Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lamont  -- CTPost In a recent picture and story , Governor Ned Lamont is shown, pen in hand, signing a new law “legalizing the recreational use of marijuana on June 22, 2001, at the state Capitol in Hartford.” A slew of new laws are due to take effect in the New Year. They include a new truck tax and a pay raise for indigent lawmakers. The new tax on large tractor trailer trucks, proponents say, will fix crumbling highways. Critics, mostly Republican lawmakers, rightly insist the truck tax “will be passed down to consumers.” A new bill will erase criminal records “for those convicted of possession of small amounts of marijuana,” as well as those convicted for some felonies that are “slated to be erased in the coming months as part of the ‘clean slate’’ law that was passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature.” Concerning salary increases for public employees, legislators have adopted judicial salaries as a baseline. “The base pay for rank-and-file legislators will be $4...

  Socrates Are Good Manners Necessary?   “The problem with bad manners,” Bill Buckley told us “is that they sometimes lead to murder.” No scholar in Connecticut has yet produced a study showing a correlation between bad manners and murderers once on Connecticut’s death row, abolished several years back by a well-mannered State Supreme Court. Scholars and prison records and even the personal testaments of prisoners have led us to believe that prisons, as a general rule, are schools of bad behavior. One of the prisoners set free from death row by Connecticut’s over-compassionate State Supreme Court in 2015 was Frankie “The Razor” Resto , a candidate for a death penalty and an ill-mannered character. The abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut was a three-step process. In 2012, the State House of Representatives voted to repeal capital punishment for future cases , choosing to leave past death sentences in place. The Connecticut State Senate had already voted for...

Johannes Vermeer  — Portrait of a Woman with a Pearl Earring The absurdities of postmodern life press upon us like some finely tuned, automatically updated incubus. What is a woman? Awaiting approval from Congress, current Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked, by a woman legislator, as it happened, to “define a woman.” She demurred, modestly pleading that she was no biological scientist. And, as it so often happens in the case of Supreme Court Justice Designees who are not named Brett Kavanaugh or Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett , Jackson was given a pass and assumed her seat on the high court. But the question, not entirely innocently presented, begs to be answered. When I put the question to two politically unbiased women, both agreed that a “woman” may be defined as one who receives flowers from a male admirer. I cannot remember ever having received a bouquet of flowers from a woman. I have given out a few bouquets of flowers to women I a...

Lamont and company -- Fox News It  seems only yesterday that President Joe Biden assured the nation that the COVID “pandemic” was over. And in fact, well in advance of his presidential proclamation, many alert citizens in Connecticut more or less assumed they soon would rid themselves of their medically deficient masks and begin to view in their rear-view mirrors the extraordinary measures taken by Governor Ned Lamont, who had assumed near plenipotentiary emergency powers for nearly two years. In Connecticut, Lamont’s emergency declarations led, predictably and inescapably, to closed schools, restaurants closed through meddlesome over regulation, closed businesses, virtual education… on and on and on. Following Lamont’s emergency declarations, the longest and most intrusive in Connecticut’s history, the state was strewn with wreckage. Particularly hard hit was the hospitality industry, young children who had lost about two years of proper schooling, businesses that had lost sal...

One Party Rule in Connecticut Reading about Connecticut politics in the news is a bit like listening to one side of a phone conversation. You realize you must interpret the substance of the conversation between vocal Democrats and muted Republicans. And then you discover, to your dismay, that the parties talking on the phone are Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat, and the Democrat leaders of the dominant party in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Matt Ritter and President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney. These privileged Democrat caucus discussions are not for public consumption, and Republicans, as usual, are not invited to participate in the shaping of important legislative measures. The Democrat hegemony in Connecticut is, as journalists sometimes say, comprehensive. Democrats in the General Assembly have nearly a veto proof margin over Republicans. Republican minority leaders in the legislature are sometimes called upon by journalists to provide a counterpoint to Demo...

Lamont wins -- Courant If Governor Lamont has his way with progressives in the Democrat dominated General Assembly – a big “if” – he is likely to position Connecticut, with respect to contiguous states, as an economic powerhouse. The Hartford Business Journal reports, “As he prepares for the 2023 legislative session, Gov. Ned Lamont said he is considering several tax policy proposals next year, including allowing the expiring corporate business tax surcharge — an extra cost the business community has long lobbied against — to sunset. “Lamont, in a Monday [December 12] interview with the Hartford Business Journal, also said he is considering a middle class income tax cut, likely targeted at people who earn up to $150,000.” What is the point in taxing a person or a business one dollar and returning to both thirty cents, after having apportioned seventy cents to budget reduction and special interests that will help progressive   politicians return to office to continue the endl...

Pictured:  Mayor Nancy R. Rossi, right, on Thursday announces $5 million in state funding… Joining her are, from left, state Rep. Michael A. DiMassa, D-West Haven; Rossi’s executive assistant, Lou Esposito; state Rep. Charles J. Ferraro, R-West Haven; and Fred A. Messore, the city’s commissioner of planning and development. (City Photo/Michael P. Walsh) Given a chance to choose virtue over vice, we should come down on the side of virtue, if only because this makes for a quiet, undisturbed life. Naturally, we don’t want to push ourselves forward as virtue exemplars. That would be to give the game away. It is always best to be virtuous without seeming to be so, not to seem virtuous while hiding from the world our horns and cloven hooves. This takes a great deal of modesty and is beyond the scope of the average politician, who must stretch the truth – artfully, one hopes -- cheat and steal, often on the advice of others, to maintain his or her political status. The horns and hooves ...

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter — the big four. CTMirror   It’s not only money, but energy as well, that makes things go. A headline in a Hartford paper, “ House extends gas tax cut ,” drives home the point, although the headline itself is a bit convoluted. What happened was this: There was a considerable energy shortage after President Joe Biden assumed office, largely because the incoming president had declared a war on energy as we know it. Biden has said several times since assuming office – the infamous “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 had not been successful, and Biden was sworn into to office shortly after the electoral count showed he had prevailed over outgoing President Donald Trump – that there would be no more fossil fuel development so long as he was president. We all know that if you reduce the supply of a consumable product, the price of the product will increase so long as demand is constant. The demand for fossil fuel was constant, and once...

Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant has assembled a phalanx of Republican Party leaders in Connecticut who are adamantly opposed to the re-election of former President Donald Trump. They are not alone. Other prominent national Republicans and, unsurprisingly, conservative outlets such as National Review are also opposed to Trump’s presidential re-election bid.   It was National Review , at the outset of Trump’s first bid for the presidency, that devoted a whole issue of its magazine to Trump opposition. The issue was titled “ Never Trump .” Some former hard-line Trump oppositionists have since softened their view. Democrats opposing the hapless President Joe Biden administration have yet to come out from behind their rhetorical flowerpots. Perhaps the most interesting take is that of House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford, described by Keating as “a fiscally and socially conservative Republican.” That description is important because it sets Candelo...

DeSantis -- Sun Sentinel State government in Connecticut is missing some dots and failing to connect others. The most obvious dot is that connecting getting and spending. These have always been causally connected. The more state government spends, the more state government must tax its citizens. The federal government may escape the necessary connection by simply printing money. This devalues the currency and causes inflation, another dot politicians find convenient to gloss over, especially during election periods. States may avoid crushing tax increases by passing the debt to future generations. Connecticut , which has the highest taxpayer debt of any state in the nation, has perfected this method. It is first in the nation in debt production and, at the same time, tax exodus. The state’s debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio is 20 percent . Nutmeggers may escape future tax debt by leaving the state, and they do, according to figures supplied by North American Moving Servi...

Lamont rejoicing -- Courant Governor Ned Lamont breathed a sigh of relief following the conclusion of the 2022 off year elections in Connecticut. Nothing much had changed. The Democrat Party hegemony in the state, unimpaired, remained in control of state government. Lamont rejoiced that ubiquitous partisan ads had at last been put to bed. So too has the prosecutorial assault on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, according to a brief Associated Press (AP) report. The report, Prosecutors: No criminal charges expected from Giuliani raid , c arried on page 4 in a Hartford paper, tells us, “Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will not face criminal charges over his interactions with Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, federal prosecutors revealed in a letter to a judge Monday. “Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said they made the decision after reviewing electronic evidence gathered in  raids on Giuliani’s hom...