Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  The good news is that State Senator Gary Winfield’s bill eliminating qualified immunity for all police departments across the state is not due to go into effect until July 2021, well past election day this coming November. The bad news is that the predictable consequences of the bill – a decrease in police recruitment, an increase in retirements, and an increase in insurance premiums paid by municipalities – will arrive much before July 2021. It is not only ideas that have consequences; policies produce consequences as well. And bad policies produce bad consequences. The consequences of state policies fall, like the gentle rain, on the just and the unjust, on the poor and the rich. It is not likely that a wealthy, low crime community such as Greenwich, home to millionaire politicians such as Governor It has been suggested by progressive legislators that the likelihood of suits attending a withdrawal of partial immunity is a scare tactic deployed by Trump loving Republicans ...

Looney and Winfield After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer -- while other officers placidly watched as the murder victim pleaded “I can’t breathe” and, six to eight minutes into his death spiral, desperately called out to his mother with nearly his last breath – there were, as might be expected, protests across the nation. In some cases legitimate protests were hijacked by ANTIFA and leftist pseudo-Marxists within the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the results of the roiling agitation is what is being called by most media in Connecticut “the new police reform bill,” the brain child of, among others, Gary Winfield, a Democrat State Senator representing Connecticut’s 10 th  District. Winfield is a talented politician who has managed to rack up several important wins, pun intended. Freshman senator Winfield was the lead sponsor of a bill abolishing the death penalty. The bill was vetoed by the governor, but the State Supreme Court years later pronounced the death...

Push has now come to shove within the Lamont administration. Governor Ned Lamont has ordered superintendents across the state to open public schools in the fall. Teachers unions have presented the administration with several “requests” that bear all the earmarks of non-negotiable demands. A CTMirror piece, “The governor says it’s safe to reopen schools, but will teachers return?” ticks off some of the union demands: 1) teachers who must miss work owing to Coronavirus and who cannot work remotely will receive full pay and cannot be required to use vacation or leave time available to them; 2) classroom size must conform to CDC and state regulations. This requirement will force superintendents to put on more teachers, a costly prospect; 3) someone, likely school districts -- municipalities having become the trap gates of General Assembly detritus -- must provide teachers working remotely with a $50 per week allowance to cover costs; 3) Teachers, who apparently have problems walking and...

When you told your mother that you really ought to have a new bike because Tommy next door got one, your pragmatic mother, if she was at all like my mother, responded somewhat as follows:   “If Tommy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you follow him?” This response usually concluded the discussion, and it was unanswerable. You were not Tommy, and his circumstance, you were led to believe, were far plusher than your own. Discussion over. You would have to work, saving up your meager salary for a new bike, or perhaps fortune would smile on the family, a rich uncle would die – there were none – and he would favor the family and you in particular with a bike in his last will and testament. Governor Edward Miner Lamont Jr. – “Ned” to you – white-privileged and brought up in the lap of luxury, likely never had to face such narrow circumstances. Lamont’s gold-platted pedigree is widely available to all curious journalists in Wikipedia . He is the great-grandson of former J. P. M...

Lamont and Weicker Following the lead of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has now unveiled the sanctions he proposes to levy against what a Hartford Paper calls “defiant travelers.” We all know that where there are no sanctions, there is, practically speaking, no law. A law without teeth is a paper-law that easily can be defied, much in the way that ANTIFA-infected Black Lives Matter protests evolve into mini-riots, stretching limbs into every powder-keg urban community in the US –  when defiant rioters meet no resistance  from those who enforce constitutional laws written by legislators. Police enforce laws. Police are the enforcement arm of legislators rather than governors. Without an enforcement mechanism, all laws are dead laws. And that is why ANTIFA and elements within Black Lives Matter dearly want, with assistance from sympathetic legislators trolling for votes, to defund police departments. When police departments have been disabled,...

I am taking breakfast in a diner in East Hartford, uncrowded on orders of Governor Ned Lamont. It is Monday, generally not a busy work day but, because of Coronavirus restrictions, far less crowded than usual. Business has suffered, here and in every other restaurant in Connecticut, because the governor has got it into his head that restaurant business should be reduced by half. This restriction has reduced profit-taking, and the halving of profits has led to a proportional decrease in staffing, and an increase in all overhead costs, such as rent. To be sure the rent cost has not changed, but the ability of the diner owner to pay the rent has been halved, on orders of the governor. We are not permitted to know how Lamont, operating in the absence of a legislature and a judiciary, both shuttered because of Coronavirus, reached his decision to cut in half the number of people usually serviced by restaurants across the state Why half, why not a third? Better still, why not allow capa...

  So then, how is Connecticut doing now that the state appears to be recovering partially from “the Coronavirus pandemic?” That formulation, the reader should be warned, is imprecise. Economically, the state is suffering from an acute business slowdown – actually, a recession – caused by decisions made by Governor Ned Lamont, not the pandemic itself, an unelected Coronavirus panic that has made no political decisions. Connecticut is not doing that great really. Fewer people are buying newspapers. They’re too expensive and too thin. But anyone can glean at no charge more than a fistful of distressing   headlines from Capitol Report , an aggregator site not yet operating under a firewall. We all knew the bill for Lamont’s gubernatorial edict-caused business shutdowns would come due at some point. The bill collector now is banging on our doors, and the state predictably is running out of funds. No surprise there; labor costs in Connecticut have long exceeded the state’s a...

The Mom my Father Married Anyone who knew Rose Pesci will tell you that she was a straight shooter, and she was not shy of firing at people who, she determined, needed to be taken down a peg, a service she often performed for a multitude of family members and the general run of humanity. Me: Too bad about all the statuary desecration in Connecticut, eh? Mom: Right. Not only are the barbarians at the gate; they are everywhere, at our lunch tables, in our basement furnaces, in our confessionals, under our beds … Me: You left us before Coronavius arrived at Connecticut’s door step, a gift from China and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo . In that sense, I suppose it can be said you escaped a garbage bin of political nonsense. Mom: Death has its uses. There’s no doubt in my mind that some of these politicians,   much more shameless today than they were in my time, would be willing to dig me up and put a “died of Coronavirus” tag on my toe bone if they thought they might by such me...

President Franklin Roosevelt was blessed with three Vice Presidents, John Nance Garner, who broke with Roosevelt in 1940 and high-tailed it to Texas; Henry Wallace, whom Roosevelt chose as his running mate during the contentious 1944 Democrat nominating convention over the objections of many delegates; and Harry Truman, who occupied the presidency upon the death of Roosevelt. During his last term in office, Roosevelt ditched Wallace in favor of Truman. Garner was once asked to evaluate the office of Vice President. He said it wasn’t worth a warm bucket of spit. Actually, Garner used a different word, but post-Edwardian sensibilities would not allow its appearance in the public media of the day – so, spit it was. Since Roosevelt’s day, sensibilities have evolved. Senator Edward Kennedy -- denominated “the lion of the Senate” by fellow Democrats who willingly overlooked the significant part Kennedy played in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island -- served Massach...

Stalked by Socialism   An Escapee From Communism Shows How We’re Sliding Into Socialism     by Jana Kandlova & Foreword by Jim Vicevich   Softcover $13.99 Hardcover $26.99 222 Pages Purchase here Reviewed by Don Pesci Jana Kandlova, author of Stalked by Socialism , has written a necessary book that raises the question: Are we here in the United States attempting to crawl back into the shed skin of totalitarian socialism? History, which proceeds in baby steps, has taught us that the road to totalitarianism is paved with emotionally attractive socialist intentions, but there is a vast qualitative difference between intent and accomplished ends. That is the lesson bitterly learned by those in Western Europe who first were overrun by Nazism and later lived for decades under communism. All the important, autocratic totalitarians of the 20 th century, among the bloodiest and most spiritually racked centuries in world history – fascists...

A waitress at a local eatery, closed for four months by Governor Ned Lamont’s ever changing executive orders, pops the question. Her eatery is partially opened, but forbidden to service more than half its regular clientele, many of whom will disappear if the eatery is not permitted to make a sustainable profit to pay the business’s overhead and its dwindling staff. “If this place can be opened now, why couldn’t it have been opened” under the same severe regimen “three months ago?” the befuddled waitress asks. Good question, but the common sense answer to the waitress's question will not be forthcoming from Governor Lamont or its waylaid legislative leaders, all Democrats, in the state’s seriously suspended General Assembly. The common sense answer to the question is simple and unambiguous. There is no reason why restaurants in the state should not have remained open during the pandemic four months ago. If social distancing, facemasks, frequent disinfections of eating areas, a...

Two police reform bills have been offered recently, a federal bill spearheaded by U.S. Senator Tim Scott, and a Connecticut state bill, yet in draft form. The Scott bill was snuffed by Democrats who shamelessly denied “Republicans the 60 votes needed to openly debate a GOP-proposed bill,” according to a piece in The Hill, “ If only woke protesters knew how close they were to meaningful police reform .” The Hill opinion piece, written by Kelsey Bolar, a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum, takes Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and her brother in arms, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, to task for their intemperate remarks on the Scott bill. "The Republican bill is really just disastrously weak,” said Blumenthal, a prominent Yahooist in the New Progressive Democrat Party. Pelosi, politically outrageous these days, went a step further. She ‘” unapologetically  accused  Senate Republicans of ‘trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George F...

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of books, has wandered, quite deliberately, into the 21 st century’s transactional, anti-scientific, a-historical, post-modern Marxist bear pit. It doesn't matter how big you are – the non-discriminatory pit swallows all orthodoxies and traditional hierarchies. Rowling’s grievous fault was to think. In a piece that appeared in the Washington Examiner, “ J.K. Rowling’s Lonely Fight For Women’s Rights ”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another thinking female, noted that   Rowling, questioning a phrase recently put into currency – “people who menstruate” – had tweeted: “’People who menstruate’ I’m sure there used to be a   word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” The humorless post-modern world soon after came tumbling down on Rowling’s head. “The advocacy group GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation),” Hersi Ali noted, “accused her of being ‘cruel’ and ‘targeting trans-people.’” Used to dyi...