Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

TicketNetwork President Donald Vaccaro got himself into a bit of a pickle at Real Art Ways in Hartford. Excessive stimulation along with a bout of bad manners – the two sometimes hang out together – may have been at the root of Mr. Vaccaro’s undoing. “Vaccaro, 49, allegedly groped women at an Academy Awards charity event in Hartford,” The Day of New London notes.” The women were apparently not impressed with his well-lubricated ‘charm.’ When he reportedly grabbed one woman around her breasts, a bouncer intervened. Mr. Vaccaro proceeded to dismiss him as a ‘black mother-(insert obvious expletive),’ according to police accounts. They arrested the ticket mogul on various charges, including for a hate crime.” After his arrest, Mr. Vaccaro’s world melted very quickly. It was remarked in several newspapers that this latest grope was not his first and that once he sued someone for having referred to his business as “ticket scalping.” Ticket scalpers, as everyone knows, do not receive m...

Governor Dannel Malloy is attempting valiantly to upgrade Connecticut’s ancient union encrusted educational establishment. Naturally, he ran into problems with those in the state who defend the status quo, Connecticut’s powerful teacher’s union among them. In a politics of narrow interests, settled opinion is king, because those who have secured their interests, sometimes at the expense of the general good, are understandably reluctant to surrender the golden favors showered upon them by a bought government. God help the man who unsettles settled opinion. Mr. Malloy has proposed to attach teacher tenure to measurable performance, according to Zach Janowski . As in most businesses, including the sports arena, those who do not measure up will be let go. Among those ardently defending the status quo is once radical Big Thinker Jonathan Pelto, whose associations with teacher unions are warm and cordial. These days, whenever Mr. Pelto attempts to throw his two cents into the conversatio...

A decent time having elapsed, sort of, since two multiple murderers had been sentenced to death for having 1) beaten with a baseball bat a husband of a family in Cheshire, 2) forced the husband’s wife to travel to a bank to withdraw funds for the two murderers, 3) raped the wife and one of the daughters, 4) bound the daughters to their beds, 5) set fire to the house, murdering the daughters and their mother, anti-death penalty legislators in the General Assembly are planning once again to file a bill that would prospectively abolish the death penalty, replacing it with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Prospective abolition would leave intact the 11 death penalty sentences of the murderers awaiting justice on Connecticut’s death row. Such a bill would leave intact the legislature’s power to commute death penalty sentences to life in prison at any time after the General Assembly had abolished the death penalty. Unlike most states, the pardon power in Connect...

In a meeting with the Editorial Board of the Danbury News Times, Republican Party Senate hopeful Chris Shays told editors on Tuesday “he will take his fight for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to an August primary,” perhaps not the most useful way to influence Republican Party convention delegates to choose him to represent the party in what promises to be an expensive and contentious battle for a U.S. Senate seat presently held by Joe Lieberman. Mr. Shays had done the math. “Only 25 percent of voters in Connecticut are Republicans,” Mr. Shays says, “and only 20 percent of them vote. So now 5 percent of the electorate are (sic) going to vote in the Republican primary, and of that 5 percent, 2½ percent plus one are going to decide. … We know who those 150,000 voters are who are going to vote and we can target them and make our best case.” The worry among Republicans is that Mr. Shays' promised primary, should nominating conventioneers once again choose party competitor...

Unhappily for Malloyalists everywhere, at least one reporter was not sound asleep when Governor Dannel Malloy’s administration unveiled a PowerPoint presentation at a recent budget briefing showing that the budget will be in balance in 2012-13 and thereafter reap surpluses in 2013-14 of $226 million and $942 in the final year of Mr. Malloy’s gubernatorial term. “In actuality,” the reporter wrote, “if the administration's estimates for expenditures -- including the conversion to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles -- and revenues are compared, the budget is balanced only in its first year. There's a $424 million shortfall in 2013-14 and a $180 million hole in 2014-15 -- the same year Malloy's budget office projects a nearly $1 billion surplus.” Absent the smoke and mirrors employed by previous Republican governors and Democratic dominated legislatures, future Malloy budgets are not in balance. The budgetary magic that transforms real deficits into imaginary surplus...

The “Stolen Valor Act” punishes with a prison sentence up to six months to a year those who “falsely represent” that they have received any “military decoration or medal.” The bill has an enviable parentage: In a 1782 military order, George Washington proclaimed, “Should any who are not entitled to the honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them, they shall be severely punished.” The “Stolen Valor Act” passed though the U.S. Congress without resistance in 2006 and eventually washed up on the shores of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned a conviction under the act, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski deciding: “If false statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the Jew Hater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit.” Responding to a request that his decision be reconsidered, Mr. Kozinski wrote, “Saints may al...

The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In the middle of Black History Month this year, U.S. Representative Allen West of Florida gave a brief history of Republicans and Blacks from the post-Civil War period to the present:

You cannot be a loyal opposition unless you are opposed to the reigning power – in Connecticut’s one party state, a General Assembly and a gubernatorial office dominated by Democrats – and are, at the same time, loyal to something other than the present regime. When Republicans in the General Assembly were frozen out of budget negotiations last fiscal year by a “notice me” governor and a Democratic legislature dominated by a single party, the Valley Forge experience forced them to become, perhaps for the first time in several decades, an authentic loyal opposition. Republican leaders in the state Senate on February 17 published their priorities for the 2012 legislative session . Pointing out the legislature’s constitutional requirement to devote the session in even years to budgetary matters, the Republicans outlined three major goals: •Strict adherence to the state’s constitutional spending cap; •No new taxes; and •No spending increases. Highlights of the Republican proposals ...

According to some reports, gas prices are due to increase as much as 60 cents on the gallon by summer. Citing rising gas prices, up 83 percent under his tenure, President Barack Obama has called for an extension of the payroll tax cut as a means of providing some relief to a Middle Class hard hit by the malingering Obama recession. “Allowing this tax cut to expire,” Mr. Obama said, “would make people’s lives harder right now. It would make their choices more difficult. It would be $40 less for groceries to feed your kids; it would be $40 less for the medications you depend on; $40 less to cover bills and the rent; $40 less to take care of an elder parent, or to donate to a church or a charity.” CNSNews points out, “When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, the city average price for one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $1.79, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figures are in nominal dollars: not adjusted for inflation. Five months later in June, u...

It would appear, according to an item by CBS , that Bridgeport, Connecticut is not the most corrupt city in the country. That distinction falls to Chicago, Illinois, President Barack Obama’s old political stomping grounds: “University of Illinois professor Dick Simpson estimates the cost of corruption at $500 million. “It’s essentially a corruption tax on citizens who bear the cost of bad behavior (police brutality, bogus contracts, bribes, theft and ghost pay-rolling to name a few) and the costs needed to prosecute it.” Vote, Or Else NRA’s “Trigger the Vote” ad is on its way

U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro began her epistle in the New York Post with the following howler: “As both a committed Catholic and a strong advocate of women’s health, I want to applaud the recently released guidelines for preventive health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The guidelines Mrs. DeLauro approved have since been redrafted. Mrs. DeLauro approves birth control, she said, because “We know that improved access to birth control is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality and helps to reduce unintended pregnancies.” No kidding. The kind of “birth control” commended by Mrs. DeLauro and Planned Parenthood would, of course, include contraceptives, abortion and other means of fetal destruction in the Planned Parenthood medicine cabinet. Birth preventatives prevent births, and the decline in birth rates leads to reductions in “unintended pregnancies’ and “infant mortality.” If you employ means that cause pre-birth mortality, yo...

A beautiful woman, a miraculous voice. The way to remember her is in her beauty and strength. And here, the song she's best known for:

There is no question that Governor Malloy shakes things up. But when the fizz settles, you find yourself holding the same old bottle of beer – only now it’s flat. “The budget is everything to Malloy,” former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry told a New York Times reporter, after which Mr. Curry issued a timely warning: “The last thing you want is a sequel to a fiscal crisis.” National Democrats could not produce a budget, even though they controlled both houses of the U.S. Congress and the White House. The day that President Barack Obama delivered his “State of the Union” address marked the thousandth day the nation had hobbled along without a budget.

Below is an excerpt from the Office of Fiscal Analysis’ Overview of Governor Malloy’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget. Spending is increased, taxes are increased, the surplus all but disappears, consolidations produce no real savings, savings decrease and there is some confusing motion in the bottom line of the budget – none of which is good. Here’s hoping the relevant legislative committees read the report. Highlights of OFA Synopsis of FY 13 Revised Budget Appropriations Synopsis of Governor s FY 13 Revised Budget Appropriations Committee Hearing February 9, 2012 1:00 PM OFFICE OF FISCAL ANALYSIS The following is intended to provide information on the Governor’s FY 13 Revised Budget for the Appropriations Committee as background for the OPM presentation. Since the budget was released only recently, we have tried to highlight the major areas of interest rather than provide a comprehensive analysis of the budget and revenue plan. Such analysis will be undertaken by the Committee ...

Appearing on “ Face the State ” with Dennis House, U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, who has announced his candidacy for Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat, passionately defended an administrative edict that would require members of some religious faiths to commit what boilerplate secularists and practical atheists winkingly call “sin.” “We need to draw a line in the sand,” Mr. Murphy told Mr. House. “Enough is enough, a women, where ever she works, has a right to a full range of reproductive health care; that should be the law of the land.” It may have escaped Mr. Murphy’s notice that the edict promulgated by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius forcing religious affiliated institutions, hospitals and schools among them, to dispense contraceptives, some of which are abortifacients, and to offer sterilization under the so called "Affordable Care Act” is not a LAW in the strict sense. Congress has not written a bill that when signed by the presiden...

A Connecticut political commentator noted on his blog that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a trifling gift of $250,000 to Planned Parenthood in the wake of its jihad to force the Susan G. Komen Foundation to reconsider its momentary pledge to cut its own grants to the nation’s premier abortion provider. Not to be too obvious, but Mr. Bloomberg is multimillionaire Democratic POLITICIAN, and supporting Planned Parenthood is advantageous politics for liberals and progressives. Planned Parenthood is not new to politics. The commentator pointed out that the politically muscular abortion provider “jumped into the 2010 Connecticut U.S. Senate campaign against pro-choice Republican Linda McMahon. Democratic candidate Richard Blumenthal’s press staff member Marcy Stech sent an October 22, 2010 email to seven others seeking ‘mysoginistic photos of women and WWE. Planned Parenthood wants to hit LM hard on it. What do we got?’ Stech was doing the bidding of Democratic consultant Andrew ...

The important thing to remember about Watergate – other than the notorious cover-up, the stonewalling, the raft of lies told to the media, the imperious claims of “executive privilege” – is that nobody died there. Some of the principal presidential miscreants responsible for Watergate were rounded up, paraded before various congressional committees and suitably harassed by the media. Some of them sang to avoid a term in jail, others went to the hoosegow. A grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” – President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson -- in March of 1974, and Mr. Nixon was secretly named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Nixon, Time Magazine said, was undergoing “daily Hell and very little trust.” The fires of Hell were stoked and the trust disappeared altogether when a “smoking gun” tape was produced showing Mr. Nixon approving a plan to cover...

The bad news is that President Barack Obama’s address at the National Prayer breakfast may have lost him the atheist vote. One wonders what the late Christopher Hitchens might have made of the address had he not been “late.” The good news is that the scriptures as interpreted by Mr. Obama sanction the progressive income tax, some military interventions in some foreign countries, and federal assistance to the poor and those marginalized by society, provided the victims of society are not aborted fetuses struggling to breathe free. The president said at the prayer breakfast, according to a site that reports on “ the hottest most social content on the web ,” that “he often falls to his knees in prayer, and emphasized the role of his religious values in determining where to lead the country. "’I’d be remiss if I stopped there; if my values were limited to personal moments of prayer or private conversations with pastors or friends. So instead, I must try — imperfectly, but I must...

Mandates in the health care law promulgated and supported by President Barack Obama’s administration already have produced some related push back from the United States Supreme Court. If the matter of health care mandates reaches the high court, it will be heard by justices who have already overwhelmingly affirmed that the First Amendment provides exceptions to religious employers. In a recent case involving the right of a Lutheran school to fire an employee, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, declared that the U.S. Constitution does not permit “government interference with an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself,” a ruling that legal scholars regard as the court’s most significant declaration on religious freedom in two decades. The unanimous 9-0 decision represented a dramatic defeat for the Obama administration, which argued in the case that in firing a teacher the school was not exempt from civil rights claims. In...

Connecticut Defense Breakdown Economic Impact Report Defense Contracts by Congressional District (est.), Connecticut, 2010 Sorted by Congressional District Go to http://www.forthecommondefense.org/reports/ct/index.html to view detailed reports on Connecticut counties, cities, Congressional Districts, industries, small businesses and information on sources and methodology. 9%: In 2012, President Obama limited U.S. military capability to fighting one "regional conflict" and one "holding action." Defense budgets for 2013-2021 were cut $487 billion -- a 9% cut, at a minimum. 18%: "Sequestration," required by law in 2011, mandates $500 billion more in 2013-2021 defense cuts -- an 18% cut, at a minimum. President Obama said he will veto any changes Congress makes. Be Prepared: In 2013 these cuts in defense jobs and businesses will hit Connecticut counties, cities and industries. This report shows how "National Average" defense budget reduc...