Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Blumenthal and Harris One has to search long and hard to find any negative news reports on Senator Dick Blumenthal, even in Connecticut's media morgues. Blumenthal recently has hitched his star to President Joseph Biden's presidential juggernaut as a consumer protection chieftain in the U.S. Senate. The two are old friends, and Blumenthal during the past four years has become unfailingly partisan. Just as a rising tide lifts all the boats, President John Kennedy’s formulation, so a rising Democrat election tide has lifted Blumenthal’s dingy. “ Blumenthal heads Senate consumer protection committee, giving him key perch for business oversight ” screams the headline in the Hartford Courant . Blumenthal has been down this yellow brick road before. One of the reasons for tender treatment by Connecticut’s press is that Blumenthal has been, over the years, adept at massaging his state’s media, which often dumped Blumenthal’s press releases into their various formats without the u...

As we all know, impeachment occurs in two stages: a presentation of charges or indictment in the U.S. House, followed by a trial in the U.S. Senate, which either does or does not convict on the charges presented by the House. The charge sent to the Senate by the House was that President Donald Trump had, according to Reuters , “incited insurrection in a speech to supporters before the deadly attack on the Capitol, setting in motion his second impeachment trial.” Partisan Democrat senators, i.e. prosecutors, failed on February 13 to convict. What lessons should we draw from this exercise in fatuity? Perhaps the person least surprised by the failure to convict was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who, one must suppose, can count up to ten without the use of her fingers. Democrats did not have the numbers to impeach in the Senate, and she knew it. Impeachment conviction is wholly a political matter. The process is dressed up in juridical robes, but this is mostly for show. It is not i...

Cuomo and Lamont, Fishing Buddies The end of life, we know, is very much like its beginning. In the end, all of us rely, as did Blanch DuBois in the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on “the kindness of strangers.” Nothing is stranger than the kindness of politicians, many of whom affect kindness while the television cameras are running, when they know that kindness can advance their political objectives. Such is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. At the height of the Coronavirus plague, Cuomo shipped hundreds of Coronavirus infected hospital patients to New York nursing homes, even though other venues were available: a hospital ship sent to New York by then President Donald Trump, a large space in the Jacob Javits Convention Center , and a little used 68-bed tent field hospital set up by Samaritan's Purse in Central Park, all venues packed with kind medical attendants waiting to care for stricken elderly patients. The strangers in all three venues waited in va...

  Looney Martin Looney is more than a state senator, a post he has occupied for 29 years. He also has been for 9 years President Pro Tem of the Senate, one of the two gate keepers in Connecticut’s General Assembly who steer the business of the state legislature when, as has not happened for a year, it is in session operating as a functional General Assembly. During the last two state elections, Republicans in the General Assembly were decimated. Dominant Democrats have nearly a sufficient number of seats in both chambers to override gubernatorial vetoes, the progressive contingent in the General Assembly comprises nearly half the Democrat caucus, and registered Democrats outnumber their counterparts in the Republican Party by a two to one margin. Unaffiliateds in the state outnumber Democrats by a whisker. Dominant Democrats have festooned Democrat Governor Ned Lamont for nearly a year with executive powers that might easily have brought warm applause from monarchs, autocrats a...

Washington “Government is force” – George Washington The waiter at the diner thrusts a finger at a below the fold story in a Hartford paper, “ Hibernating to survive , ” and smiles ruefully. “Have you read that one,” he asks? The reporter has interviewed Joe Sweeney, whose restaurant, Pomona Pete’s, is “temporarily closing” for the winter. “With the cold weather,” Sweeney says, “we no longer have access to the patio. The colder it got, the headcount started diminishing. Put that on top of restrictions to be in compliance with the law, and that it still takes the same amount of labor – we can’t do the sales we need.” Pomona Pete’s, the paper notes, “is one of about 100 restaurants statewide that have gone into hibernation,” in anticipation of the return of fair weather in the spring. Tempered by hope that springs eternal in the human breast, the story sounds this death knell: “But Pomona Pete’s is not closing forever, as 600 Connecticut restaurants have done since the COVID-1...

Lamont But I have promises to keep  – Robert Frost In a recent CTMirror story, “ In third year, still an uncertain relationship for Lamont and legislators ”,  reporter Mark Pazniokas harvests the following quote from Governor Ned Lamont: “Gov. Ned Lamont has had two very different years in office. During the first, he had to contend with the Connecticut General Assembly, but not COVID-19. During the second, he faced COVID, but not lawmakers. “Any guess which he found easier? “’Obviously, this last year has been very different. I mean, the legislature went home. That was amazing. We got a lot done,’ Lamont said recently. Then laughing, he added, ‘You know, I kind of liked it.’ “A joke, perhaps.” The joke, perhaps, may have been intended to raise a chuckle among Connecticut’s legacy media but, if the present Coronavirus trajectory holds true, Lamont will soon find that he  must  negotiate with a reinvigorated General Assembly, a body controlled by progress...

Navalny The headline – “ Russian Prosecutors Urge [Alexei] Navalny Jail Term as Protests Swell ” -- inspires terror, but then communist Russia is no stranger to terror. Both Lenin and Stalin relied on the terror, first introduced by Lenin and perfected during the Stalin regime, to destroy potential opponents. In exile in Mexico, Trotsky was visited by one of Stalin’s assassins who buried a hatchet in his skull. Shortly after rising to the top of the blood-encrusted presidium, Stalin arranged “show trials” during which his victims, mostly old-line communists, were compelled to give false testimony against themselves concerning their drift from Stalinist orthodoxy, after which they were dispatched and later airbrushed from old photographs indicating their solidarity with Stalin and Lenin. Once communism – Albert Camus in France later would call it “the socialism of the gallows” – had been firmly established in a purged Russia, Stalin brought other nations, newly free, into an ines...