Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

When Democrat and Republican leaders announced they had produced a bipartisan budget, details to be released in two days, a Hartford paper lamented in a page one, top of the fold headline, “State Budget Negotiations: Talks Turn Bitter.” Sorry, but no. Virtually all Democrat and Republican caucus leaders, closeted together for more than a week hammering out a compromise budget, agreed that their talks were cordial, business-like, productive and remarkably free of animosity. The compromise budget passed the Senate by a veto-proof majority of 33-3, and there was much fist-bumping in the House when the budget passed in the chamber by a veto-proof 126-23 majority.

Writing in National Review ,  Red Jahncke, president of Townsend Group International and a Connecticut political columnist, advises that Republican members of the General Assembly should not sign off on what is being called a compromise budget, because a solution to long-term financial obligations -- AKA “fixed costs” -- has been excised from the only budget to have passed in both Houses of the General Assembly, a Republican production. “There is actually one document,” Jahncke writes, “which provides insight into the fundamentals driving the state’s fiscal deterioration: the Executive Order Resource Allocation Plan for Fiscal Year 2018 by which Malloy has been running the state since July 1 in the absence of a budget.”   The figures Malloy relies upon in this document are stark and brutal—but they are reliable:

Fact Check recently examined a proposition put forward by U. S. Senator Chris Murphy who, according to some of his gun toting critics, will not rest content until he has repealed the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolished the National Rifle Association (NRA), and confiscated every "assault weapon" – assault guns, assault knives and, especially prominent just now in Europe, assault vans – from sea to shining sea. “What we know, Murphy said, "is that states that have tougher gun laws, that keep criminals from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence." Fact Check found that while Murphy was entitled to make up his own mind on assault weapons, he was not entitled to make up his own facts, and the Junior Senator from Connecticut was given three Pinocchios.

“When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him” -- Napoleon That the compromise budget is predominantly a Democrat production should come as a surprise to no one. Weighing gains and losses in the scales, the left in Connecticut, best represented by Speaker of the State House Joe Aresimowicz, a union employee, has prevailed over its opponents. The state’s Capital City, Hartford, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, will receive a bailout from state taxpayers, at best a temporary solution to long- brewing, unresolved problems centering on the city’s hegemonic political structure, and a virtual guarantee that the city’s political shakers and movers will be bellying up to the bailout bar again in the not too distant future. UConn funding, cut in the Republican budget that had passed both Houses of the General Assembly, has been restored. Major changes in employee pensions, a prominent feature in the Republican budget, were dropped – but...

Shortly after Democrat and Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced they were close to reaching agreement on a compromise budget, Governor Dannel Malloy offered his fourth budget, Republicanized, some believe, to make it acceptable to the “turncoat Democrat legislators” who had rejected Malloy’s third budget and embraced a Republican offering, the only budget so far accepted by both Houses of the General Assembly. Malloy pitched his fourth getting and spending plan to querulous reporters as a " lean, no-frills, no-nonsense budget ,” inviting comparisons to his previous offerings, which were, one is entitled to presume, fat, union-friendly, and replete with the usual frills and nonsense. Malloy’s third budget factored in a SEBAC deal that assures state union workers raises of 3.5 percent per year, following a temporary 3 year wage freeze, until the expiration of union favorable contracts in 2027. The SEBAC deal also prevents future Governors, Democrat or Republ...

Just a gigolo, everywhere I go People know the part I'm playing Paid for every dance Selling each romance Every night some heart betraying There will come a day Youth will pass away Then what will they say about me When the end comes I know They'll say just a gigolo As life goes on without me Approaching the end of his second term as Connecticut Governor, Dannel Malloy has been bounced from the budget negotiating room. In some quiet corner of the Connecticut political barracks, Republicans must have been murmuring to each other, “How does it feel?”

Everyone in Hollywood wants to be a libertine -- like the Marquis de Sade, who also was an amateur revolutionist -- or perhaps they wish to emulate ex-Presidents John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Kennedy was a tolerable Catholic because Catholic dogma did not live loudly in him, and the husband of Hillary Clinton was permitted indiscretions with cigars and interns because he was a hale fellow well met with a photographic memory, whereas ordinary politicians rely on Google and an expensive staff of brash know-it-alls. To be an artist, after all, is to be in perpetual revolt against the usual pieties, conveniently listed in the Decalogue. Marriage among the Hollywood elite, for instance, is considered but a temporary interruption of multiple liaisons, and adultery, sex outside the boundaries of marriage -- “You shall not commit adultery” -- is rampant.  Andy Rooney, whom everyone will admit was a nice guy, had eight wives, the same as Henry VIII, none of them executed fortunate...

Soon to be former Governor Dan Malloy might easily imagine himself in the role of the man who fell to earth from Mars. Here is Malloy speaking about the “gridlock” in the General Assembly: “We have discussions that are on hold with companies that want to enlarge their footprint or move to our state who said, ‘Hey, listen, when you get a budget, we’ll have further discussion,’” Malloy said. “We’re going to lose thousands of jobs, potentially, because we can’t do the hard work that we were elected to do? That makes no sense at all.’’ The clanging irony in these lines – Malloy has chased more jobs and money out of Connecticut than any other Governor in recent memory – no longer shocks people stunned by his reckless policies.

A Boston Paper reports, “Authorities say the statues [of Christopher Columbus] at Harbor Park in Middletown and Wooster Square in New Haven were vandalized overnight Saturday. The paint has been cleaned up.” On August 21 st , the  Baltimore Sun reported  that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of  Antifa, a group that claims to be anti-fascist,   but does not scruple to employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters by masked, black-clad brownshirts.

It’s OK apparently to offer false solutions to serious problems – a national replication of Connecticut’s gun restrictions will not prevent mass slaughters such as happened at a Country and Western concert in Las Vegas – but profiting politically from wading in blood may be a bridge too far. Concerning U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy’s most recent campaign money grab, Kevin Rennie writes in a Hartford paper, “If a politician is going to try to raise money off the dead and wounded of the Las Vegas slaughter only hours after the attack, be honest about it. U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy wants the money but wrapped his fundraising appeal in a deceptive request of support for control advocates. Murphy’s Monday email sought contributions for Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, Everytown and Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. When supporters clicked through to the Act Blue donation site, there was a fourth organization splitting contributions, Murphy’s re-election campaign.”

Q: You believe the state of Connecticut is in crisis. A: Yes, and I’m not alone. There are two crises; the state itself, by which I mean its people and businesses, is in crisis; and state government, sometimes mistaken for the state, also is in crisis. To a certain extent, the first crisis is driven by the second. Q: These two are not the same? A: They are never the same. Lincoln spoke of a government of, by and for the people, but if you pause over that formulation and think about it, you will discover the two are not the same. In a perfect representative system, differences between the two are slight; state government and the larger, real state are close cousins. But that can never be the case in a republic in which government operates by force. This is the present condition in Connecticut, and the state has been in this mode for a long while. We have had single party government in the General Assembly, Connecticut’s lawmaking body, for almost half a century. When the...