Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter — the big four. CTMirror   It’s not only money, but energy as well, that makes things go. A headline in a Hartford paper, “ House extends gas tax cut ,” drives home the point, although the headline itself is a bit convoluted. What happened was this: There was a considerable energy shortage after President Joe Biden assumed office, largely because the incoming president had declared a war on energy as we know it. Biden has said several times since assuming office – the infamous “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 had not been successful, and Biden was sworn into to office shortly after the electoral count showed he had prevailed over outgoing President Donald Trump – that there would be no more fossil fuel development so long as he was president. We all know that if you reduce the supply of a consumable product, the price of the product will increase so long as demand is constant. The demand for fossil fuel was constant, and once...

Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant has assembled a phalanx of Republican Party leaders in Connecticut who are adamantly opposed to the re-election of former President Donald Trump. They are not alone. Other prominent national Republicans and, unsurprisingly, conservative outlets such as National Review are also opposed to Trump’s presidential re-election bid.   It was National Review , at the outset of Trump’s first bid for the presidency, that devoted a whole issue of its magazine to Trump opposition. The issue was titled “ Never Trump .” Some former hard-line Trump oppositionists have since softened their view. Democrats opposing the hapless President Joe Biden administration have yet to come out from behind their rhetorical flowerpots. Perhaps the most interesting take is that of House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford, described by Keating as “a fiscally and socially conservative Republican.” That description is important because it sets Candelo...

DeSantis -- Sun Sentinel State government in Connecticut is missing some dots and failing to connect others. The most obvious dot is that connecting getting and spending. These have always been causally connected. The more state government spends, the more state government must tax its citizens. The federal government may escape the necessary connection by simply printing money. This devalues the currency and causes inflation, another dot politicians find convenient to gloss over, especially during election periods. States may avoid crushing tax increases by passing the debt to future generations. Connecticut , which has the highest taxpayer debt of any state in the nation, has perfected this method. It is first in the nation in debt production and, at the same time, tax exodus. The state’s debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio is 20 percent . Nutmeggers may escape future tax debt by leaving the state, and they do, according to figures supplied by North American Moving Servi...

Lamont rejoicing -- Courant Governor Ned Lamont breathed a sigh of relief following the conclusion of the 2022 off year elections in Connecticut. Nothing much had changed. The Democrat Party hegemony in the state, unimpaired, remained in control of state government. Lamont rejoiced that ubiquitous partisan ads had at last been put to bed. So too has the prosecutorial assault on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, according to a brief Associated Press (AP) report. The report, Prosecutors: No criminal charges expected from Giuliani raid , c arried on page 4 in a Hartford paper, tells us, “Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will not face criminal charges over his interactions with Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, federal prosecutors revealed in a letter to a judge Monday. “Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said they made the decision after reviewing electronic evidence gathered in  raids on Giuliani’s hom...

Forbes magazine tells us, “The death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman  Mahsa Amini  has sparked protests in Iran. Amini was arrested for breaking the country’s law that requires women to cover their hair with a headscarf and she later died while in police custody. Since Amini’s death, women and girls in Iran have been removing their headscarves as a form of protest. Now, all eyes are on Iran, with some equating women’s removal of their headscarves to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Oriana Fallaci, were she alive, might have been in the midst of the protests. Fallaci, pretty much forgotten by postmodern journalists, was a Florentine. The vital center of small “r” republican resistance to autocratic regimes before and throughout the Renaissance was Florence, Italy, the home of Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy and, let it never be forgotten, the modern Italian language. Fallaci turned to journalism in the 1960s and was likely the mo...

Lamont to DeLauro's right -- CTPost Connecticut’s Democrat Party Hegemony On the Sunday following the conclusion of the off year elections in Connecticut, Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant raised the following question: How did Dems do so well in state ? The short answer to the question is: The Democrat Party hegemony won because hegemonies most often win. The more interesting and illuminating questions are: How did Connecticut become a one party state? When did the erosion of competitive politics begin? And is there a turning point at which formerly Republican strongholds in the state – Greenwich and West Hartford come to mind – will revitalize Republican Party ranks? The extent of the Democrat Party hegemony was most accurately depicted by Dr. Eric Ostermeier in a short piece, Connecticut Democrats Set New US House Electoral Record , t hat appeared in in Smart Politics five days after polls closed in Connecticut.  “Since 2008,” Ostermeier wrote, “Democrats [in Connect...

Nothing is written in stone yet, the Associated Press cautioned the morning after Vote Day, but: “For weeks, Republicans predicted a ‘red wave’ would carry them to power in Congress, as voters repudiated majority Democrats for failing to tame skyrocketing inflation and address worries about rising crime. “The reality appeared far different early Wednesday. “Rather than a wholesale rejection of President Joe Biden and his party, the results were far more mixed as returns from Tuesday’s midterms trickled in.” This is good news for Democrats, although Republicans appear to have captured the US House of Representatives, a troublesome acquisition at a time when partisan U.S. Congressional activity has been used to bruise Republicans before elections.   In Connecticut, the results were not quite as “mixed.” Democrats secured their majority position in the General Assembly, retained all their seats in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, an...

  Should Elon Musk have taken over Twitter? Yes. Since its advent, politicians the world over have learned to twitter-speak, and the media has also spent a good amount of time pouring over witless tweet idiocies in search of eye-catching stories. “There are only so many hours in the day,” Oscar Wilde once responded when asked why he did not take socialism, much in vogue during his day, more seriously. Media hours, we all know, stretch from here to eternity. Generally, Twitterdom has had a baneful influence on political discourse. Twitter is the breeding ground of bad manners and sloppy thought. Abraham Lincoln, many debate coaches might agree, is a better rhetorician than say, former President Donald Trump or (former?) Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. If you are a politician and your discourse begins to sound like it was ripped from a bumper sticker or a random tweet, you should be impeached instantly. The fear lately is that Twitterdom has introdu...

  The New Haven Independent tells us, “’Working Americans are facing sticker shock’ while ​‘companies like Shell doubled their profits and [diverted] billions in stock buy backs’ while jacking up gas prices, [U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut’s 3rd District] stated. “She accused oil companies of ‘padding the pockets of their executives and shareholders’ while ‘artificially keeping prices high.’ She noted that the top 25 oil and gas companies reaped a record $237 billion in profits in 2021 and are in line for even more in 2022; the top five have recorded 200 percent jumps in profits in the first quarter of 2022. “The average price of a gallon of diesel stood at $5.924 Wednesday compared to $3.688 a year ago, according to AAA.” Two years ago, during the reign of the much demonized yellow-haired-demon, ex-president Donald Trump, the price of gas was considerably less, partly because the United States was teasing from the...

Blumenthal The 2022 elections in Connecticut are about a week away. Many political commentators agree that nationally Republicans may take charge of the U.S. House of Representatives, depriving California Representative Nancy Pelosi of her well worn gavel once again. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs as well. Here in Connecticut, Democrats are the dominant party by far, and have been so for many years. The governor’s office has been held by Democrats Dannel Malloy and Ned Lamont for the past eleven years. The General Assembly is solidly Democrat. All the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats, and all the state’s constitutional offices are held by Democrats. The state’s largest cities have been in the grip of a rusting Tammany Hall like Democrat political machine for about half a century -- and it shows. How did this Democrat Party hegemony take hold, and is Connecticut’s Democrat Party fortress unassailable? Can it be successfully breached --- and, if s...

Blumenthal and Hillary -- DennisHouse TV U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has been in the public eye in Connecticut for thirty seven years, and there are signs that the public eye is weary and wary of him. Blumenthal’s approval ratings, like those of President Joe Biden, have softened. In many ways, Connecticut’s senior U.S. Senator is tied inescapably to Biden short coattails by his affirming and negative votes in the Senate and his long standing cordial relations with the President, former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton. Republican Party challengers in the past, some tougher and more resilient than had been supposed by Connecticut’s left of center media, had effectively played on that particular organ stop – Blumenthal’s long standing friendships with power brokers in his party. He went to Yale with both Clintons, and his relationship with Biden has been amorous and only a touch less cri...