Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Kyiv They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially saying, “Peace, peace.” But there is no peace -- Jeremiah 6:14  The war of Russian aggression against Ukraine began a full month ago, when a forty mile convoy of destructive war material was seen by Maxar Technologies in Colorado snaking its way from Belarus, to Kyiv, Ukraine. Many supposed at the beginning of the war that Stalinist wannabe Vladimir Putin would overcome Ukrainian resistance in a matter of days. That convoy certainly seemed intimidating, pregnant with portents of future mass destruction. This notion – that Ukraine would fall without effective resistance, as Czechoslovakia had done when faced with superior Nazi firepower from 1938-44 – likely was hard baked into the American response to the war. Lt. General Scott Berrier, who leads the Pentagon’s Primary Intelligence Arms, recently admitted that the Pentagon had misjudged Ukrainian resistance: “We made some assumptions about his [Putin’s]...

The default position of Connecticut’s majority Democrats on the matter of getting and spending has not changed within the past three decades: Tax cuts, infrequently imposed, should be temporary and bravely endured, while tax increases, deployed for the most part to satisfy imperious state employee union demands, should be permanent. The recent temporary suspension of Connecticut’s 25 cents per gallon excise gas tax conforms to the default position of Democrats who have controlled Connecticut’s General Assembly for the last 30 years: The tax is to be suspended – operative word – “temporarily” from April to July 1. Connecticut Democrats, it should seem obvious, are reading from a national Democrat script. The increase in the price of gas, they say, is due chiefly to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the greedy oil barons they accuse of having profiteered from an economic slowdown imposed as a result of Governor Ned Lamont’s necessary shut down of Connecticut’s businesse...

Lamont and Kooris Governor Ned Lamont, as expected, has placed himself on the Green side of the “destroy fossil fuel production” revolution. President Joe Biden gave the revolution a leg-up when, immediately upon assuming office, he “revoked the permit his predecessor granted to Keystone XL, and also moved to re-enter the United States in the Paris climate agreement,”  according to a CNN report . Biden also restricted fossil fuel energy production on federal lands, increased regulations and bussed the cheek of U.S. Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s  dystopian mission  to eliminate fossil fuel production in the United States by 2035. The remodeled State Pier in New London, we are told in a recent  story , “is to be ‘transformative’, but the price tag for the project will swell once again.” Touring New London’s State Pier, “Governor Ned Lamont… praised the ‘transformative’ potential of the future hub for offshore wind development — shortly before the annou...

Putin A mid-March report on Putin from Frontline strongly suggests that Putin, after a period of self-isolation, has reverted to character. He is a Stalinist ex-KGB agent who mourns the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, which once embraced in a liberty-snuffing stranglehold Ukraine, the Baltic States, East Germany, Poland and to a lesser extent Finland. Putin’s present character is quite in keeping with his unprovoked military attack upon the civilian population of Ukraine. Did the Frontline documentary, “ Putin's Road to War ,” get it right? It got an important part of it right. It is now impossible for Putin to slough off his essential character. The mask has very dramatically been tossed aside. Frontline shows a horde of communist legislators and administration officials trembling before Putin, precisely in the way the Soviet Politburo quailed before Stalin, the “Breaker of Nations.” Stalin, like Putin, was what President Joe Biden might have called a “war criminal.” War c...

Stefanowski Bob Stefanowski, the likely Republican Party choice for governor, has been reborn since he last ran against Governor Ned Lamont. The last time out of the shoot, Stefanowski lost to Lamont by a nose in the gubernatorial race. Political savants suggested, numerous times, that Stefanowski lost because he was too conservative for deep blue Connecticut. He had made a serious mistake by placing at the center of his campaign a vow to do away with the state’s income tax, a campaign ploy used by former Governor John Rowland, soon abandoned after Rowland had achieved office. Stefanowski said his plan was largely aspirational and indicative, suggesting to voters that he was seriously considering permanent reductions in taxes. As a Republican, Stefanowski believes, along with most liberal Democrats during the Camelot era of President John Kennedy, that reductions in marginal taxation will “lift all the boats.” In addition, Kennedy told an audience at the Economic Club of New York in...

Schumer, Blumenthal, Murphy In mid-March – comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb – U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal was in Poland, condoling with Ukrainian refugees. Poland borders Ukraine, an outgunned country under siege for months by Russia. Indeed, a piece in the Hartford Courant --  In Poland, Sen. Blumenthal sees desperation, misery among Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian army as bombs land within 15 miles of border – tells us that Blumenthal did not enter the war zone in Ukraine because “Our ever-vigilant security would not allow us to cross the border. The authorities didn’t want us to go anywhere near the site. We didn’t see the destruction. We were 12 miles away. But we met refugees, and we talked to Polish authorities who were there at the time.” Blumenthal promised to bring home with him certain indisputable “takeaways” from his visit, one of which is “the urgency of providing more military support — whether planes like the MiG29s or anti-aircraft batteries or dron...

  Ukraine My friend, Your question to me is: What should be done right now about the war in Ukraine? The West does tend to complicate simple issues, often for political reasons. There are only two important questions concerning the West’s posture towards Ukraine and Russia. First question: How should the West construct a coherent foreign policy? Answer: A realpolitik foreign policy -- see von Bismarck on the point -- is constructed according to a realistic appreciation of friends and enemies. Second question: Between Ukraine and Russia, which nation is the military aggressor in the current conflict? These two questions are paramount in any discussion of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, because the answers to them establish national postures, which are NOT temporary strategic or diplomatic poses. No doubt the easily provoked Putin regards Ukraine’s valiant attempt to thwart a military invasion from Putin’s Russia as a provocation. A modern Orwell writing in the Associated Press migh...

Lamont and unions The deal between Governor Ned Lamont and SEBAC, a union consortium representing state workers, is a tentative one, CTMirror’s tells us: “ CT state workers to get $3,500 in bonuses under tentative deal with Lamont: Deal must be ratified by unions and legislature .” The ratification of deals arranged by Democrat Connecticut governors and SEBAC have not in the past been strenuously contested by the General Assembly’s dominant Democrat Party. Surrenders on the part of Connecticut Democrats to public employee unions have been commonplace for a number of reasons, many of them political. It is not politically profitable for state Democrats to resist union demands. The state Democrat Party relies on union workers during campaign seasons for “boots on the ground support” and money contributions. So called “negotiations” between the two parties during the tenure of former Governor Dannel Malloy have tended to be Kabuki theatre performances in the course of which a Democra...

Lamont The leave taking of Mellissa McCaw, head of Governor Ned Lamont’s Office of Policy Management and Connecticut’s first Black OPM Secretary, made Connecticut papers at the end of February, inviting rude comparisons to disgraced former President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre.” Previous to McCaw, Lamont had dumped Konstantinos ‘Kosta’ Diamantis. Lamont in on record as having said that Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr., who has retired, would “be gone” if the governor had the power to fire him. McCaw may be the last high ranking Lamont official -- not yet a target or a person of interest in an FBI investigation -- to quit service in the governor’s administration. McCaw has accepted a job as finance director for the town of East Hartford, and Lamont gave her an affectionate send off. The Hearst papers reported, “In an afternoon press conference outside his office at the state Capitol, Lamont and other administration officials heaped praised on McCaw. Th...

Pazniokas The Jonathan Swift prize for Gentle Satire in Journalism may be awarded this year -- in a very private ceremony not opened to the public, on the third floor of Connecticut’s state Capitol, in the hallway abutting the Democrat Party caucus room, closed during strategy meetings to both the general public and the state’s news media – to CTMirror’s Mark Pazniokas . Swift, it may be recalled by students of satire, was the author of the bitterly satiric “ A Modest Proposal ,” subtitled, “for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.” Pazniokas, to be sure, is not bitter, but a bitter attitude is the least part of gentle satire. Swift’s “modest proposal” was that children of the poor in Ireland should be usefully cannibalized, and no part of the food source should be allowed to go to waste: “Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass...

St Sophia Cathedral Kiev People in the United States, some of them foreign policy “experts,” were surprised, surprised when the Ukrainian military was able to hold off a Putin invasion of the country for weeks on end. Ukrainians in Connecticut were not surprised. Neither will they be surprised at the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian resistance. Nor will US intelligence services or politicians in the United States sympathetic to Ukraine, the Alamo of Europe, be surprised. There have been no surprises, and there should in the near future be no surprises. Putin’s 40 mile Russian convoy is approaching Kiev. The Russian military already is in possession of the largest nuclear plant in the world a few miles from Kiev, having bombed it first. Not to worry, it appears no one in NATO, putatively a defense corridor against Russian aggression, will be harmed by Chernobyl ll. Putin is using cluster bombs , outlawed by virtually all western human rights organizations years ago, to terrorize...

The state of the union, in the immediate future, will depend upon the state of the national Democrat Party. In the distant future, we are all dead. The American mind generally is instantly captivated by matters of interest, labors over them for a short time and then, exhausted, “moves on,” as the politicians say, forgetting even yesterday in its hectic rush forward. President Bill Clinton – a child of Camelot and the last President to have balanced a national budget -- adopted as his campaign theme the Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop.” Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop, it'll soon be here It'll be here better than before Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone The song enshrines a frame of mind, buoyantly optimistic, that consigns yesterday to the dustbin of history -- and not only yesterday, but every yesterday. Tomorrow is always a blank sheet upon which transcending politicians may writer whatever they please, unobstructed by political princ...