Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

A CliffNotes version of the case against Graham Platner, Maine’s Democrat Senate frontrunner, may be found in the Connecticut Centinal under the byline Reese On the Radio.   Revelation followed revelation, most of them debilitating: “The most recent revelation: Platner exchanged sexually explicit text messages with multiple women early in his 2023 marriage. His wife discovered them, reported the matter to campaign leadership last year, and the issue was handled privately—reportedly with counseling. When the New York Times and Wall Street Journal published the story days before the primary, Platner dismissed it as ‘gossip’ and ‘journalistic malpractice.’ His wife called the coverage ‘shameful’ and urged focus on ‘the issues.’ Some Democrats muttered about ‘questions to answer,’ but the campaign and base largely treated it as a distraction.”   Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Chris Murphy recently was given the opportunity by Margret Brennan of CBS News to defend the indefen...

  PURA loses   The title of the Hartford Courant story was worth a thousand words:   PURA agrees to settle suit . And the subtitle -- “Authority [PURA] admits improper decision making by ex-chair [Mellissa Gillett]” – could not have gone down the gullet of Governor Lamont, an early Gillett enthusiast, easily. Crow is nearly always indigestible.   Lamont robustly defended his choice of Gillett as chairwoman of PURA almost to its inglorious conclusion.   Gillett was appointed to her position with great fanfare. Finally, PURA was to have at its chair a woman who did not flinch in a fight with Connecticut’s energy distributors. Following an interview with   David Roberts in 2024, Connecticut Commentary noted that in the interview Gillett had forcefully summarized her regulatory philosophy:   “What is the point in constructing a regulatory regime that never or rarely says ‘no’ to Big Business monopolies that can by their very weight and po...

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has written a book, a neo-progressive manifesto that dismisses conservative realities – the free market, for instance -- as “cults” or heretical departures from the political cult of neo-progressivism. His book is titled Crisis of the Common Good and is certain to be received with worshipful hosannas by the legacy media’s leftist chorus.   The title of the book is itself a knockoff of Robert Reich’s earlier work entitled The Common Good . Most of what is praiseworthy about Murphy is derivative. Murphy’s book is subtitled, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America .   In a confessional sense, Murphy does not address in his book in what sense the neo-progressive movement has “broken” America. But then, the book is not a confessional. It is a tangle of wormwood eaten, boastful, and dry as dust campaign solicitations.   The expression “the common good” has a long and honorable literary lineage. “I have seen Americans maki...

The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC) for donations to scholarship granting organizations is simple and readily understandable. According to the IRS, “Beginning January 1, 2027, individual taxpayers may be able to claim a Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC) for certain cash contributions up to $1700 to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). A state or the District of Columbia (state) must choose to participate in the FSTC and provide a list of SGOs in that state to the IRS before an individual taxpayer can donate to an SGO within that state and claim the FSTC.”   As of April 26, 2026, the following states have signed onto the program: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Connecticut, not known in the past for allowing federal dollar...

  The Lamonts, Governor Ned Lamont and his lovely wife Annie Lamont, an accomplished money-making investor, have been with us a long while. Ned Lamont first entered politics under the sheltering wings of former Governor and U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican millionaire bumped by Connecticut Republicans way back in 1988 when they realized that Senator Weicker, who as governor graced the state with an income tax, was a Teddy Kennedy Democrat in disguise. Weicker served in the U.S. Senate for three terms from 1971 to 1989.   Weicker’s Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating during his last year in the Senate was ten points higher than that of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, not a “moderate Republican.” Moderate Connecticut Republicans espied Weicker’s Democrat Party leanings when rarely subtle Weicker boasted of himself that he was “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.”   Neo-progressive revolutionists with knives in their brains, socialists teetering on the edg...

Governor Ned Lamont spoke over the heads of moderate Democrat delegates to a different neo-progressive constituency in his acceptance speech as the Democrat Nominating Convention concluded. He was addressing the 25% of delegates who voted for Josh Elliott, a neo-progressive heartthrob some quasi-socialist Democrats in Connecticut regard as the Zohran Mamdani of Connecticut.   Elliot, who garnered a sufficient number of delegate votes to primary Lamont, has vowed to engage the governor, considered by some a moderate Democrat, in a primary.   The delegate count, Elliott has said, did not adequately portray his delegate support. He believes he would have won the endorsement had the delegate vote been anonymous.   “People were afraid to cast their votes against the governor,” he said. “I’ve been hearing threat after threat from people if they voted against the governor today. I’ve been telling people to channel that frustration into energy over the next three months. We have ...