Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Feds once again are sniffing in the Bridgeport political mire, fertile ground for prosecutors. “State Sen. Dennis Bradley Jr. of Bridgeport and his campaign treasurer, former city school board chairman Jessica Martinez,” we are told in a Hartford paper , “were charged Tuesday with a conspiracy to cheat the state’s troubled public campaign financing system out of about $180,000.” “Troubled” is newspeak for -- the public campaign financing system is so riddled with politically manufactured loopholes that it no longer works. If the state of Connecticut had an independent Inspector General (IG), armed with subpoena power and charged with uprooting intentional and incidental corruption in state and municipal agencies, Bradley’s alleged attempt to steer a crooked course around the plain intent of the law that established the “troubled” campaign financing watchdog might have died aborning. Democrat Progressives in the state’s General Assembly recently established an IG position an...

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”  – Shakespeare Everyone in the United States – indeed, the world – is either 1) a buyer, or 2) a seller, or 3) someone who facilitates buying and selling. There are no exceptions. Politicians consider themselves service providers. Their opening, invariably, is “We’re here to help.” As a general rule, politicians collect money from some people, launder it through bewildering, little understood administrative ganglions, and give it to those who, they determine, need help. A sizable chunk of the gift is devoted to the labor costs of the administrative apparatus, and other parts are parceled out to grease the political machine. Politicians call this “investing.” They imagine they are doing what millionaires do effectively in what is still laughingly called, here in the un-United States, a “free market.” A free market may be defined correctly as an unregulat...

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter It’s been 16 months since this writer first noted that Governor Ned Lamont’s most obstreperous political opposition in Connecticut would come from progressive Democrats, not Republicans: “During his first term in office, Governor Ned Lamont need have no fear of the Republican Party, which was thoroughly thrashed by Democrats in the recently concluded elections.” Under an ominous title, “ Potential budget showdown over tax hikes ,” a Hartford paper notes – better late than never – “Democrats in the General Assembly are pressing ahead with plans for raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, despite Lamont’s opposition to the idea, setting up a potential budget clash with the governor.” We are advised that closed-door budget talks have begun as lawmakers race toward the legislative session’s June 9 adjournment.” A “closed door budget talk” has been, since the administration of former Governor Dannel Malloy, one to which minority Republicans h...

Truman Before Carthage in modern day Tunisia was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC, the Roman orator Cicero was known for having ended all his speeches in the Senate with the words “ Carthago delenda est ” – “Carthage must be destroyed.” Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is not quite as insistent that Hamas should be destroyed, but he did manage briefly to mention the Iran supported terrorist organization in a story in a Hartford paper, “ Sen. Chris Murphy makes bipartisan plea for a ceasefire in the Middle East as others, including President Biden, join call to stop bloodshed .” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and his Republican colleague, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, the paper noted, “are calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers in an effort to stop civilian bloodshed. “’Israel has the right to defend itself from Hamas’ rocket attacks, in a manner proportionate with the threat its citizens are facing,’ Murphy and Young said in a joint statement issued Sunday night. ‘A...

Weicker and the Late Cuban Caudillo   “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives…” F Scott Fitzgerald in “My Lost City” Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker , as everyone knows, was a misfit in the Republican Party. He considered himself a Jacob Javits Republican, but he often slipped the Republican leash and voted with left leaning Democrats. During his last years in the U.S. Senate, his Americans for Democratic Action rating was higher than that of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. And following his imposition of the Weicker income tax on Connecticut, the ex-Republican received a Profile in Courage award from the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Weicker’s dissatisfaction with both the national and Connecticut Republican Party was hardly a secret. “Someone should take over the [Connecticut Republican] Party. It’s so small,” he once mused as Senator and, in the blink of an eye, he was able to appoint as chairmen of the state GOP Tom D’Amore, who began fiddling wit...

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one" – Tom Paine The question – How will we know when the Coronavirus pandemic has ended? – has, until now, produced highly attenuated, ambiguous answers. But there are, here and there, some hopeful signs that the nation has shown Coronavirus the door. True, the ubiquitous signs posted in shop windows announcing “no entry without a mask” have yet to be replaced with more hopeful messages – “no admittance to anyone wearing a mask, including burglars” – but give it time. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s medical scold, has ceased screeching from the rooftops, and a smiling President Joe Biden -- whose White House windows have been broken by Iranian supported Hamas terrorists, a profoundly stupid border policy, and the unfortunate cancellation of an energy pipeline, just as Russian hackers closed the southeastern coast’s chief energy pipeline -- announced, belatedly, that facemasks ...

William Randolph Hearst News is what people don't want you to print. Everything thing else is ads – William Randolph Hearst . Does the following headline from Hearst media ring a bell? – “ Controversial housing reform stumbles but Democrats vow to revive it .” Here is the story’s lede graph: “A controversial bill that would make it easier to file lawsuits against towns if they didn’t support new affordable housing has quietly died amid a Republican threat to filibuster the issue in a crucial legislative committee.” Progressives are more than eager to sow the desert with legal corpses, later to be disposed of by iron-jawed jackals – provided the corpse is, relatively speaking, an independent municipality or a police organization. A recent bill in Connecticut’s progressive General Assembly, spearheaded by State Senator Gary Winfield , that withdraws legal immunity from police departments has resulted in an exodus of police from the state’s larger, high crime impact cities to...

The Country Mouse The City Mouse, now retired, was once an American Studies professor back in the day when American Studies was yet a new pedagogical venture. She has lived in one of Connecticut’s major cities, Stamford, now finds herself within hailing distance of a second, Hartford, the state’s Capital City, and talks in full sentences. She still considers herself a John F. Kennedy Democrat and draws a sharp, categorical distinction between Kennedy liberalism and postmodern progressivism. “President Kennedy,” she wrote to me some time ago, “has been buried twice: once in 1963 following his assassination, and more recently following the continuing upsurge of postmodern progressivism, to which I am temperamentally opposed. “Not,” she added, “that anyone in my ideologically battered party would take my temperament into account when making political judgments. “Old-goat Democrats, such as Biden, Pelosi and others, most of whom have now brashly and publicly turned a new postmodern, ...

"No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session” -- Gideon John Tucker (February 10, 1826 – July 1899), American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician The General Assembly’s session will end on June 9, 2021, after which we may all fancy that our life, liberty and property has survived the legislative assault by Democrat progressives. Many reporters in Connecticut still ask Republicans, long after former President Donald Trump has left the White House, whether they support the orange man, and they allege further that the state’s Grand Old Party is irreconcilably divided between fanatical Trump supporters and the usual Republican phalanx, mostly Republicans who profess to be fiscal conservatives but social liberals. This view does not adequately depict the real correlation of political forces in Connecticut, and pretty much all reporters in the state, were it possible for them to shuck off a pretense of objectivity, know it does not. All ...

Just as car mechanics, who have for many years worked on car engines, know best how to diagnose car problems, so intelligent prisoners – there are some in Connecticut’s Corrections facilities – know best  how to diagnose prison problems. It ain’t rocket science, and it helps sometimes to look under the hood. Michael Liebowitz – co-author with Brent McCall of  Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime  --  below examines a newly proposed legislative bill, SB978, and the bill -- soothing no doubt to the placid, largely ineffectual legislative conscience -- does not pass close inspection. _________________________ By Michael Liebowitz Up for debate in Connecticut’s current legislative session is SB978, a bill which if passed will reduce the percentage of time required to serve for parole eligibility by inmates who committed serious offensives after turning 18 but prior to turning 25. This is part of a nationwide trend resulting from an...

The City Mouse After nine years of strenuous gym workouts, the City Mouse, who lives in Hartford, had let her membership elapse. “I feel,” she told the Country Mouse, “liberated. Good to know that the Coronavirus plague was good for something. Because gyms everywhere in Connecticut have been closed for more than a year on orders of His Excellency Governor Ned Lamont, I felt no pangs of conscience, and I managed to save $500 last year in membership fees.” “Good for you,” the Country Mouse wrote back, but what about this: “ Sex, gender and discrimination dominate arguments at the Supreme Court in a case about women’s privacy at gyms .” The Country Mouse emailed the newspaper story to the City Mouse and waited for what he imagined might be an explosive but humorously sardonic response. The City Mouse, pickled for years in temperature raising satire, is afflicted with a sense of humor – unlike Connecticut’s Supreme Court. The case before the Court involved a suit brought by the humor...

The Country Mouse The merry month of May has burst upon Connecticut. The City Mouse went to lunch in Hartford with one of her lady friends – sans mask , while they were eating – and a conversation arose concerning the age old quarrel between city and country. The City Mouse is a no-nonsense character, a quality disappearing quickly in our homogenous, progressive Connecticut culture -- Connecticulture? -- and differences of opinion clouded the air. The City Mouse was not surprised that Yale law students had launched a suit on a wealthy suburb because, the students asserted, Woodbridge had, through its zoning regulations, frustrated the construction of low rent housing in what had been historically a predominantly Middle Class municipality. If the suit were to be decided in favor of Yale, a certain percentage of low income housing would be required in all Connecticut municipalities, not solely in Woodbridge. “Law students will be law students,” the City Mouse said, “but the zoning ...

Samuel Adams, Journalist, Agitator, Son of Liberty Chief Executive Officers of large Connecticut businesses, one eye always focused on the exit signs, have been used to couching their simmering dissatisfactions with Connecticut’s increasingly progressive government in semi-ambiguous terms, so as not unduly to alarm politicians in the state they may exit, or in the states to which the CEOs, like Moses leading towards a new promised land the captives of a stone-deaf Pharaoh, have migrated in a mass exodus. Such has been the case with almost every large business in Connecticut that has in the past few decades picked up stakes and moved to some less tax predatory state. In other cases, large Connecticut home grown businesses have been swallowed up by out-of-state buyers, the penultimate step preceding a move by the company – forgive the repetition – to pull up stakes and “move forward,” as the politicians say, to a less tax predatory environment, either out of state or overseas. Not th...