Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of The Development of Christian Doctrine and principally responsible, after his own conversion to Catholicism, for founding the influential Oxford Movement in Western Europe.   During one of his intellectual meanderings from atheism, through Transcendentalism, to what Hilaire Belloc later would call The Path to Rome, Brownson, the author of The American Republic , would insist that throughout history there were only two political parties: the party of stasis, and the party of forward movement, falsely identified by our current neo-progressives as progressivism.   Brownson’s observation remains true today. But how does one...

  Lamont The recently proposed omnibus emergency certification bill -- a catch basin for previous legislative measures that had been presented to Connecticut’s General Assembly and, for one reason or another, had not passed muster – has been modified by Governor Ned Lamont’s veto and intervention.   No Democrat legislator protested the original measure on process grounds, and the most important question – “Who benefits by stuffing parts of unpassed bills into an omnibus emergency measure?”—was never answered, because the question was never asked.   The short answer to this question is, as might be expected – tax thirsty single-party partisan Democrats benefit. Their emergency omnibus bill allows Connecticut’s ruling Democrat Party to skirt normative processes, and it creates one measure from many separate pieces that may be voted into law without confronting the usual inconveniences: public hearings; debates in various relevant committees; legislative process barrie...