Skip to main content

Democrat MIAs Aboard The Titanic

Democrat Dan Drew, the mayor of Middletown, has withdrawn from the governor’s race. His name may now be added to a crowd of Democrat MIAs. Drew announced he was running for governor before Governor Dannel Malloy threw in the towel. His gesture of mild defiance could not have set well with the thin-skinned Malloy who, like a post-Capone Capo di tutti capi, likes his vengeance dishes served cold.

Malloy’s Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, pleading grandchildren, has decided not to run. Malloy’s Comptroller, Kevin Lembo, earlier decided he did not want to be governor. Attorney General George Jepsen, who easily might have held his position as long as his predecessor, Dick Blumenthal, decided to call it a day after only six years – hopefully setting an unalterable precedent. And Jepsen did not announce for governor. Blumenthal was Attorney General for two decades and might still have been there, a scourge of Connecticut businesses, had not then U.S. Senator Chris Dodd left the Senate for Hollywood, turning over his two decades old sinecure to St. Dick.

Suddenly doors are open: three important offices -- governor, attorney general and treasurer – have become available, almost as if the state had instituted term limits. Present State Treasurer Denise Nappier has abandoned ship after eighteen years, perhaps because, like Drew’s campaign, the state has run out of money.

John “Cactus Jack” Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, a most un-Blumenthal-like character, retired from his job after only eight years, Roosevelt having served as president for a total of twelve years, after which the presidency was wisely term-limited. Someone asked Garner what he thought of the vice president’s office, and he replied, disarmingly, that it “wasn’t worth a warm bucket of s**t,” a good old Middle English word the use of which in private discourse made public has recently got President Donald Trump into a boatload of trouble. They still make politicians that way in Texas.

The down-and-out state that Malloy has left to his successors ain’t worth a boatload of trouble, and THAT is why the governorship can’t be sold for a penny to any first-string Democratic politician in Connecticut. No one yet has asked Blumenthal whether he wants to be governor; nor has anyone asked the other worthy Democrats that hold every position in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation. If the state had term limits, there would be no need to ask.

While Drew was running for governor, a local dust-up was occurring in his own bailiwick. A slate of progressives replaced a longstanding Democratic Town Committee group prepared to support Drew’s gubernatorial bid. Having lost the support of a committee that selects delegates to the state nominating convention, and broke after having shuttled $88,000 in consulting fees to the Vinci Group where, CTPost noted, “Drew’s ousted mayoral chief of staff Geoff Luxenberg had once been a partner,” Drew threw in the sponge and withdrew from the race.  Recently entering the opened door are Susan Bysiewicz and Ned Lamont, who, some years ago, had successfully challenged then Senator Joe Lieberman in a Democrat primary but lost to the senator in the following general election.

All the scrambling for seats on the Titanic, quickly approaching the iceberg, casts a veil over the real political issues in Connecticut. Do we continue on the state’s failing progressive course, or do we reverse engines and re-plot a course in an opposite direction? Should Connecticut, which has transferred to the state’s most politically effective special interest a control over budgets constitutionally assigned to legislators, dissever contractual ties with unions in the near future? The predominant constitutional budget making authority in Connecticut rests with the General Assembly – not with an executive department that finds in a mutually beneficial alignment with grasping unions a certain path to reelection. Pressed by artfully arranged extensions of contracts, should the state achieve cost savings by privatizing all possible state functions? Should a besieged legislature pass “right to work laws” in Connecticut, a union oppressed state that still has not recovered from a national recession that ended elsewhere in the nation more than eight years ago? Should the income tax, volatile and unpredictable, be replaced in due course with consumption taxes? How will the state deal with its “fixed costs,” which are crowding out discretionary costs? Answer: unfix them. Should Connecticut adopt recall and ballot initiatives to counter anti-constitutional and anti-republican (note the small “r”) court decisions? And what should we do about appellate courts, mini-legislatures that regularly breech constitutionally necessary walls of separation? In a well ordered constitutional republic, should Connecticut’s Malloy-packed Supreme Court be allowed to override the collective will of elected legislative representatives, as it had done recently in its absurd capital punishment revocation? The answers to these questions will determine the future of Connecticut. All the palavering about balanced budgets is a progressive blind to insure repetitive and self-destructive tax increases and, of course, equally ruinous spending increases.


These are questions of moment that ought to be ventilated in election before Connecticut collides with the iceberg.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p