Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse than progressives who are striving mightily to destroy the state. They may be suffering from a sort of moral atrophy. G.K. Chesterton addressed the question of moral atrophy in the following few lines about Pimlico, a town in England that, in Chesterton’s day, was what we might call a hopeless case: “Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico w...

Governor Dannel Malloy began his education reform proposals by challenging the usual pedagogical assumptions. He likely will end his term as governor by supporting a union led, reform-resistant status quo. Malloy is at swords' points with Democratic leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly on the matter of tax increases. Progressives in the General Assembly want a bevy of tax increases. They have proposed toll taxes, an increase in the progressive tax on Connecticut’s idle rich and an increase in the sales tax, among others. Democrats are now touting the benefits of a sales tax increase. Without such as increase, progressive Democrats in the legislature and Malloy now say, fire  and brimstone resulting from Malloy’s cost reductions will reign down upon the heads of every man, woman and child in Connecticut who has not yet fled for other less punishing states.

It may not be too early to provide a brief autopsy on the Malloy administration, even though the patient is still flopping on the table. After two terms in office, Governor Dannell Malloy has decided to throw in the towel. He will not be running for re-election in 2018, which is not to say Republicans and Democrats will not be running against Malloy. Some Democrats will be running away from Malloy with their pants on fire, and he likely will serve Republicans as a bludgeon deployed against Democrats in the campaign.

Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’ During his long political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.

Connecticut’s Attorney General's Office long ago overflowed its statutory and historic banks. The office, one of the oldest in the state, evolved from what had been known in the colonial period as the king’s lawyer. Leaving aside for the moment the recently accrued kingly powers of Governor Dannel Malloy – the inability of the Democrat dominated General Assembly to cobble together a budget within the prescribed time period has bestowed on Malloy plenary powers once associated with royalty – the Attorney General’s Office was, before the advent of Attorney General Joe Lieberman, a relatively modest affair.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me They call themselves Antifa, meaning “antifascists.” George Orwell would have been the first to point out that the antifascists are, in fact, a modern offshoot of the brown shirts one associates with Mussolini and Hitler, violent fascists pledged to break the bones of those who disagree with them so that by means of force their intellectual opponents may be silenced. A broken bone is a very convincing argument, as any thug well knows.

The “concession” agreement fashioned between Governor Dannel Malloy and SEBAC that recently was approved on a narrow partisan vote in the Democrat dominated State House and Senate was, most people would agree, beneficial to unions. The agreement was quickly adopted by rank and file state employee union workers and, following its passage in the General Assembly, union lobbyists vigorously cheered the union-favorable pact. The concessions made by union negotiators during the secret conclave were the usual give-backs made by union leaders in the past. In return for temporary concessions – wage freezes that thawed after two years and increased thereafter by 3.5 percent– the SEBAC deal was pushed out 5 years to 2027, after which it might be re-negotiated or not. The two-year wage freeze was accepted by unions in exchange for four years without layoffs. The putative concessions, we are told, might save $1.57 billion over the next two fiscal years. However, nagging problems persist...

A twitter war has broken out between Connecticut Democrat U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and President Donald Trump. Following Blumenthal’s early denigration of Secretary of State Jeff Sessions – prior to his interrogation of former Senator Sessions, Blumenthal broadly hinted that Sessions and the KKK were on friendly terms – and following Blumenthal’s not so subtle hints that Trump may have collaborated with the Ruskies to damage the presidential prospects of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton. Trump, never one to suffer fools gladly, struck back, using twitter as a rhetorical cattle prod.

Here is an addendum to Rahm Emanuel’s now infamous apothegm, “Never let a crisis go to waste,” especially when you are responsible for having produced the crisis: to leverage the crisis you have caused so that it will be politically useful, it is vitally important to fob-off on the opposition the logical and inevitable consequences of your own failed policies. Emanuel, once a Barack Obama campaign maestro, is now the Mayor of shoot’em up Chicago, a failed Democratic city in a failing state. Politics, in both our state and nation, has become a Darwinian struggle among political insiders in which the most fit rise to the top. And the fittest are those whose narratives, partly fiction, are the most compelling; the narratives themselves occasionally have only a remote connection to a) the truth, and b) objective reality; i.e. the real-world consequences of prevailing political programs.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” – Karl Marx  The labeling worked. Almost immediately, contract negotiations between Governor Dannel Malloy and SEBAC head honchoes were tagged “union concessions.” There were, to be sure, some concessions made by unions in the final agreement, but these concessions were offset by positive union gains. And in the end the gains considerably outweighed the concessions, mostly because the gains were permanent, while the concessions were, for the most part, temporary. Unions, for instance, agreed to forgo raises for three years; on the third year, however, 3.5 percent raises would kick in, and likely remain kicking well beyond the termination of the contracts in 2027. Most working stiffs in Connecticut, who doubtless will be tapped to pay for future union wages and almost inevitable tax increases,...