Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Andree and the Mighty Titan   Before there was an Andrée Pesci, there was an Andrée Descheneaux of Fairfield, Connecticut. Her father, Ernest, was French Canadian from Trois-Rivières on the Saint Laurence seaway, and her mother Margaret was Slovakian, a delightful lady, sweet but, as concerned her children, a bar of tempered steel. I first noticed Andrée around 1963 as she was performing a solo dance at Western Connecticut State College in Danbury, Connecticut. I did not know, until later in our budding relationship, that she had been legally blind since birth, largely because this was a matter of indifference to both Andrée and her mother, who treated her no differently than her siblings, a brother Earnest and twin sisters Sandy and Sonia. By the time The Lions Club came knocking at her mother’s door, Andrée had excelled in all her elementary school classes. She had an ear for music and sang wonderfully well. Much later, early in our marriage, she and a piano accompanist opened a ...

John Moritz, Hearst Connecticut Media Group Electric Vehicles have been pushed in California by Governor Gavin Newsom who, some commentators tell us, has his eyes set on the big prize: the presidency of the United States. Should Newsom secure the office in the not-too-distant future, Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut might easily be his spokesperson. Speaking before what Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant calls “the top environmental lobbying groups at the state Capitol,” more than 300 souls vigorously applauding Lamont’s honeyed words, the governor pulled out all the stops on his pipe organ. Lamont favors a measure that would outlaw the sale of gas-powered vehicles in Connecticut in a little more than a decade. His confederates in the state General Assembly, Keating tells us, “are calling for a plan that all new car sales in Connecticut starting in 2035 would be electric and plug-in hybrid.” No gas-powered vehicles permitted. Here is a sampling of Lamont’s sheet music: “This is n...

Trump, Politico Magazine The usual response of any incumbent politician to any hypothetical during campaign season is a resolute refusal to step into the bear trap: “Sorry, I’m not going to answer any hypotheticals.” But hypotheticals in court rooms are more common. Suppose a president orders Seal Team Six to murder his opponent. Would federal prosecutors be justified in arresting the president for murder without first impeaching him? This question was put by a judge to former President Donald Trump’s lawyers. The lawyers answered, in so many words – lawyers do tend to verbosity – the president must first be impeached, then tried. Almost immediately, possibly because the hypothetical president was Trump The Usurper, the Democrat political universe erupted in displeasure. Republicans were unwilling to lounge in the improbable hypothesis, which presents numerous difficulties. Trump is not President, as the hypothesis supposes. A more probable hypothesis might run like this: Pre...

Fani Willis – Lynsey Weatherspoon for TIME And indeed, there will be time/… And time yet for a hundred indecisions/ And for a hundred visions and revisions/ before the taking of a toast and tea – T. S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Harris For President Republicans, some unaffiliateds and some Democrats believe that President Joe Biden is decomposing before their very eyes; therefore, any vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris as president.   Depending upon when Biden exits the scene – some suppose sooner rather than later -- Harris could be president for two plus terms. Her approval rating is about 1% lower than Biden’s. The Los Angeles Times tells us, “As of Jan. 9, 39 % of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Harris and 55% had an unfavorable opinion — a net rating of -16 percentage points, according to a Times average.” Is the above scenario likely or unlikely? It’s certainly possible . Whether it is likely or not...

In honor of Martin Luther King, may I offer the following CC pieces on him:   1) Republicans, Martin Luther King, And The Strangers In Our Midst https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/01/republicans-martin-luther-king-and.html   2) Obama, MLK and The Clintons https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2008/01/obama-mlk-and-clintons.html   3) The Black Family After MLK https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/02/addresses-never-delivered-to-blacks-in.html   4) Lincoln And King https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/08/lincoln-and-king.html   5) Lincoln, Martin Luther King, And The Not For Sale African American Vote https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2024/01/lincoln-martin-luther-king-and-not-for.html   6) Politics and Memory https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2021/11/politics-and-memory.html   7) John Brown: The 150th Anniversary Of The Raid On Harper’s Ferry And lastly, something on John Brown. Fredrick Douglas and Brown were on speaking terms.   https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/1...

Strapped to a lie detector, many Americans – and a sizable chunk of President Joe Biden worshippers – might admit that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not an insurrection. Most recently, even the Associated Press (AP), rarely friendly to once and future chief insurrectionist Donald Trump, has used other less inflammatory expressions in its news accounts. Here are a few January 2024 AP headlines mentioning “riot” rather than “insurrection”: Trump downplays Jan. 6 on the anniversary of the Capitol siege and calls jailed rioters ‘hostages’ Former President Donald Trump campaigned in Iowa and spent time there marking the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. [sic Capitol building]. To plead or not to plead? That is the question for hundreds of Capitol riot defendants Hundreds of people charged with storming the U.S. Capitol three years ago have had a powerful incentive to plead guilty rather than go to trial. On Jan. 6 many Republicans ...

Anyone who has written about politics for longer than, say, a few months sooner or later will find himself descending into skepticism, a critical wrestler’s crouch. Skepticism is not simply a temporary purgatory on the way to a blissful heavenly utopia. Voltaire, in Candide , got the categories right. At best, the optimist is a fool imprisoned in his own optimism. At worst, he is blind, deaf and dumb to the realities than envelop him, chiefly because he believes he is the architect of the realities. But reality, in the long run, will not be mocked in this way. Using words to reshape reality, the post- modern politician somewhat confusingly mistakes his rhetoric for reality, and the resulting production is always grossly distorted. As always, it is best to let Voltaire speak for himself: “Optimism,” said Cacambo, “What is that?”   “Alas!” replied Candide, “It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.” “If this is the best of possible wor...

Judge Arthur Engoron – source, Jeenah Moon/UPI “First the verdict, then the trial, the imperious Queen of Hearts says to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Alice, whose sense of Justice has been refined by centuries of English Common Law, knows immediately that something is wrong with that proposition. Ordinarily, just verdicts follow, they do not precede, trials. Carroll, a very creative mathematical scholar, loved word play because he knew that words were emblems of reality. In "The Mouse's Tale," a shaped poem in the same book, "Fury said to a mouse, that he met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you - Come, I'll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I've nothing to do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear Sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' Said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try th...

  Civil Rights leaders pose in the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963 --PhotoQuest / Getty Images Neo-Progressive leftists in the United States are bewildered. How is it possible that former President Donald Trump, the campaign footstool of Democrat opponents, is gaining in reliable polls after a bevy of prosecutors has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him? A few weeks ago, they hurled the kitchen sink at Trump. Several states pulled Trump’s name from their ballots, citing dubious Constitutional authority . Their reasoning was as follows: 1) The January 6, 2021 protest run wild at the state Capitol in Washington DC was an insurrection; 2) Trump participated in the insurrection, more or less by word of mouth, when he encouraged protestors to march “peacefully” on the Capitol in which electors were casting ballots for president; 3) therefore, Trump had engaged in a conspiracy that amounted to an insurrec...

Bob MacGuffie As Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional convention on its last day, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.” One thing is absolutely certain, my favorite cynic tells me: “Because we live in a representative Republic in which politicians stand for election by the public, the public ALWAYS deserves the politics it receives from its representatives.” Or, as Henry Mencken once put it, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” None of the founders of our country, democracy tooters may be surprised to learn, favored democracy as a form of government. Students of history, the founders knew that democracy could only be successful in small – very small – political units. The demos, the root word in our modern conception of “democracy,” and the polis, the root word in our modern conception of poli...