Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...