Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Inflation Calculators from InflationData.com Hillare Belloc’s Advice to the Rich: “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine. And remember -- soon you will die.” To what should we attribute the steep rise in gas prices? A Hartford paper noted Connecticut’s “double-digit spike” in gas prices under the headline “Pain at the pump.” Gas prices were far less painful under the administration of former President Donald – “drill baby, drill” -- Trump, now beleaguered with multiple court actions, none of them accusing Trump of a border policy that has ushered into the United States millions of illegal aliens, or imprudent “taxes on the rich and the middleclass. The Poynter Institute’s Politifact reported in December 2023, “Federal Energy Information Administration data shows that the average gasoline price during Trump’s four-year term was $2.46 per gallon. During President Joe Biden’s presidency so far, the average [gas price] has been $3.54… GasBuddy.com data shows ...

The French created an ingenious prison cell so confining that the occupant of the cell could never stand, sit or rest at ease. They called it, appropriately enough, “the little ease.” Conservatives, libertarians and independents in Connecticut must occasionally feel the constraints of the little ease, but there are outlets in the state that relieve the constant pressure. Pastor Will Marotti’s radio program on WTIC 1080 provided some release. The above-named groups have been short sheeted in Connecticut for decades. There has been little presence of conservative, libertarian, independent and contrarian political opinion in Connecticut’s left of center print media for decades. Nationally, the print media is overwhelmingly neo-progressive. One detects the strong odor of bias in the print media from things not said. Gallup polling has been measuring the public’s Confidence in Newspapers since 1973. According to a 2022 poll, “Percentages of Democrats, Independents and Republicans who...

Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels. (Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: Carolyn Kaster/AP, Gregg DeGuire/WireImage/Getty Images) We do not know what the relationship between Porn Star Stormy Daniels (AKA Stephanie Gregory) and former President Donald Trump really was. She and prosecutors in the Daniels-Trump trial now underway in New York City claim the mutually beneficial relationship was not Platonic but sexual in nature. Trump denies committing coitus. These claims will now be tested in a trial. Stormy is perhaps the only person involved in the relationship who may benefit from the trial, whether the jury accepts or rejects her claims. In matters of this kind, it is nearly impossible to besmirch the character of an illustrious porn star. It is possible to besmirch the character of Trump, who likely will be the Republican Party’s choice as its presidential candidate in the upcoming 2024 elections. Character assassination has become a staple in American politics, but ethically unsa...

Biden, Alex Wong -- Getty Images An Associated Press (AP) story printed below the fold in the Hartford Courant on Monday, April 15, 2024 titled “U.S. Tries to halt escalation over Iran” bears close scrutiny. The story is subtitled:  “Biden pushes Israel to show restraint, not answer attack.” What is the difference between “not answering an attack” and abject surrender? Unlike persons, countries do not have left cheeks they may turn to their enemies when they are struck on the right cheek. The attacks on the state of Israel by Iran and its terrorist mafia – Hamas, in addition to being the government of Gaza, Iran’s most repellant terrorist organization, Hezbollah, located in Lebanon, and the Houthis of Yemen – have a long pre-history. These groups are agents of Iran, financed and supported militarily by a state that considers Israel “the Great Satan” and the United States Satan’s brother in arms. It is Iran that is responsible for “widening the war” in the Middle East, not I...

Confusion plays a major role in politics, much of it intentional. The variety of confusion is more various and destructive in the modern period. Benjamin Disraeli is reputed to have said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies and statistics.” Lying, as he understood it, has been much improved since the late 19 th century.   By way of example, take the mass confusion surrounding inflation. The tendency in modern politics is to confuse the general public by conflating inflation and high prices. Though increases in the price of goods and services and inflation – a product of government spending, borrowing and currency devaluation – are related, they are not the same. Inflation is caused when the federal government prints and borrows money, thereby reducing the purchasing power of the dollar, therefore making goods and services more expensive. The classic definition of inflation is: too many dollars chasing too few goods. When the federal government over a long period of t...

National Review, a magazine founded by Bill Buckley in 1955, has given a thumbs down to National Public Radio’s recent documentary, ‘The Incomparable Mr. Buckley’, and no wonder. The documentary barely scratches the surface of the man who wrote in the inaugural first edition of National Review, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Buckley was quick witted and aphoristic in his entertaining confrontations with a leftist media determined, for ideological reasons, to misunderstand him: “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University (Meet the Press, 1965)” Buckley was determined to slough off artificial impositions placed upon him by a power thirsty national government: “I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more po...

Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly this election year decided not to tinker with Democrat Governor Ned Lamont’s bi-partisan budget. We shall have to wait and see whether progressive Democrats in the state legislature are able, before the curtain finally descends on the two year budget, to make final spending adjustments in the budget through sleight-of–hand maneuverers in what is called the state’s “omnibus bill,” a gargantuan final budget edit presented to spending dissenters (read Republicans) moments before legislative adjournment. Republicans have often complained they had not received the omnibus bill early enough to read it before adjournment and kill all the new spending “rats” in it. So far, according to Democrat leaders, the state’s dominant party has been able to resist the usual blandishments of Connecticut’s clamorous left wing, most ably represented by State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney of New Haven, the Bernie Sanders of Connecticut politics. Th...

Politics in Connecticut is one of the few continually successful – i.e. money generating – businesses in the state. No one ever went poor in Connecticut betting on the ability of politicians to stuff their coffers with money drawn from hard pressed citizens. That wise old codger Ben Franklin once pointed to the only “two certainties in life” – “death and taxes.” His apothegm is truer in our day than his because politicians in the post-American Revolution era did not have the advantage of an income tax, state or federal. The very first thing to notice about Connecticut politics is that the state has been dominated for several decades by the Democrat Party, an adept money generator. What accounts for the slow and painful disappearance of the state Republican Party when not so long ago both parties shared power and influence and state budgets were modest and reasonable? What are the baleful effects of a one party state? Or, to put the question in another form that true “friends of t...

Biden -- The Guardian The Democrat and Republican campaign scripts are beginning to come into view. Here and there, reading newspapers, one finds scattered references to both in news stories and commentary pieces. The creation of the scripts themselves are shrouded in mystery. We know who distributes the scripts: newspapers, largely progressive in the Northeast; television stations, largely progressive in the Northeast; and internet sites, largely progressive in the Northeast. But who creates the scripts? They are fashioned, one supposes, by leaders of the two principal parties in the United States, most of them not containing the warning “Made in Washington DC.” Rather than relying upon the native intelligence of a national audience in shaping the scripts, both parties, the Democrat Party more intensely, rely upon two propagandistic devices to sell their messages: incessant repetition and the power of totemistic words and labels to haul in votes. Political debates in the United ...