Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Michael Liebowitz is, along with Brett McCall, the co-author of Down the Rabbit Hole , reviewed a few years ago in Connecticut Commentary. Both are Connecticut prisoners, neither of whom has let his mind go fallow while serving time. Michael has appeared frequently on WTIC News Talk1080, Todd Feinburg ’s radio talk show, is refreshingly grateful, and believes he has been justly punished. Down the Rabbit Hole , subtitled How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime , is not an apologia for crimes committed; it is highly and, some readers of the book may agree, justly analytical. The essay below by Liebowitz  is  also analytical and will repay close scrutiny. Orwell A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it ea...

Jen Ezzell Let us now praise famous men, and women. At a legislative hearing in the state Capitol building on March 6, progressive Democrats on their way to vote in favor of higher taxes and more cumbersome regulations may not have noticed Jen Ezzell, of Lisbon, Conn., standing quietly flourishing two handmade signs, one of which read “CUT TAXES”, this above another hand lettered sign that read, more ominously for progressives, “NOT ONE PENNY MORE!” If any of the progressive Democrats in the General Assembly had noticed Ezzell and her signs, it was not evident in later votes taken by dominant Democrats. A Hartford paper noted for posterity the present clash of interests: “The legislature’s finance committee has approved a range of taxes as a starting point in negotiations with Gov. Ned Lamont, who said he is (sic) not in favor of tax increases when he submitted his budget in February. “Liberals, community activists, labor unions and others are pushing for higher taxes they say...

Twain "An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere” – Mark Twain Coronavirus – which, by the way, is not the cause of widespread business shutdowns – has been a boon for some Connecticut politicians because it has allowed them to solve the problems they have caused. The United States, and Connecticut with it -- thanks in large   part to former President Donald’s Trump’s initiatives, which dug the spurs into slow moving pharmaceutical giants to produce creative and cost effective anti-Coronavirus products – has only recently moved from phase 1, widespread gubernatorial ordered business shutdowns, to phase 2, a lifting of crippling gubernatorial sanctions. With one dramatic exception in the northeast, most governors and inactive legislatures have emerged unscathed from the problems they have caused. The glaring exception is, of course, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, author of American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic . Cuomo, Lamo...

Martin Looney Martin Looney , for half a dozen years the President Pro Tem of the General Assembly’s state Senate, is fast becoming the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of Connecticut. The President Pro Tem of the Senate is the head of the Senate’s Democrat Caucus and a doorkeeper who allows and does not allow the business of the Senate to reach the floor, where bills are debated and decided by the full Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. A few years ago, the Senate was split, about 50-50, between Democrats and Republicans and, for a brief shining moment, there was in that august small “d” democratic body a measure of bi-partisanship, very unusual for a political organ of government that had been controlled by Democrats for almost thirty years. When the 2016 elections had concluded, the General Assembly saw an uptick in aggressive government, not at all business as usual, because both houses in the state legislature saw an inrush of progressive Democrats, relieving Democrat wat...

  The City Mouse The City Mouse has a friend who is a libertarian. She has interviewed him below. Interview with a libertarian on pot profits Q: You’re a libertarian. Could you tell us briefly what that means? A: It means I’m a person who believes that people, as a general rule, should be free to be their potty old selves. That’s Bill Buckley’s definition of libertarianism. Q: How does libertarianism differ from anarchism? A: The anarchist is set upon overthrowing government so that he might luxuriate in the ensuing chaos. ANTIFA, the anti-Nazi Nazis, are anarchical, much worse, in my opinion, than some few violent members of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, who want to rub white faces in flames and free stores of overpriced sneakers. The libertarian is set upon perfecting limited government by removing unnecessary impediments to fructifying liberty. As a general rule, he or she believes that less government maximizes personal freedom, and the maximization of personal f...

Lamont, Biden and Hayes There are some reasons to believe that the contra-constitutional authority assumed by governors across the nation during a now ebbing Coronavirus pandemic is itself beginning to ebb as legislatures reassert their suspended constitutional powers and obligations. Connecticut, as usual, has lagged behind other states. Kentucky Republicans last January, according to a piece in Politico , kneecapped “Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. They dropped legislation in January that placed new limits on the governor’s emergency executive powers, quickly passed the bill, overrode his veto and then fought him in court… In the months that have followed, lawmakers across the country — from Maine to California, Oregon to Florida — have proposed and, in many cases, passed similar measures to curtail the sweeping powers bestowed on their state executives.” Woke lawmakers, according to Politico, “are only now realizing how much power they ceded to the executive — and are attempting...

The two following letters were written by Brent McCall, co-author along with Michael Liebowitz of “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Cultureof Corrections Encourages Crime .” Both concern what prisoners in New York call “clocksuckers,” prison employees who engage in stretching their paychecks at the expense of taxpayers.    When Does Government Management Become A Crime?   You’ve probably heard that Connecticut’s prison population is the lowest it has been in 30 years. Much less touted by the powers that be is that staffing levels within the Department of Corrections (DOC) remain at record highs. There are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 Corrections employees guarding less than 9,000 prisoners, And at a cost of more than half as billion dollars a year to run the state’s prison system, it’s hard to imagine how such staffing levels may be justified. Even when they cannot be justified, DOC employees readily conspire to make it look like they can. This...

President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” And, supposing there is no obvious crisis, it is always possible for an inventive politician to spin one from his or her teeming imagination. The more horrific the imagined crisis, the greater the opportunity to do things that could not be done before it had been loosed upon the world. The corollary to this piece of stupidity involves ignoring serious crises, easily done if you can call upon a subservient media to bury them. Much of the media is anxious to do business with the prevailing power and, for this reason, too few in the media are contrarians. To find a vigorous American contrarian, we have to go all the way back to Mark Twain, who said politicians were like babies: both politicians and babies soil their diapers often, which have to be changed as often, “and for the same rea...

Malcolm X Certain social divisions – that between city and suburb, for instance – are semi-permanent, if not permanent. People in cities sometimes believe that this division is inauthentic, much too artful, and harmful. Are we not all brothers and sisters under the skin? A 3 year old baby in Harford has died in a shooting incident. Surely, city and suburb can huddle around the casket and shed tears of sympathy and remorse. But is sympathy enough? A poet wrote a poem in the 17th century titled “Love is enough.” It was reviewed by Charles Lamb, perhaps the most prominent social critic of his day, in a single spare line: “No, it isn’t,” Lamb wrote. The 3 year old baby shot in Hartford, Randell Tarez Jones, is referred to by  our media   as “the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting.” That descriptor is partly correct. We know little of the shooter so far. He stole a car in Windsor Locks, opened fire a few days later on a car in Hartford containing a mother and her three ...

Mayor Florsheim The crisis at the border has now officially become “a border crisis.” A story in Hartford paper boldly labels it as such: “Lamont was personally asked by Vice President Kamala Harris recently if Connecticut could provide space for some of the thousands of children who are being kept in detention centers along the Texas border after fleeing from their Central American countries. Their numbers have increased as the federal government is facing a border crisis (emphasis mine).” “Crisis” is not a term often found waltzing around with the new administration of President Joe Biden. But it has become impossible in recent days for Friends Of Biden (FOBs) to overlook the massive numbers of illegal – shall we, for once, call things by their right names? --   immigrants that have poured over the US border after Biden, a few weeks into his presidency, opened the door to illegal immigration while telling the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Honduras, Guatemala and ...

The state of Connecticut has a new Blumenthal on its block, Stamford State Representative Matt Blumenthal, son of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. Before Dick Blumenthal hopped into the Senate, he was for two decades Connecticut’s crusading Attorney General. Along with his predecessor, former Attorney General Joe Lieberman, who also hopped from the Attorney General's office into the U.S. Senate, Dick Blumenthal changed the nature of the office. Historically, the mission of the office was a narrow one: The attorney General, known in colonial days as The King’s Lawyer, was to represent the executive office and state agencies when called to court. With a little judicial jujitsu, Lieberman and Blumenthal were able to add to the initial mission a new function: the office has now become a prosecutorial consumer protection agency for the people of Connecticut. Like his father, Matt Blumenthal is a progressive reformer. By definition, a reformer is anyone who changes the forms of things a...

Despite assurances from deconstructionists – read, destructionists and nihilists – that the world and everything in it is devoid of fixed meaning, dictionaries are available to which the confused and befuddled may repair for enlightenment. Offered below, with a caveat, are some few brief definitions of postmodern – read, confusing – political terms. To be wide awake and politically active in the postmodern 21 st century is to be confused much of the time. The caveat is this: Politicians suspect, correctly, that the bulk of their constituents are much too busy making a living in hard times to press to their eyes jewelers' loops with which they may closely examine bills streaming through legislatures or, just as fraudulent, self-serving pronouncements issuing from ad-men politicians. For this reason, politicians are careful in naming their bills, and the names, many of them designed to appeal to emotions rubbed raw – “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”, “For the People Act of 2...