Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Any admission from Colin McEnroe, a Courant commentator and host of his own radio show on National Public Radio, “The Colin McEnroe Show,” that he is disposed to vote Republican should be taken, as Mark Twain once said, “with a ton of salt.” Mr. McEnroe wrote in a December 07, 2012 column, “ Searching The Ballot For Worthy Republicans ,”  that he was “itchin' to vote for a Republican.”  And he even provided some tantalizing biographical information: Both of his parents had been Goldwater Republicans. Political obligations to one’s parents, however, rarely survive a Yale education,  the fifth  commandment having been seriously eroded by sophomore year.  Mr. McEnroe noticed that his father had been sliding towards the Democratic heresy at the end. In his later years, his father had “ taken to slipping into the voting booth and quietly voting Democrat. I could tell this was happening because he slowly stopped saying anything about politics in front of my mot...

One of the problems with columns written by humorists is that they may be taken seriously when they are intended as humor or – worse – they may be taken humorously when they are intended to be taken seriously. This was the curse that followed Mark Twain to the end of his days. So too with Mr. McEnroe . “Give me the right guy,” he has said ,   “and I’ll vote GOP for once.” Mr. McEnroe’s humor rests, like a coiled snake, in that “for once.” Has he ever voted for a Republican? Not likely. Let the word go round at the Hartford Courant that any of its columnists voted Republican, and they would never survive the shattering laughter that would greet them when they sit down at their keyboards to advise Republicans who they ought to nominate to run against, say, U.S. Representative John Larson in the 1 st District, or Rosa DeLauro in the 3 rd District, both of whom are certain to die in office, Ms. DeLauro dressed as a 1930’s flapper, hip to the last.

One news publication apparently has an ear for a political pitch : “In the first-term Democratic governor’s recent speeches, echoes can be heard of the broad themes that President Obama successfully used in 2012 to make a case for his second term, despite stubbornly high unemployment and a tepid economic recovery, the same conditions confronting Malloy. “Like Obama, Malloy is asking for more time to overcome fiscal challenges left by a Republican predecessor, rattling off statistics that point to progress and ignoring those that do not. And like the president, the governor acknowledges the electorate’s fears and frustrations about the pace of recovery.” The publication notes that Governor Dannel Malloy has not yet formally announced his candidacy. His on the stump remarks are styled by the publication as a “soft opening of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s unannounced re-election campaign.” Pause for a moment over the oxymoronic expression “soft opening of an unannounced campaign.”...

Another version

Mary said: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. for he has looked upon his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel for he remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children for ever."

Kings College choir

Kings College choir

Kings College Choir

in hoc signo vinces -- "In this sign, you will conquer." In one of our catechism classes, Sister Mary Immaculata asked us to distinguish between a sign and a symbol. Correct answer: A sign IS the thing it symbolizes. The Christian cross is a sign, not a symbol. It was “a sign of conquering” for the Emperor Constantine, who had a dream before the Battle of the Milivan. The legend of Constantine’s dream comes to us from a very close and reliable source, Lactantius, a poor man patronized by the emperor who wrote the first biography of the conqueror who Christianized Europe. The sign Constantine saw in the sky, Lactantius tells us, was a "staurogram", or a Latin cross with its upper end rounded in a P-like fashion.

Kings College Choir

Some stories just make your brain pop. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal was visiting with Gregory and Celeste Fulcher, whose daughter, Erika Robinson, 26, had been slain in a nightclub shooting by Adrian Bennett, 28, aka “Bread.” Mr. “Bread,” Mr. Fulcher told Mr. Blumenthal , should not have had a gun, and he should not have been on parole: “It’s senseless, he shouldn’t have been out of jail walking the streets as a convicted felon.” Fulcher said of Mr. Bennett. “The system failed us, but I also blame the establishment.”

The war on the Tea Party, much more than a rhetorical offensive, continues unabated months after the putatively non-partisan Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – the guys and gals that audit you to make sure you are paying your “fair share” to support your president, your U.S. Congress and your federal courts – had targeted tea party political groups for punitive audits. The same “death to the Bill of Rights” progressives at the U.S. Treasury Department have now promulgated rules that will, they hope, insure the extinction of the political sons and daughters of Sam Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and – coming closer to Connecticut  -- Roger Sherman, William Samuel Johnson, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Lyman Hall and the authors of Connecticut’s 1818 “ Declaration of Rights ,” Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr. among them, which declares in section 4:

The office of Attorney General in Connecticut evolved from the King’s Lawyer in the pre-Revolutionary period. It was the English attorney general who, after a hearing with Connecticut Governor John Winthrop, approved a bill for incorporation of the Connecticut Charter. In Connecticut’s colonial period, the office of state’s attorney represented both the administrative and criminal interests of the crown. The office of Attorney General was established in 1898 to represent the civil interests of the state, the criminal interest to be retained by the chief state’s attorney. The office of Attorney General today retains its initial purpose in colonial law. The Attorney General’s office is statutorily obligated to represent the legal interests of the governor of the state and his administrators. While the nature of the chief executive in Connecticut has changed from king to governor, needs remain constant. Both king and governor operate politically within set legal constructs, and bot...

Here is former President George Bush on Russian President Vladimir Putin's domestic centralization of power as quoted in a recent book, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House: "He thinks he'll be around forever. He asked me why I didn't change the Constitution so I could run again.” Mr. Bush, brutalized by then candidate for president Barack Obama, never looked back when he left office and has been silent as a tomb ever since. Still, one cannot help but wonder what Mr. Bush’s reaction was to the latest news out of Russia, as reported by Reuters: “ Putin dissolves state newsagency tightens grip on Russia media .”

A runner-up for Time's “Person of the Year” was Edward Snowden. The prize went to Pope Francis  who, apparently, is more like Pope John and Jesus than Pope Benedict and Satan. Pope Benedict XVI—the first pope in centuries voluntarily to surrender the papacy—is, like his successor, “modest,” a virtue Time considers indispensable in popes: What could be a greater indication of modesty than giving up the papacy in exchange for a life of prayer and holy silence? This is not the kind of renunciation – of wealth, power and glory – one expects from popes or editors of Time magazine. Benedict would never have made Time's cover as “Person of the year.” Too orthodox, too much of a theological scholar, too unTimely. Years flow by quickly and Mr. Snowden should not give up hope. There is always next year. 

Last Year the state – i.e. Governor Dannel Malloy and majority Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly -- decided to end its long-time practice of sending out paper checks for tax refunds. The state decided instead to use refund cards for a variety of purposes, including the refunding of tax over-payments. When state Senate leader John McKinney, now a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, called for a hearing on the change, autocratic Democrats snickered that a public hearing was quite unnecessary. Indeed, the Republican Party, it would seem, was quite unnecessary. Go away. It turns out that some data in the cards has now been exposed to possible identity theft. About 14,335 accounts have been breached, and State tax commissioner Kevin Sullivan, who once served in the state Senate with Mr. McKinney, is still snickering.

When Northeast Utilities CEO Thomas May talks campaign donations, his managers listen. But then, Governor Dannel Malloy’s crony capitalist friends tend to be effusive in their praise of their benefactor. "While he has accomplished much, there is more to do," Mr. May wrote in an e-mail to 50 of his managers. "Please join me in providing support to continue the work begun, providing new opportunities, and securing the leadership to make it happen." Of battling Dannel, Mr. May enthused, “he battled through issues of historic proportions — from nature's wrath to one man's horrific actions," a reference to Adam Lanza’s slaughter of children in Sandy Hook Elementary School. Storm Sandy, of course, stood no chance when confronted with battling Dannel. And mention of Mr. Lanza by politicians in campaign modes cannot help but generate among the voting public a thumbs up for the politician and a thumbs down for Mr. Lanza.

Hilaire Belloc's Advice to the Rich: "Get to know something about the internal combustion engine and remember -- soon you will die." The brief pre-Christmas homily on money, politics and Christianity found below is long overdue. I can’t be sure that the sort of millionaire who supports antagonistic politicians, always anxious to hang him with the rope he so credulously delivers, is a patriot or a scoundrel. I do know that, generally, money covers a multitude of sins. Jesus was indifferent about politics, economics and what we would call sex: He knew the road to Heaven was not paved with gold or worldly glory or condoms. He forgave the sins of the flesh readily, having first made inflexible demands upon the spirit, but the materialist itch, He intimated often enough, could be a hindrance. More than 2,000 years after God was nailed to a cross – “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? -- it still is more difficult for a rich man to pass easily into Heaven t...

By endorsing Mark Greenberg’s candidacy for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5 th District, a seat now held by U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty, state senate leader John McKinney has tossed a wrench into the political machinery. Mr. McKinney is an announced candidate for governor , a position now held by Governor Dannel Malloy, the first Democratic chief executive in more than 20 years and the nominal head of his party.

The reviews of Danbury State Attorney’s Stephan Sedensky preliminary criminal report are now in. Mr. Sedensky would be prudent to hang on to his present job, by his bloody fingernails if necessary. Mr. Sedensky’s preliminary report, Connecticut Commentary noted elsewhere, may be little more than a desperate attempt to control the narrative that is sure to follow the release of the full criminal report at some point in the near future. Hartford Courant columnist and humorist Colin McEnroe  was not amused by assertions made by Mr. Sedensky in the preliminary report:

Jonathan Pelto, who is to the Malloy administration what Inspector Javert was to Jean Valjean, demonstrates how Malloyalists help a city – Will anyone be surprised to discover that it is Bridgeport? – circumvent its statutory obligations, not to mention its moral obligations to taxpayers living outside the confines of Bridgeport: “Apparently without the approval of the State Board of Education or the approval of the Connecticut General Assembly, the Malloy administration is planning to provide Malloy ally, Mayor [of Bridgeport] Bill Finch, with a special deal so that he doesn’t have to have the City Bridgeport meet the state law concerning their minimum budget expenditures for local education. The law is called the Minimum Budget Requirement (MBR).” http://jonathanpelto.com/2013/11/24/news-flash-secret-deal-malloy-political-ally-turns-education-funding-formula-joke/

The short answer to the question “Why can’t whistle blowers beat city hall?” is – because the statutory, administrative and judicial cards are stacked against the whistle blower. The game is fixed, as usual in favor of those who forcefully wield power. The purpose of the whistle blower statute is admirable and necessary. If you are a worker in a state or municipal agency and you discover in the course of your duties some sort of malfeasance, large or small, it is in the interest of the state that the problem should be reported to people who are authorized to correct the deficiency. If not you, then who? This is how operations seriously derailed are righted. It goes without saying that administrators in deficient agencies have a personal interest in quashing all whistle blower reports.

These posting are slightly premature, but at some point in the near future, only 11 years, we shall be celebrating the great lady’s 100th birthday. Maggie Thatcher – who broke more ceilings in the British Empire than any other modern post-feminist gal – was the head of Britain’s Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990, an astonishing accomplishment in itself, and Prime Minister of Britain for 11 years from 1979 to 1990, the last year the governance of Britain made any sense at all. Here is the great lady having fun with the guys, Maggie being Maggie: And here she is on budgeting by borrowing. Members of Connecticut's General Assembly should take notice: Here is Maggie dispensing with the British equivalent of Jay Carney, bidding good bye to her friends and opponents:

The composition is magnificent. But check out the pictures too. This is young America, bursting at the seams with an irrepressible energy. As in the music, the history of New World is that of an arc bending upwards. Much of his time in America was occupied by teaching and organizing performances. But above all else Dvorak was a composer and in his first winter in New York he began to write the symphony that would become his most cherished. (It was completed that summer on vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a colony of Czech immigrants who helped assuage Dvorak's intense homesickness.) Formally, the work fell solidly within European tradition, with a sonata-form opening, a meditative largo broken by restless outbursts, a lusty scherzo with bucolic trios and a vigorous, triumphant finish. In keeping with the emerging trend of cyclical form, its themes all germinated from a common seminal motif and returned in the finale. But beginning with its hugely successful premiere that December...

Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky released on Monday a 40 page preliminary report on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. He has promised to release the full report numbering 2,000 pages sometime or other, perhaps in May. Release of the full report has now been twice delayed. What, some people now are wondering, is the purpose of the preliminary report? There are no shockers in the document. Very little of the released information, now certified as correct by the preliminary report, can be construed as adversely affecting a prosecution, and indeed the preliminary report confirms that prosecutions were unlikely months ago:

It’s now official, though it may take some time for Governor Dannel Malloy’s message to trickle down to the members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation: “I understand this frustration,” Malloy said. “I’m frustrated. I think the federal government has messed up big time. This couldn’t have been a worse rollout, except in the states that embraced what we’re trying to do. In Connecticut, we're signing up people left and right.” Mr. Malloy’s “rebuke of the White House over Obamacare” may be found in a short piece in CTMirror, “ Malloy rebukes White House over Obamacare .” Mr. Malloy’s rebuke, it should be noticed, does not touch the essence of the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare. The act itself, he thinks, is praiseworthy, but its execution leaves much to be desired – unlike Mr. Malloy’s own flawless roll-out of the Connecticut Obamacare exchange.

The human heart is a prison. This is what happens when God touches its bars:

The FBI’s singing canary in the Donovan probe, “labor activist” Ray Soucy, was not given prison time for the part he had played in the attempted corruption of former Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan. The lede on a story in a Hartford paper  ran as follows: “A labor activist at the center of an attempt two years ago to kill a tax on tobacco by bribing a top state lawmaker with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign money was sentenced Monday to three years probation, the first six months to be served at a halfway house.” Connecticut’s majority Democratic Party is full of “labor activists.” It’s only a slight stretch to say Governor Dannel Malloy, who has marched on the picket line with union workers, is himself a “labor activist.” Mr. Malloy pledged his troth to unions when he was in the political nursery, and he has renewed his vows several times during his administration, most notably when his first budget was on the drawing boards .

An Obamacare supporter had just finished explaining on Facebook that Obamacare, once fully implemented, would ring out of the private insurance market all those expensive and useless “substandard” plans when, hesto presto, Mr. Obama, under pressure from Democratic notables such as former President Bill Clinton to keep his promise that insurance purchasers will be able to keep their insurance plans, announced during one of his infrequent press conferences that everyone he had promised could keep their plans could, following his change of mind, keep their plans. The Obamacare Facebook supporter fell silent and went on to other matters. Wrinkles began to appear in the smooth winding sheets of the usual Obama supporters.  Jon Stewart impaled Mr. Obama on his news/comedy show The Daily Show:

Applications for pistol permits in Newtown are up 110 percent in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, according to Connecticut State Police who issue the permits. It would be an error to suppose that the increase has been driven solely by restrictive gun laws written by the General Assembly in response to the mass murders. After having produced a budget in the absence of any input from Republican leaders in the General Assembly, Governor Dannel Malloy felt compelled to include Republicans when his signature gun control legislation was in its formative process. Republicans who boisterously supported Mr. Malloy’s gun control bill were put in Coventry once again when Mr. Malloy shaped his second budget. Somewhat in the manner of a mistreated yet faithful wife, Republican leaders have since complained about the unusual abusive treatment.   

So then, what’s wrong with secrecy in politics? Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Democrat from New York, was the chairman of a congressional commission that in the post-Cold War period inquired into the uses of governmental secrecy. Moynihan felt that a “culture of secrecy” had pervaded the U.S. government and its intelligence services for 80 years, starting with the Espionage Act of 1917. The Commission’s findings were presented to President Bill Clinton in 1997. As part of his presentation, Mr. Moynihan secured the release of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Venona file, which documented Soviet espionage efforts in the United States during the preceding 50 years, a treasure trove of information that ought to have been released much earlier.

The Tea Party in Connecticut is likely to loom large in future state-wide campaigns, even though Democrats in Connecticut would be hard pressed to name any incumbent Tea Party members in the General Assembly. There are no Tea Party incumbents in Connecticut’s left of center U.S. Congressional delegation, all the members of which are Democrats, and Governor Dannel Malloy may safely be ruled out as a Tea Party enthusiast. “What was once the Republican Party,” Mr. Malloy said at the 65th Annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner  “is now the Tea Party – this is a case were (sic) the tail is literally wagging the dog. They don’t give a darn about our economy, it’s quite clear that they would sink our economy for their own political good.” The brute fact is: There are no enemies on the left in Connecticut politics, which is why the state over the past few decades has moved steadily left of center. The same Democrats who find it politically expedient to regard the Tea Party in Co...

No seasoned political watcher in New Haven will be much surprised by the gaggle of 14 karat Democrats who showed up at St. Luke’s Parish Hall to lend their support to state Senator Toni Harp in her bid to replace John DeStefano as the Elm City’s mayor. Everyone who is anyone in Democratic Party politics showed up to row the Harp boat successfully ashore, although former Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano, notably absent, did not on this occasion join the chorus of prominent Democrats pledging their support to Mrs. Harp.

When Mark Twain said ““Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well," he might easily have been talking about bonding. Usually a state sells bonds to pay for long term capital projects. But like any political practice, the selling of bonds may be subject to abuse. The use of bonding to pay off current expenses that ought to be discharged through tax increases or spending decreases is considered a “no, no” among agencies that rate state bonding. The practice, however, is a “yes, yes” among politicians who want to avoid either the unpleasant option of raising taxes or the equally unpleasant option of cutting spending. The beauty of bonding for such politicians is that it allows them to escape the wrath of voters who understandably resent tax increases imposed to pay for current budget expenses and improvident spending. The downside to bonding abuse is that current expenses are carried into the future, a benefit for cowardly politicians charged to...

U.S. Senator Chis Murphy plans to travel to Europe on an apology tour, according to a brief notice in  a Hartford paper. “Over the last several months,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a media release, “our European allies have raised legitimate concerns about the nature and scope of U.S. intelligence programs, and I agree that at times, U.S. surveillance programs have not been conducted with the appropriate restraint and security, both in the United States and in Europe. While foreign citizens do not enjoy the same constitutional protections as American citizens, the United States should have processes in place that assure non-U.S. citizens that all possible steps are being taken to limit the scope of our surveillance programs so that we are targeting only the information absolutely necessary to find and catch individuals who pose a security threat to the United States and our allies. My goal for these meetings will be to help cement the overall relationship between the United S...

It is commonly thought that Connecticut did not ratify the Bill of Rights Amendments until 1939, a pro forma ratification. But in fact, misfiled documents newly discovered in Connecticut’s archives show that Connecticut ratified the first 12 – significantly, not 10 – Amendments to the Constitution, commonly called “the Bill Of Rights,” in 1790. The ratification document, discovered by researcher Eugene Martin LaVergne and misfiled under “Revolutionary Documents,” has been reported to Connecticut’s archivist. The newly discovered document -- misfiled in the year 1780, rather than in its proper year, 1790 -- is itself revolutionary because the earlier ratification dates of Connecticut and Delaware mean that at least one important long forgotten amendment – a reapportionment amendment, the real “First Amendment” to the Bill of Rights reported out for ratification by Congress – must now be considered an amendment lawfully ratified in 1790. In order to make the amendment operation...

It was bound to happen sooner or later. In Hartford, Connecticut, a one party town for decades, political favoritism has raised its ugly head – not for the first or last time. Mayor of Hartford Pedro Segarra and Hartford school officials, we learn from a stinging editorial in a Hartford newspaper , “are dead right in asking city auditors to clear the air on whether city Treasurer Adam Cloud had a conflict of interest in allegedly moving a city insurance policy from one broker to another one, Hybrid Insurance Group.” The connections between Hartford’s Treasurer, Mr. Cloud, and the insurance group that was awarded a substantial account are, the paper finds, unsavory: “Hybrid is a tenant in a downtown Hartford building owned by Mr. Cloud and family members. Also, treasurer Cloud's brother, Christopher Cloud, is a lobbyist for Hybrid.” Hartford’s “sharp-eyed chief financial officer,” Paula Altieri, discovered that the insurance policy had been transferred from one bro...

A little more than a month ago, Jim Powell of Forbes Magazine did us the favor of pulling together in one piece – “ How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America's Worst Performing Economies? ” -- a load of data much of which was  already in the public stream . It’s useful to have all the festering lilies together in one bunch, so that one might get a good whiff of them. Before and since the publication of Mr. Powell’s distressing news, some Republican opponents of Connecticut’s progressive governor and his helpmeets in the state’s General Assembly have been energetically flourishing some of Mr. Powell’s little red flags, hoping that the state’s sometimes inattentive media might awaken and take note that Connecticut is teetering on the brink.

  “The ink war.” That is how Tom Dudchik of Capitol Report styled the controversy between Chis Powell, the icon busting editor of the Journal Inquirer, and, following a rebuttal editorial in the Hartford Courant, pretty much everyone else manning the barricades on the left who ever lifted a pen or pounded a keyboard in defense of the liberal view of the decline of print media. The controversial pieces are printed here as they appeared, in chronological sequence; first, Mr. Powell’s initial column; then the Courant’s editorial rebuttal; then, an interview with Jim Romenesko; then Mr. Powell’s response to what he regards as the distortions of his critics; and finally a Courant rebuttal accusing Mr. Powell of having defended the indefensible – namely, himself. Unprinted here are a slew of editorials and commentary pieces, all more or less bearing the same message: that Mr. Powell has attacked all single parent moms; that he is a holdover from those glorious days of yore when ...

Real political corruption – the most corrosive kind – involves the use of governmental power to advance private or purely political interests, which is why, come to think of it, Lord Acton said “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A watchful student of history, Lord Acton added, “Great men are almost always bad men.” When great republics collapse, “great men” step into the breach. Caesar rose from the ashes of the Roman Republic, and a string of monarchs in Europe was followed by the revolutionary anarchs of France and the guillotine. They, in turn, were supplanted by Napoleon, one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “great men.” The idea of the republic usually suffers some form of corruption before its ruin.     

In the course of writing political columns, a bad habit I’ve been nurturing for more than 30 years, people have sometimes ask me, with a note of desperation in their voice, will things in Connecticut ever change? These people generally are either conservatives or libertarians and therefore immune to the usual political nonsense. The Democratic Party has been in charge of the state roughly since the Mesozoic Era. Will we ever sniff change in the air, they wonder? It’s a serious question: What will it take to shake people in Connecticut from their lethargy – to wake them up before the plane we’re all traveling in finally crashes into the mountain? We’re perilously close to that. Only a month ago, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) released its 12th annual survey of businesses in the state , and the news was bleak. The organization surveyed 377 in state companies and found that 82 percent had a negative or somewhat negative opinion of Connecticut as...

The three Connecticut Democratic millionaires in the state’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation have decided to forgo their salaries for the duration of the shutdown. Millionaires Senator Dick Blumenthal and U.S. House members Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes, will be devoting their salaries to charity, according to a report in the left of center CTMirror .

Danbury State Attorney Stephen Sedensky, the keeper of the Sandy Hook secrets, has so far had a fairly easy time of it, but disquieting murmurs rend the air. The Associated Press (AP) last July petitioned Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) to order the release of 911 tapes made during the mass shooting of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The commission found – surprise! – that such information could not be withheld from the public merely because Mr. Sedensky asserted a criminal investigation was ongoing .

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea -- T.S. Elliot Kevin Rennie, a Harford Courant columnist, is regarded by some in politics as the Torquemada of Connecticut commentators – especially in matters of what one might call political ethics. Many politicians have felt his bite and winced.

S’matter with the governors of New York and Connecticut? Even Benito Mussolini was able to make the trains run on time. Neil Vigdor of the Greenwich Times reports :  They [Malloy and the Malloyalists] were told it could take until Oct. 14 to restore full power to the nation's busiest commuter line, which was crippled Wednesday when a backup feeder line supplying electricity to overhead catenary wires failed in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. The railroad is currently in the process of modernizing a substation that normally supplies trains with power…

Like wealthy one per-centers who spend part of the season in foreign parts, Mr. Scully's home is with Scully Communications .  During the political season, some punitively nonpartisan owners of public relation firms wander into political campaigns, at which point the mask of political impartiality is momentarily discarded. The New Haven Register reports:

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s awkward false claim, made or intimated several times , that he had served as a marine in Vietnam rose out of the newspaper morgues recently after former New York Times political writer Ray Hernandez joined a Washington D.C. PR firm. The story in the Hartford Courant, “ NY Times Reporter Who Was Fed Blumenthal Vietnam Scoop Will Join DC Firm Led By One Time McMahon Adviser ”, actually is a story about a story, a story twice removed.

It’s shear happenstance that Andrée is reading a biography of Flannery O’Connor on “talking books” just as I had finished reading to her a short biography on Simone Weil . Following the Weil biography, I picked up a book called the Simone Weil Reader , a collection of her major writings. Both writers were afflicted, O’Connor with lupus and Weil with an eating disorder. Camus says of Weil that she refused during the Second World War to take more nourishment than was available to troops in the war theatre and so starved herself. This was partly true; Weil had suffered for years from anorexia.

Two appearances by Republican Party gubernatorial hopeful Tom Foley, one on WFSB’s “Face the State” and another on NPR’s “Where We Live” program, have produced a raft of hearty criticism from Connecticut’s left of center media. The most interesting Foley response was a letter written to the Hartford Courant .  Mr. Foley made two points in his letter: 1) Three of the four charges he made in his “Face The State” appearance were true, and the fourth has yet to be denied unequivocally by Governor Dannel Malloy; 2) The people of Connecticut rightfully expect their politicians to be free of even the appearance of corruption, a point repeated ad nauseam in thousands of political reports and editorials.

The Chris Donovan, “Roll Your Own” scandal is being judicially tucked to bed now that some principals in the scandal have been sentenced.  Most recently, Joshua Nassi, former state House Speaker Chris Donovan’s campaign manager, was sentenced to 28 months in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton. Mr. Donovan was running for the U.S. House in Connecticut’s 5 th  District when his campaign was rudely interrupted by FBI wired singing canaries, prominent among them former corrections union official Ray Soucy, a character who might have done well for himself during the good old days of Tammany Hall and George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall boss who always was careful to make a sharp distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, the chorus of crying Democrats, is running out of active enemies. There are no longer any Republicans aboard; haven’t been since the last moderate Republican in New England, Chris Shays, fell to a young, seemingly moderate Democrat, present 4 th  District U.S. Representative Jim Himes. In the past 15 years, no fewer than 3 moderate U.S. Congressional Republicans in Connecticut have been displaced by Democrats. U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson was displaced by former U.S. Representative Chris Murphy. Mr. Murphy is now a progressive U.S. Senator. U.S. Representative Rob Simmons fell to Democrat Joe Courtney.

Finest hours in the lives of politicians are so rare that they ought to be celebrated as often as possible,  pretty much in the way John Adams said the country should celebrate its founding: "The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.’’ More often than not, the scribes sleep and snooze through legislative hearings on technically complex issues.

Here is an accurate transcript of a conversation between Dennis House of Face the State and former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley . Mr. Foley hopes to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for governor. Neither Mr. Foley nor Governor Dannel Malloy has as yet formally announced their respective bids for the governor’s office. A great deal of commentary – most of it critical of Mr. Foley’s comments -- already has preceded the posting of a transcript. But it’s always a good idea to put first things first: First the transcript, then the commentary:

The Washington Post  reports: “The United States and Russia agreed Saturday on an outline for the identification and seizure of Syrian chemical weapons and said Syria must turn over an accounting of its arsenal within a week. “The agreement will be backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution that could allow for sanctions or other consequences if Syria fails to comply, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said.” The speed with which all this is happening – and that as a result of a serendipitous statement that fell unbidden from the lips of Secretary of State John Kerry – is a little too unbelievable to be believed. One imagines that at some point in the distant future, some reporter or historian, rooting through deservedly forgotten documents and private communications, will discover that the whole US, Russian, Syrian “deal” was cooked up far in advance of the precipitating incidents. Assuming prior negotiations between the parties, the only open question is: Who d...

When former Governor Jodi Rell retired from office, she retired from politics as well. Mrs. Rell has not endorsed Republican wannabe governors, however coveted her endorsement might be. In this respect, she is to Connecticut what former President George Bush is to the nation – hardly there at all. There is among former presidents a private code verging on a tradition that when opposition candidates are elected president, the retiring president should ride off into the sunset, break ground for a presidential library and permit the new president to govern without carping from the sidelines, however much the incoming president savages the former president by claiming that he or she has been crippled by problems “inherited” from his now stubbornly silent predecessor.

A couple of months ago, President Barack Obama drew a red line in Syria. He said if Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad, the Middle East’s answer to North Korea’s runt dictator, were to use chemical weapons against his political opponents, this would catch Mr. Obama’s interest and trigger a military response. At least, that’s what everyone thought he said. A little over a year ago, at one of Mr. Obama’s infrequent news conferences, the president said :

In any issue of importance, congressmen generally are torn in two directions.  On the one hand, they are legislators charged with representing the interests of their constituents. On the other hand, they are members of a national assembly charged with advancing the public good or the good of the nation. National interests do not always coincide with constituent interests. Edmund Burke spoke to the distinction in an address to the electors of Bristol , the County in South West England he represented in Parliament. Mr. Burke was forced to address the point publicly in a campaign for office. This is the message he sent to his constituents:

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”  ―  Flannery O'Connor ,  The Violent Bear it Away In September, Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy traveled to New Haven to asperse New Haven mayoralty hopeful Toni Harp with his precious endorsement. Mr. Murphy followed in the trek of Governor Dannel Malloy, who earlier had endorsed Mrs. Harp, whose deceased husband was New Haven’s premier tax scofflaw. Upon Mr. Harp’s leave-taking, his mountainous tax debt, along with his valuable assets, was passed along to his son. Mrs. Harp has disclaimed any responsibility for the tax debt, arguing that her affairs and those of her husband were separated by a Berlin Wall. But there are some in New Haven who think Mrs. Harp is at least morally responsible for the debt to Mr. Malloy’s government.

According to a piece in Time , Pope Francis is, on the matter of Syria, allied with the angels of peace: “Pope Francis’ response to Syria is in line with how his predecessors handled international conflicts. Pope Benedict XVI expressed concerns over the military intervention in Libya. Pope John Paul II continually and strongly spoke out against the US-led war in Iraq. The US and the Vatican squared off during the 1989 Panama invasion when Dictator Manuel Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy.” There is nothing surprising in the pope’s declaration. The possible persecution of Catholics, should President Obama intervene militarily in what has now become a religious war between Islamic sects in Syria, adds yet another dimension to the pope’s plea for peace. Somewhat like Chicago politicians, radical Salafists in the Middle East – i.e. members of the Muslim Brotherhood – are not inclined to let a crisis go to waste.

It’s slap back time in Stamford. Following Governor Dannel Malloy’s endorsement of William Tong as Stamford’s next mayor, the Chairman of the Democratic Party in Stamford took up cudgels in the city’s press. Party Chairman John Mallozzi, speaking on behalf of the Democratic City Committee that had voted overwhelmingly to endorse David Martin as mayor in the upcoming elections, wrote in a letter to the Stamford Advocate on Friday:

A picture, it is often said, is worth a thousand words. In the case of a picture on the front page of a newspaper captioned “After Newtown,” the picture may be worth a thousand dead end arguments. The photo shows parents and children milling in the hallway of Henry Barnard Elementary School in Enfield on the first day of school. A bright yellow banner greets the students: “Welcome Back!” In the foreground of the picture, Kevin Hart, “one of the guards stationed at every Enfield school this year,” stands watch, his hands folded in front of him and a gun strapped to his hip. Mr. Hart is “a retired Hartford police officer hired as a monitor for Henry Barnard.” But for the pistol, he is inconspicuous and would arouse no notice.

  I learned after I had been married that Andree, my wife, had spent some time in retreat at the The Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis  in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Her time there had left a deep impression upon her. She spoke often of the nuns she heard rather than saw. Occasionally, one would catch glimpses of them through wooden gratings, but their singing drifted out into the chapel, and from there plunged a dagger of beauty into the heart. The Gregorian chant of the nuns is a prayer sung. Plainsong, the official music of the Catholic Church, predates both harmony and polyphony. Andree, I should mention, was a singer, and music for her even now sets her soul aflame. And so, here was this cleansing wave of beauty washing over her, the poetry of the texts in Latin informed with the inexhaustible and numinous mysteries of Christ’s birth, passion, death and resurrection. Later, we visited The Abbey of Regina Laudis together. No doubt Mother Delores Hart was...

The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now officially underway. It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel -- easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has not said whether or not he thinks it was wise diplomacy when President Barack Obama drew his red line in the sand on the question of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian strongman Bashir al Assad against his opponents. But the answer to the question can be deduced from Mr. Murphy’s position on a promised U.S. military intervention. Mr. Assad having stepped across Mr. Obama’s red line, Mr. Obama seems poised to respond militarily in some thus far mysterious fashion. Mr. Murphy, the junior U.S. Senator from Connecticut, has been tagged by his state’s media  as “one of the most vocal opponents of a proposed air strike.” His Democratic comrade in the Senate, Richard Blumenthal, is less pacific. Mr. Blumenthal is urging prompt military action in Syria “to send a message to Assad.”

The following is a media release from Shelia Mathews of AbleChild : Ablechild vs.ChiefMedical Examiner: FIC Docket No: 2013-197, Attorney: Patrick B. Kwanashie, AAG (Office of the Attorney General) argues release of Adam Lanza records to public “can cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications”. Ablechild argues that lack of transparency comprises informed consent and puts public health “at risk”. December 14, 2012, 20 year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adults in a mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And zero at the bone . —Emily Dickinson Connecticut’s far left – Governor Dannel Malloy and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy – have offered public endorsements to New Haven mayoralty candidate Toni Harp, not the brightest thing to do during a Democratic primary campaign. The endorsements have disappointed Hartford Courant commentator Colin McEnroe. The irritant in his shell has produced the following pearl of wisdom :

Robert Braddock, the hapless finance director for the Chris Donovan U.S. House campaign, took the bullet bravely enough. Outside the courtroom in which he was sentenced to 38 months for having accepted fraudulent campaign contributions for Mr. Donovan, Mr. Braddock spilled the beans. FBI agents, Mr. Braddock told the media, offered him a deal he had bravely refused. The FBI, directing Donovangate from behind the curtain, wanted to wire-up Mr. Braddock so they might haul in a larger catch – perhaps Mr. Donovan himself – but Mr. Braddock refused to cooperate because, unlike FBI “rats” Joshua Nassi and Raymond Souci, a certain private code of honor kept him out of the FBI sting operation.

Last week, Connecticut’s Supreme Court overturned on process grounds a jury's decision that the state of Connecticut should pay $18.3 million to Computers Plus, a company that once operated out of East Hartford. The jury found that the state – specifically, then quick-to-sue Attorney General Richard Blumenthal -- had defamed the owner of the company and violated her due-process rights. The jury’s multi-million dollar award should be taken as an indication of the depth of the state’s perfidy in driving Computer Plus out of business on a fraudulent claim of wrongdoing.

Secretary of State John Kerry has released a statement  on the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Bashir Assad’s Syria: "What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world," said Kerry. "It defies any code of morality. Let me be clear: The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable. And despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured, it is undeniable."

M en are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions -- Niccolò Machiavelli     A bit of advice for Democrats in Connecticut: First of all, stop worrying. You outnumber opposition Republicans by a margin of two to one, and there is no viable third party on the horizon, just a few Tea Party groups vowing to end the public careers of middle-of-the-road Republicans.

Will the gun restriction bill passed by the legislature have an appreciable impact on gun crime in Connecticut? The future will provide an answer to that question, but it does not seem likely. The gun restriction bill is targeted at gun owners that even Michael Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s choice to reform penology in the state, would be forced to admit do not generally show up in crime statistics. How many NRA members are currently doing time in Connecticut prisons because they used their guns to hold up EZMarts – like Frankie Resto?

The Hill, a much respected Washington D.C. publication, reports that Senator Dick Blumenthal, “not a businessman by trade,” has never-the-less acquired a fortune by “his marriage to the daughter of a New York real estate magnate.” His marriage has given Mr. Blumenthal “an impressive investment portfolio.” Mr. Blumenthal is not alone among Connecticut’s Democratic politicians in having acquired fortunes through family members. U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, married to pollster and consultant to Democratic political stars Stan Greenberg, also falls within the bounds of Connecticut’s millionaire one-percenter politicians.

When Abraham Lincoln died after having been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, Secretary of war Edward Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages. There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen." Lincoln, who always had a modest appreciation of his own merits, probably would have disagreed that he was a perfect ruler; or, at least, he might have made some joke about it. Lincoln and humor were always on good terms with each other. A heckler in an audience once charged he was “two-faced.” Lincoln stopped in mid-sentence and shouted back at the heckler, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” On August 28 of this year, the nation will be celebrating in Washington DC, within sight of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, the 50 th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural -- delivered on March 4, 1865, about a month before the end of the Civil War on April 9 and a little more than a mont...