Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut taxpayer funded campaign finance reform has died the death of a thousand cuts. Hartford Courant reporter Edmund Mahony, who has been around the state’s campaign reform process for many years, has written its political obituary in a story titled “ Election reform concerns remain: Long dormant case casts light on taxpayer campaign funding .” The blunt weapon used to bludgeon campaign finance reform in the state was a “perfectly legal” walk-around amendment that subverted the campaign reform law’s intent and purpose – which was to level the campaign financing process between incumbent politicians of both parties and outspent challengers. The last rites on Connecticut’s campaign finance laws were read by Charles Urso, “who spent decades investigating political crime for the FBI and led the State Elections Enforcement Commission’s [State Senator Edward] Kennedy investigation until retiring in 2016.” While serving in the FBI, reporter Mahony notes, Urso “was a lead investigator i...

Perhaps someone in Connecticut’s General Assembly should propose a law forbidding legislators and state officials from misusing the expression “common sense” and its derivatives. “The nation’s highest court,” a Hartford paper reported in late June, “overturned a New York law that dates back to 1913 and says that applicants need to show ‘proper cause’ that they need a gun for self-defense in order to obtain a license that they could carry the concealed weapon in public. “But the court ruled 6-3 that the New York law ‘violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.’” The ruling produced a spate of objections from Connecticut politicians in which the expression “common sense” and its derivatives were painfully iterated by so called “gun control advocates.” William Tong, Connecticut’s Attorney General advised that Connecticut gun restriction laws, different than those...

Lamont, Biden and Hayes No one knows exactly why postmodern progressives have been cool on President Joe Biden, who has been performing consistently as a rusting, antique, radical, since he first stepped into the White House. Some progressives argue that Biden, Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, and US Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer of reliably left wing New York, all  talk a good game but are slow to deliver on transformative policies. Time, sadly, has passed them by. Just now in the Democrat Party, Biden’s opposite number is not Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders but rather Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat in the fashion of President John F. Kennedy, the King Arthur of Camelot. No one of importance in the Democrat Party yet has recommended that Manchin run for president in 2024, although there is much dissatisfaction with progressive/socialist doctrine among moderate to liberal Democrats . The average De...

Buckley Bill Buckley used to say, “The problem with bad manners is that they sometimes lead to murder.” If Buckley was speaking, as he often did, from a sort of transcendent skepticism, attractive in people with good manners, he never-the-less said the truth. Many murderers, most people reading these lines will have noticed, lack a certain social grace. They are unacquainted with Kant or other enlightened pre-20 th century moral philosophers. The postmoderns, addicted to group-think, usually end up finding Nietzsche less wearing on their frayed nerves. Kant , modern philosophers tell us, is a deontologist. For Kant, “morality is not defined by the consequences of our actions, our emotions, or an external factor. Morality is defined by duties and one’s action is moral if it is an act motivated by duty.” The moral law proceeds from “the good will” directed to a good end. Kant summed up his moral law this way: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my ma...

Arles Café at night, by Van Gogh Whenever French President Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron comes to mind, more often than I would wish, my remembrance floats back to a conversation we had with François, a boat owner in Arles more French than the Eiffel Tower and more emblematic of France than Macron. François’ boat was parked on the Rhone just below our larger boat. My wife Andrée and I were leaning over the rail, about to descend on Arles, when he called up to us in communicable English. “Where are you from? You are American.” “Connecticut. This is my wife, Andr é e.” “Ah, French!” “Her father was from Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada. She has Indian blood in her. The French and the Indians were on amicable terms, you may recall.” “Yes.” He would have said “yes” in any case, because he was in the process of selling his boat. “Americans are rich, eh?” “Not us,” my wife responded in French. “We’ve escaped that torture.” François laughed, a hearty boatman’s laugh, ...

Trump Anti-Trumpism in Connecticut has been a politically profitable business among Connecticut Democrat office holders. There are two categories of anti-Trumpists: those whose numerous beefs against former President Donald Trump are rational, and those who are partisan politicians pushing what appears to them to be a successful campaign ploy. Trump is in many ways the perfect Democrat Party foil. He falls outside a traditional Republican Party box, and his volatile character is unsettling among those who are easily unsettled. Voters across the nation, even in Democrat bastions such as Connecticut, understand the difference between the two categories of anti-Trumpists mentioned above. Connecticut, home of Yale and the cunningly amusing Colin McEnroe, is not a state brimming over with political rubes who are putty in the hands of Machiavellian politicians. Across much of the nation, the general voting public has more or less “come of age” in our sometime confusing, postmodern 21 s...

Voltaire “If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize” ~ Voltaire At first I thought the column might be a parody of Democrat Yahooism taken straight from the 2022 Democrat Party campaign book. But on second thought, I believe it’s the real article. The column should be preserved as a political artifact of the upcoming 2022 campaign, which helps to explain why Connecticut is on the ropes, economically, politically and journalistically. The state has been laboring for decades under an unsupportable $58 billion debt. Its debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio is about 20 percent, and every citizen of the “state of bad habits” owes the overmastering Democrat hegemon about $16K, figures rarely mentioned by Connecticut columnists.   Here is what Hearst readers of the column -- Moderate Connecticut Republicans should head for the lifeboats -- are asked to swallow. The columnist's remarks are in italics. There may be no better example ...

Chesa Boudin, defective Political language – and with variations, this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind – George Orwell California, most people understand, has been the petri dish of postmodern progressivism. Early in June, District Attorney Chesa Boudin of San Francisco was recalled, apparently for having failed to do his job. The recall vote was unambiguously decisive. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on June 7, “San Francisco voters overwhelmingly voted to remove District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office on Tuesday, favoring a recall effort that argued his progressive reforms were too lenient and made the city less safe. “Boudin trailed by about 20 percentage points Tuesday evening, according to the latest figures from city elections officials. Around 60% of San Franciscans who cast ballots voted to recall him.” ...

                                                                 The issues driving her campaign for the U.S. Senate, Leora Levy reiterated at a recent campaign stop in Manchester, Connecticut, are the same “driving the issues nationally: inflation, the lack of protection for our borders, the lack of parental control over their children and over the curriculum in the schools and other woke policies.” Though President Joe Biden will not be on the ballot in 2022, the president’s policies are inextricably connected with the campaign of incumbent U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, long a fixture in Connecticut politics. Blumenthal should not be permitted to hide behind the flower pots in the coming campaign. Levy believes she is the Republican candidate for Congress best able to confront a weakened Blumenthal on important policy ...

Looney "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just" – Thomas Jefferson There is a difference, people in Connecticut may have noticed, between tax cuts proposed by fiscally conservative Republicans and “tax cuts” proposed by progressive Democrats. The tax cut favored by progressive Democrats such as President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney and Speaker of the State House of Representatives Matt Ritter are first collected by the state and then distributed, according to progressive principles, to various constituencies favored by tax collecting Democrats. When Republicans propose tax cuts, personal assets are left in the charge of taxpayers -- which is to say, essential choices that shape private futures are left in private hands, rather than the sometimes grasping hands of politicians. The possibility of collecting and distributing tax money uncollected is therefore foreclosed, because you cannot redistribute an uncollected tax levy, and the redist...

Blumenthal “ I believe in capitalism ” – Blumenthal on the campaign stump U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is on the road again, this time making a pit stop at a Hartford gas station to unveil his legislative assault on Big Oil. The front page above the fold headline in a Hartford Paper read: “ As gas prices in Connecticut hit $5 a gallon, Sen. Blumenthal targets oil companies’ billion-dollar profits . “I’m angry,” Blumenthal said, “just as every driver in the state is.” And “The big oil companies are profiteering. They are making record profits causing consumers unprecedented pain.” And oil company buybacks “…are benefiting shareholders, but not consumers.” And “Those buybacks help the people who own the companies, but not consumers.” In addition to reaping obscene profits, the oil companies also are cutting back on job production. The solution to this obscene profit taking is, Connecticut’s consumer protection senator has said, a “Big Oil windfall profits tax,” fifty percent of...

Schumer, Blumenthal, Murphy One of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s problems is that familiarity, as the old saying has it, does indeed breed contempt. That seems to be the message in a Connecticut paper’s Sunday edition, front page, top of the fold story: “ Blumenthal’s poll ratings in decline .” The unfavorable headline is itself a story. After 40 years “serving the people of Connecticut” in public office, Blumenthal’s formulation of his long run in Connecticut politics, something has changed. Whatever can it be? Themis Klarides, one of three Republicans vying for Blumenthal’s seat in the U.S. Senate, has offered an answer to the question. “I just think that some people eventually wear out their welcome before they realize it’s been worn out,” Klarides told a reporter. “The bloom has been coming off that flower for several years now. I don’t think it was an overnight issue. ... Dick Blumenthal has become a caricature of himself. He’s known as the person who gets in front of t...