Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The short answer to the question presented above in the title is – Putin wants Ukraine -- for now -- and a return to the vanished glory years of Joseph Stalin, known during the pre-World II years as “the breaker of nations.” Ukraine was among the nations broken by Stalin. Others were the Baltic States and Poland, which simply disappeared from Russian maps following its forced incorporation into the Soviet Union.   It was not until 1946, when Winston Churchill delivered his “ Iron Curtain ” speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, that the West shook off its partly self-induced slumber. Russian historians date the Cold War from the delivery of Churchill’s speech.   The Churchill speech – The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’) – may be found here . The speech, even today, gives voice to what Abraham Lincoln once called “the mystic chords of memory.”   “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declaimed in what historians ha...

So then, what are we to make of State Senator John Larson’s most recent attack on ICE, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement?   As its title suggests, ICE is the enforcement arm of US immigration and custom processes, which include the time honored and orderly entrée of immigrants into the United States. Border jumping, rampant during the administration of former Democrat President Joe Biden, remains illegal, and is invariably attended with consequent illegal acts, such as gang activity, drug dealing, murder and mayhem.   Even Larson might agree that a family in Connecticut that made loads of money by facilitating illegal border crashing, charging the “illegals” large entrance fees and later demanding a cut on their annual salaries, was in retrospect an attack on illegal immigrants, victims of the violation of a process ICE fully intends to restore. The chief mandate of ICE is to enforce prevailing immigration law, which assures legal entrée into the United States fol...

The quoted potions cited below are taken from an op-ed piece – “The alternate reality of the modern GOP” -- written by Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney for the Hartford Courant and printed in the paper’s Saturday, August 23, 2025 edition.   Looney’s remarks are celebratory and somewhat repetitive, even boastful, but they bear close scrutiny as a preliminary campaign strategy for national and state Democrats.   Looney begins by offering an answer to a critique of national Democrats – “a glut of notions expressed in print that the Democratic [sic] Party, both in Connecticut and at the national level, has somehow become ‘radical’ or ‘extreme,’ while Republicans now occupy the hallowed moderate middle ground of American politics.”   Such notions are “false, self-serving, and dishonest.” Looney begs the reader to study democratic Connecticut as a paradigm of true, altruistic and honest politics.   “Beginning in 2018,” he writes, “and in every sta...

In the not so distant past, Connecticut has been a catch basin for wealthy New Yorkers voting with their feet in protest of high taxes and crippling business regulations. All regulations are hidden taxes because they decrease profit lines, cripple expansion and innovation, and result in higher product and service costs. Every regulation, state or national, is a business tax.   Democrat Party choice for Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani has yet to grasp this elemental economic rule, perhaps because he already is mentally living in a highly idealized socialist universe. Socialism and its variants – especially communism – has been throughout the last century a politics of force. There can be no Stalin without a gulag and a Lubyanka prison, now a museum but once socialist housing for defrocked and dispossessed capitalists.   Last June, Mamdani was being lauded by anti-capitalist leftists for “his bold response on capitalism: 'Finally someone with principles speaking up.’” ...

“Oh, what a wicked web we weave, when once we practice to deceive” -- Sir Walter Scott   The headline in the Courant story must be concerning to the defense: “Judge orders CT regulatory agency to explain statements in controversial utility lawsuit.”   Public Utility Regulatory Authority (PURA) chief Marissa Gillett and her defense lawyers in William Tong’s Attorney General’s office, no strangers to litigation, have a “discovery” problem with Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik. And it appears that Budzik is not one of those judges willing to accept gladly seeming fools who contravene his court orders.   “A judge [Budzik],” the Hartford Courant tell us, “has ordered a lawyer defending the state’s chief utility regulator to appear in court and explain why she denied possessing any electronic records concerning authorship of a controversial, anti-utility opinion column when she knew an automatic deletion program she activated on her telephone would have destroy...

Q: We haven’t talked to you in months.   A: You’ve been denying yourself a great pleasure.   Q: We are several months into the Trump presidency. He continues to be reviled by progressive Democrats as a larval fascist. Their effort to destroy him has been fruitless. Successive impeachments failed to dislodge him, and some of his policies – the restoration of the U.S. southern border, for instance -- have proven to be wildly successful and popular.   Tariffs, when used as a policy instrument to reduce unfair foreign trade practices, do not, according to most objective observers, contribute to destructive increases in inflation. Prices, even housing interest loans, appear to be moderating. What economists call the bones of the U.S. economy remain strong. We’ve known for some time that the economy does not tank when business taxes and regulations are reduced. The opposite is true. You have sometimes said that the essential relationship between government, state and na...

Like the weather in New England – about which Mark Twain says: If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a minute and it will change – political parties are sometimes subject to rude and rapid change.   Here is John Droney , a stalwart Democrat, on recent changes in his party:   “I was there in the Bill O’Neill days. I was a John Kennedy Democrat. I was a Scoop Jackson Democrat. I was a Bill O’Neill Democrat. That’s when we were the party of the working man and the party of rational behavior. And we were very successful in Connecticut at every level. That party doesn’t exist anymore nationally. It’s a bunch of left-wing psychos from the various universities and a bunch of socialists and people who are troublemakers, and they’re going nowhere. They couldn’t make the sale at the national level, and they’re not going to make the sale in Connecticut.”   There is more. There is always more in Droney’s case. The former Chairman of the Connecticut Democratic State Ce...

Quasimodo declaims from the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in 15 th century Paris, after he has swooped down from the dizzying heights of the Cathedral to rescue Esmeralda, a gypsy Romani street dancer, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”   Emile Zola’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1482) gave birth to a stirring 1939 film rendition of the romantic novel depicting a rescue scene that remains one of the most stirring defenses of unjust ravaged innocence.   Zola was feverishly courageous. It was he who confronted France’s insipient anti-Semitism – always with us in one form or another – in his attack on France’s judicial system. “J’Accuse” (I Accuse) was a splendid and successful defense of French Army General Staff officer Alfred Dreufus, sentenced for espionage to lifelong penal servitude on Devil's Island in French Guiana.   Both Dreufus and the fictional character Esmeralda were, it should not be necessary to point out, innocent victims of a judicial and clerical force ...

Let’s begin with soon to be ex-Governor Gavin Newsom of California, famous in recent days for its ungovernable wildfires and government supported unions.   The super-sane Washington Examiner notes in a recent editorial – “ Government unions show Newsom who’s really in charge of California ” – that Newsom “is incapable of getting his employees to show up to the office more than two days a week.”   He tried and failed: “This March, just weeks before the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office projected current and ‘persistent’ deficits of between $10 billion and $20 billion a year, Newsom issued an executive order directing all agency heads to update telework policies to require staff to be in their offices four days a week rather than two days, as is now the case. Agency heads were given three months to get this done, with an implementation deadline of July 1.”   Alas, it was not to be: “California’s government unions, SEIU Local 1000 most prominent among them, v...