Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Marissa  Gillett Credit Yehyun Kim  ctmirror.org A Hartford paper on Wednesday led with a story titled “ A grim outlook for more utilities .” The utilities in Connecticut are energy distributors, not energy producers. Their operations are overseen by PURA, the Connecticut Public Utility Regulation Authority.   “Overseen” certainly is too weak a word. PURA exercises life and death powers over Connecticut utilities because the oversight agency, under the direction of PURA Chairman Marisa Gillett, is able to deny energy distributers   cost increases that, like all business taxes, are passed along to its customers – virtually everyone in Connecticut.   Three principal rating agencies have downgraded Connecticut’s energy distributors and, as the paper headline suggests, this news is “grim” for both energy consumers and energy distributors.   A rating downgrade increases prices because it increases the cost of borrowing money. Companies borrow money t...

Victor Davis Hanson “Years ago,” Victor Davis Hanson tells us in his latest column, “[President Barack] Obama invited the Russians into Syria, empowered dictatorial Syria, berated Israel nonstop and all but ignored the violence of Iran’s surrogate terrorists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.   “But after Oct. 7, Israel retaliated to the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians with all-out war against Hamas and Hezbollah — rendering these once-feared terrorists nearly impotent.”And then, hauling us before a present historical tribune, he notes, “The 2024 anemic Democratic campaign and the Trump Electoral College and popular-vote victories — combined with record defections of Hispanic and African-American voters from the Democratic Party to Trump — proved a resounding rejection of the Obama legacy and his surrogates’ left-wing visions.”   This is, to be sure, fairly rough handling, but then history is a rough handler, and Hanson’s view of Obama’s “lost mystique” likely is ...

Energy users in Connecticut – all of us, poor and rich alike – must feel as if they had stepped into a mice roundabout. It is becoming nearly impossible in the “state of steady habits” for most people, including the vast middle class that absorbs the brunt of taxation, to get out from under costs directly related to 1) taxation, 2) the cost of regulations passed on by businesses to their customers, and 3) the solicitous and smoldering heap of empathy extended to all by politicians who are there “to help.”   Luther Turmelle, a business reporter with Hearst Connecticut Media Group, tells us in the Stamford Advocate , “Standard & Poor's Global Ratings on Monday downgraded the credit rating of a pair of Eversource Energy subsidiaries, according to officials with the utility.” The credit rating agency had “downgraded Connecticut Light & Power, from an ‘A’ to an ‘A- while the energy company's natural gas subsidiary, Yankee Gas, saw its rating [plummet] from an ‘A-‘ to ‘...

Netanyahu and Biden Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, Fox News tells us, for “accepting gifts from Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan in exchange for advancing his interests, failing to report a bribery attempt from newspaper ‘Yediot Aharonot’ publisher Arnon Mozes, who wanted Netanyahu to allow a bill to pass outlawing free newspapers and offered him favorable coverage in exchange, and accepting an offer in which Shaul Elovitch, the owner of Israeli telecom conglomerate Bezeq, would grant Netanyahu favorable media coverage in exchange for favorable regulatory changes.”   Netanyahu has asserted that the charges are false, highly inflated – and political. Netanyahu’s political enemies have been gunning for him for decades.   It will all come out in the wash, political cynics believe. But there is a great deal of dirty linen in the wash tub. Consider the title and then the lede to the Fox News story: “ Netanyahu knocks Obama, John Kerry in...

  Murphy No one in Connecticut, a deep blue state, will be surprised to learn that U.S. Senator Chris Murphy survived the recent presidential election washout.   President-elect Donald Trump structured his campaign mostly on policy: patch and restore the suppurating U.S. Southern border; reduce inflation; cut excessive government spending where possible, the chief contributor to inflation;   concentrate on small businesses that do not have the political heft to survive a cumulative inflation rate of 20%; use tariffs as a political tool to redress economic imbalances that – to choose but one egregious offender, China --   have been deployed by foreign states that traditionally have been enemies of the United States to undercut pricing on the home front and thus   drive important US businesses out of business… and so on. Everyone knows the Trump political product song, often delivered with hyperbolic missiles directed at his political foes.   Democrat...

People who know President Joe Biden well knew that, when push came to shove, Biden would pardon his son, Hunter Biden, before he left office. Biden is due to leave office in less than two months.   Among those in Connecticut who know Biden well are current Attorney General William Tong and past Connecticut Attorney General for 20 years U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal.   The “ Full written statement from President Joe Biden on his decision to pardon his son ” supplied by the Associated Press may easily have been written by President Elect Donald Trump’s legal staff concerning the President-Elect’s many trials and tribulations.   “Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” the President wrote.   That sentence cannot be fairly parsed. Biden is assert...

Powell Several years ago, this writer had a brief conversation with Chris Powell, then the Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, a fiercely independent paper lately purchased by Hearst.   The question put to Powell was:  What should we do about “fixed costs” in the state budget? Fixed costs, much of it the result of contractual obligations with state unions, was, then and now, removing control over state budgets from the legislative branch to the judicial branch, the primary enforcer of contracts and legal obligations.   Powell’s answer to the question was brief and on point: unfix the costs, he said.   “With ‘fixed costs’ and government employee compensation now constituting the great majority of state government expense, and with the discretionary portion of the budget constituting only a minority,” Powell wrote in a column published a year ago, “the only way of controlling expense is to reduce the ‘fixed costs’ and the costs qualifyin...

Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood This writer cannot be the only one who has noticed that Cotton Mather of Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard, known in his own day as “the pope of the Connecticut Valley,” and his grandson Jonathan Edwards of South Windsor Connecticut -- called by Charles Lamb the best metaphysician of his age -- no longer hold sway among us.   One can only wonder how this protestant triumvirate might have greeted Connecticut’s Reproductive Freedom Defense Act , which legally protects medical providers and patients traveling to Connecticut seeking something called “abortion care.” Would Connecticut’s recent favorable ruling on chemical abortion and the FDA's approval of mifepristone, an abortifacient soon to be available through the mail, have passed unremarked and unnoticed by any of the three protestant divines mentioned above?   The muted silence among Christian politicians in the state surrounding the expansion of “abortion rights” in the...

Note to the reader: The following is a satire, which means only the facts in it are verifiably true. The padding and stitching is merely probable. Two ladies, both middle-aged, both married, though not to each other, are chatting at a restaurant in Manchester, Connecticut. Both are friends and confidants of long standing. Their chatter went something like this:   Lady 1: I see Senator Murphy is separating from his wife.   Lady 2: Who?   Lady 1: Senator Chris Murphy, your senator from Connecticut, and mine.   Lady 2: I hadn’t heard that.   Lady 1: There was a discreet mention of it in the Hartford Courant,  short on details. Both Murphy and his wife of 20 years are lawyers. My impression was that their separation is legally amicable. The announcement was sent to a newspaper more or less under the table. It was reported by way of an email sent to the couple’s friendly acquaintances. I suspect political hanky-panky, but most of it will be...

Pyrrho of Elis, early Greek Skeptic This writer has called himself, variously, a political skeptic and a contrarian. But what is the difference between them? The real difference is slight. The expression political “skeptic” and its various iterations has become a devil word among supporters of the status quo . Here in Connecticut, the status quo has been reliably Democrat for thirty years and more. Democrats control by a significant margin the General Assembly the Executive and its administrative arm, and the Judiciary – all three branches of government. Additionally, Democrats have controlled large major cities in Connecticut for about half a century. All the members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats. These numbers are infallible indicators of a one party state. Should the electorate in Connecticut be concerned with this political evolution? The answer to that question is an unvarnished “Yes!” – Exclamation point! The founders of the country were the natur...

Murphy -- Anna Moneymaker, Getty Images U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, usually cited by the nation’s left-leaning media as the new voice of the new-model neo-progressive Democrat Party, submitted to an interview by National Public Radio’s (NPR) Steve Inskeep following catastrophic party losses in the recently concluded national presidential election. Former President, now President-Elect Donald Trump won the popular vote, the Electoral College vote, and Republicans seized the U.S. Senate and maintained control of the U.S. House of Representatives – an unquestionable rout.   Inskeep was better at asking follow-up questions than were the few media interrogators privileged to interview Vice President Kamala Harris.   NPR noted that “Democrats,” Murphy among them, “are undergoing some introspection.” Democrats, Murphy advised, “need to listen to working Americans.”   Asked, “What do you think is wrong with your party?” Murphy replied, “Right now, people are feeling o...

It appears to be a clean sweep. Former President Donald Trump is now the President-Elect. The U.S. Senate has fallen into the hands of Republicans, and the U.S. House has followed in its train. The conservative wing of the Republican Party is pretending not to gloat. Leading Democrats are in abject disarray. Their party lies broken between two opposing groups – those who have vowed to continue an absurd politics dramatically rejected by a plurality of voters, and those, fewer in number, who value prudence above campaign braggadocio. Some Democrats have suggested a corrective move to what used to be considered the vital “moderate” center of American politics, but this too may pass.   It was German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who noted that Americans never solve their most pressing problems, choosing instead to “amicably bid them goodbye.” The Democrat effort to install as president a candidate that had awkwardly bypassed all the checks and balances of conventional American pr...

From Yankee Institute Capitalizing on Democrat Party campaign errors, soon to be President Donald Trump, much reviled by Democrats and media allies as an autocrat slightly removed from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, has made a clean sweep. He won the presidential office with a plurality of electoral votes – Trump, 277 Harris 224. Newsweek noted, “At the time of writing, [Nov 06, 2024, at 11:33 AM EST], Trump garnered 71,571,943 votes, or 51 percent of the popular vote, while Harris received 66,512,020, or 47.4 percent. In a separate story, Newsweek wrote, “With Republicans having been declared winners of the White House and the Senate, the race for the House of Representatives remains undecided. There are 435 voting members of the House, with 218 needed for a party to hold a majority. So far, the Associated Press has called 199 seats for the Republican Party and 180 for the Democrats. Of the 56 uncalled races, Republicans currently lead in 23, and they need to win 19 of those to s...