Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Commentary on a pending visit of U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to the Buckley Institute , located on the grounds of Yale University, has been scattered and occasionally scatterbrained.   The Yale Daily News tells us, “In an interview, Yale President Maurie McInnis lauded the Buckley Institute for scheduling an event with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose department has investigated Yale and slashed federal funding for universities.”   Driving the point home, the paper adds, “McMahon is slated to speak about diversity, gender and the government’s education policies at an April 16 event hosted by the Buckley Institute, a group that brings conservative voices to campus. The secretary, a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, oversees a Department of Education that has canceled billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding grants to universities across the country.”   Much of Connecticut’s media is in danger in its news accounts of becom...

For Christians, the Resurrection of Jesus, called the Christ, lies at the very heart of their belief and faith. Good Friday, then, is a very good day indeed. It is a day in which the promises of Jesus and those of the Old Testament were fulfilled.   The New Testament is a gradual unfolding for Christians of the realization that God is with us -- in every sense of these words. God is “for us”; he will not abandon creatures he has made in his image. God is trustworthy, and we believe in his promises. He is alive in our lives. This is the sum and substance of Christianity.   Jesus offers his disciples a foretaste of his divinity in New Testament accounts. The resurrected Jesus tells doubting Thomas, “You have seen and you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”   The apostle Peter, recognized by Christians as the rock upon which Jesus built his church, was a believer in the divinity of Jesus – up to a point. Three times he denied he knew J...

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...