Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

DeLauro -- churchmilitant.com There is one simple and effective way to cut excessive spending, the primary cause of debt, when expenditures overflow budget borders and that is to reduce spending. Reductions in spending would also help to mitigate the disastrous effects of inflation. Both these revelations have come as a great affront to state and national Democrats. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have proposed to enforce a current debt limit – sort of – and reduce expenditures over the long run so that Republicans and Democrats in Congress will in future years not be on the same political stump barking at each other. The national and state debt ceilings, presumed obstacles to unlimited spending, have not prevented the kind of raging inflation that is nibbling at middle class prosperity. Taxpayers tend to be responsible because they know that, unlike the federal government, they cannot print inflated funny money to cover their debts. Still less are they able to bor...

Carlson -- Wasington Examiner Some of the news reports on the Fox News/Dominion “settlement” border on the absurd. The “settlement” between the two contending parties settles little, for obvious reasons. It certainly does not settle the chief claim both parties brought before the court: Did or did not Fox defame Dominion? A jury trial, or a trial before a judge, might have clarified important issues in the case. Defamation suits are hard to prove in American courts, largely owing to the First Amendment, which gives political broadcasters in particular a wide birth of freedom. Defamation in Great Britain is, by comparison, far less constricted. In U.S. courts, those claiming defamation must show that plaintiffs had knowingly lied -- to lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not -- and the lie must be rooted in malice. This writer’s problem with the Fox News/Dominion so called settlement begins with the word “settle.” If the claims before the court were not settled by the settleme...

Lamont -- Hartford Business. com A Hearst editorial has been answered by Governor Ned Lamont . “The Hearst Connecticut editorial, ‘ Caution on the budget can go too far ,” the Governor wrote, “suggests that our balanced budgets and budget surpluses are shortchanging spending on important needs. Respectfully, I disagree. “On the contrary, the fiscal guard rails established by the legislature in 2017, and recently reconfirmed on a bipartisan basis for another five to 10 years, have served as the foundation for our state’s fiscal turnaround, stability and economic growth. Higher growth is more than GDP — it means more families moving into the state, more new businesses, more job opportunities and more tax revenue (not more taxes, but more taxpayers). All of which have allowed us to increase investments in core services while proposing the biggest middle-class tax cut in our history.” Neo- progressives in the General Assembly appear to be moving towards dismantling by degrees the spe...

Total Spending in Connecticut -- usgovernmentspending.com Ordinary people – that is to say, non-politicians who have no reason to fudge the truth – know that there are only three ways they may liquidate their debts. They might 1) increase their earnings by, say, getting another job or, less likely, winning a pot at one of Connecticut’s Indian casinos, and use their increased earnings to pay down their debt. They might 2) reduce their debt through a declaration of bankruptcy or, in other words, stiff their creditors. Or they might 3) carry their debt to their graves. The dead usually are not pursued by creditors beyond the grave, and there are in the United States no debtors’ prisons. Governments, however, are not ordinary people. A state government may discharge its debt by raising taxes or cutting spending. Of these two means, cutting spending is the less popular among politicians. That is why, facing a troubling, steadily increasing debt of some $95 billion, one rarely hears fall...

Murphy and Biden -- United Press International "It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority... averts all dangers from my path... if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life” -- Alexis de Tocqueville U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for re-election in 2024 , has turned his attention to the moral superiority of the regulatory state and “loneliness.” His ruminations on both appear in a recent story published in The New Republic . “ When I” -- Grace Segers, a staff writer at  The New Republic – “ a sked Murphy whether he connected the failures of deregulation to a rise in loneliness, he said that ‘the exercise of regulating the market is the way in which we look out for the common good. When you outsource all morality to the market, and you deregulate every industry, you’re removing an opportunity for us to have a connected conversation about our morals [and] our values,’ Murphy argued.” It is a pale argument to suppose 1) the U.S...

The Middletown Press tells us, “In late March, at a meeting of the Education Committee, Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, delivered what may have been the most rousing defense of charter schools ever heard in Connecticut’s legislature. “McCrory, a Hartford Democrat, spoke for 31 uninterrupted minutes, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., invoking civil rights touchstones such as the killing of George Floyd and arguing that poor families in Connecticut cities need school choice for a shot at a good education. “’It is time to give our parents a choice and give our students a chance,’ he concluded, drawing applause from some in the hearing room, where clapping is strongly discouraged.” One can only imagine what McCrory’s reception in the General Assembly would have been if he had been supporting Milton Friedman’s proposal to allow tax dollars spent in Connecticut on education to “follow the student.” Once we put students and their parents in charge of financing education – still, after all...

Blumenthal -- Real Clear Politics Connecticut, as most legislators in the state’s General Assembly know, is called “the nutmeg state.” The descriptive phrase, when first launched, bordered on an insult rather than a compliment. The state’s nutmeg farmers occasionally mixed wooden nutmegs in their product to deceive purchasers and boost sales. Such sharpers, those nutmeggers! Eventually, of course, the plot to cheat purchasers was discovered and the nutmeggers gave up their sinful ways. Proper business relations were restored, but the phrase stuck and was later appropriated as a compliment. Connecticut, “the nutmeg state,’ may also justly be called “the casino state.” Gambling is an old way of separating most of the people most of the time from their hard won assets in return for – the pleasure of losing money. Casinos have been perfectly legal in the nutmeg state ever since then Governor Lowell Weicker made a side deal with certain Indian tribes according to which the tribes were...

Trump -- Newsweek Other than former President Donald Trump, four Republicans have so far announced their candidacy for president. Democrats took note of Trump’s announcement in mid-November, 2022. Among them was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who successfully indicted Trump for… aye, there’s the rub. Bragg’s unsealed indictment showed Trump would be tried on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Before the indictment had been disclosed publically, Bragg strongly hinted that there may be a new charge, as yet undisclosed, that would tie the felony charges to a federal felony crime, thus vindicating his grand jury’s return of an indictment. “Get-Trump” leftists in the country have been salivating at the prospect of an indictment for the entire length of the Trump presidency and beyond. Finally, they supposed, Bragg would be able to attach the 34 donkeys’ tails to a stout donkey, a federal crime. There is, as yet, no visible sign of a donkey. There ...

Bragg -- NYPost There are, we sometimes forget in our highly politicized judicial environment, two sides to every case. The Grand Jury sitting on the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Bragg against former President Donald Trump brought in an indictment against Trump, who now will be forced to travel to a court hearing and processing in New York City, during which he will be arraigned before a judge, fingerprinted and mugshotted. Already on the internet there are photo-shopped pictures of Trump showing the former President in cuffs heartily objecting to the indignity. Bets already have been laid on the question: How long will it take before the mugshot appears in the New York Times, along with a lurid headline and a story that does not give much ink to important questions ventilated in what some people on the left have been pleased to call the “conservative” media. There are very few signs in Connecticut that the conservative media has had its heavy hand on the media wheel...

O'Leary -- Waterbury Observer Waterbury’s Neil O’Leary has announced he will not be running for Mayor again. I ran into him briefly when my wife Andr é e and I were returning home from a trip to Tennessee. Why Tennessee, the reader may ask? The answer is: Tennessee is the picture perfect postcard of Connecticut in the post-World War II War period, say around 1965 – and it has horse farms. Andrée is addicted to horses. We stayed at a horse farm, and she went riding as often as possible. O’Leary was hunkered down in his airplane seat staring vacantly out the window. I leaned over and said, “You know, people who do that always think they know where they are.” He laughed, a rich unabashed laugh, and leaned over to affectionately stroke Andrée’s Fidelco guide dog, who was named by Fidelco, providentially, Dublin. “Ah! Dublin!” said O’Leary, pleased as punch to have encountered an Irish German Shepard in Connecticut. We did not talk business, but I did mention that crime sta...

Bragg -- NYPost Former President Donald Trump has been indicted, a Hartford paper has told us in a front page, top of the fold banner headline. To quote Winston Churchill in a far different context: “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Having secured from a Grand Jury an indictment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg must now prosecute Trump on the charges considered by the Grand Jury. As yet, we do not know what the charges might be. Grand juries are secretive affairs, not unlike Star Chamber proceedings. They are prosecutorial instruments, somewhat like impeachments in the U.S. House of Representatives. Long ago, this writer, hoping to provoke a chuckle, wrote that a Grand Jury properly primed by an ardent prosecutor, in the absence of defense attorneys, might be able to return an indictment charging a watermelon with jaywalking. Neither impeachments in the House nor indictments by Grand Juri...