Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Jefferson The title of the story in a Hartford paper -- buried on page seven, where news goes to die -- may be troublesome to many in Connecticut: “ Biden win could mean less defense spending for state .” The defense industry in Connecticut has been a vibrant part of the state’s economy and, consequently, a money producer for the state budget since the American Revolution. Then and now, Connecticut, bursting at the seams with defense related manufacturers such as Sikorsky and Pratt&Whitey and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies, remains “The Provision State.” U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal , fresh from his Stakhanovite effort to deep-six Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court, remains unruffled. He’s visited this treacherous political turf many times during his lengthy political career. “I envision a serious skeptical scrutiny of our defense budget that will eliminate some of the waste or less effective programs,” said a phlegmatic Blumen...

Police officers of all kinds, both old-hands and newly minted officers, are leaving Hartford Connecticut, according to a piece in a Hartford paper . No surprise there. The job, as everyone knows, is fraught with danger. Police are not accountants or legislators tucked away in a malfunctioning Coronavirus General Assembly; still less are they social workers. The pay and benefits are okay in the cities but better in suburbs. And a new “ Sweeping Reform Bill ” -- inspired, we are told, by police assaults on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor -- has driven multiple wedges between police across the state and their employers, Democrats and Republicans and, eventually, the urban population that police are sworn to protect. The new bill is the brain child of State Senator Gary Winfield , who is Black. The reader will note the capitalization of “Black.” The new Associated Press reporting guide requires every mention of “Black” in news reports to be capitalized, even though the word designa...

The Country Mouse October 28, 2020 To the country mouse, We’ll be kissing our cousins from afar this year. Secularists have already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of Christmas difficult, but not impossible like everyone’s daddy and mommy, Governor Ned Lamont. It is not enough that enlightened, “science based” politics has driven our relations out of state. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted by King Ned. Bradley Field airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is now a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing ashes on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas: “With Thanksgiving a month away, Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them. “’I am really worried about thousands of kids coming ba...

The City Mouse I must admit I was nervous six months ago. The city mouse and I had not met in ten years. Our connection had been entirely by means of e-mail on my part and written letters on her part. She no doubt would notice the buzz-cut of my thinning hair, just forming jowls, lips thinning, eyes narrowing, speech more deliberate, more carefully considered and reflective, less spontaneous and daring, and I had gotten a pair of new glasses, more modern than the old, round, owl-eyed looking glasses I wore in college and after years. I was prepared for some changes on her part too, though I understood her to have been careful about her looks – sorry, her presentation; not the same thing as “looks”, she often reminded me – from the early days of our acquaintance. She was always modestly well dressed, never went out without makeup and had shimmering, cornflower blue eyes. Funny, you carry around in your mind an image of people that does not change through the years, provided you do...

Blumenthal and Murphy U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is being touted by the progressive media as a possible secretary of state in the -- inevitable? -- presidential administration of Hunter Biden’s dad , Joe Biden. Perhaps because he is a home state lad, Connecticut’s press has tended to speak of Murphy in the reverential tones formerly reserved for such giants of international diplomacy as John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, who is credited, according to The Department of State Office of the Historian , with solidifying a “general consensus in U.S. policy that peace could be maintained through the containment of communism.” Any sound foreign policy negotiator will tell you that, as a general rule, it’s best to negotiate with an enemy that had been defeated and, even then, negotiations, particularly if they involve multi- nations, may conspicuously fail. Such was the case with Germany after both World Wars. Germany bowed to the terms of surrender fo...

Politics, particularly during a campaign season, is the sometime ungentle art of fooling all the people some of the time. Fooling all the people all the time, Abe Lincoln tells us, is not possible in a constitutional republic operating side by side with a vibrant and watchful media. But fooling all the people all the time is hardly necessary when appointment to office depends upon garnering 51 percent of the vote. In the struggle for votes, we all know, incumbents have a huge money and status advantage over challengers and, despite mythical views of a free press unattached to the reigning power, incumbents usually are able effortlessly to round up what we might call the media vote as well. Fooling all the people some of the time would not be possible in the absence of 1) a bewitching populist message, 2) a convincing ritualistic denunciation of a clamorous minority opposition, and 3) an adulatory media “glad to be of use” in T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “to start a scene or two....

Cronus eating his children -- Goya A Hartford paper points out the brutal irony: Connecticut has averaged 366 new cases a day over the past week or about 10.3 per 100,000 residents, just above the threshold at which states are added to the travel advisory. The advisory, which currently includes 38 states and territories, is updated each Tuesday in conjunction with New York and New Jersey. It requires travelers arriving from those states to either produce a negative coronavirus test result or quarantine for 14 days... Lamont said Thursday he’s considering a dramatic overhaul to the advisory, saying “It’d be a little ironic if we were on our own quarantine list.” Connecticut’s list of quarantined states has grown by leaps and bounds, very likely because the parameters initially were set too low. The gods of irony will not be mocked. Cronus is now eating his own children. It is nearly impossible to determine definitively who set the parameters, but we do know that Governor Ned La...

Gorsuch and Blumenthal The title of the news report was, “ Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes last-ditch effort to delay Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but Republicans prevail on party-line vote .” Blumenthal’s last stand occurred following the termination of the Senate public hearing convened to pass on Amy Coney Barrett’s fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s elevation to the high court is a virtual certainty, since Democrats in the Senate do not have the votes to block her admission to the court. Unlike Custer’s last stand, Blumenthal’s occurred on an empty battlefield. And Barrett, who already had been through Blumenthal’s drill, certainly will not respond publicly in the pages of the Hartford paper to issues Blumenthal had previously raised in the public Senate hearing, exhaustively covered by the anti-Barrett media. During her public hearing, Barrett was peppered with questions from Blumenthal and others that she wisely chose not to answer....

Tip O'Neill It is always difficult during an election year to separate the wheat from the tares until the elections have been concluded, at which point most information is stale and useless to politicians on the make. One important datum in the 2020 elections, as in all elections, concerns base turnout and negative campaigning. What turns people off often turns them out. That is why so called “negative political ads” excite and alarm politicians and media adepts. It is generally assumed that President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden both have unbudgable base support, that early campaign polling is reliable, that election messaging must appeal beyond the base to unaffiliated voters whose political preferences have not been sufficiently probed by Harvard and Yale political scientists, that state politics is less important than federal politics, and that political results in elections are determined by   personalities rather than policies, which might explain why ...

Judge Amy Coney Barrett A lede in a story covering Senator Dick Blumenthal’s second day questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Barrett correctly reports that the senator “spent most of his allotted half hour Tuesday questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett about her support for an organization that says life begins at fertilization and on her controversial dissent in a gun case.” At the beginning of his questioning, Blumenthal assured Barrett that her Catholic faith was not on the questioning chopping block. But it was. Blumenthal is a master of insinuation, and pro-abortion-at-any-stage-of-pregnancy-Democrats such as Blumenthal, a regulator-in-chief Attorney General in Connecticut who unaccountably has opposed all and every attempt to regulate the abortion industry, is clearly combative in the presence of Catholics. The anti-Barrett forces, who are legion, have questioned feverishly Barrett’s association with a Catholic group regarded as a cult by many progressiv...

Blumenthal and Harris U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, before interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett on day two of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings, laid before Barrett, according to a story in The Hill, a non-negotiable demand. “Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), The Hill reported, “on Monday urged Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from any case involving the election that comes before the Supreme Court, as Democrats prepare to push her for such a commitment as part of her confirmation hearings.” In a prepared remark, Blumenthal intoned, “Your participation, let me be very blunt, in any case involving  Donald Trump 's election would immediately do explosive, enduring harm to the court's legitimacy and to your own credibility. You must recuse yourself. The American people are afraid and they're angry, and for good reason. It's a break the glass moment." The quotable Blumenthal was at one time an editor of the Harvard Crimson, a...

Blumenthal and Sanders It has been said of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal that there is no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between him and a television camera. On the day after Judge Amy Barrett’s first appearance before the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal’s picture appeared twice in a Hartford paper. He was prominently featured in both an AP story, “ Barrett makes case as next justice on the Supreme Court ,” and a separate Connecticut story, “ Blumenthal says fate of Obamacare is on the line .” Blumenthal is used to receiving in his home state gushingly favorable press. So, no surprise there. The first day of Barrett’s testimony was not devoted to the questioning of the nominee by senators. Barrett briefly addressed the assembled senators, after which the senators addressed Barrett, sitting mutely before them, looking somewhat like a masked pillar of salt. The interrogatories occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday. What is the real purpose, some may wonder, of this awkward pre...