Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

    “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session ” -- Gideon J. Tucker   For very good reasons, the above quote has been misattributed to political scourge Mark Twain . Connecticut’s legislative session will close June 4. Until that time, Connecticut taxpayers would be wise to guard their life liberty and property from greedy neo-progressives in the General Assembly.   It was Twain who reminded us, “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”   Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror tells us, “The Senate Democratic majority passed a bill Wednesday that would provide jobless benefits to strikers in Connecticut, defying Gov. Ned Lamont’s expected veto should the measure pass the House and reach his desk…The bill would provide unemployment insurance to strikers after two weeks out of work, similar to the policies of the only two states with jobless benefits for strikers, New York and New Jersey....

You’ve asked me half a dozen questions and begged me to be brief in my responses, pointing out that brevity is the soul of wit. That is true, except in those cases in which brevity is witless. Mark Twain, never witless, tells us: Say the truth always; that way you don’t have to remember what you’ve said. Elsewhere he says that telling the truth will astonish your friends and disappoint your enemies.   Your first question touched on foreign policy. How do we construct a rational foreign policy?   The answer is deceptively simple. A rational foreign policy should be rooted in sound principles and a just appreciation of friends and enemies. The leaders of some foreign policy players – Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Iran’s most recent fundamentalist Ayatollah – have successfully defined themselves as America’s enemies. U.S. foreign policy should be adjusted to reflect such foreign policy preferences.   You ask: How can the Republican Party in Con...

Connecticut’s Trust Act, written and endorsed by left leaning legislators in the state’s General Assembly who do not trust ICE, has now been expanded by the state’s partisan legislature, according to the Hartford Courant .   The lede to the Courant story reads “With federal agents arresting immigrants nationwide on a constant basis, Connecticut lawmakers voted Wednesday to strengthen the current law to maintain the independence of state and municipal police. The controversial Connecticut Trust Act blocks local police from making an arrest that is based only on a request by federal agents in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agency.”   The controversial act is meant to serve as a barrier between ICE and the police authority everywhere in Connecticut. What we are witnessing here is a clash of mandates. The federal authority is mandated to detain, for questioning or deportation, migrants who have illegally entered the country and are for that reason of interes...

Defending a move by majority Democrats in the Connecticut General Assembly to deal with prospective Medicaid cost increases, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven let the cat out of the bag.   “In his wrap-up speech,” the Hartford Courant tells us, “Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said the Medicaid funding was a ‘crisis’ that needed to be resolved in straightforward fashion. ‘We know there is a national problem in Medicaid that more and more people are relying on Medicaid [emphasis mine] ,’ Looney said on the Senate floor. ‘They often rely on Medicaid-paid aides if they are fortunate enough to live at home. This is a current problem. … The federal impact is coming, and we will probably have to deal with that in the fall.’”   More and more people are relying on Medicaid principally because President Barack Obama was successful in extending the reach of a Medicaid program that initially was designed to cover catastro...

The Biden-Media Autopsy   Several indicators suggest that the Democrat Party, following President Donald Trump’s dramatic and undisputed assent to the presidency, is slowly emerging from a monkish political seclusion.   Months after the election decks had been cleared, Democrat strategist Sawyer Hackett let loose, according to an Associated Press (AP) report reprinted in the Hartford Courant, with the following thunderbolt: “The stench of [former President] Joe Biden still lingers on the Democrat Party. We have to do the hard work fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”   AP noted in its story, “Biden: Dem’s Unwanted Distraction,” that a “core controversy… has emerged following the publication of Original Sin , a book written by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thomson of Axios. The book “questions Biden’s decision to run for a second term despite voters, including Democrats, telling pollsters that ...

I last wrote about my cousin Abdul Raman four years ago.   Tuesday, October 26, 2021   Thinking of Abdul Raman (AKA Raymond Mandirola), my cousin from Medina who visited us here some years ago.   “You’ve already lost,” he said to me during a meal.   “How so?”   “Demography is king, and we, in this one respect, are out-producing you.   The replacement birthrate, demographers tell us, is two and a half children per family. Italy falls well below the mark, other European nations as well. Some years ago, the Pope encouraged Italians to have more children. He was roundly derided in the press -- how un-modern! In the United States, family production is going the way of the birthrate. That is not true in Islamic countries.”   The current fertility rate for Italy in 2021 is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020. In the United States, the fertility rate has dropped from a post-World War II high of 3.8 births per woman at the...

There is no categorical difference between state “oversight” and state “regulation.” As the night follows the day, regulation follows oversight. State legislators who want greater oversight of homeschooling fully intend to regulate homeschooling. And in the future they will move on to the regulation of all forms of schooling that lie outside of public education. State Democrat progressive leaders – most of them beholding to state employee unions -- have been itching for years to control all forms of education that fall outside unionized public school education.   Parents of school aged children, on the other hand, have been scouring the countryside in search of alternative means of education. Broadly speaking, parents of school aged children have availed themselves of (four) alternatives to public education: private schools, religions institutions, charter schools, and homeschooling. If public school education were up to par, the sometimes desperate search for alternative modes...

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” – H. L. Mencken   A seasoned Connecticut political reporter notes in CTMirror , “A less popular topic for [Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield] is President Donald J. Trump, whose rise in national politics has coincided with hard times for blue-state Republicans — even more so in Connecticut. Harding’s caucus issued no assessment of the president’s first 100 days…Republicans, who had come close to parity in the General Assembly when Trump took office in 2017, lost more state legislative seats in Connecticut than any other state during Trump’s first term. They now hold 11 of 36 seats in the Senate and 49 of 151 in the House.”   The unstated premise of such assertions, gently suggested by the reporter, is that had Connecticut Republicans more fervently denounced President Donald Trump, the titular head of the Republican Party during his first, and now second, term in office, Republicans might have fa...

A Doxology of the Left   If you find yourself agreeing, even sleepily, to three or more of the italicized propositions below, you may proudly count yourself a man or woman of the left.   1) A Feodor Dostoevsky character exclaims in one of his novels, “If there is no God, anything is possible.” There is no God, and anything is possible .   2) Punishment is no answer to crime, because crime is a social disorder that should be treated by psychologists and sociologists, not prison wardens, and social disorders may be adjusted through the adjustment of antique societal structures.   3) Laws and punishments do not restore order . They exacerbate social disorder and provide employment to lawyers and law schools.   4) Both education and parenting are forms of oppression . See Paulo Freire ’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , copyright 1970.   5) “ History is bunk ” – Henry Ford.   6) The present must always trump the past , bec...

T he birth control pill has been with us for a long time. The “morning after pill”, as it has been called, a pill designed to abort birth after conception, is readily available in Connecticut for about $25, and surgical abortion, Planned Parenthood’s money maker, is also readily available in birth control Connecticut.   When churches, synagogues and mosques make the distinctions mentioned above – for both scientific and theological reasons – it is unscientific and contrary to settled theology to accuse them of political or theological apostasy. In the imperial Roman world, the Christian Church was among the first social organizations to oppose abortion. Opposition to abortion in the year AD 70 was “cutting edge” reform.   The Didache, also known as The Lord's Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations, parts of which constitute the oldest extant written catechism, dating from AD 70, states: “The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You sha...

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.” ...