Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...

Trump After all the political tooting and hollering, we knew that following November 5 th someone, either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, would be shuttled into the White House by the U.S. Electoral College.   Democrats have been thumping the drums to eliminate the Electoral College as a relic of days gone by. Of course, every day, including yesterday, is a day gone by. Only Satan and his fallen angels are permitted by common consent to treat history as “bunk” – a phrase Henry Ford cribbed from Satan himself. “History is bunk,” said Ford.   Up-to-date neo-progressive Democrats believe gas powered Fords are bunk and should be dumped on the ash heap of history, to be replaced in a couple of decades by EVs, electric powered vehicles much too expensive to buy. Under certain conditions, EVs burst into unquenchable flames, and the infrastructure network supporting EVs, battery powering stations, remains sadly on the drawing boards.   ...