Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

David Mamet is, the cover to his new book – The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror and Entertainment – announces, “one of the foremost American playwrights.” The description is a bit too modest for Ben Shapiro, who tells us  “David Mamet is America’s greatest living playwright and screenwriter.”   He is also a Goddamned joy to read.   In this slender book, the entire world-stage of the sad and despairing post-modern age – ours – forms the warp and woof of Mamet’s always entertaining romp through philosophy, philology and culture in an analysis bordering on trenchant political satire and cultural horror.   One chapter of the book – “A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes” – is, among other things, an examination of a political and cultural con-game and the dangers of luxury, the lavish backyard pool in which many of America’s loftier critics swim.   “A con game functions through exciting greed, the political-social con though assuaging fear.” This political writer w...

“Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity,” George Bernard Shaw once said. It would not have served Shaw’s peculiar political ambitions – Shaw was a Fabian Socialist – to emphasize that politics, most especially socialist politics, is a profession.   Keith Phaneuf of CTMirror has been writing about state budgets and budget flimflammery for many years, but his latest offering – Budget cap workaround draws GOP ire -- merits public notice.   The lede to his story is especially noteworthy: “State officials have underfunded key contractual obligations in Connecticut’s budget by hundreds of millions of dollars for the second consecutive year, knowing the rest of the plan will generate more than enough surplus to cover the problem.’   There is a purpose, Phaneuf points out, to the budget flimflammery: “This underfunding allows legislators to assign more dollars to education, municipal aid and other core programs without violating budget caps.”   ...

In covering the news, one must be mindful of Mark Twain’s admonition about New England weather: If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute – it will change.   In no particular order, this is what’s new:   FROM FOX NEWS -- "Representatives of the Squad are trying to harm the coexistence and partnership that exist in the region between Arabs and Jews," Haddad said. "I think it was [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez herself who said she had no idea about the geopolitics of this region—she’s right. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib know exactly what’s going on here, but they decide to lie and twist the facts."   https://www.facebook.com/share/172gWADi2s/   FROM REASON -- Now there's a legislative push in Connecticut to finally reform the state's eminent domain laws to prevent another situation like Kelo's. HB 5123, introduced by Rep. Tami Zawistowski (R-Suffield) would stop the state and its municipalities from using eminent domain...

CT's debts and assets The general public is the last group of people to fully understand that the Obama revolution has reached an endpoint. The neo-progressive Democrat Party revolution began with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009-2017 and ended with President Joe Biden’s catastrophic exit from politics, the longest and unintentionally comic third act in post-modern American politics.   The neo-progressive revolution is rooted in Keynesian economic theory, the central pillar of which is that cautious spending is unnecessary; the sky’s the limit on improvident spending because the national debt is a debt we owe to ourselves. In actual fact, governments approach economic calamity when accumulative expenditures in a nation exceed gross domestic product (GDP), the monetary value of everything produced. State debt occurs when expenditures exceed assets ( see chart above ). For the last 16 years and more, Connecticut’s ascendant neo-progressive Democrat Party has been engaged in...