Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

A fifteen minute conversation with any free-market economist would uncover plans to reduce the cost of everything. Below, the attentive reader will find the essence of such a discussion.   Everywhere in the United States, the law of supply and demand continues to hold sway, although we find here and there performance politicians who pretend never to have heard of it.   The Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is one of the more persuasive pretenders.   The law of supply and demand holds that the cost of goods and services is directly related to the supply of goods and services. Energy, to choose one product, becomes more expensive as its supply diminishes. The same is true of housing. If the demand for housing is constant and the supply diminishes, housing becomes more expensive, further diminishing supply.   Here in Connecticut, new housing is becoming too expensive to produce. The expense may be mitigated in one of two ways. State government must pro...

 Mamdani For those unfamiliar with politics in the good old USA, it may be necessary to point out the difference between a primary and a general election.   A general election is a cross party struggle, and a primary is an interior party struggle.   Democrat Party partisans in New York City are still celebrating their victories in the New York City primary race, and they hope to extend their forward momentum beyond New York. It has been rumored that socialist squad leader Alexandria Cassio Cortez (AOC) has her eye on Chuck Schumer’s U.S. Senate seat. AOC has yet to issue a categorical denial that Schumer may be the next target of ambitious New York socialists and Schumer, for his part, has most recently dressed himself up in the usual socialist rhetorical apparel. Hey Schumer, Pelosi, Blumenthal – you’re next.   The same is true in Connecticut, where long-serving U.S. House member John Larson finds himself under primary assault from young anti-establishment D...

Governor Ned Lamont, primed for a third term, now finds himself between a rock, conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Fazio, and a hard place, Democrat primary opponent state Rep. Josh Elliott. Other politicians have survived the squeeze.   Lamont was nursed early in his political career by former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, widely regarded as a “moderate” Republican until it became impossible for Republicans in Connecticut to regard him as such. Towards the end of his Senate career, Weicker had brashly identified as a liberal Democrat, long before the term “Republican In Name Only (RINO)” had become a fashionable tag for politicians who straddled both party political sawhorses in their highly misleading political campaigns. Finally, and at long last, Connecticut Republicans gave Weicker the boot, shortly after Weicker had presented himself in his last campaign for the Senate as a “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” During his last year in C...

 In a Library of Congress blog, Ellen Terrell tells us that a quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge – “The business of America is business” – is an abbreviation.   What Coolidge actually said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington D.C. on January 17, 1925 was this: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”   Terrell adds a codicil to her correction: “Given that the speech was before a news trade group, Coolidge was talking about the role of the press in a modern, democratic America and included warnings about the evils of propaganda.   But more specifically, he was talking about the role of the press in free-market America.”   For conservatives in the U.S. squaring up against their opposite number, neo-progressives and socialists, the correction may be a distinction without a difference. “W...

“The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightning bug” -- Mark Twain   Everyone in Connecticut, perhaps including political writers, should know by this time nearly everything they were afraid to ask about Maine Democrat U.S. Senatorial prospect Graham Platner .   Thomas Feeney in the Washington Examiner has provided us with a shortened version of Platner’s resume. Leveling a criticism at what is still amusingly called The Mainstream Media, Feeney writes: “There is also no excuse for not looking at the candidate’s social media profile. Clearly, the Democrats missed what one news outlet characterized as “a slew of horrifying posts made on Reddit [in which he disparaged] women, rape victims, minorities, veterans, cops and working-class voters. Moreover, might it not have seemed off-putting to voters that the candidate sent sexual text messages to numerous women while he was married, as reported nationall...

As a general rule, incumbent politicians do not like audits. An audit is a scrupulous examination, political and economic, of a politician’s record in office. If the audited politician’s career in office is at an end, an audit, usually performed by the opposition party, may seem redundant. What is the point of beating a dead political horse? These strictures would seem to apply to former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart’s career-ending audit about which much reportorial and commentary ink has been spilled. At this point, it seems safe to say that Stewart’s political reputation has suffered irremediable damage. Stewart’s withdrawal from her race for Governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket was occasioned by the publication of an audit’s findings. The audit was commissioned by the incoming Democrat Mayor of New Britain, Robert (Bobby) Sanchez, and conducted by a putative “non-partisan” law firm, Crumbie Law Group. In recent days, we find another audit has tickled the interest o...