Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Cuomo, Lamont fishing for votes What has been called in some quarters “the northeast triumvirate” – Democrat Governors of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey Ned Lamont, Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy – have imposed through executive orders a quarantine on people moving into their states from Coronavirus afflicted states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Texas. The Lamont announcement appeared in CTMirror on June 25: “Lamont visited the Windsor Locks airport to promote new signs around the airport urging travelers coming from high-infection states to self-quarantine for two weeks.” The signs cautioned, “Your cooperation is expected,” and travelers were urged to “ check the governor’s website  for quarantine guidelines.” According to a story published by NBC News on June 25, coincident with the Lamont announcement of the quarantine on the same date, “ The U.S. is not China': Proposed quarantine could be unconstitutiona...

Very late in the day, three northeast Democrat governors – Ned Lamont of Connecticut, Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York – have decided to impose by executive order quarantines on visitors from Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Texas. Had Lamont earlier imposed a quarantine on “hot spot” New York City, he might have prevented somewhat the leeching of Coronavirus to Fairfield Country, Connecticut, which predictably and unsurprisingly became a Connecticut Coronavirus “hot spot.” When Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island sought to turn New Yorkers away from her state, she was bitterly criticized by the left of center media in the northeast. Connecticut was expected to admit New Yorkers and suck it up. Lamont had early during the infestation made a compact with Cuomo and Murphy, the purpose of which was not entirely clear. Certainly Connecticut’s needs were not the same as those of New York City, and no one, in the absen...

Mark Twain once said about the weather in New England, rudely changeable, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one seems willing to do anything about it.” The same may be said of the effort on the part of social and political anarchists to destroy all the emblems of the past in order to build a brave new world. No one appears willing to put a stop to their anarchic vandalization of history.  None of the iconoclastic protesters who have defaced statues in Connecticut have yet taken aim at Elihu Yale, whose statue in Yale University remains strangely unmolested. The prestigious college, known the world over, is in New Haven, whose Democrat Mayor, Justin Elicker, recently winked at those, himself included, who wish to air-brush Christopher Columbus from the historical memory of the nation for the crime of… what? The African slave trade in America began about two hundred years after the first slaves were shipped to the New World. Columbus personally had no hand at all in the Afric...

Oliver Dart, whose bones sweeten the ground in Elmwood Cemetery in Vernon, Connecticut, is not entirely forgotten. There is a "Commemorative Biographical Record” that, in a few poignant paragraphs, traces the broken ligaments of his brief life. He died at 40 years of age from consumption or tuberculosis. Graves swallow up the joys and sorrow of a man’s life, and there is nothing more silent than the grave. Dart had no monuments erected in his honor – no celebratory statues to put up or, frequently in our time, pull down – and the biographical record is unsentimentally brief. It   reads in part: Oliver Dart met with an experience during the war of the Rebellion that few could have survived. He was a member of the 14th C. V. I., and [on] Dec. 14, 1862, when the battle of Fredericksburg was at its height, a shell burst in the midst of Company D, his company, killing a number of men and blinding Mr. Symonds, of Rockville, while a fragment of the shell tore off the lower portion...

  When Jesus said “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone,” He was referring to a specific sin, that of adultery. You can comb through all of Jesus’ maxims, precious distillations of godly wisdom, and you will find that He was less preoccupied with “sins of the flesh” than, say, a modern professor of second wave feminism or a publisher of smut. Jesus’ only advice to the adulterous woman in danger of being stoned was to go and sin no more, a thing easy to say but hard, in the absence of the grace of God, to do. “Then Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you? “No one, Lord,” she answered. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no more.” We happen to live in an age where smut of one kind or another, pornography or politics – don’t titter; the two have much in common – are in the air we breathe, and there are some refreshing...

Chicago, once again this year, was not celebrating Father’s Day.   And, a bit of good news, no one in Chicago -- which the poet Carl Sandburg called “the City of the Big Shoulders” – has yet suggested that the Chicago Police Department should be defunded. The Chicago Sun Times reported over the weekend in banner headlines, “ 60 shot, 9 fatally, so far this weekend in Chicago : “ Nine people have been killed, four of them minors, and 51 others have been wounded in shootings across Chicago so far this weekend.” The details are not uplifting. One of the victims, a 13 year old girl, “was inside a home about 8:30 p.m. in the  1000 block of North LeClaire Avenue  when the shots were fired, and she was struck in the neck, Chicago police said. She was taken to Stroger Hospital, where she was pronounced dead… “Two boys, 15 and 16, were sitting on a porch when one of them noticed a red laser pointing at him and heard gunfire, police said. The younger boy was struck in the bac...

Governor Ned Lamont, sinking to his knees, recently asked state union officials if they might please – PLEASE! – accept some reductions in the cost of labor. Connecticut, Lamont reminded SEBAC, a conglomeration of union chieftains authorized to strike contracts with the chief executive of the state, was in dire straits following months of a crippling business slowdown caused by the shuttering of businesses across the state ordered by Lamont in response to an international Coronavirus infestation. On June 20, some Connecticut-stay-at-homes quietly celebrated their three month liberation from government enforced sequestration by having breakfast – inside their local eateries. Lamont, through his extraordinary executive authority, had permitted the opening of restaurant interiors, provided owners observed his strictures: restaurants could only be half filled, awaiting further orders, and everyone had to wear masks, except when moving their chops over bacon and eggs The usual seating w...

Christopher Columbus statues across the state are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone, “It’s nothing personal.” The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus moth-ballers such as Mayor Justin Elicker of New Haven and Mayor Luke Bronin of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge. Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be wo...

Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood If U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch were a controversialist rather than a Supreme Court Justice, he might, following a decision he wrote highly praised by the LGBTQ community in Connecticut, be writing in state newspapers – “Hey, Blumenthal, how do you like me now? Blumenthal did not like Gorsuch then, and his carefully calibrated distaste for the “conservative” justice may still be found, in the form of an op-ed piece he had written to the Hartford Courant, still posted on his own site . The op-ed piece appeared in the Courant on March 21, 2017. “On Monday,” it begins, “I will vote against the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch as United States Supreme Court justice. I made this decision after questioning him extensively at the Judiciary Committee hearing, reviewing his record, and deliberating carefully and deeply. It is one of the most important votes I will ever cast.” And it ends with a bang: “Today, we still know very lit...

The Coronavirus infestation has presented Governor Ned Lamont with an ethical tightrope, according to front page, top of the fold story in Sunday’s Harford Courant, “ Lamont faces ethical tightrope .” The governor married well. His wife, Ann Lamont, is a very clever financier; some even suppose she is the brains behind the Lamont Juggernaut. Mrs. Lamont is a co-founder and managing partner of Oak/HT/FC. Gracing the front piece page of Mario Puzo’s Mafia epic “The Godfather” is a quote indirectly derived from Balzac – “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.” It is no less true that behind every great fortune lies a marriage. A 2006 New York Times story disclosed that Lamont's financial filings “ show that $54 million to $193 million of the family’s wealth stems from Ms. Lamont’s work at Oak Investment Partners in Westport, Conn., while $1 million to $5 million is traced to Mr. Lamont’s stake in his Greenwich-based cable television company, Lamont Digital Systems.”  By the b...

  The State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition ( SEBAC ), the negotiating arm of public employee unions in Connecticut, apparently has bruised Governor Ned Lamont's finer sensibilities. A report from CTMirror quotes the governor on Dan Livingston’s refusal to adjust the terms of a contract hammered out in  2017 by former Governor Dan Malloy and SEBAC. The bargaining coalition “has rejected his [Lamont’s] call for workers to forgo raises owed them at month’s end and help the state cope with financial pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “’I would have put it off, and I think we should put it off,’ Lamont said of the raises. ‘I think we’re in an economy where you’ve got close to 20% unemployment. I think you’re in an economy where you see a lot of people on furlough.’” The governor is referring to the results of his executive orders issued during the Coronavirus shutdowns. Apparently there has been some sort of communication between the governor and SEBAC’s le...

New Haven protesters Some people protesting police brutality after the intentional murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis are demanding the abolition of police departments. Others want to reduce financing of police departments and divert the tax revenue saved on a worthless cause to worthier social causes such as the financing of underperforming schools and social services. It’s never a good idea to burn down the house to catch a mouse. But if those peddling such notions are serious, the great experiment might begin individually with them. It’s obvious that if you abolish police departments, there will be no police to respond to situations in which criminals will be able to prey, unobstructed, on helpless citizens. If you abolish those whose business it is to uphold the law, you are inviting the jungle into your life. In such a Hobbesian universe, the law of the jungle – always red in tooth and claw -- reigns supreme. Power, not justice, will then be the arbi...

Lamont On June 20 th , Connecticut will once again be open for business – sort of. The road to the grand opening has been a bumpy one full of false turns, sudden cul-de-sacs, and the driver of the bus headed towards a reopening of the state, now nursing a potential budget deficit of close to one billion,  appears to be navigating irresolutely.   Will restaurants in Connecticut be fully opened on the date set by Governor Ned Lamont, June 20 th , or not? Governor of Rhode Island Gina Raimondo, with whom Governor Lamont of has of late been having a Coronavirus shut-down bromance, already has turned the corner. Restaurants in Rhode Island, having got the jump on Connecticut, already are opened for business – sort of. In a June 3 rd story, Hearst news noted that Connecticut restaurant owners were clamoring for an earlier opening date for indoor dining: "Some 550 businesses signed a petition by the Restaurant Association calling for a return to indoor dining on June 10. They i...