Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Biden-Media Autopsy   Several indicators suggest that the Democrat Party, following President Donald Trump’s dramatic and undisputed assent to the presidency, is slowly emerging from a monkish political seclusion.   Months after the election decks had been cleared, Democrat strategist Sawyer Hackett let loose, according to an Associated Press (AP) report reprinted in the Hartford Courant, with the following thunderbolt: “The stench of [former President] Joe Biden still lingers on the Democrat Party. We have to do the hard work fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”   AP noted in its story, “Biden: Dem’s Unwanted Distraction,” that a “core controversy… has emerged following the publication of Original Sin , a book written by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thomson of Axios. The book “questions Biden’s decision to run for a second term despite voters, including Democrats, telling pollsters that ...

I last wrote about my cousin Abdul Raman four years ago.   Tuesday, October 26, 2021   Thinking of Abdul Raman (AKA Raymond Mandirola), my cousin from Medina who visited us here some years ago.   “You’ve already lost,” he said to me during a meal.   “How so?”   “Demography is king, and we, in this one respect, are out-producing you.   The replacement birthrate, demographers tell us, is two and a half children per family. Italy falls well below the mark, other European nations as well. Some years ago, the Pope encouraged Italians to have more children. He was roundly derided in the press -- how un-modern! In the United States, family production is going the way of the birthrate. That is not true in Islamic countries.”   The current fertility rate for Italy in 2021 is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020. In the United States, the fertility rate has dropped from a post-World War II high of 3.8 births per woman at the...

There is no categorical difference between state “oversight” and state “regulation.” As the night follows the day, regulation follows oversight. State legislators who want greater oversight of homeschooling fully intend to regulate homeschooling. And in the future they will move on to the regulation of all forms of schooling that lie outside of public education. State Democrat progressive leaders – most of them beholding to state employee unions -- have been itching for years to control all forms of education that fall outside unionized public school education.   Parents of school aged children, on the other hand, have been scouring the countryside in search of alternative means of education. Broadly speaking, parents of school aged children have availed themselves of (four) alternatives to public education: private schools, religions institutions, charter schools, and homeschooling. If public school education were up to par, the sometimes desperate search for alternative modes...

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” – H. L. Mencken   A seasoned Connecticut political reporter notes in CTMirror , “A less popular topic for [Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield] is President Donald J. Trump, whose rise in national politics has coincided with hard times for blue-state Republicans — even more so in Connecticut. Harding’s caucus issued no assessment of the president’s first 100 days…Republicans, who had come close to parity in the General Assembly when Trump took office in 2017, lost more state legislative seats in Connecticut than any other state during Trump’s first term. They now hold 11 of 36 seats in the Senate and 49 of 151 in the House.”   The unstated premise of such assertions, gently suggested by the reporter, is that had Connecticut Republicans more fervently denounced President Donald Trump, the titular head of the Republican Party during his first, and now second, term in office, Republicans might have fa...

A Doxology of the Left   If you find yourself agreeing, even sleepily, to three or more of the italicized propositions below, you may proudly count yourself a man or woman of the left.   1) A Feodor Dostoevsky character exclaims in one of his novels, “If there is no God, anything is possible.” There is no God, and anything is possible .   2) Punishment is no answer to crime, because crime is a social disorder that should be treated by psychologists and sociologists, not prison wardens, and social disorders may be adjusted through the adjustment of antique societal structures.   3) Laws and punishments do not restore order . They exacerbate social disorder and provide employment to lawyers and law schools.   4) Both education and parenting are forms of oppression . See Paulo Freire ’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , copyright 1970.   5) “ History is bunk ” – Henry Ford.   6) The present must always trump the past , bec...

T he birth control pill has been with us for a long time. The “morning after pill”, as it has been called, a pill designed to abort birth after conception, is readily available in Connecticut for about $25, and surgical abortion, Planned Parenthood’s money maker, is also readily available in birth control Connecticut.   When churches, synagogues and mosques make the distinctions mentioned above – for both scientific and theological reasons – it is unscientific and contrary to settled theology to accuse them of political or theological apostasy. In the imperial Roman world, the Christian Church was among the first social organizations to oppose abortion. Opposition to abortion in the year AD 70 was “cutting edge” reform.   The Didache, also known as The Lord's Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations, parts of which constitute the oldest extant written catechism, dating from AD 70, states: “The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You sha...