Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

By Jim Oliver James Arsnow A few years back I attended a family dinner.   You know a typical American dinner where everyone is angry and fuming at each other over politics.   I felt like throwing a fork at one of my siblings. Today, we find ourselves bombarded by talking heads, tweets and Facebook posts.    Our civic lives are punctuated with invective, anger and unrest. Witnesses the riots and looting in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and New York.   Witness the calls to defund the police, to end Capitalism - the creation of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”   What is going on? It is very disorientating and depressing. We are trapped at the center of some strange vortex of political correctness, cancel culture, outrage politics and fake news.   It is hard to know what is true and what is false.   In which leaders should we place our trust? Is there anything about our nation worth preserving - worth conserving?   How can one stay grounded...

Columnist and former Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell has noted: “Prompting suspicion that he seeks to follow in his father's footsteps, state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, D-Stamford -- son of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, formerly Connecticut's attorney general -- proposes amending the state law that purports to require the attorney general to have 10 years of experience in the "active practice" of law. “Presumably Matt Blumenthal will have only nine years of ‘active practice’ in 2026, when the next election for attorney general will be held and the current occupant of the office, William Tong, is expected to run for governor instead. So Blumenthal's legislation would reduce the ‘active practice’ requirement to six years.” The legislation is unnecessary, Powell adds: “For the restrictive legislation he seeks to amend is plainly invalid. “Connecticut's Constitution says: ‘Every elector who has attained the age of 21 years shall be eligible to any of...

Duff -- Wilton Bulletin   Democrat Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff’s mercifully short YouTube video, “ Florida’s March to Fascism ,” is packed with explosive campaign hyperbole. Said Duff: “The march to fascism in Florida continues with this new “Don’t Say Gay” bill. For a bunch of people in Florida” – specifically the nearly 60% percent of Floridians who voted for Governor Ron DeSantis during his last campaign, the largest margin in 40 years, according to  NPR  -- “who claim to be about family values, they are certainly showing the opposite… At this point in Florida, they are practically burning books… The next step in the march to fascism for Florida is to continue on this “Don’t say Gay” bill… What it does is, it takes a small group of people and marginalizes them within the rest of society. Florida puts them in the “other” category… LGBTQ+ kids shouldn’t be used as fodder for the Republican campaign base… Hopefully, in Florida, they get their act toge...

Ritter and Looney -- Courant For practical and political purposes, progressivism may be defined as the manic urge to extend a dubious doctrine too far. A friend tells me that if the progressive Democrat Party in Connecticut were a restaurant, all the meat served would be sizzlingly overdone -- burnt to a crisp in fact, because whatever progressives do, they invariably overdo. Take voting for example. Democrats want prison inmates to vote in elections. It’s a fetal idea that progressive Democrats in Connecticut hope will emerge as a squalling infant, plump and healthy. Progressive Democrats also want everyone to vote in elections. To this end, some eager progressive over-doers propose to punish people with fines who do not vote. These fines will be imposed on top of President “Lunchpail Joe” Biden’s inflation tax. Now it happens there are not a few people in Connecticut who do not wish to vote. Some of them suppose, not without reason, that in a one-party state such as Connecticut...

Hale -- Where We Live.org There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter: from the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing  – Daniel Webster Governor Ned Lamont, feeling his oats, has decided that Noah Webster would be a better “state hero” than  Nathan Hale . Nutmeggers — We still haven’t figured out what precisely to call ourselves -- no doubt should be thankful that Lamont has not suggested his political patron, Lowell Weicker Jr., father of the nutmeg income tax, as a replacement for Hale. "I know the legislature made Nathan Hale our s...

Kelly -- Senate Republicans The Democrat Party in Connecticut has ruled the General Assembly roost for decades, and the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey – i.e. John Bailey, the last real Democrat political boss in Connecticut --  has made no apologies for frustrating both minority Republicans and Connecticut voters represented by the GOP. Occasionally, the dominant party petitions the minority to support its infrequent bipartisan measures. In one-party states such as Connecticut, it is not argumentation in deliberative bodies that carries the day, but rather sheer numbers and the approbation of those who shape public opinion. Opinion influencers the world over tend to lounge sleepily in the trough of incumbency, partly for business reasons. Just as you cannot get water from a stone, so, if you are a media outlet, you cannot get news from a party out of power. In a recent news story – “ CT Republicans call for increased transparency and accountability in government spending ”...

Buckley -- National Review “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (The more things change, the more they remain the same) -- French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849. Most Americans – including, of course, citizens of Connecticut – are unfamiliar with libertarianism as a political orientation. Libertarianism has a long historical pedigree and a sometimes tangled history. Were the anarchists of the post Romantic period in Europe libertarians? Some historians would answer yes. Was Robespierre, partly responsible for the worst excesses of the French Revolution, a libertarian? Some historians believe he was. May the revolutionary writings of the Marquis DeSade be characterized as libertarian?   Were DeSade’s moral judgments likewise libertarian? What is the difference between libertinism and libertarianism? Historically, libertarianism has two taproots, one on the left, rooted, though not inexorably, in what might be called anarchic individualism, and another on the r...

Blumenthal -- Pesci Walgreens has aroused U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s ire, easily aroused during his 20 year reign as Connecticut’s Attorney General. “Walgreens has succumbed,” said Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal in a recent Hartford Courant news story, “it has caved cravenly, cowardly to this bullying and intimidation. Walgreens should know better. Walgreens has simply thrown up its hands and said ‘women lose, you win.’ That’s not the law. And that’s not moral (emphasis mine). It’s not acceptable.’ “On March 2, Walgreens announced that it would not sell mifepristone, an abortifacient, in 21 red states after threats of legal action from those states by Republican Attorneys General. Connecticut is not one of those states. “Mifepristone is the first part of a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion, the most common way to end a pregnancy.” As Attorney General of Connecticut for two decades before he moved on to the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal , ...

Parents Defending Education Americans survive large calamities – natural disasters and so called “Acts of God,” relatively easily -- but martial lines are drawn in the case of inconveniences. Parents at Boards of Education in many Connecticut communities appear to be irritated more than usual these days. At the root of their discomfort lies a sundering violation of the doctrine of subsidiarity. The doctrine holds that subsidiary political institutions should not be overruled by larger, less competent political organizations. There are six political organizations that affect the education of children. Listing them from smaller and more competent to larger and less competent political organizations, they might be arrayed as follows: 1) the family, 2) the neighborhood, 3) the local school, 4) the municipality, 5) the state, and finally 6) the federal government. It should be obvious by now to anyone but pedagogical “experts” that the frisson at Boards of Education meetings involve...