Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut US Senator Dick Blumenthal, the Hartford Courant tells us, is wary of Delta airlines’ use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).   Should Blumenthal’s wariness worry us?   Artificial Intelligence is a relatively new technology, and the most wary among us know that there is no such thing as a perfect undeveloped technology. The real question is: Should Blumenthal and other national and international regulators be permitted to impose regulations upon AI at this fetal stage of technological development? If you do not know what the problem is – or, indeed, that there is a problem – how can you propose an intelligent regulatory solution to a prospective, and possibly imaginary, problem?   This is a quandary Blumenthal had manfully faced during his 20 year stint as Connecticut’s Attorney General .   Blumenthal – and, before him, Attorney General Joe Lieberman -- changed the nature of the Attorney General’s office from an agency statutorily obligated to ...

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."   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 to take property that would be used for any proj...

  The front page, top of the fold headline in the Hartford Courant reads, “Dam breaks in primary field.”   U.S. Representative John Larson, who has held Connecticut’s First District since 1999, is being besieged by Democrat primary challengers, among them former mayor of Harford Luke Bronin, regarded by most serious political commentators as Larson’s most serious challenger.   The First District has been in Democratic hands without interruption since 1957, and for all but six years since 1931. For the mathematically challenged, that is a span of 94 years. The 1 st District castle, it would appear, is impregnable to Republican Party assault.   Chris Powell, longtime managing editor and editorial page editor of the once independent Journal Inquirer, now retired from the paper, pops the relevant question: Why now?   “In the 2nd District, eastern Connecticut, Kyle Gauck of East Hampton, another unknown, wants to wrest the Democratic nomination from...

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...