Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

States – Connecticut in particular -- should avoid deficit spending whenever possible for the same reason Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickins’ David Copperfield suffered misery because he had failed to keep his eye on personal debt.   If a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, Micawer tells us, he would be happy, but if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable -- and committed to a debtors’ prison. Dickens’ father was committed to such a prison. The Debtors' Act of 1869 limited the ability of the courts to sentence debtors to prison, a sign that such prisons were slated for abolition.   What we might call the Micawber principle never-the-less still stands as an ominous warning to both persons and states.   Although the state of Connecticut is sitting on a massive accumulative state pension debt of some $35 billion, most of the chatter in our media concerns the state’s biennial “surplus.” ...

Columnist for the New York Times Ross Dothat, a reliable guide in Catholic matters, tells us in a recent column – “Pope Francis and the end of the imperial papacy” -- that the late pope had unraveled “the attempted doctrinal settlements of previous popes,” thereby “unsettling conservative like me.”   The unraveling of papal authority had been hastened by “two rebellions” tolerated by Francis. The first involved a partly successful suppression of the Latin Mass. “After Vatican II in the late 1960s… Pope Paul VI “remade the church’s liturgy” The pope “commanded enough deference that he was able to swiftly consign the mass that every Catholic in the world had grown up with to the modern equivalent of the catacombs – to church basements, hotel rooms and schismatic chapels.”   When Francis later attempted a like suppression, “reversing the permissions granted by [Pope] Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and co...

Some underrepresented conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut were buoyed, momentarily, by the neo-progressive resistance to President Donald Trump’s tariff initiative.   A tariff is a tax, a political charge on incoming goods, said the anti-Trump chorus, and taxes raise the price of goods for middle class Americans and the American poor. This refreshing honesty burst several neo-progressive bubbles.   There is no essential difference between a tariff and a corporate tax. As a political Gertrude Stein mighty put it: “A tax, is a tax, is a tax,” and what can be said of tariffs may also justly be said of corporate taxes, or indeed any other taxes.   Corporations are not tax payers; they are tax collectors. A “fair” corporate tax is charged upon a company by a government; the company then collects the tax in the form of a higher price for its goods or services, shuttles the tax to the government’s receivables, and then uses the price difference to defray it...

Among Catholics, Mary Magdalene is known as “the apostle to the apostles.” The gospel of John tells us why:   Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.   They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”   “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.   He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”   Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”   Jesus said to her, “Mary.”   She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).   At the place of burial, she recognized the risen Christ in the w...

Complexity has been added to complexity in the unfolding PURA mess. And we all know, do we not, that political fraud of every kind nests comfortably in complexity, awaiting a resolution that resolves little?   PURA is Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Until the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the commission’s top position, PURA was, according to statute forming it, a (six) member commission whose mission was the regulation of public utilities.   The commission was from its inception imperfectly formed. There are presently three members serving on the PURA board. Gillett, Governor Ned Lamont’s handpicked chairman is, most political watchers will agree, a disturber of the peace, but she has the unqualified support of Lamont and gatekeepers in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, chief among them Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk. When these three work in concert, alternative voice...

CC: We haven’t talked with you in a while. How are you?   Cynic: Likely not as good as you, from the looks of you.   CC: Meaning?   Cynic: You are young, I am old: “I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”   CC: Ah, T.S. Elliot. And Connecticut? How goes the state?   Cynic: Politically, economically, and in other ways, it is living up to its motto, still the “state of steady (bad) habits.” Connecticut, under the last few governors and legislatures, has hardly scratched the surface of its gargantuan debt. I noticed that you noted in numerous blogs that the state has an unaddressed spending problem, made worse by political inattention. [Governor Ned] Lamont’s pretenses are becoming wearisome. How often do we see the word “spending” presented in newspaper accounts as a serious problem?   CC: Which of Lamont’s pretenses annoys you the most?   Cynic: His carefully crafted pretense to moderation. Moderation among state Democrat...

The last Republican U.S. Representative in Connecticut’s gerrymandered 1 st District was Edwin May in 1959. The seat has been held uninterruptedly by Democrats for 66 years. Geographically, the district resembles a lucky horseshoe.     Larson's 1st District   Along with other districts in Connecticut commandeered by Democrats for multiple decades, U.S. Representative John Larson’s district is a more or less permanent Democrat fiefdom. Larson has occupied the district unmolested for the last 24 years. He is one of a handful of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressmen for life. Both Larson and Rosa DeLauro of the 3 rd District, dominated by New Haven and environs, are immovable presences for as long as they wish to hold their offices.   The Democrat Party in Connecticut has wielded enormous power in the state for the last three decades; so much so that the aggressive power of legacy Democrats allied with neo-progres...

  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...