Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Global Finance  Mag "If a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable." – Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’  David Copperfield . At some point, hopefully before Connecticut and the nation are driven to the poor house, woke Democrats will discover the causal connection between getting and spending: The more you get in taxation, the more you spend; the more you spend, without trimming expenses, the greater the necessity of 1) raising taxes, 2) borrowing money, or 3) printing money, the chief producer of inflation and, inflation’s uglier twin sister, recession. Remaining out of debt was, scholars believe, the primary motivator in Dickens’ life, even when he was well on his way to achieving literary celebrity status. Dickens well understood the connection between getting and spending and felt the debtors lash on his shoulders for much of ...

Hunter and Joe Biden -- logically.ai  Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s wayward son, fell over a political cliff when he -- inadvertently? -- left his laptop at a computer store, presumably for repairs. The compromising nature of the computer data, partly salacious but also containing sensitive communications implicating former Vice President Biden in a possible pay to play scheme involving foreign entities not friendly to the United States, induced the legally blind shop owner to contact the FBI concerning the compromising computer. Hunter Biden, trading on his father’s name, was enriched, the laptop rested safely in FBI hands – end of story? Alas, the whole business, all of which happened prior to a hotly contested presidential election,   proved to be a “tangled web” of the sort Walter Scott imagined when he penned the lines “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive.”  After having had no response from the FBI, the shop owner wisely shar...

  T he Debt Limit Democrats in the U.S. Congress are treating the nation’s “debt limit” on inflationary borrowing in the same manner they have treated the southern U.S. border. The border has now become a term of political art. It exists presently only as a demarcation line on a map. The “debt limit” has been delimited by presidents and the U.S. Congress no fewer than 78 times since 1960 - 49  times  under Republican presidents and 29  times  under Democratic presidents. Initially, the debt ceiling was “a fix that enabled bonds to be issued without requiring repeated congressional approvals,” according to the Associated Press .   The debt ceiling, in other words, is a “workaround” that relieves the U.S. Congress of its constitutional oversight obligation to control every dollar spent by the executive department. The ‘”debt limit” has become a term of art deployed by artful politicians who have no intention of reducing debt by cuts in long-term spending....

  Blumenthal, Schiff, et al The Daily Caller, a right of center publication founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, a 20-year veteran journalist, and Neil Patel, former chief policy advisor to Vice President Cheney, reports that Twitter executives have identified Connecticut’s bully U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal as a congressional troll: ‘ Congressional Trolls’: Twitter Execs Bashed Dem Lawmakers’ Claims About Russian Bot Manipulation . In a push push, shove shove roundup of congressional irritants, the Daily Caller notes, “Democratic lawmakers such as California Rep. Adam Schiff, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal pressed Twitter on claims of Russian bots influencing trends on the platform. Their source was the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI official Clint Watts and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), according to journalist Matt Taibbi.” Tabbi is the “no respecter of persons” journalist who has been keeping tabs on Twitter...

Gordon “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” — Mark Twain State Senator Jeffrey Gordon’s Senate Bill SB128 should generate some interest in Connecticut among state politicians who have said repeatedly they are interested in positioning Connecticut as a business generator in New England. Among politicians interested in repositioning Connecticut so that in the post-COVID era the state will be friendlier to businesses, as well as taxpayers whose own household budgets have been depleted and stressed by a raging recession, is Governor Ned Lamont. Following the recently concluded off-presidential-year elections, Lamont pledged to reduce taxes and maintain what he calls “guardrails” erected with the help of GOP leaders a few years back when the State House was nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. A bipartisan House had put caps on the state budget that in the future now upon us would prevent a spendthrift ...

Jana Kandlova’s  short book, a little over 200 pages –  Stalked by Socialism  – could not be more timely, largely because the United States has slowly, and one hopes not irrevocably, been sinking into a socialist morass that Kandlova (AKA Jane Benson) had hoped to escape when she emigrated from communist Czechoslovakia in 1988. Kandlova is married to retired radio talk show host and television reporter Jim Vicevich and joins him on his podcast,  RadioViceOnLine , every Wednesday. I have been a guest on the show numerous times. Kandlova’s memoir of her years under the jackboot of socialist totalitarianism provides us with a view from inside the communist leviathan. And the subtitle of her book,  An Escapee From Communism Shows How We’re Sliding Into Socialism , is a timely warning to the United States, a palace of security and comfort for refugees from socialist inspired communism now prowling the byways of the nation that welcomed her and others like her, st...

Hanson -- Fox News In a recent column, Victor Davis Hanson – classicist, military historian and conservative polemicist – makes the case against the postmodern university. He concludes: “Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant. “How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.” That is a rather foreboding prediction. Is it true? As we say in the journalism business, “We’ll see.” As always in journalism, accurate description trumps prophesy or, as prophesy used to be called, divine revelation. Over the course of a few decades, we have seen the divine flee academ...

St. Agustine -- Communo “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet” – St Augustine CTMirror , a Connecticut publication, reports, “With inflation  topping 7% , energy prices surging and many municipalities and businesses not recovered from the pandemic-induced woes of 2020, the desire to tap the state’s swollen coffers is great. But the Democratic governor will ask lawmakers to balance those needs against massive debt problems that likely will require belt-tightening for many years to come.” Inflation, accurately defined as too many dollars chasing too few goods, will likely be with us in “the land of steady habits” for some time, and there are indications that unabated inflation will produce a recession in the near future. These prospects have caused Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont to tighten the state’s belt, sort of. Politicians do tend to oversell both themselves and their policies, and Lamont is no stranger to selling products and ideas, nor is his very successful...

Obama, Joe and Hunter Biden -- Vanity Fair The targets of congressional investigations and possible prosecutions in this New Year will be, since Republicans have recovered the US House of Representatives, much different than they were in the now discarded Old Year. The Associated Press (AP) tells us that “The House Jan. 6 committee is shutting down, having completed a whirlwind 18-month investigation of the 2021 Capitol insurrection and having sent its work to the Justice Department along with a recommendation for prosecuting former President Donald Trump.” It’s doubtful that a widely covered 18-month investigation of Trump can credibly be called a “whirlwind investigation.” Eighteen months is not a blink of the eye by anyone’s reckoning. The legacy media produced almost daily reports on the doings of the semi-bipartisan 18 month investigation. The AP report mentions that the investigation panel “formally or informally interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, collected mo...

  Washington -- Stuart Is politics a moral endeavor? In the very long run, yes, it is. Moralists have never had an easy time of it. Socrates died of an overdose of hemlock administered by agents of the state who thought he was corrupting morals. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Cicero, a very wordy moralist and an arch small “r” republican, was first banished from Rome and later murdered by the emperor’s assassins. And, of course, if the British were able to prevail over George Washington, he would have been hanged, along with everyone who had signed the Declaration of Independence. Cicero has come down to us as a republican martyr whose assassination has been described vividly by the second-century A.D. historian Appian: As he leaned out of the litter and offered his neck unmoved, his head was cut off. Nor did this satisfy the senseless cruelty of the soldiers. They cut off his hands, also, for the offense of having written something against Antony. Thus, the head was brought to...