Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous. Q: It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after the election. Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy’s Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, and this thunderclap caught the notice of some papers. GG: Yes, Barnes may have been, if only for a moment, the Jonathan Gruber of Connecticut. Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of (President Barack) Obama’s Health Care initiatives, is on record as having said in various venues that Obamacare was intentionally deceiving, and necessarily so because most Americans, who are far less bright than MIT professors, would have rejected Obamacare had its architects been more honest than either Gruber or Obama. It’s true that Henry Mencken once said no one ever lost money by underestimating t...

The deficit is back. Like an aging coquette, it appears and disappears around corners, smiling fetchingly at us: Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day. It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after Governor Dannel Malloy, the seven members of  Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation, members of the all-Democratic State Constitutional Offices and Democrat legislators who dominate the General Assembly were returned to office. Faced with an “unexpected” state deficit, Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy's Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, a thunderclap that caught the notice of some papers. Mr. Barnes may have been mistaken by some, if only for a moment, for Jonathan Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s Health Care initiative. Mr. Gruber is on record as having said in various venues that Ob...

Thanks Jeff Cohen “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election” – Otto Von Bismarck “I am a porcupine” – Dannel Malloy The endorsements of Governor Dannel Malloy prior to Vote Day (VD) were not full throated. In fact, many Malloy endorsements made by editorial boards the members of which could not bring themselves to recommend as governor a guy who owned a yacht named "Odalisque" were so hedged about with thorns that the rose was barely visible among them. A Hartford paper’s editorial endorsement was typical of most. The paper mentioned some minuses and pluses, added up the sums and endorsed the incumbent governor. Over the years, the paper had fallen into the bad habit of reflexively endorsing incumbents, and in Connecticut all the leading positions in government – the governor’s office, the constitutional offices, the members of the U.S. Congressional delegation and the leadership of the state’s General Assembly – are ...

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - Otto von Bismarck A Hartford paper’s Sunday edition crackles with a front page story that asks and answers the tormenting question: Is progressivism dead ? The paper’s emphatic answer is – no, not yet, certainly not in Connecticut. The paper notes in passing the whupping progressive Democrats took in the off year elections, though the account spares the wounded the most important details.

State Senator Joe Markley of Southington lately has expressed an interest in heading the state Republican Party as its Chairman, which is on the order of Custer expressing an interest in leading the 7 th Calvary against a Cheyenne and Sioux encampment near the Little Big Horn River. Why would anyone want to do that?

During the midterm elections of 2010, President Barack Obama invited members of the U.S. House, then controlled by Democrats, to join him on a plank hovering above shark infested waters. They did so and lost the House. The loss was substantial. Regaining control of the House they had lost in 2006, Republicans picked up a net total of 63 seats, the greatest party loss for Democrats in a House midterm election since 1938. In yet another off year election, Democrats have now lost the Senate in what some are calling a Republican sweep.

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous -- November 9, 2014 Q: By Sunday November 9, most journalist morticians in Connecticut and others had turned in their reports. Among them was Lowell Weicker, who left the Republican Party to run as an Independent for Governor in 1990. GG: The Weicker response to the current elections was a reprise of a column written by him and printed in the (Hartford) Courant last May. Even then, there were serious problems with the Weicker analysis. Weicker argued that the Republican Party has declined since he left it to run as governor. A careful historian may want to pause here to note that Weicker did not leave the parry of his own accord when he lost his seat to then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman. He was not able to garner a sufficient number of votes to win re-election, possibly because the Republican Party in his own state had grown t...

Will it strike anyone as odd that the best war song of WWII was also a love song? Here is Marlene Dietrich singing Lili Marlene: And in German: A captain in the U.S. Army, she won the war.

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous. Q: It’s the day after the day after in Connecticut. On V-Day (Vote Day) everyone marched to the polls and reelected Dan Malloy governor. Since then, we’ve been pelted with the usual after the vote analyses, all suspiciously similar. I was hoping you might be able to offer a fresh light on the winners, almost all Democrats, and the losers. In Connecticut, very little has changed politically – not so in the nation.

  The morticians are palavering over the corpse of the Foley campaign. Two of them, former U.S. House Representative Chris Shays and former Republican U.S. Senator and Maverick Governor Lowell Weicker, are quoted in  a story in a urban newspaper . Mr. Weicker, who declined to run for a second term as governor after he had fathered Connecticut’s income tax and who as a Maverick Republican Senator often described himself contentedly as a “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” thought his former party had pandered to the National Rifle Association (NRA). He said, “I absolutely reject the pandering to the NRA and the gun lobby in Connecticut. They didn't want to rock the boat. Well, Jesus, the boat needing rocking, if you look at what happened up there in [Newtown] with that nutcase.”

“You don’t have to love me. I’m a porcupine” -- Governor Dannel Malloy There are two ways to lose an argument: by not saying enough or by saying too much. Likewise, there are two ways to lose an election. The Republican nominee for Governor, Tom Foley, cannot be accused of having said too much in his attempt to wrest the gubernatorial office from Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Malloy, on the other hand, has never in his long political career said too little. Mr. Malloy’s second gubernatorial campaign and President Barrack Obama’s second presidential campaign were remarkably similar. Of the two, fortune -- as well as lots of money, a suburb ground game, sharper demagoguery, a media used to genuflecting before incumbents and a progressive ideology that has not yet wearied the general public in Connecticut – smiled broadly on Mr. Malloy, while baring its teeth towards Mr. Obama. National progressives lost the Senate and sent Joni Ernst to the chamber where she will no...