Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lamont It would seem that the Lamont administration is having difficulty adding one and one and arriving at two? But then, the state of Connecticut has for the past three decades been fearlessly math deficient. Governor Ned Lamont tells us “Maybe I’m mad as hell (sic) that this is going from $150 [million] to $250 [million]. But I do think about the nature of this public-private investment in New London, and what this could mean for this round of wind power, and the next five rounds that come after it, and the possibility that southeast Connecticut can be a major hub for what we think is an important new industry going forward.” The dockworker expression “mad as Hell” fits millionaire Lamont like a roomy set of oversized clothes. Note to AP: Shouldn’t the AP Style Book instruct all journalists to capitalize “Hell,” which is a place name of a real place suited especially for politicians who cannot add one and one and arrive at two? Would a dockworker ambush a perfectly useful sla...

  Mamet Recessional: The Death of FreeSpeech, and the Cost of a Free Lunch by David Mamet Broadside Books, Copyright 2022, $28.99 David Mamet – American playwright, filmmaker and author – has taken the road less traveled among turn of the 21 st century liberals.  His long upstream journey from unreflective liberalism -- shall we agree to call it cultural liberalism? – to something resembling conservatism, was largely a matter of self-realization. Mamet was raised as a cultural Jew in Chicago and has embraced, in a born-again conversion, his past, present and future.   Most importantly, he has managed to live vigorously with his eyes opened. The years have not swallowed Mamet. Mamet has swallowed the years. It was his open-eyed, persistent fox-chase after elusive, shape-shifting truths that had made a playwright of him. The same may be said of any great playwright. Modern commentators now feel free to indulge the suspicion that Shakespeare, like his father, was ...

Blumenthal People are noticing the drop in U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s approval rating. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Blumenthal’s approval has dipped into a danger-red area. “The job approval of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is seeking a third term this fall, CTMirror reports, “was his worst in Quinnipiac polling since the Democrat took office in 2011. He was barely above water: 45% approve while 43% disapprove.” Coincidentally, the approval rating of President Joe Biden , which ranges from 36% to 43%, is underwater. The New York Post , every postmodern progressive’s bete noir , suggests that Biden’s reactionary economic policies may lie at the root of his disfavor, but these roots may go deeper than anyone supposes. “President Biden,” a Post commentator writes, has dismissed inflation worries, “saying that Milton Friedman — the famed inflation-fighting economist — no longer runs the show. Well, the late economist certainly didn’t run Biden’s show, but his obs...

Michael Ross   Following a school shooting in Texas, eerily similar to the  Sandy Hook slaughter  of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been out on the political stump pedaling their solutions to mass murders. Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, we find from a  news report , “has been pushing for gun restrictions earlier this year, but the recent legislative session expired in early May without action.” The report quotes him: “… there are so many illegal guns on the street right now. I’d like to think we could have done a better job here in Connecticut and send a message far afield, especially when it comes to those ghost guns.” Was Lamont suggesting that the elimination of ghost guns would have prevented the most recent slaughter of the innocents in Texas? Was he suggesting that black-market gunrunners would cease and desist their already illegal activities should the national legislature pass gun l...

I find this in a letter to the editor written by Terrence Richardson of Glastonbury: “People generally don’t understand that the issue” –central to the Supreme Court draft decision on  Roe v Wade  – “isn’t about what we want. It’s about which authority is best suited to make the decisions: SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of the United States], 50 independent state legislatures, or one U.S. Congress.” That is a brief description of the   Principle of Subsidiarity , an indispensible vein of liberty that runs through all governments everywhere, but most glowingly here in the United States. The animating idea of subsidiarity is that public functions should be exercised as close as possible to the citizen. The doctrine, originally a principle of social organization within the Catholic Church, holds “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and a...

Blumenthal finding shelter from the storm “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice”―  G.K. Chesterton A few months prior to the November 2022 elections, Connecticut’s media is focusing upon ideological factions within the GOP . These factions are much in evidence in the state’s upcoming U.S. Senate race, which at the moment pits three Republican challengers against present U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. All the members of Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation will be defending their seats in 2022. For various reasons, Blumenthal is considered by many commentators as the GOP’s San Juan Hill. Reading between the lines of many media reports, Blumenthal, it would appear, is nearly invulnerable to attack. He is a Connecticut Achilles without an Achilles’ heel. Blumenthal has won by comfortable margins all of his races during his three decades long stint in Connecticut politics. In his current race against three R...

Murphy It sometimes seems that controversy on important political and cultural issues showcased in Big Media is a one-way street, a no-exit cul-de-sac. To some it may seem that reading commentary on issues of moment is pretty much like overhearing a one-way phone conversation. The un-recorded voice, rarely heard or given sufficient space to make a detailed presentation, must always be inferred, often incorrectly. Following a “leaked” first draft of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right of state legislatures to decide whether or not states should pass laws regulating abortion, one discovered, in Connecticut and elsewhere, the usual explosion of opinion on the Supreme Court’s attempt to chuck Roe v Wade overboard. The Alito decision found serious errors in Roe v Wade and concluded that in the future the Court should not preempt state legislative authority in deciding abortion issues. In this way all the hustle and bustle surrounding abortion, not in the least stilled since the C...

Susan Bysiewicz  There is little doubt that Democrats this election year will be sounding the Abortion Gong in nearly every competitive political race. Here is Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz’s sound-off, courtesy of CTMirror : “Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said Stefanowski is offering women no assurance he would veto any (emphasis mine) effort to restrict access to abortion in Connecticut, a state whose legislature passed a law 32 years ago codifying the tenets of Roe. “’It’s one thing to support the current law. It’s another thing to step forward and say if a bill should come to your desk, that you will veto it, and you will fight any attempts to weaken our law, because those happen every year,’ Bysiewicz said. ‘So you’re not pro-choice, in my estimation, until you step up and say that.’” Republican gubernatorial aspirant Bob Stefanowski supports current law, but Bysiewicz and Governor Ned Lamont believe that Stefanowski’s pledge does not go far enough. Everyone – in...

  The overriding obligation of both journalists and political representatives was best expressed by Edmund Burke in a letter to his constituents. “Your representative,” Burke said, “owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Try always to say the truth, never say more than you know, and always know more than you say. Representations of any kind, journalistic or political, swing on the notion that the representative – whether a journalist presenting propositions to his readers, or a politician claiming to represent the true interests of his constituents – is obligated to present the truth without fear or favor. He owes this to his constituents, if he is a representative, or to his reading public, if he is a reporter or commentator. Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, has been in office long enough, nine years, so that congressional ways are familiar to him.  Prior to filli...

Opinion writing in Connecticut tends to drive everything left, including common sense, which used to preside over reasoning. A Connecticut opinion writer has made in The Day  a strong case for voting against Governor Ned Lamont. He writes that he doesn’t “like the way Gov. Ned Lamont has presided over Connecticut.” Lamont was “born rich and entitled, and that alone might not be something to hold against him, except that it explains a lot about the prince-like way he has governed, contemptuous of laws meant to ensure open and transparent government.” Lamont’s management style is “arrogant,” and “he has presided blindly over what appears to be a government of monumental corruption, with senior administration managers, who didn't heed warnings about no-bid contracts, jumping ship as federal authorities probe literally hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending.” But, the commentator argues, “… given the news this week from the Supreme Court, I'll probably vote for him aga...

Eric Lindquist Most people whose lives have not been radically disrupted by a violent crime have only a notional understanding of crime and punishment in Connecticut. The heinous murder of three members of his immediate family by Sergio Correa, a habitual criminal released early on parole, has made an activist of Eric Lindquist . Correa was sentenced to life in prison without parole following his trial and conviction of murdering in December of 2018 three members of the Lindquist family – father and mother, W.H. Kenneth and Janet, and a son, Matthew Lindquist. Correa murdered Matthew, testimony at trial showed, because he had reneged on a deal to exchange his father’s guns for drugs to be supplied by Correa, who then went on to murder Mathew’s father and mother, an assault so vicious that prosecutors tried Correa on a charge of “ murder with special circumstances – the most serious charge a person can face in Connecticut.” Execution used to be the most serious punishment  ...

Supreme Court In a 1916 interview, Henry Ford told Chicago Tribune reporter Charles N. Wheeler, “History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today." Historians vehemently disagree, but there is a gathering consensus that Roe v Wade is larded with historical bunk. Even former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Antonin Scalia’s antagonist on the Supreme Court, thought Roe was poorly argued. In a piece on abortion enticingly titled The Corruption of History , Senior Editor of National Review Ramesh Ponnuru has this to say about Roe v Wade’s slipshod scholarship: “To a greater extent than even most of its opponents realize, the reign of  Roe v. Wade  has relied from the very beginning on a false and sometimes fraudulent version of history. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion repeatedly cited slipshod scholarship that was already in t...