Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lamont and His General Assembly Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it, said either Mark Twain or, more likely, Hartford Courant editor Charles Dudley Warner, a close friend of Twain’s. The same may be said of political polarization, frequently mentioned in stories in which former President Donald Trump is cast as the nation’s sole polarizer. Here is a sentence drawn at random from a recent Courant opinion piece, “ JFK’s ‘Best and Brightest’ revisited ,” written by Scott Badler, a former Harvard and Emerson writing instructor: “The nation is polarized, and it is rare that someone from one party votes with the other party.” “Polarized” is the perfect word to describe a left-right standoff on irreconcilable issues. Think of Alaska’s frozen tundra, of lungs scorched by below zero temperatures, of breathless politicians swooning into man-high snow drifts. Bader supposes that the John F. Kennedy era was considerably more bipartisan and well-manner...

Blumenthal -- WSHU Cliff Owen Dick Blumenthal is the most “appeared” candidate for office in Connecticut history. He himself has joked that he has been “known to appear at garage door openings,” one of the infrequent jokes he’s told during his three decades in office, first as a consumer protection Attorney General and now as consumer protection U.S. Senator. Facing the public is an important part of politics. Over the course of years, Blumenthal’s public face has been obligingly presented by a soft-core media determined not to play the devil’s advocate with him. Part of the Blumenthal-Media-Complex is business related. Blumenthal gives the nation’s left of center media what it wants, progressive hard copy, and the media throws at his feet fresh bouquets of unfiltered copy Blumenthal has pre-assorted for them. His media releases are richly detailed and bursting with self-praise. The Blumenthal media has only to paste these direct and indirect encomiums in their pages and adopt a no...

Levy -- Trendraters Writing in the Greenwich Times , a pro-President  Joe Biden, pro- U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal columnist has accused Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate Leora Levy -- who remarked that President Donald Trump would not be on the ballot in 2022, while she would be --  of “lying” on the campaign trail: “I’d like to correct one statement  — a lie — made by U.S. senatorial candidate, Leora Levy, the Republican running against incumbent U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal… Trump is very much on the ballot, and we wait to see if this could be the election that removes his foul stench forever. For his part, Trump has pinned his hopes on candidates such as Levy, whom he endorsed in August.” The truth of the matter, incidental to Trump-hunting Connecticut columnists, is that Levy was stating the unvarnished truth when she pointed out that former President Trump will not be on the ballot during the off-presidential year elections in 2022. Therefore, Levy could not ha...

New Haven, Achievment First students 2016 COVID and the political response to it in Connecticut – Governor Ned Lamont and the Democrat dominated General Assembly shut down public education in the state – has lifted the lid on the state’s pedagogical Pandora’s Box. Some literate students in Connecticut, increasingly diminishing in number, may recognize the reference. Pandora’s Box contained all the evils of the world. Once its lid had been removed, the evils rushed out to feast on suffering humanity. Only Hope remained in the box. The “Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has now been sent home to parents. The results, a story in the  Washington Examiner  tells us, “weren’t pretty. The average fourth grader’s reading score dropped 5 points since 2020 — the most significant drop among the age group in over two decades. The math test results were even worse as the average 9-year-old faced a 7-point drop, making it one of the most disappoin...

Andrée and Dublin at Arrowhead Lee Massachusetts is everyone’s vision of a typical New England town. The Main Street is short and to the point. Buildings, unmolested by town planners, have maintained their character throughout the years. The house where we bunked for several days dates from the 19 th century and has been well kept by its owner, an engineer who had, like Odysseus, moved about in the world. He was born, very likely in or near the house we occupied, moved with his family to Washington DC, where his father had found a job he could not refuse as an electrical engineer, and later back to Lee. The firehouse across the street from Garfield House is a solid stone structure that boasts a square steeple one easily might mistake for a bell tower or a medieval watch tower. Traveling around New England, one must – delicately, delicately – approach the topic of politics. Open wounds are everywhere. New England is solid ultramarine blue; which is to say, many people in New Englan...

Hunter Biden's teeth Possibly a number of Democrats have read the more lurid parts of Hunter Biden’s “ Laptop From Hell ” by now. A news account of content on the laptop, Hunter’s own Satyricon , was published by the Daily Mail nearly two years ago, after it had been determined beyond doubt that the matter on the laptop was not planted there by the devious Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias, including Ukraine. Included in the report are samples of compromising father and son emails. The Daily Mail report is a combination of plain old pornography, courtesy of Hunter Biden, and political pornography. The saddest picture published in the news report is one showing Hunter Biden showing his teeth, ravaged by drug use, to the camera. Thanks to the New York Post (NYP), accurate reports on the laptop’s content were printed before people in the U.S went to the polls to elect Joe Biden, Hunter’s dad, as President, but the publication of the laptop’s content, lurid because Hunte...

“The future ain’t what it used to be,” Yogi Berra famously quipped. As concerns postmodern Democrat politics, neither the past, present nor future is what it used to be. In the past, Democrats and Republicans, who often came together off the campaign trail to click glasses and propose mutually amicable toasts to each other, used to be concerned with profligate spending, which leads, unsurprisingly, to profligate tax increases. The general idea animating both parties during the John F. Kennedy administration (January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963) was that businesses, relatively unmolested by tax thirsty politicians, produced jobs and government facilitated the production of jobs. Naturally, the government, national and state, was interested in carving out a modest piece of the business pie. Kennedy visited the  New York Economic Club  about a year before he was assassinated and unveiled his new economic program. Marginal taxes were too high, Kennedy said. His program...

Sen. Blumenthal, Hartford Mayor Bronin, Governor Lamont, Attporney General Tong and Lieutenant General Bysiewitz What is the difference between Sep 01, 2022 at 9:00 am and Sep 01, 2022 at 2:56 pm, apart from the time difference, about six hours? It took Attorney General William Tong a tortuous six hours to adjust his reaction to an explosive video released by Project Veritas. A longtime respected Hartford reporter was obliged to publish two stories six hours apart covering essentially the same material. Here is Tong, Connecticut’s Democrat Attorney General, at 9:00 am : “State Attorney General William Tong, a Stamford Democrat, condemned the comments but also questioned the practices of Project Veritas. “’There’s something also wrong about this entrapment journalism and gotcha journalism,’ Tong said in an interview. ‘Journalism should be left to journalists, and law enforcement should be left to law enforcement — to police officers and state’s attorneys and the attorney general...