Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

John Durham and Nora Dannehy, AP photo, Bob Child Nora Dannehy has overcome one hurdle on her way to an appointment as an associate justice to Connecticut’s State Supreme Court. The state legislature’s Judiciary Committee voted Tuesday, 8/19/2023 -- 30 votes recommending confirmation and four against – to send Dannehy’s appointment to the state House and Senate for approval which, according to one report , is “expected to vote to confirm Dannehy during a special session on Tuesday [ 8/26/2023].” Her Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing was, according to the report, “the first time Dannehy has spoken publicly about her decision to leave the investigative team led by a colleague, former U.S. Attorney John Durham. Among other things, Dannehy said [then Attorney General William] Barr pressed the Durham team to produce an interim report, presumably critical of the treatment of former President Donald J. Trump, that she feared could have influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidentia...

Hunter Biden -- New York Post “There is no public evidence that Joe Biden abused his government powers to help his family,” CNN asserts. On the other hand, The Daily Caller insists, “Here’s All The Evidence Connecting Joe Biden To Hunter Biden’s Foreign Business Dealings.” The Caller cites a raft of evidence: “Witness testimony, emails, text messages, flights and additional evidence indicate Joe Biden was knowledgeable about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and communicated with his son’s business associates on numerous occasions.” Henry David Thoreau memorably said that sometimes “coincidence” is important – “as when you find a fish in the milk pail.” The presence of a fish in a milk pail almost certainly means that some guilty party put the fish in the milk pail. Fish do not swim from the Concord River across farmland and plop themselves in milk pails. And though the fish in the milk pail coincidentally suggests the presence of solid evidence that some kid is playing pranks,...

Dannehy — Connecticut Law Tribune A columnist has written a piece critical of Nora Dannehy, Governor Ned Lamont’s choice to fill an open position on Connecticut’s State Supreme Court, one of the few critical pieces written about Dannehy, who appears to be a shoe-in for the open position. The General Assembly is dominated by Democrats, few of whom would wish to oppose the nomination of Dannehy on pain of incurring frowns at tea time from majority members of Connecticut’s ruling party. The nominee does not check the Democrat “diversity” box, the columnist remarked. Following George Floyd’s assassination at the hands of a police officer, “Lamont told members of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, ‘I need your help when recruiting not just teachers but judges… we have a long way to go.’” The columnist points out that “Lamont’s four nominees to the State Supreme Court could be mistaken for the executive committee at the Greenwich Country Club… He [Lamont} talks about dive...

Connecticut Supreme Court bench In Connecticut, as elsewhere, the cogs of justice grind exceedingly slowly. The characters in this First Amendment melodrama are two Republican state senators: present state Sen. Rob Sampson and former state Sen. Joe Markley; attorney Charles Miller, a senior counsel with the public interest law group Institute for Free Speech in Washington who is representing Sampson and Markley; the State Elections Enforcement Commission; and Deputy Associate Attorney General Maura Murphy Osborne, representing the state of Connecticut in a First Amendment case now before the state Supreme Court. The case, sloshing around in various courts for ten years, has now arrived at the doorstep of Connecticut’s Supreme Court. One report tells us: “The case arose from the 2014 election, when Markley and Sampson were fined by the State Elections Enforcement Commission for using a portion of their public campaign grants on postcards targeting then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. “...

John Miller -- Hillsdale John Miller, well known in conservative circles, teaches courses in journalism at  Hillsdale College  in Michigan. He asks his new students each year what is the most important motivating factor in journalism? What do all journalistic enterprises strive for? Some say truth, others the imparting of knowledge, still others – who probably have boned up on their Gideon Tucker – to serve as a breakwater against the political equivalent of highway robbery, for we all know that “No man’s liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” “Money,” Miller answered. Money makes the world of journalism go round. Journalism is preeminently a business that sells a product. Miller acknowledges to his students that all their answers figure into the journalistic equation as well. And we are off. Miller’s two-day presentation at Hillsdale College’s  The Blake Center for Faith and Freedom  in Somers, Connecticut touched upon the founders of the ...

In Connecticut, following the decimation of independent newspapers, the captured, monopolistic press tends to exert its power and message from afar, and the message, which lacks intellectual vigor, tends to be wearily the same. The media in Connecticut is not only censorious, mostly to a center or right of center vision of the world, it tends to be a rigorous censor of views, a sort of doctrinal overseer of the left, the secular equivalent of the Catholic Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). One of the benefits of such exclusionary censorship for those censored is that the excluded, if ever they had been connected to a neo-progressive media, find themselves free of ideological and business obligations. This sudden liberation makes some stranded journalists go batty, if they weren’t batty before. The truth that sets you free is always foreboding, hard-edged, and a career-threat. If King George could have caught Boston publicist Sam Adams, known even during his own day as...

  Dannehy -- Connecticut Law Tribune, Gary Lewis "I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price” – Senator Chuck Schumer A Hartford Paper’s front page, top of the fold report covering Nora Dannehy’s impending appointment as an associate justice to Connecticut’s State Supreme Court is appropriately subtitled “[Governor Ned] Lamont picks ‘trailblazer for women in the legal profession’ to fill high court vacancy.” We are told in the report that Dannehy is “known for avoiding the spotlight,” a modesty that befits any Supreme Court Justice, state or national, who hopes to maintain the independence of the court from unwanted and distorting political pressure. It stands to Dannehy’s credit that she is no Dick Blumenthal, a former state Attorney General known for his brazen journalistic immodesty. It had often been said of Blumenthal, now one of two Democrat U.S. Senators, that the most dangerous place in Con...

Some journalists believe it is the business of Connecticut’s media, or any media that proudly wears upon its breast a journalist’s badge of honor, to say the inconvenient truth boldly and often. A timid journalism will always avoid asking questions that make establishment politicians uneasy, unless the politician falls on the wrong side of the ideological barricades. Connecticut’s media tends to veer left because they are pulled in that direction by a neo-progressive dark star. Why should conscientious journalists discriminate between liberals, progressives and neo-progressives? That is an example of a good question, precisely the sort of question that is rarely asked or answered in public political discussions here in deep blue Connecticut. For reasons not often discussed, western and eastern seaboard states have been trending left for decades. But progressivism, much older than people think, has little to do with postmodern progressivism. Bull-Moose Teddy Roosevelt, a Repub...