Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, cited by the American Enterprise Institute as the worst attorney general in the United States, has more sleeves on his tentacles and cards up them than Harry Houdini. In his attempt to impoverish the Hoffmans , Blumenthal may have violated a contract his office signed with his victims and a company that is holding their money in escrow. Contracts can no more restrain Connecticut’s attorney general than chains could restrain Houdini, and both are artists in the craft of misdirection. Here is the operative paragraph in the contract signed by Blumenthal’s office: "The Escrow amount shall be released by escrow agent only after a receipt of an order by a judge of a Superior Court of the State of Connecticut directing: 1) to whom payment is to be made from the escrow account; and (ii) the amount of each payment. In the event that one of the parties shall appeal the order of the Superior Court of the state of Connecticut pursuant to Conn. General. Stat....

Former pugilist Sen. Harry Reid has reached a private arrangement with defecting former Republican Sen. Arlen Specter that would allow the Specter to retain his seniority , and this has got true-blue Democrats in the senate who have been patiently waiting their turn at the chairmanship trough in a snit, according to a story in The Hill . “Reid told reporters Tuesday that Specter, who plans to change his party registration to Democrat in May, would not bump any Democrats from plum committee posts this year or next year. But Reid said Specter could invoke what would be three decades of seniority at the start of the 112th Congress. “’Of course in a year and a half, at the start of every Congress, it’s a new game and Sen. Specter has seniority over a number of people on committees he wants to serve on,’ Reid said.” An unnamed “senior laymaker” curtly told the Hill, “That’s his deal and not the caucus’s.

MailOnLine is reporting that Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicholas Sarkosy, here striking a philosophical pose, is about to be exposed. Bruni had a life before Sarkosy with several men one of whom, philosopher Julien Enthoven, memorialized his non-platonic encounters with her in pics and videos. This cache, coming to a clip near you soon and given by Enthoven to his brother for safe keeping, has now been stolen by thieves. What ever happened to French discretion, not to speak of philosophical rectitude?

Arlen Specter has come out of the closet – partially. He has gone over to the Democrats because… because… Well, no one short of his conscience – the conscience of a moderate – knows why. But here’s a wholesome guess: Arlen is getting along in years; the power vector has shifted from Republicans to Democrats, which means Republican congressmen can not expect in a government controlled by Democrats to wield any influence as party chairmen. But Arlen can – if he switches parties and wins. One expects Democrats to be appreciative and buy the guy off with a chairmanship of something or other. Better to go out as a traitorous influential dog than a clawless, toothless upright lion.

The Washington Times , citing a Gallup April poll, is reporting that only one other president, Bill Clinton, is less popular after his 100 days in office than Barack Obama. “Mr. Obama's popularity after 100 days,” the Washington Times editorializes, “is the second-lowest for a simple reason: He is more partisan and divisive than his predecessors - including Richard Nixon” and George Bush.

There are five political parties operating in Connecticut: the governor’s party, headed for the past few years by Jodi Rell; the old guard Republican Party; the new Republican Party; the old guard Democrat Party, and progressive Democrats. Governor Rell and the new Republicans have in the past been at logger heads on important budgetary issues. The new Republicans want a stripped down state managed preferably by a Republican dominated legislature that is fiscally responsible and energetic in the pursuit of conservative economic principles. Rell will, as she and her predecessor had in the past, reach compromises with the Democrat dominated legislature that will be distasteful to the new Republicans, who hope to be able to mount a convincing campaign against an entrenched Democrat majority. A similar bifurcation presents itself in the Democrat Party. The diminishing old guard is in the process of being swallowed whole by progressives; occasionally one glimpses a bloody torso dangling fro...

Every so often, when we fall into a reverie, we depend upon members of the press to pinch us awake. Europe, Bruce Thornton reminds us in FrontPage Magazine , never loves us so dearly as when we are shedding our blood, sweat and tears in its behalf. “The love-fest in Europe has not resulted in our NATO allies making anything other than cosmetic changes to its half-baked support of our efforts in Afghanistan. American troops will continue to bear the lion’s share of the burden of fighting and dying, while Europeans train policemen.” The mercurial Hugo Chavez’s temporary love fest with President Barack Obama is certain to be short lived. “Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chavez will not stop that autocrat from working against our interests by buddying up with Iran, a state that has the blood of American soldiers on its hands, or by fomenting revolution in neighboring Columbia.” Servility can only take you so far. “Nor will that embarrassing bow to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah convince the Saud...

In March, 2009, Mathew Fitzsimmons, an assistant attorney general in Attorney General Dick Blumenthal’s office, found himself peppered by a battery of uncomfortable questions in Judge James Bentivegna’s Superior Court in a case involving Valerie and David Hoffman. Before Dick Blumenthal’s office fell on her like a ton of bricks, Valerie Hoffman, a small business woman, owned an herbal internet company, and her husband David was a house builder. A small independent contractor, David would buy land, put a house on it, sell the house and use the proceeds to repeat the process. Any monetary interruption in the business chain, he knew, would prove fatal to his livelihood. Valerie had been cited by the state’s Consumer Protection department on a few complaints, information that made its way to George Gombossy, recently installed at the Hartford Courant as the paper’s consumer protection bulldog. Because of the connections between the Courant and Dick Blumenthal, whose beaming visage often ap...

Pierrot says to Columbine in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria DeCapo, “Don't stand so near me! I am become a socialist. I love Humanity; but I hate people.” In the same spirit, one might say that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal loves golf; but he hates golf courses. Well, (ITALICS) new (END ITALICS) golf courses anyway. As for environmentalists, Blumenthal loves most passionately those who agree with him. The others? Eh! The attorney general does not think that a new golf course at the present time would be economically viable. In view of the 30 percent corporation tax that Blumenthal’s Democrat cohorts in the legislature intend to slap on businesses in the state, it is a chancy proposition that (ITALICS) any (END ITALICS) new Connecticut business will be able to make a go of it. Pity the commentator who suggests that the litigation happy Blumenthal should sue those who wish to destroy the state through improvident taxation; Blumie would no doubt reply that such powers overr...

At the Latin American Summit in Trinidad, President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, no longer the gun toting communist dictator who moved Indian tribes around throughout his country as if they were pieces on a chess board, did what hard-boiled anti-American revolutionary pimps do best: He unfurled a fifty minute stem winder accusing the United States of everything but successfully overthrowing the Cuban dictatorship of the Castro brothers. Ortega was determined not to let the usual crisis in Latin America go to waste and, despite warm overtures from the American president, he was in no mood to re-write his harangue. It has been reported that President Barack Obama sat placidly through the discourse, occasionally taking notes. Confronted later during a photo opportunity with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and asked what he thought of the speech, “Obama said, “"It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked twice to comment on...

“A little frightening how you cats jump straight to revolutionary violence when faced with a political loss. I know you’re joking here, but that shit is for real for a whole lot of people” – a frightened blogger Okay, let’s at least try to get the history of the Boston Tea Party right. There were genuine revolutionists among the “Indians” who threw the tea into Boston harbor. The principle organizer was Sam Adams, as fine a made in America revolutionist as you are likely to find anywhere. But the issue that propelled the dumping was THE TEA. In an attempt to save the East India Company, an early government supported entity (GSE), the British government gave a subsidy to the company in the form of a tax reduction that allowed the company to reduce the price of its tea. Americans drank a lot of tea in those days because Starbucks as yet was not in business, and the British knew they could undercut the market by lowering the price of tea produced by their principle GSE. So they loaded al...

A citizen of Castro’s Cuba, a hotel cook and taxi cab driver, perhaps weary of the slender tips he has been receiving since Castro came to power in 1956 , takes a drag in his cigarette outside the Xanadu hotel, built in the 1920’a by U.S. millionaire Irenee du Pont de Nemours and expropriated by the Castro regime, and tells a Reuters reporter, “Not one person here has anything against the Americans. Let them come to Varadero in their boats or whatever because for us the Americans mean one thing -- more money.” Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez speculates whether the “Cuba sí, Yankee no!" proposition is destined for the ash can of history. Supposing the island is to be flooded by U.S. Tourists, she wonders, “What would party militants think if they were told to accept those who until recently they were told to hate?" Bloomberg news reports that Latin American “leaders” such as the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez will press President Barack Obama for an end to the Cuban embargo pu...

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, arrows hanging from his Achilles heel, has a full page to himself in the right leaning Washington Times .

In attempting to stop development of a golf course displeasing to some environmental groups, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has adopted what he has called “extraordinarily unusual” tactics. According to a story in the Harford Courant , Blumenthal, “who disagrees with the project's tentative approval by the state Department of Environmental Protection” has threatened to sue if the project goes forward. In order to sue the developers of the golf course, Blumenthal must abandon his statutory requirement to serve in his capacity as a lawyer whose chief obligation is to represent the state in civil litigatory matters. The golf course project has already received temporary approval from Department of Environmental Protection, and Blumenthal is by law required to represent the interests of that state agency. The series of events that led Blumenthal to leap over his statutory responsibilities in an effort to satisfy environmental groups that fall outside his purview is much less inter...

Anyone kindly disposed towards John Larson might have told him that if he lay down with dogs, he might get up with a few fleas. They apparently didn’t, and he did. The Journal Inquirer has reported in a flashy first page story, “ Larson on the hot seat ,” that the popular representative of the impregnable 1st District had struck up a very close friendship with earmark king Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, now under scrutiny, for the second time, by the FBI. Murtha and Larson were drawn together through their opposition to the war in Iraq, for all practical purposes now considered won by the good guys, although Murtha insisted as early as June, 2006 that the American presence in Iraq was more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran. The FBI didn’t get their man on the first try, an ABSCAM sting operation launched in several years ago in which agents disguised as Arab sheiks attempted to entice legislators to accept bribes in return for political favors. I...

A professor from Yale and a professional politician, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Friedan, have got together in the New England Journal of Medicine and decided that sugar sweeteners in beverages are not good for kids. This is not a shocking surprise. New York is broke and much in need of tax money these days. The two have proposed taxing sugary sweet things out of existence, using the tax on smelly cigarettes as their template. Just as tobacco is bad for kids and grow-ups, so are sugar substitutes bad for kids. These pathological behaviors must be abolished. As soon as kids, the last refuge of scoundrels, are mentioned in any political connection, one may be certain that there will be tax-Hell to pay, and so it is in this case. It would be pointless to argue that sugary sweet things are good for kids. They aren’t; never were, never will be. We all know this because when we were kids and reached for the candy, kept out of hand usually in some inaccessible cabinet, daddy – s...

Lets take this one step by step. In a recent editorial, the Hartford Courant inveighs against Connecticut’s death penalty law. “A legislative committee,” the paper advises, “has taken a brave step toward abolishing Connecticut's death penalty, a law that is all but unworkable, not to mention expensive, unfair and risky." The bill abolishing the death penalty was brought forward by the same folk who recently sought unsuccessfully to deprive Catholic bishops of their responsibility, in an apostolic structure, of determining the finances of their organization. The Catholic Church also opposes the death penalty, for legitimate religious reasons. Now, why does the paper think that bringing forth such a bill is “brave?” It may be right, according to the revised religious precepts of the Catholic Church, but why is it brave? Is the opposition to the death penalty in Connecticut so fierce and unrelenting that those who have petitioned for its abolition are in some sense threatened?...

President Barack Obama has returned from Europe empty handed. If he had gone there to persuade friendly heads of state in Europe to lend a fighting hand in his new military venture in Afghanistan, the trip must be counted a failure, according to the New York Times , one of the president’s innumerable media cheerleaders: “With protesters raging outside, NATO leaders on Saturday gave a tepid troop commitment to President Obama’s escalating campaign in Afghanistan, mostly committing soldiers only to a temporary security duty… “Despite a glowing reception and widespread praise for Mr. Obama’s style and aims, his calls for a more lasting European troop increase for Afghanistan were politely brushed aside, as they had been in negotiations leading up to the meeting. “As expected, European allies agreed to provide up to 5,000 new troops for Afghanistan, the White House said Saturday. But 3,000 of them are to be deployed only temporarily to provide security for the August elections in Afghanist...

If newspapers were musical compositions, Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer, a publication that for years has been following U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s entangling alliances with Big Business, might very well be Bach. Consider the lede line on Powell’s most recent column, “Anyone can beat Dodd – why not Blumenthal": “Now that the latest Quinnipiac Universality poll has found that any Republican who has not worked for AIG could defeat U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd by a mile…” Powell points to a story in The Washington Times in which a top executive from AIG “whose derivative instruments ruined the company and the world financial system, Joseph Cassano, conducted a political fund raising operation at the company for Dodd just after the 2006 election, as Dodd ascended to the chairman of the senate Banking Committee, whereupon Dodd continued to help insure that Cassano’s deadly inventions escaped government regulation.” Some Democrats, frightened that Dodd might lose his seat to Republicans when...

There were hints very early on, for those paying attention, that Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly preferred tax increases to spending cuts as a means of liquidating the state’s spiraling deficit. Perhaps the chief evidence is that in the past spendthrift Democrats have always preferred to fill deepening deficit pot holes with tax dollars. New England is not exactly a safe haven for heavy breathing tax payers. We are no British Virgin Islands, where the weather is balmy and the tax climate is propitious for business. The BVI has only 21,000 people —but over 400,000 registered International Business Corporations, second only to Hong Kong in total number. One of the reasons Connecticut has lost so much business to South Carolina, to pick at random just one Southern state where taxes are less punishing, is that plucked taxpayers flee fleecing states for pretty much the same reason that householders flee flaming houses: They don’t want their britches to catch on fire. The budget ...

The state Judiciary Committee, headed by co-chairs Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor, seems to be unwilling or unable to accommodate religious proscriptions. The panel recently rejected an amendment to a technical bill drafted to reshape laws allowing court-ordered same sex marriages. The amendment to the enabling legislation, offered by Democratic Rep. Bruce Morris, would have insured that religious organizations would not be forced by law to participate in activities prohibited by some churches. While the enabling legislation passed the committee on a 30-10 vote, the amendment that, according to one news account , would have “specified that organizations affiliated with religious groups wouldn’t be compelled to take actions that contradicted their religious convictions” was defeated by the Judiciary Committee. A few weeks ago, the panel put forth a bill that would have reformed the apostolic nature of the Catholic Church. The two co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, both of whom ...