Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Biden and Trump -- source, CNN The common expression every New Year is “Out with the old, in with the new.” Whatever one’s politics may be, the New Year promises to be a repeat of past times, at least nationally. The two leading candidates for president are former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden, oldies but, their parties assure us, goodies. The dish on Biden is that he is well past his prime. His enemies are saying the man is a doddering old fool, while his friends have been slightly more charitable. He’s just old, and perhaps doddering, but certainly no fool. Even so, Democrat luminary David Axelrod, former Democrat President Barack Obama’s Wizard of Oz, has said the old guy should bow out, in favor of someone else whose poll numbers are… ahem… more encouraging. Axelrod recently has given aid and comfort to the enemy by insisting that booting Trump off the ballot in numerous states would be a disaster worse than… well, the erasure of our southern b...

  Who do you say that I am? – Mathew 16:15 As we grow older, everything tends to vanish. Our interests and focus is repurposed.   We have tucked Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Past” in our memory banks, but draw upon our reserves to give us the pleasure of seasonal joy. King Lear is old, and painfully wise. A terribly sane Lear, suddenly dispossessed of his kingdom, finds himself, along with his faithful fool, on a forbidding heath in Great Britain’s frigid north, while winds and hurricanes beat about them. A friendly Kent, disguised as a beggar, points the way to a shabby hovel. Lear addresses his fool: “In, boy. Go first, you houseless poverty.” And he then challenges the unforgiving storm: “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness defend you from seasons such as these? O, I have taken too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, expose thysel...

  Trump -- Newsweek CNN’s Data Reporter Harry Enten is depressed. The figures he has been examining show prices for essential goods increasing and real wages decreasing, the result of an inflationary dragon scorching the house with its fiery breath. Just look at this, Enten noted: “From the first year of a president’s term to now in a term -- look at this! We’ve actually had negative growth. We have actually decreased the amount of disposable income we’ve had, 2.7% for the Biden administration. Look at that. The average for the president since JFK, is plus 4.5 percent. And even in the last few months, the last six months, the growth that we’ve had — just 0.2 percent. The average six months since 1960 [is] 1.1 percent, so we’re even behind on that metric. “It is kind of depressing.” CNN, it should be noted, is not part of the Republican Party’s anti-democracy plot to return former President Donald Trump to office in 2024. Political readers should know that the station is just ...

Netanyahu and Biden -- Avi Ohayon, Israeli Government, via Associated Press The views of Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation on war and peace in Israel are remarkably similar, as if they had all flowed from the same mind and pen. Very likely they did. Democrats are famous for producing campaign scripts and assuring that all the players, both nationally and in-state, rigidly adhere to them. This saves politicians the trouble of thinking independently. We owe to the Harford Courant’s Chris Keating an unobstructed view of the delegation’s scripted mindset. And the mind of the delegation is set in concrete political narratives. U.S. Representative John Larson of Connecticut’s 1st District, which has lain sleeping in Democrat hands for 64 years, may serve as an example. To the politically unlettered observer, the district appears to be horseshoe shaped gerrymander. The principal cities in Larson’s district are Bristol, Hartford, and Torrington. The district has been r...

The question I am asked most often, and most often find too hot to handle, is this one: What must Republicans in our state of perpetual Democrat dominance do to win office? They must – in their campaigns for office – begin to agitate against the policies of President Joe Biden, who will appear on the 2024 campaign ballot. Take a lesson from successful campaigners, former President Donald Trump among them. Campaigning and governing are two distinct endeavors. Well sure, but most Republicans would consider that as an invitation to suicide, given that those who present news to the public are almost universally opposed to Trump.   No one likes larval Nazis. True or not, Trump has been effectively boxed as, in Democrat parlance, an enemy of the democracy, a charge Biden has nimbly deflected. All this is mildly interesting. It certainly produces internet clicks in our 24/7 news outlets. However, the media scales have in Connecticut and much of the northeast been tipped in favor of ...

Kushner, News Times Danbury During the COVID crisis, businesses in Connecticut were shut down, schools were closed, and everyone – including restaurateurs – settled in for a spare few years. Eventually, politicians declared COVID over and dazed struggling businesses began a painfully slow recovery. When the COVID waters receded, businesses that had not gone out of business, adapted to what some economists are still pleased to call the free market system. We now discover that some of the more destructive restrictions imposed on the free market during COVID were both unnecessary and ruinously unproductive for both workers and employers. Businesses closed down, workers were thrown out on barren streets, and everyone suffered equitably. In Connecticut, where taxes and regulations are onerous, large chain restaurants closed some operations and moved to greener pastures in less punishing states. Smaller Connecticut restaurants, unable to turn a productive profit, shut down and let their ...

  Nadler U.S. representative for New York's 12th congressional district Jerry Nadler, proudly Jewish, recently spoke against a congressional resolution because it identified anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. “This resolution,” Nadler said, “does nothing to counter the scourge of anti-Semitism.” The Congressman did not on this occasion share with his fellow comrades measures that would be successful in countering the scourge of anti-Semitism at, among other places, Harvard, Yale and New York’s own Columbia and Cornell universities. “The resolution, said Nadler, “states that all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. That is either intellectually disingenuous or factually wrong… While most anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Semitic, the authors [of the resolution] if they are at all familiar with Jewish history and culture, should know that Jewish anti-Zionism was and is expressly not anti-Semitic. This resolution ignores the fact that even today certain orthodox and Hassidic communities, the S...

Newsom Carthago delenda est,” Carthage must be destroyed – the motto of Cato the Elder and the Roman army during the Punic wars National Review reports, “California Governor Gavin Newsom will conduct tonight’s Christmas tree–lighting at California’s state capitol virtually, amid threats from pro-Palestinian protesters… The Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights announced that it would protest at the state capitol on Tuesday night — the same night Newsom was set to direct the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. The group told KCRA Channel 3 that it wants to ‘out Governor Gavin Newsom for hiding from the public because he doesn’t want to face their anger at his shameful stance in regard to the genocide in Gaza.’” Perhaps President of China Xi Jinping can show Newsom the way. The Governor of California need not scurry to a place of safety because he wishes to avoid a public headline-generating backlash as a result of a strenuous moral opposition against a genocidal...

                                              Lamont – Hartford Business Journal The Western Journal , little read by Connecticut’s top-heavy, neo-progressive political establishment, notes, “When even Ned Lamont believes phasing out internal combustion cars by 2035 is a lost cause, you'd better believe it's a lost cause.” Following deep blue California’s lead, Lamont had vowed to end the sale of gas powered vehicles in Connecticut by 2035. An avalanche of objections, some coming from minority Republicans, buried the proposal, and on January 6 Lamont wisely retreated. Few people in Connecticut wish to follow California down a rabbit hole, destination unknown. "On Monday afternoon,” the publication noted, the state’s Legislative Regulation Review Committee, equitably divided between Democrats and Republicans nixed the proposal. “The move was celebrated as a victory f...

Getty Images On October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorists swooped down upon a peaceful gathering of young Israelis enjoying themselves at a concert. ABC in mid-October provided us with a textual description of the ensuing slaughter: “Then the video [made by Hamas terrorists] gets grisly. Other militants are busy mashing a dying man's face with their boots. Another pair screams ‘Allahu akbar [God is great] as they use a garden hoe to try to decapitate another man. In another house, a gunman sticks the muzzle of his rifle into a room inhabited by a family. It's a mash of colors. In one, a terrorist is standing on an Israeli man's chest and shoots him point-blank in the face.” The slaughter was filmed by what some news outlets in the West are pleased to call “militants” rather than terrorists. These horrific clips, used by Hamas terrorists to convince the brethren they seriously intend to displace Israel with a forward marching conquering Islam, are a trifle too bloody to appear...

Lieberman Former U.S. Senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman, a bit like the eupeptic Hubert Humphrey, is a happy political warrior, gleefully defending a vanishing middle ground among his fellow Democrats and so called MAGA Republicans. He is a man of what used to be called “the vital center” in American politics, and his natural optimism is deeply engrafted on his character. In the view of moderate Democrats -- a very thin residue within the party of Jackson, Jefferson and (John) Bailey, Connecticut’s last Democrat political boss, the hard right and left now bracket American politics, which, some have argued, has become Hobbesian in its passions. A remedy for extreme measures and bad political manners embraced by the Democrat and Republican brackets is the elixir now being sold by Lieberman’s “No Labels” party. Lieberman probably will recall Barry Goldwater’s quip – if you cut off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country. Goldwater was describing the Democ...

Biden and Xi -- Getty images Connecticut Democrat Governor Ned Lamont and the state’s majority Democrat General Assembly seem determined to follow California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom down a neo-progressive rabbit hole. One of the distinguishing characteristics of neo-progressivism is its vacuous unconcern with attendant consequences. After the neo-progressive assault on the internal combustion engine has been completed, radical environmental extremists in the United States likely will call upon the U.S. Congress to repeal Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Generally, the Law means that when one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts a force of equal magnitude and opposite direction on the first object. The law applies as well in the realm of ideas. Every idea, especially an insupportable one, generates an equal and opposing restorative idea. People in Connecticut who o...

The Micawber principle states: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” The inescapable golden rule of budgeting – announced dramatically by Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is this: When income exceeds expenditures by an infinitesimal amount, you are blessed with happiness. When, on the other hand, your expenditures exceed your income, you quickly arrive at the gates of “misery.” And in Dickens’ day, misery involved spending a good deal of time in debtors’ prison, the fate of Dickens’ own father. Nearly everyone in Connecticut who does not draw a salary from taxpayer provided funds, regarded as infinite by neo-progressive spendthrift politicians, tends to abide, if grudgingly, by the golden rule, even though debtors’ prisons have long been abolished. In the political realm, exceptions to the rule are the rule. Slithery polit...