Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Logan As the media in Connecticut is certain to notice, former State Senator George Logan is Black.  The AP style book  now suggests the word “black” should be capitalized. Logan is not a woman, as anyone can see, but he likely does not regard this as a disqualification for office in the U.S. House of Representatives. Jahana Hayes, the present U.S. Representative in Connecticut’s 5th District, is a “Woman” – the media might consider capitalizing the word – and Black. At some point during his battle for the 5 th  District, Logan may vow, a la Ronald Reagan, to make a strenuous effort  not  to hold Hayes’ color or her gender against her. The danger in modern politics is that one’s political opponents gracelessly may take things said in a humorous vein seriously. Abe Lincoln could not have survived in such a poisonous politics.   The Trump Thing   No one will be surprised when -- not if --Trump is used by Democrats as a foil in the Hayes-Logan ...

It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men – Sam Adams Bob Whitcomb used to be the Editorial Page Editor at the Providence Journal at a time when Moxie was plentiful in Connecticut. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Moxie in “the nutmeg state” has become rarer than modest politicians. Whitcomb was my Editorial Page Editor at the Providence Journal back in the day. And this is one of my pet peeves – that journalism is no longer able to produce Editorial Page Editors such as Whitcomb, perhaps because journalism lacks “moxie.” A piece in Whitcomb’s   New England Diary tells us that Moxie is “a carbonated beverage brand that was among the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States. It was created around 1876 by Augustin Thompson (born in Union, Maine) as a patent medicine called ‘Moxie Nerve Food’ and was produced in ...

The Cynic Interview With The Cynic Whatever the Cynic says, it all sounds alarmingly commonsensical. I asked him why Republican moderates in Connecticut consistently lose to progressive Democrats. There is no question that post-modern progressives within the Democrat Party in Connecticut far outnumber silent Democrat moderates, he said. What we might call the Democrat moderates, John F. Kennedy remnants, becoming ever smaller, may secretly want to bite the state employees’ union bullet, but they are certain, if they do so, the bullet will go off in their mouths. And so they remain mute. And the status quo marches on – more spending, more debt, to be passed along, as always, to the children and grandchildren of the debtors. The ever dwindling number of moderate Republican politicians are also silent on important social issues of the day and, as we know, silence signifies assent, both in law and politics. But Republicans cannot remain silent forever and hope to mount in reliably bl...

Pelosi and DeLauro The Catholic Church throughout the world is the body of the faithful led by a faithful clergy. The satanic priests who sexually corrupted young people, it should be noted, were not by any stretch of the imagination faithful Catholics. The words “faithful” and “led” in the above definition are necessary and decisive, for not everyone baptized a Catholic is faithful to the teachings of the Church. A masterful politician, Cardinal Richelieu of France was also a faithful servant of the French court. When the Cardinal died, Pope Urban VIII was asked for his assessment of Richelieu. He said, “If there is no God, Richelieu will have lived a good life. And if there is a God, he will have much to answer for.” Richelieu, known during his day as “The Red Eminence”, was consecrated as a bishop in 1607 and appointed Foreign Secretary in 1616. He became a Cardinal in 1622 and Chief Minister to King Louis XIII of France in 1624, retaining office until his death in 1642. Riche...

The bright boys and girls in the national government, along with intellectual aristocrats in the media and what former President Donald Trump disparagingly called “the swamp”, the nation’s permanent government, think they may control inflation forever by turning a few knobs at the Federal Reserve, but inflation may be controlling them. In any master-slave relationship, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish, as the best of the Greek comic writers well knew, between master and slave. “If your primary concern right now is inflation,” President Joe Biden assured the nation a few days ago, “you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan. It will take the pressure off of inflation.”   Biden plans to spend $4.7 trillion in tax revenue to take the pressure off of inflation. We’re already experiencing inflated prices for goods and services. Jumps in consumer costs are a consequence of inflation. In post-World War II Germany, a wheelbarrow full of near worthless currency woul...

Former Vice President Joe Biden may have campaigned for president as a Kennedy Democrat, but his nose ring while in office has been fashioned in a far left smithy. And whenever Biden feels the tug, he moves inexorably to the left. When the late Barry Goldwater said “If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country,” he meant that the ideological and historical center of the country should be central to Democrat and Republican politics. Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate ruffian Chuck Schumer naturally think differently. The locus of political power within the Democrat Party is precisely that portion of the country Goldwater would have lopped off, the New England states plus New York and California. Pelosi is from California, Schumer from New York. Since the Obama administration, the national Democrat Party has been able to cobble together a majority by including within its “Big Tent,” more narrowly constricted ideologically than most...

When Connecticut finally does come home again from the business dislocations associated with Coronavirus, what will home look like? Red Jahnke , a columnist and founder of The Red Line, tackles the question, and the answer is not soothing. The state’s unemployment figures place it, once again, first in the business of being last. Connecticut’s workforce, we are told “has shrunk by about 160,000, or 8.2%, from its pre-pandemic level of  1.93 million in February 2020 , the worst decline in the nation. Only three other states have experienced drops of more than 5%, and Connecticut has achieved yet another first in being last. About 7.9% of Connecticut’s workforce is unemployed, the highest unemployment rate of the 50 states. Of the pre-pandemic workforce, “300,000 people or 15.5%... have dropped out or are currently unemployed. The next worst level is 10.9% in Hawaii.” Despite these alarming figures, politicians in the state appear to be doing little to retrieve from the catch ...

Duff The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary -- H. L. Mencken The disjunctions grate on our sensibilities. A front page, above the fold story that appeared in a Hartford paper the day after majority Democrats in the General Assembly voted to extend Governor Ned Lamont’s emergency powers was jarring. We know from this and other media accounts that Coronavirus is on the wane in Connecticut. If the emergency is largely over in the state, what is the purpose of extending emergency powers first granted to Lamont during a true emergency, now hobbling off the political stage? Initially, the emergency power trigger was pulled by legislators who supposed, when Coronavirus moved from Wuhan, China through New York to Connecticut, that hospitals would be overrun by afflicted patients, in which case hospitals would be unable to provide ordinary car...

Robyn Porter Very soon Governor Ned Lamont and the Democrat majority in the state’s General Assembly will find themselves pressed between two large grindstones – public worker unions on the one hand and hard-pressed middle class workers and taxpayers only now starting to shake off with varying degrees of success the battering they have endured from the first state-ordered business shutdown in Connecticut’s history. The whole point of an unnecessary extension of gubernatorial plenary power is to delay the clash as long as possible. Two recent rallies at the state Capitol building in Hartford – a murder row city, if one compares current murder and mayhem statistics with earlier data – shine a bright light on the struggle for what has often been called “the soul of the Democrat Party.” That struggle has been ongoing for decades, but at long last progressives in Connecticut appear to have captured the party’s heights. Nationally, Schumer, Pelosi, Biden and the leading lights of the Democ...

Democrats are suffering a continuing message problem concerning an extension of Governor Ned Lamont’s extraordinary emergency powers. Those autocratic powers should wax or wane depending upon the severity of the emergency. At a State Capitol rally on July 13, a number of Republican legislators protested before a crowd estimated by Capitol Police at 200-250 that Governor Ned Lamont did not need a sixth extension of powers to contain an outbreak in Connecticut of the disappearing Coronavirus virus. The Governor’s extraordinary powers were first applied in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, when, as now seems increasingly likely, Coronavirus escaped from a gain-of-function lab in Wuhan, China. The emergency at that time was that hospitals in the state would be overburdened by infected patients. Those conditions, if ever present in Connecticut, have disappeared over the course of time. At the present time, speakers at the rally all seemed to agree, the extreme plenary...

Lamont, Biden and Hayes On some issues – the speculative impact of fossil fuels on the environment, for instance – Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont is sitting in the same ideological pew as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Leon Trotsky of progressives in New England, and socialists bawling from the rooftops such as Vermont  Senator Bernie Sanders, who has not had an original thought since his college days in the silly sixties, when it was considered cool politically to brush cheeks with the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua   (Pronounced on college campuses of the day Knee-Ka-RRRRAG-WA) or the Castro brothers in Cuba (Pronounced KU-BA). Lamont is a wealthy millionaire, with a well-appointed family homestead in Maine to which he might retire from a state in the process of conforming to the now possible impossible dreams of quixotic, memory defective progressives. Lamont, like all good Democrats, is also a faithful camp follower; so is Dick Blumenthal, husband of the daughter of a r...

Blumenthal U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is likely the most humorless politician in the state of Connecticut. The graces who bestow virtues on babies in the crib, humor being one of them, took a hike when Blumenthal let out his first war-yopp in the bassinette. He’s been known to make at least one joke that tells against him, and that one has not been often repeated. “I’ve been known,” the ubiquitous Blumenthal said, “to make appearances at garage door openings.” The joke produced muffled snickers among some members of Connecticut’s media who, attached to Blumenthal's ankle like a ball and chain, follow the life-long politician as he makes his frequent rounds about the state. Media releases about Blumenthal, most of them, have been written  by  Blumenthal, or one of his aides. They are, for this reason, embarrassingly flattering, as are most biographies and memoirs frequently written by hired hands. Former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker’s biography, Maverick –  re...