Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Washington At some point, very far in the future – long after President Donald Trump has been replaced in office by Joe Biden – some dispassionate and truly objective journalist will write an essay on the Coronavirus political myth; that is to say, the way politicians used the Coronavirus pandemic to feather their political nests. Pre-Biden, during the Trump relapse, such brave journalism would have been regarded by approximately 90 percent of the media as reckless and unwise. This imaginary journalist will regard certain grammatical formulations as treacherous and logical impossibilities. Take, by way of example, any line common in Associated Press reports attributing business slowdowns anywhere in the nation to Coronavirus. Coronavirus is not a person; therefore, it cannot be the efficient cause of the many shutdowns that, in Connecticut, have made a wasteland of Hartford , the state’s Capital city. These shutdowns were caused by Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, operating in accor...

Biden mock-swearing-in Murphy, but not to his cabinet We shortly will be back to Barack Obama in our foreign policy. Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is out as presumed President-elect Joe Biden’s Secretary of State and Anthony Blinken, “a defender of global alliances and President-elect (sic) Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s closest foreign policy adviser,” is in, according to a report in the New York Times .   The Times’ ballot for “President-elect” Biden is premature; a candidate for president does not become “ President-elect ” until electors meet on December 14 to cast ballots for president and vice president. Murphy had been touted in Connecticut’s media as a possible Secretary of State appointment. The senator, blushingly modest, said at the time he had no intentions of leaving the Senate and planned to run for reelection to Congress, but this is the usual demurral of young and ambitious congressmen on the make, and few political watchers, even among the most credulous of Conn...

Pelosi and DeLauro U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, bosom pals with Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, is hankering to become the next chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and just in time too. Connecticut, among the most wealthy states in the nation and in the top tier of high spending, high taxed states, is broke, the result of years pushing the spending envelope. Among the bluest of Northeast states, members of the state’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation will be sending DeLauro back to Washington D.C. with a tin cup in her hand. The very mention of permanent, long-term spending cuts is a third rail, highly charged and rarely touched,   among Democrats who control by nearly veto proof margins the state’s General Assembly and the governor’s office,. Even the state’s left of center media, which consistently during the past 40 years has winked at spending and tax increases, is loathed to mention the words “employee union driven debt.” Governor Ne...

Biden and Pope Francis Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has let it be known throughout his half century long political career that he is a Kennedy Catholic; in some quarters, Kennedy Catholicism is called cultural Catholicism. Biden helpfully explained cultural Catholicism to Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service (RNS) last November. The RNS piece is titled Joe Biden, president-elect at last, was shaped by a very American Catholic faith: The way he manages his allegiance to Catholicism gives a glimpse of how Biden will govern as he takes hold of an office he has sought since 1988. The piece lifts several quotes from Biden’s book “Promises to Keep: On Life in Politics.” “I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic,” Biden wrote. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the cul...

Biden It’s probably not too soon to imagine a political world without President Donald Trump in the White House and to sketch some optimistic and pessimistic views of the coming utopia. In fact, much of the media have been imagining such a world for weeks, pounding at keyboards and raising new specters: Will Trump leave office quietly after the electoral votes have been tallied in January, or must he be perp-walked out of office by either the Capitol Police or a contingent of National Guard troops hastily assembled by progressives Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Dick Blumenthal and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez? Here in Connecticut, lists of Trump supporters are being compiled by distressed McCarthyite leftists fearful that Democrats who control the state’s General Assembly – which, by the way, when does it plan to assemble again? – the governor’s office, the State Congressional Delegation, all Connecticut’s Constitutional offices, and the Daniel P. Malloy state Supreme Court may be underm...

Connecticut's Coronavirus hot zones We have been living in the dark forest of Coronavirus long enough now – about eight months – so that we should be able at this point to shed a few primitive conceptions and misconceptions concerning the virus. The novel virus is not the Black Death which, from 1347 to 1351, decimated Eurasia, North Africa and Europe. The Black Death carried off 75–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, peaking in  Europe; nearly 50 percent of the population of Europe died of – not with -- the plague. Businesses were lost because lives were lost. Consumers died, employees died, businesses died. This is not the case with Coronavirus. Businesses are disappearing in Connecticut, for instance, not because employees have been carried off by a deadly pandemic. In fact, many of the Coronavirus deaths in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey occurred in nursing homes ill prepared to confront the virus. The governors of these three states knew from the get-go...

The City Mouse November 11, 2020 The city mouse writes: To the Country Mouse, You’ve written quite a bit – perhaps more than is necessary – about political personae, the various masks politicians present to the public. Our next president, it would appear, will be former Barack Obama Vice President Joe Biden. It may be safe to assume that the U.S. Supreme Court will be reluctant to overturn the vox populi as expressed in votes, however appealing the arguments pressed by President Donald Trump’s crowd of lawyers may be. Proceeding on the assumption that Biden will be the next president, would you care to say something about Biden’s personae? There are more than one, no? I wrote back to her: To the city mouse, Biden wears more than one mask, and this is the case with most politicians. Fielding a question from an   audience in Danbury – I was present on the occasion – Bill Buckley was asked, following his comments on President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, all of them bitter...

We’ll be kissing our cousins from afar this holiday season. 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. The Coronavirus governors have raised his bid to destroy joy. And the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are leading the pack. It is not enough that enlightened, “science based” politics has driven our relations out of state, many of them in pursuit of fleeing businesses. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted at the borders, and those entering Connecticut from foreign parts – Massachusetts has recently been put on the interdiction list – are beginning to feel what wretches feel. It is less of a chore in Connecticut to bust the Mexican border and settle in one of our state’s sanctua...

Blumenthal and Harris In Connecticut, Biden country, the expectations from a Joe Biden presidency appear to be a bit overripe. Hours after President Elect Biden had garnered sufficient electoral votes to put him over the top, two Hearst reporters enthused, “A Joe Biden presidency is a new opportunity for Connecticut to win additional federal investment and recover from the grips of the coronavirus pandemic, as the blue state and its representatives can expect a closer relationship with the Democrat and his administration, replacing an often antagonistic rapport with President Donald Trump.” Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut was his usual ebullient self, heartened by the prospect of funding from Washington DC: “This is going to be a unique time in history. You’re going to have a president making available money for us to fix the transportation system that’s been falling apart over the last generation or so.” Lamont did not pause to explain precisely why Connecticut Democrats, in...

The 2020 elections in Connecticut, as complete a rout by Democrats as can be imagined, means, at the very least, that the so called Republican “firewall” has been wholly destroyed. Governor John Rowland and Jodi Rell, now enjoying herself in Florida, are distant bugles.  The political choices in Connecticut for the foreseeable future will be 1) progressive, and 2) more progressive. We have been brought to this pass by "moderate” Republicans who were fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The best specimen of the type was Lowell Weicker, father of Connecticut’s income tax. Unlike the national elections, the consequences of state elections in Connecticut are crystal clear. Democrats have managed to engineer a clean sweep, and the state Democrat Party is in the grip of a progressive floodtide, leaving in its wake both Republican and Democrat moderates. Nearly half of the Democrat super-caucus is made up of progressives whose resemblance to John F. Kennedy Democrats is superfic...

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter, the Four Horsemen “ Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force ” – Lord Acton Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Connecticut by a ratio of two to one, and unaffiliateds have a slight edge over Democrats. All in all, that is a steep hill for Republicans to climb in any state campaign. During the 2020 campaign, Democrats “solidified” their majority in the state’s General Assembly. Democrats now outnumber Republicans in both the upper and lower chambers by about two to one, surprising no one. In politics, numbers are destiny. Democrats have had the jump on Republicans for decades and, a bit like absentee landlords, they have owned major cities in Connecticut, nearly all of them crumbling to dust, for the last half century. The day after ballot numbers began to pour in, one Democrat leader, breathing a huge sigh of relief, noted the Democrat majority in both houses of the General Assembly was refreshingly ...

The Baltimore sage, as he was called, wrote, voluminously, at a time when journalism in the United States was not only readable but quotable. He was, as were the founders of the nation, an anti-democrat; both the early federalists and the anti-federalist were (small “r”) republicans mistrustful of chief executives, legislators, and judges, which is why they cleverly created a constitutional system in which the powers of execution, legislating and judging were separate but equal. In Connecticut, just now, these three functions or powers of the state have come together in the person of Governor Ned Lamont – owing mostly to the Coronavirus hobgoblin. Here are some few Mencken quotes: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Trump haters may want...