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| Bronin, Ritter, Blumethal, Murphy |
Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont’s fishing buddy and political guru, has fallen from the starry heights. Months after receiving an Emmy award celebrating his communication skills, an alarming report by New York Attorney General Letitia James has put a dent in Cuomo’s halo.
Early in December 2020, Cuomo received
the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Founders Award, “in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic
and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”
James' report found that
Cuomo “may have put [nursing home] residents at increased risk of harm in some
facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”
The obscurantists had been
very busy indeed. Pre-election reports had showed that upwards of 60 percent of
all Coronavirus related deaths in New York and Connecticut had occurred in the
state’s nursing homes. The new news from the Attorney General is that these earlier,
pre-election reports from Cuomo’s administrators had “vastly undercounted”
nursing home deaths.
“Using a sample of a few dozen
nursing homes that revealed discrepancies between what those homes told
investigators and what the state Department of Health told the rest of us,” The
New York Post reported, “the AG’s office estimates the official death toll has
been off by 55.4 percent.” That’s fifty-five-point-four percent, not a
negligible rounding error.
Cuomo, never very creative in
his excusifying, found a convenient scapegoat in former President Donald Trump,
banned by Twitter from responding on its platform to Cuomo’s less than
masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong,
James' counterpart, has not yet begun a similar investigation in a state where Coronavirus related death figures in nursing homes pattern those of New
York.
People in New York were shocked by the new revelations. Across the border in Connecticut, seasoned politicians – U.S. Senators Blumenthal and Murphy, accompanied by Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin and President Pro Tem of the State Senate Matt Ritter – were SHOCKED to discover “that new statistics showed that 48% of in-person learners in the city schools are considered chronically absent,” according to a piece in the Harford Courant.”
Here’s betting two-to-one the
reporters who wrote that story were not shocked by a statistic that might well
have been officially produced shortly after the Coronavirus pandemic slammed
into Connecticut via Cuomo’s New York. Any teacher in any failing Hartford
public school easily could have reported the figure very early on, and that
reporting might well have persuaded Democrat legislators, very early on, to support
a move by Democrat Governor Lamont to open public schools to in-teacher
learning.
It has been well known for
some time that “science” supports Lamont’s fading ambition to open public
schools. And it is also well known that Lamont has been opposed by the sustained
effort of teacher union officials who, early in the Lamont administration, told
the governor to take a flying leap when he suggested that some contractual
terms inked during the Dannel Malloy administration should be revised so that
an in-arrears multi-billion dollar pension debt might be slightly ameliorated.
The solution to union leadership
intransigence is to end pension and salary negotiations between the executive
department and unions. Allowing legislators unilaterally to decide both
salaries and pensions would remove decision making on the spending of education
dollars and debt resolution from the courts to the General Assembly, where such decisions properly and constitutionally belong.
Do the professional
politicians named above who, in the glare of TV cameras, banged their heads together
deciding precisely how to divvy up $405,730,706 million in federal funding
slated for Hartford from the December stimulus package that was signed into law
by then President Donald Trump really think that the incoming federal tax bonanza
will substantially reduce the SHOCKING “48% of in-person learners in the city
schools [who] are considered chronically absent”? Those students have now lost
an irrecoverable one to two years of learning, and they will be the poorer for
it – in every sense of the word. The summer school extensions proposed
by Blumenthal, Murphy, Ritter and Bronin is little more than a bandage meant to
cover a suppurating wound.
Will the four professional
political problem solvers pledge, right now, to support Lamont’s valiant effort
to open schools immediately in the face of implacable union leadership
opposition? That is the only question worth deliberating.
The federal dollars, one may be certain, will be shuttled to where they will be
politically advantageous for ruling Democrats. The public good and the private good
of politicians, we have learned from bitter experience, are not always the
same.
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