Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lumaj, Klarides, Levy Leora Levy , here fairly interviewed by Dennis House , is among three Connecticut Republicans hoping to unhorse U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal in the upcoming 2022 elections. All three met in debate at the end of July. The other two Republicans challenging Blumenthal are former Republican leader in the General Assembly Themis Klarides and conservative lawyer Peter Lumaj . One columnist , typical of many, wrote immediately after the debate, “None of the three found a moment to denounce Trump’s attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. The collective zero they scored during their only debate adds to the reasons none of them will be in the Senate the next time it gathers to affirm the counting of electoral votes and the election of a president.” The columnist, some Republicans speculated, was simply tilling the ground for a future editorial endorsement favoring Blumenthal in the left of center paper for which he writes. It’s always possible the Repub...

The Contrarian, Andrée and Dublin, about to board July 2022   The heat wave devastating much of Europe and America probably will peter-out in the next few days. The expression “peter-out,” traced by some linguists to 1845, has its origin in gold mines, said to have petered-out when over-prospected. It also may be related to saltpetr e, an element in gunpowder. Once a shot has been fired, the saltpeter may be said to have petered-out. In any case, the heat wave, attended in California by forest fires more destructive than the mal-administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, will in due course peter-out. One may wish the same fate upon environmental, end-of-the-earth predictions – all “based on science,” of course, in much the way that books theorizing the Mafia killed President John Kennedy in collusion with then Vice President Lyndon Johnson are “based on facts.” What grand political misdirection during the past 246 years of the American Experiment in Republican Government ha...

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning – Abbie Hoffman Governor Ned Lamont sat down with Hearst Media in mid-July and bared his breast. “Lamont said,” Hearst reported , “that he is running not only to defend the state’s existing [gun] laws, but to propose a new range of regulations on so-called ghost guns, assault weapons and the carrying of firearms in public.” The problem with laws is that any single law extended infinitely in one direction sooner or later bumps up against another countervailing law. The most efficient way to end gun violence, for instance, would be to end legal gun possession, but the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes that prospect forbiddingly unlikely. Of course, it is always theoretically possible to repeal the Second Amendment , regarded by the founders of the country as the palladium of liberty . At the time the Bill of Rights w...

Kordas Jessica Kordas, a Republican candidate for Attorney General, is a rarity – a competent litigator running for an office that depends largely upon litigation experience. William Tong , the present occupant of the office, has had litigation experience. Former Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, who had managed during his twenty years as Attorney General to drape himself in favorable publicity, had little litigation experience. Kordas’ mission is both reasonable and necessary. “ I am seeking the office of Attorney General of Connecticut,” she says, “because it is time to stand up and demand that the government, and the state’s largest law firm, works for the people. The office of the Attorney General, and the government, must no longer be a platform for self-interested politicians.” In the case of Blumenthal, who once joked about himself that he had been known to make appearances “at garage door openings,” nearly all his too frequent appearances having been tenderly covered by Con...

Blumenthal and his financing arm In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that passed the fiery abortion ball back to the states – where, some Constitutional scholars have argued it always belonged – a strategic rift has opened between U.S. Representative Jim Himes, perceived by some in Connecticut’s chattering class as a moderate, and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, a leading progressive Democrat. The High Court decision will not affect the availability of abortion in Connecticut. In fact, abortions in the state will become more not less prevalent, owing to a push by progressive Democrats such as Governor Ned Lamont and many Democrats in the state’s General Assembly to provide abortion seeking refugees from other states a “safe harbor” in Connecticut, where they may seek abortions without being molested by their own state’s restrictive abortion laws. The Himes- Blumenthal rift concerns political strategy on the matter of abortion following the Supreme Court finding. If both po...

    Andrée, Don and Dublin February 2022 It may be time for me to explain, if only to myself, what I think I have been about. __________________ I woke up this morning thinking: Why should we not confess our joys as well as our sins? Today, February 6, 2022, is full of sunshine, following three or four days of grey skies. It snowed several days ago. This was followed by a light rain, followed by a freezing rain – very inconvenient. It is not the hammer blows of despair, but rather the water torture of inconvenience that, in the postmodern world, drive men to murder and mayhem. The morning sun is burning brilliantly on what is left of the snow, Andree is snug in her bed – glad I was able to warm her, since I usually wake at about 7:30 and descend the stairs to write a column I suspect no one will print – and it seems just now, as Professor Pangloss often says in Voltaire’s Candide, “the best of all possible worlds.” God is in his heaven and, while the world sleeps...

Friedman How is it possible that Connecticut Democrats running for office in 2022 so infrequently offer comments on the obvious and, more frequently, fail to connect glaringly obvious dots? During his basement campaign for the presidency, President Joe Biden, one eye cocked on pseudo-anarchists such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her “Squad,” pledged to do away with fossil fuel.   He abandoned a nearly completed pipeline and sharply reduced the possibility of supply – as a surety of his pledge. It worked. In no time at all, gas at the pump being in short supply and demand rising after the U.S. and much of the world had shaken off its COVID slumber, the price of gas rose -- from a low, during the supposedly intolerable Trump regime, of $2.96 in May 2018 to its present level, a brain rattling $4.84 per gallon. In concert with high energy prices, increased costs in the price of goods and services -- owing largely to exorbitant spending -- rhetorical buffoonery some ascribe to m...