Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Merchan (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) Dispassionate political observers should agree on the following sensible proposition:  If the reason for a judicial gag order has expired, the gag order should also expire. Gag orders at trial generally are imposed by judges to preserve the integrity of a jury’s verdict. The commonly accepted notion that the accused, facing a deprivation of liberty, should be presumed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers evolved from judicious instructions to jurors to accept for deliberation only matters admitted at trial. The instruction makes no sense when applied to editorial writers, say, or wives suspicious of their husbands’ wandering eyes. Both may presume innocence or guilt to their heart’s content, and there is no need to wait on the deliberations of a jury before reaching a provisional conclusion based on compelling evidence at hand. Concerning Juan Merchan’s gag order -- slapped on “convicted felon” Donald Trump, a once and future pr...

Ganim, Fox 61 Industria Crecimus (by industry we thrive) – Bridgeport’s motto Like pornography, we all think we would know political fraud when we see it. Ballot fraud is only a small sometimes insignificant subset of political fraud. Following the arrests of four Democrat political operatives in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, we think we know what ballot fraud looks like, but election fraud is a different animal. It may plausibly be argued that election fraud occurs most often in one-party states and municipal offices in which rival parties have all but disappeared. Unhidden and open political fraud is possible in such unitary political structures because no one is looking critically at Connecticut’s dominant Democrat Party. Those attending to political affairs are members of the dominant party, along with a sometimes indifferent media reliant for its news on the dominant party. This is a picture perfect postcard of Democrat politics in Bridgeport and other Connecticut...

Tong Connecticut Attorney General William Tong sounded very much like an extremist libertarian when he commented, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that plaintiffs had no standing in a mifepristone case brought before the court, “Medication abortion is safe, legal and accessible in Connecticut. That was true before today, and following this decision, it will stay that way.” However, Tong advised, “Anti-choice radicals are combing this decision as we speak and have already started the process of coming back with new plaintiffs. We will fight back at every single step along the way to protect the rights of patients and providers to live their lives and do their jobs free from extremist political micromanagement . [Emphasis mine}.” The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, giddily approved by Tong, Governor Ned Lamont, Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz and other prominent state Democrats, was penned by associate Justice Brett Kavanagh, who wrote, echoing a court decision that shut...

The New York Post front page on Wednesday, June 12, 2024, following Hunter Biden’s conviction by a Delaware jury on charges that The First Son had falsely claimed he was not an addict when he purchased a gun, makes reference to the “First Felon,” and some grocery shoppers who caught sight of the headline could not restrain a snicker on their way to purchase overpriced eggs and other commodities. The price bumps are the result in large part of an inflation spiral caused, some think, by Biden’s reckless getting and spending policies. A friendly cynic who has what he likes to call his master’s degree in common sense believes the entire President Joe Biden administration must in the near future collapse into a soul-purifying, loud and sustained horse laugh. Accused of cynicism, my friend will remind the accuser that the Greek cynics were pre-Socratic philosophers. Even Socrates was tainted with a healthy dose of cynicism, and Antisthenes, the founder of the Greek Cynic School was a stu...

Twain Mark Twain, we know, was bitterly opposed to Teddy Roosevelt. When former President Roosevelt traveled to Africa to hunt water buffalo, Twain wrote that he had gone to the Dark Continent “to shoot cows.” Roosevelt, whose sense of humor was well hidden in his campaigns, was not amused. Twain continued his attack on Roosevelt for much of his presidency. During the Spanish American War Roosevelt distinguished himself as a “Rough Rider” charging up San Juan Hill. These were the glory days of American journalism, and Roosevelt played a larger-than-life part in the yellow and golden press of the day. Twain thought the whole of the Spanish American War was little more than specious war-mongering political propaganda. The gravamen of many of the pieces Twain wrote on Roosevelt was that the loudmouth Roosevelt was a pious fraud puffed up by an uncritical media. For his part, Roosevelt threatened to hang Twain. “I wish I could skin Mark Twain alive,” Roosevelt managed to spit out. T...

Biden -- The Guardian For roughly four years, while President Joe Biden winked at an ever increasing tide of unprocessed illegal migrants flooding the vanishing southern border of the United States, Democrats could easily afford to ignore the “crisis.” No longer. The approaching national and state 2024 elections – and polls showing that illegal immigration is now foremost in voters’ minds – have forced Democrats to face the issue, but not yet here in Connecticut, a deep blue state wedged between political behemoths New York and Massachusetts, where some crucial and vulnerable all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s Congressional are up for reelection. Connecticut, a state in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by a two-to-one margin, has been a reliable Democrat bastion of political power for the last thirty years. Many of the state’s major cities suffering from severe social disorders have been run by Democrats for decades. The state’s General Assembly is dominated by left of cent...

Netanyahu and Biden -- Avi Ohayon, Israeli Government, via Associated Press To celebrate the landing of U.S. forces at Normandy – D-Day, June 4, 1944 – President Joe Biden traveled to France and remarked on the courage of U.S. troops and the resolve of U.S. politicians to take the war to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned the present war of Russian aggression against Ukraine, but not Israel’s aggressive war against that country’s terrorist Iranian proxies. The war on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been, during the last two years of the Biden administration, a defensive war. Until recently, the supply of money and weaponry to Ukraine by the United States has been conditioned by an agreed upon pledge that Ukraine would not engage in an offensive campaign upon Putin’s aggressive forces outside the borders of Ukraine. To put it in military terms, only a defensive war would be allowed. Ukraine would be permitted to defend its castle, but any aggress...

Blumenthal and Murphy - Getty images Consumer Protection U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has said recently concerning former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict by a New York City jury, "Our justice system, although not infallible, is the most reliable in the entire world, so we'll see what happens on appeal, but I think the jury spoke with a resounding, powerful voice that Donald Trump is not above the law." Most of the Trump prosecutions have been delayed beyond the 2024 presidential campaign. These delays have astonished Trump’s critics on the left less bland than Blumenthal who seem to believe that while no president should be “above the law,” Trump, alone among citizens of the United States, should occupy a place, devoted to tyrants and devils, below the law . Trump has been found guilty by a New York jury in the so called “hush money trial” involving a headline-seeking porn star, Stormy Daniels, and a serial liar, Michael Cohen, often referred to in news stori...