Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

MacGuffie-- CTPost The Republican Party in Connecticut might become a viable alternative to the Democrat Party, inexorably sliding into post-Constitutional irrelevance, if the GOP becomes an aggressive reform party. The state, caught for decades in a progressive groove, is much in need of reform. Under GOP auspices, necessary reform should involve a restoration, not a reformation, of first principles. The dominant Democrat Party in Connecticut now controls all the state’s major large cities and has done so for decades. The U.S. Congressional Delegation, once divided almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, has been for some time a Democrat Party preserve. All the constitutional offices are filled by Democrats, and Democrats also have a nearly veto-proof majority in the General Assembly. The transition to a vibrant reform party will take a great deal of courage but, as a famous or infamous, depending on one’s political orientation, national politician said to those consideri

President Joe Biden seems at first glance to be a complex political creature. He was elected to the presidency, after little public scrutiny, as a moderate Democrat, but has ended his first term in office as what some would consider a raging neo-progressive, and he has had his foot to that pedal throughout his first term in office. But Biden is not complex. He is a simple man, a copyist and a plagiarist. Such men borrow the characters of others. They live, so to speak, in the skins of others. T.S. Elliot, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , described the type perfectly: No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two… Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool. Biden is entirely unoriginal. Biden’s first term in office may be viewed as a somewhat distort

Justice -- Old State House “The more things change,” the French say, “the more they remain the same”: “Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.” That is true of all one-party states. It is also true in Connecticut’s urban areas where, over a long period of time, the political opposition has been effectively suppressed. On the crime and murder front in Hartford, Connecticut, the state’s Capital, both the murder rate and the nature of the murders, have changed since the last Republican mayor of the city, Ann Uccello, surrendered her post to Democrats a little more than a half century ago. A succession of Democrat mayors and Democrat town councils dramatically illustrates the old French bromide. For a half century, murders have become more frequent in the Capital city, and it is not likely that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s war on “ghost guns” will greatly affect the murder rate in Hartford. Republicans last held the mayoralty of Bridgeport, the state’s most populous city, i

Biden and Newsom “One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it ” -- Mark Twain It should surprise no one in Connecticut that their state, whose neo-progressive legislature and governor have chosen to adopt California as a political template, has now chosen to ban sales of the internal combustion engine. This fatal choice is a conscious if not a conscientious one. And it is wholly political. Meghan Portfolio of the Yankee Institute tells us, “ And Just Like That Connecticut Will Ban Gas Cars. ” Of course, the state would be much better off banning the sort of people who have declared eternal war on the internal combustion engine and who seek to replace Henry Ford with Greta Thunberg, the amateur environmentalist who, along with others, decided to rid the world of fossil fuels. Thunberg’s effort is aimed at tidying the environment. Politicians like Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, whoever it is that runs Connecticut’s Department of Ener

  Trump and Fani -- Washington Press The Washington Examiner reports: “A grand jury in Georgia indicted Donald Trump on Monday on racketeering charges related to the 2020 election, marking the fifth indictment across four criminal cases this year against the former president and current 2024 GOP front-runner. “Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought the charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against Trump and 18 others, according to the   98-page indictment .” What should we make of the indictment? Reporters rarely note in their reports 1) that a Grand Jury is not a trial jury, 2) that the RICO Act should never be used in political cases, 3) that a Grand Jury indictment is not a finding of guilt or innocence, and 4) that the quantity of indictments – 91 counts brought against Trump across four separate court cases, so far -- have little to do with the justice or validity of the indictments. Most of these important points lie li

  View from a Cage: My Transformation from Convict to Crusader for Liberty by Michael Liebowitz Paperback, $12.95, Barns&Noble, 229 pages     Michael Liebowitz has not returned from Hell with empty hands. He is the author, along with his prison pal Brent McCall, of Down the Rabbit Hole : How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime . Liebowitz tells me that McCall is largely responsible for the text of the book, an analytical review of the proper and improper uses of punishment. I recall a conversation with Liebowitz shortly after he was paroled concerning personal suffering and writing. Late in life Fredrick Nietzsche said that he had refused to read authors who had not suffered some personal tragedy. It was suffering that produced many of the works of Feodor Dostoyevsky, an author, Nietzsche thought, who was the best psychologist of his time. Liebowitz (very excited): “I love Dostoyevsky.” He had in mind in particular The House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky’s cl

An old Republican long put out to pasture tells me, with an impish smile creasing his face, “What a difference a House makes, eh?” He adds, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has, like himself, been put out to pasture. He supposes Pelosi may now be dancing her last political dance. Her compatriot in partisan politics, California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90 years old last June, announced her retirement from office in February, according to the Associated Press . Feinstein may be replaced, Democrats suppose, by Adam Schiff, who has, my retired Republican says with a barely concealed snarl, never met a brotherly lie he has not warmly embraced. The he notes, beneficently, “Well, politics is not bean-bag, you know.” After former President Donald Trump’s Huey-Long-like one term in office, countless political rallies during which the upstart Republican castigated thin-skinned reporters as shameless “fakes,” two failed impeachment proceedings – “failed

Obama, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden -- Vanity Fair “Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler has awarded President Joe Biden “Four Pinocchios” for his false claim that his son, Hunter Biden, never made money from China. Kessler highlighted that Hunter Biden’s court testimony last week directly contradicted his father’s previous statements during the 2020 presidential debates,” according to The New York Post. Kessler, it should be pointed out, is associated with the Washington Post, not the New York Post, which, some suspect, is too friendly to former President Donald Trump, the destructor elect of the nation’s “democracy,” according to Trump’s most furious media critics. Kessler “detailed Hunter Biden’s involvement with the BHR investment advisory firm, which included Chinese entities, shortly after the 2013 trip. Additionally, in 2017, after Joe Biden left public office, Hunter entered into a deal with CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate. Documents found on a laptop c

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child “-- Cicero In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and others – among them the justly celebrated Roger Sherman of Connecticut -- drew up our  Declaration of Independence  from Great Britain. The Declaration contained what we might call a bill of particulars that formed the root of separation. My father, Frank Pesci, born in Italy, memorized portions of the Declaration and read it every Independence Day. The Declaration was read by some outstanding student in our parochial elementary school, because the sisters of Saint Joseph, a teaching order in the Catholic Church who tolerated us from first to eighth grade, were fiercely patriotic. George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian Socialist, often expressed his distain of patriotism:   “Patriotism if you must, but please, no parades.” Had Shaw been a student of Saint Mary’s Parochial School in Windsor Locks way back when, his knuckles would have been daily bruised by some ru