Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Biden and Pope Francis President Joe Biden, a Catholic, met today in Rome with Pope Francis, also a Catholic . To put the matter as mildly as possible, it is obvious to all – and not merely Catholics – that the Pope and the President are not sitting in the same pew on the matter of abortion. The Pope believes, along with Popes stretching back to Peter, the rock upon which the Catholic Church was founded, that abortion is a serious sin. The modern church calls sin a “disorder.” Of course, in sin, as in the law, there are degrees of culpability. First degree murder is not manslaughter. Punishments are affixed according to the severity of the sin. The Christian Church condemned abortion very early in the 2 nd  century BC in a document called the  Didache   (literal translation: “Teaching”) written sometime after 100 AD: “You shall not kill the embryo by abortion, and shall not cause the newborn to perish.” Since the sixteenth century,  Canon Law  (1398) ha...

Don From October 2021   Sunday, October 24, 2021 The appearance of U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia at an “America First” rally in Plainfield, Connecticut has given left leaning state newspapers a new burst of energy. Major newspapers prominently covering the event were: the Hartford Courant, Anti-Biden furor on display at ‘America First Rally’ featuring U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Plainfield ; the Day, Marjorie Taylor Greene headlines ‘America First’ rally in Plainfield THE DAY ; The Stamford Advocate , Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene brings 'message of conservatism' to Connecticut , among others . Taylor Greene is easy to cover because she has been exhaustively covered by leftist publications such as The Dot . Copy and paste journalism requires little thought and less effort.   Tuesday, October 26, 2021 “ Am I happy ?” he laughs. “Perhaps happiness is a sinful hope, an unnatural expectation. And people make too much of it, do...

Biden and Sanders The Biden budget, and its ever changing proposals to tax billionaires, has been called by some the “Sanders’ Budget.” That designation is not farfetched. Sanders is a socialist, not a progressive. He hasn’t changed at all from his early years. Sanders spent his honeymoon in Moscow, when it was not yet clear that the Soviet Union was economically in disarray. He visited Nicaragua and there rubbed socialist shoulders with the Ortega brothers. He never sharply criticized the Castro brothers after they had thrown into prison their ideological opponents. The socialism of the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are all rooted in the politics of envy. It is what Friedrich Nietzsche use to call “ ressentiment” that gives life to both socialism and communism. Nietzsche divided mankind into two classes: masters and slaves. The world is best governed, he thought, by aristocrats. Their superiority always engenders ressentiment among the slave class. But Nietzsche, l...

When you were very young in college, you ran across some authors, almost by accident, who took your breath away, so lucid and creative were their minds. And you promised yourself – someday I will return to your table and feast again on your wisdom. Will it be as nourishing then. you wondered, as it is now? Simone Weil   (pronounced VEY), whom Albert Camus thought was the most courageous person among the writers of his day, many of them, including Camus, literary giants, was hauled into the Christian faith by the following George Herbert poem: Love (III)  By George Herbert Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back                               Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack                              From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questionin...

Former West Haven State lawmaker Michael DiMassa is only the latest Connecticut politician to have been caught with his paws in the cookie jar. Apparently, DiMassa never made the acquaintance of George Washington Plunkitt, a New York Tammany Hall leader, who said way back when “ honest graft ” was a staple of American politics, “The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With all the grand opportunities around for the man with political pull, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent.” Sadly true – even today, perhaps especially today, when some honest grafter politicians are lawyers acquainted with all the legal snares. Both Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi and US. Representative Rosa DeLauro are millionairessess several times over. Pelosi and DeLauro have spent much of their lives in politics making money and steering business to their husbands. Others in the U.S. Congress have become millionaires by playing the stock market on the side – all legal and allowa...

Tom Dodd Former U.S. Senator Tom Dodd, censured in 1967 for having misused campaign funds, was a man more sinned against than sinning. The rededication of the Thomas Dodd Center at UConn has brought Thomas Dodd once again into public notice. This Sunday (10/17/21), the Hartford Courant ran a long piece on the continuing effort of his son, former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, to “restore the political honor of his father, Thomas Dodd.” The Courant noted, “Thomas Dodd was an advocate for human rights as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, for which he was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom. Later, he became a critic of the totalitarian leaders who ruled in Europe behind the Iron Curtain and called out the U.S. State Department for what he said was its inadequate response to the persecution of Soviet Jews.” Former Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Chis Healy was quoted in the piece on both the father and the son. A critic of Chris Dodd when he was Senator, Healy said that Dodd th...

Biden in Connecticut President Joe Biden has withdrawn from Afghanistan all American troops but not – perhaps an oversight – billions of dollars’ worth of war material. In its haste to leave Afghanistan before August 31, the administration surrendered to the Taliban, still cited as a terrorist group by the sometimes United States,  American civilians, numbers unknown, and possibly thousands of Afghans who had helped the United States ward off Taliban terrorists for more than 20 years. The Biden administration deeded the whole of Afghanistan to the Taliban, along with several air force bases, the most important of which was Bagram , a watchtower that allowed U.S. intelligence, and three presidents other than Biden to serve as on the ground eyes and ears on Iran and China. In the post Biden withdrawal period, the United States will be both blind and deaf in an area bordering China, Iran and Pakistan. The Associated Press (AP) reported during the second week of October, citing a m...

                                               Sham: Inside The Criminal Corrections Racket By Brent McCall C. 2021 $12.95   People who have never been inside a prison – most of us -- think: 1) the purpose of a prison is to provide punishment, not rehabilitation; 2) justice essentially means, “If you did the crime, you do the time; 3) every prisoner has duped himself or herself into thinking he or she is innocent and therefore any punishment, however unjust, is merited; 4) egotism does not stop at prison doors, and the notion that one should   take a prisoner’s testimony as gospel truth over that of prison authorities is patently absurd; and 5) books written by prisoners nursing grievances should be taken with two tons of salt. People convinced that the above propositions are indisputably true will not be persuaded otherwise by Brent McCall’s latest...

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Voltaire knew from bitter experience that if one wanted to take a true measure of freedom of thought and expression, one had only to ask what is not being published. It’s always difficult, sometimes impossible, to map negative-space. Voltaire, a cartographer of the anti-clerical Enlightenment period, ending in a bloody bang with the French Revolution, followed by the rumbustious Romantic period, mapped his own negative space by saying the unsayable, an effort that got him thrown out of most civilized European countries. We no longer exile our public nuisances. In the postmodern period, exile is thought to be unpostmodern, unwoke.   Instead, clinging tightly to narrow ideologies, we deny them space in approved publications – like, Voltaire would say, were he alive today, the opinion pages of much of the print media in the northeast; and let us not forget Facebook and Google, who are not publishers, we are told, and therefore not subject to constitut...