Skip to main content

Say what? Who’s “Misleading And Deceptive?”


In the face of a current budget deficit of nearly half a billion dollars, Republicans are proposing what they have always proposed -- a modest cut in spending of 6.5%.

The Republicans also want to restore 84 million in cuts to municipalities as well as the half percentage point sales tax reduction that disappeared because Speaker of the House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams cleverly pegged the reduction to disappearing revenues. The tax would have remained in place if state revenues did not sink below a predictable level that caused its elimination.

The Republican proposal has caused the union bought Speaker of the State House of Representatives to reach for his adjectives. Speaker Chris Donovan denounced the Republican plan as “misleading and deceptive" – sort of like the budget he and President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams fashioned, which is now, only weeks after its passage through the Democratic dominated legislature, a half million dollars in the red.

In the new fiscal year, the state will face a multi-billion dollar budget gap, Christmas pudding to the Democrats, whose as yet unannounced plan is to cover the bulk of the coming deficit by increasing Connecticut’s new progressive income tax.

Gov. Jodi Rell, now a lame duck and free to display her true colors, objected to the Republican plan because it contained a $36 million cut in higher education spending that would deny the state $541 million in stimulus funny- money that the federal government is prepared to borrow from the Chinese government, whose economic program is decidedly more Friedmanesque than President Barrack Obama’s command economy.

Donovan was delighted, as always, to use Rell’s objection to frustrate Republican measures, the one constant in his too expensive leadership of the House.

Williams, Donovan’s co-partner in the Senate, was encouraged that more and more lawmakers were speaking out on cue “about the negative impacts Gov. Rell's proposed cuts would have on cities and towns. Unfortunately, while Republicans say they want to protect municipalities, their own plan would shift many costs to cities and towns, make mid-year property taxes more likely, and possibly compromise public safety.”

The Democratic leadership's concern for the public safety is touching, all the more so since the Judiciary committee co-chaired by the Catholic averse Michael Lawlor in the House and Andrew McDonald in the Senate, reinstated days before William’s announcement “an early release program for prison inmates that was curtailed after two parolees were charged with killing a woman and her two daughters in Cheshire in 2007,” according to an Associated Press story.

Lawlor said, according to the AP report, that the decision of his committee was “part of the state budget approved by lawmakers and supported by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Officials say it will save about $4 million a year by reducing the prison population.”

With a bow to public safety, leading Democrats in the legislature consistently have refused to pass a Republican inspired “three strikes and you’re out” law for violent offenders. When the Democratic dominated legislature rejected the effort while punctiliously passing a bill making it illegal for citizens to keep dangerous large primates as pets, Chris Powell, the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and a columnist for that paper, noted the logical inconsistencies of Democratic legislators and could not help but notice the similarity between chimps and chumps:

“Responding to the horrible incident in Stamford in February, the legislature outlawed making pets of large primates and other animals considered dangerous. But the legislature has yet to respond to the horrible incident in Cheshire two years ago, in which a woman and her two daughters were murdered, purportedly by two career criminals on parole. Not only did the legislature refuse again this year to pass a "three strikes" law or even a "20 strikes" law; it again declined to inquire into why the defendants in Connecticut's worst atrocity in living memory have not even been brought to trial after two years. Apparently it is enough that Connecticut is now a bit safer from rogue chimpanzees.”

As a point of interest, it may be noted that the “three strikes and you’re out” bill was blocked in the legislature after the founder of the Three Strikes Coalition, Sam Caligiuri, announced his bid to run for U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s seat.

Caligiuri, as well as Justin Bernier, an energetic and promising Republican, currently is running for the 5th district U.S. House seat held by U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy.

Comments

Anonymous said…
what a lovely bombshell re: the Ct AG in today's Courant. It's about time!
Don Pesci said…
Thanks. I probably would have missed that one. Blumenthal always crosses the line because he will not perceive that there are lines.

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p