Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Maureen Dowd, a longtime New York Times columnist who never has been over friendly to Donald Trump, was interviewed recently by Bill Maher, and she laid down the law, so to speak, to the Democrat Party.   In the course of a discussion with Maher on the recently released movie Snow White, “New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared Democrats are ‘in a coma’ while giving a blunt diagnosis of the party she argued had become off-putting to voters,” Fox News reported.   The Democrats, Dowd said, stopped "paying attention" to the long term political realignment of the working class. "Also,” she added, “they just stopped being any fun. I mean, they made everyone feel that everything they said and did, and every word was wrong, and people don't want to live like that, feeling that everything they do is wrong."   "Do you think we're over that era?" Maher asked.   “No," Dowd answered. "I think Democrats are just in a coma. Th...

“I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning” -- Rahm Emanuel   No one has yet cried fire in the crowded theatre, but there is no question that mainstream Democrats smell smoke.   Fire alarms have been pulled by legacy Democrats whose cries are becoming both desperate and shrill. Not only did President Donald Trump win his election by a majority that, he boasted, was “too big to fix,” he scooped up large chunks of what had been for decades the Democrat Party’s mainstay voting blocks.   Pretty much everybody – including Democrats who wish their party well – appear to agree that national and state Democrat Parties need to redraft what used to be called in the old days their “platform”, the manner in which national and state parties present themselves to voters. The well-worn Democrat Party “legacy” had not served the party well in the recently concluded national elections. ...

There are two kinds of corruption in our politics: hidden and revealed. Instances of corruption revealed are but the tiny tip of an iceberg.   If Connecticut’s one-party state could boast concerning its political victims, it might say it has successfully managed over the years to reduce revealed corruption by smothering it with a blanket of silence or, failing that, by moving corruption into the hidden column.   There are numerous ways of implanting corruption, an effort made much easier in an autocratic, one-party state. All one-party states are either autocracies – think Stalin or Mao – or political plutocracies, both systemically corrupt.   Democracy, as we misunderstand it here in the United States, is the chief victim of one-party states. The tumbril on the way to a political guillotine awaits all the beneficiaries of small “r” republican governance. If the halls of governance contain only one dispositive party for any length of time, corruption becomes i...

The copious tears of U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes may be premature.   Hayes, describing herself “a product of Connecticut’s public education system,” told CTMirror – the story in the publication has no personal byline -- “’Angry wasn’t the word,’ she said, to describe her feelings toward what she and many lawmakers across the country are calling an attack on public education. ‘I am not going to sit by and let us go back to a time where special education students were placed in the basement and not allowed to be educated alongside their non-disabled peers. I am not going to go back to a time where students came to school and didn’t get a hot meal or a book or computer or broadband — or all the things they needed to learn,” she said, her voice cracking, at a news conference in Hartford Monday.”   These retrenchments will occur if, Hayes supposes, the U.S. Department of Education is eliminated altogether, its functions being transferred to the Connecticut public educ...

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...

The LooneyDuff to Connecticut taxpayers: “Yes, we can spend our way to Prosperity”   The headline in the Hartford Courant – “ Lamont confronts spending cap ” -- was slightly and unintentionally misleading. Actually, Lamont is, and has been for his whole term in office, confronting Democrat gatekeepers in the General Assembly, two of whom, President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff, are arch progressives. House leader Matt Ridder is more cautious than Looney, whose largely urban district has been in Democrat hands for decades.   Perhaps operating under the false pretenses of British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously suggested that states needn’t worry overmuch about their national debt because “It is a debt we owe to ourselves,” Connecticut’s debt lovers have been in the business for decades of boosting the state’s accumulative deficit. Under the direction of dominant state Democrats, Connecticut has managed to compile...

It’s the New York Post , and so there are pictures. One shows Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy canoodling with “Courier Newsroom publisher Tara McGowan, 39, last Monday by the bar at the Red Hen, located just one mile north of Capitol Hill.”   The canoodle occurred one day or night prior to Murphy’s well-advertised absence from President Donald Trump’s recent Joint Address to Congress.   Murphy has said attendance at what was essentially a “campaign rally” involving the whole U.S. Congress – though Democrat congresspersons signaled their displeasure at the event by stonily sitting on their hands during the applause lines – was inconsistent with his dignity as a significant part of the permanent opposition to Trump.   Reaching for his moral Glock Murphy recently told the Hartford Courant that Democrat Party opposition to President Donald Trump should be unrelenting and unforgiving: “I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if Donald Trump is ...

It should come as no surprise to political watchers in Connecticut, including reporters and political columnists, that Connecticut has been for some time a one-party state.   U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy has been swimming in a warm one party state pool for his entire tenure in office.   Democrats in Connecticut control 1) both houses of the state’s General Assembly by nearly a two to one majority, 2) all Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Offices, 3) the gubernatorial office, 4) Connecticut’s semi-independent court system, and 5) the State Supreme Court. Justices on the court owe their appointments to Democrats, who have not hesitated to use courts as a prop and launching pad for the promulgation of leftwing ideas.   The one-party state, history buffs will have noticed, is boringly similar wherever it has raised its horned head above the political horizon. In the blood soaked 20 th century, significant socialist/communist dictatorships in Germany ...

Tong Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, we are told by Hartford Courant political reporter Chris Keating and Tong himself, is on a mission.   He has been putting in the hours, “working seven days a week as he battles executive orders and federal spending freezes by President Donald J. Trump in cases both locally and nationally.”   Tong is mandated by his position as Attorney General of Connecticut, he believes, to serve as a “check and balance” against President Donald Trump and efforts within his administration to oversee the spending of tax dollars. “The lawsuits we [Tong and other attorneys general] have filed, particularly against Elon Musk and DOGE, are really important as a check on these guys,” Tong has said. “If there is no one checking these guys, there are no checks and balances, then they are unrestricted with unchecked, unrestricted power, and they can do whatever they want to hurt the people they don’t like who are their political, and I should s...