Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

  Meloni Q: May I sit with you?   A: It depends on whether you’re armed or not.   Q: I’m harmless.   A: We’ll see.   Q: I’d like your reaction to this story ( He brandishes an Associated Press story in the World&Nation section of the Hartford Courant: “3 allies recognize Palestinian state” ). According to the lede, “The U.K. Australia and Canada formally recognized a Palestinian state on Sunday [9/22/2005]…” Further along in the story, we find this:   “The coordinated initiative from the three commonwealth nations and longtime allies reflects growing outrage at Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and the steps taken by the Israeli government to thwart efforts to create Palestinian state…”   A: May I?   Q: Please…   A: Either British Prime Minister Keir Starmer or the Associated Press (AP) – perhaps both – appear to be confused. The Prime Minister appears to have recognized a non-state as a state. There is a ben...

Lamont and Gillett They were very damaging admissions on the part of PURA (Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority), a state agency that, captained by Marissa Gillett, sought to lower energy prices by imposing price controls on the state’s energy distributors.   In a front page, top of the fold Hartford Courant story – “CT agency at center of controversy suddenly releases emails at center of long-standing dispute” – we were told, “In another twist in a contentious disagreement over missing documents, the Public Utility Regulatory Authority reversed itself Wednesday and acknowledged the existence of directives limiting the ability of commissioners to consult staff experts directly on regulatory questions.”   The Courant has been following the story through it various permutations. The “contentious disagreement” between the energy distributors and PURA chairman Marissa Gillett has become a matter of court litigation, and litigation usually turns on supportive...

In a postmodern age awash in what Jacques Maritain called “practical atheism,” Charlie Kirk had several strikes called against him before he was assassinated at a crowded college campus in Utah.   A partial listing of strikes would include 1) a loving marriage to his wife. Really, who in an age of twinkling celebrities and star power politicians remains married to the same woman until “death they do part and boasts of it publicly? 2) Kirk was an unapologetic Christian fundamentalist at a time in which the profession of belief in any firm religious doctrine is frowned upon by all the right people, perhaps even your local pastor, not to mention the editorial page editor of your local newspaper. 3) In Kirk’s ordering of highly important matters, politics falls behind faith and marriage, a lamentable disordering in an age of post-pagan paganism.   The post-modern post-Christian pagan has leaned to tolerate brief periods of religious eruptions pretty much the same way Ponti...

People who are truly non-partisan are not likely to take seriously remarks made by arch partisans on the importance of non-partisanship.   In a Hartford Courant story printed days after the assassination Charlie Kirk, reporter Chris Keating provides a quote from US Senator Chris Murphy on the assassination of conservative Christian fundamentalist Charlie Kirk:   “’No more glorification or rationalization of violence,’ Murphy wrote on X. ‘I’m not going to pull punches – I think Donald Trump, and his celebration of January 6th, has done more to normalize political violence than any other American. He should apologize and put those people [pardoned rioters at the US Capitol building] back in jail. But some voices on the left celebrated Luigi Mangione. We just need to be crystal clear – and Trump needs to lead – that political violence is unacceptable no matter who pulls the trigger and who is the target. And any perpetrators go to jail, no matter who they support… No new gun...

 Megan Portfolio of the Yankee Institute has produced an examination of a Hartford public school paraeducator, Shellye Davis, who serves as president of the Hartford Federation of Paraeducators (HFP) and secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO. Her exposé draws upon time sheets obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, so all the information in her report is, as we say in the journalism business, a matter of public record.   Portfolio’s analysis, When It Comes to Attendance, Hartford Schools Hold Students Accountable — But Not Staff , should stun the shakers and movers in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Even state workers might be abashed by the disclosures because most state workers are hard and conscientious workers, as are most people who work in the private marketplace. State workers do not like work shirkers; they also are taxpayers.   There is a “but.” Majority Democrats in the General Assembly and Democrats holding office in Democ...

  Kirk Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, Democrats issued formulaic regrets . Former Vice President and Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris said “Political violence has no place in America,” inaugurating an often repeated meme. Democrats know how to read with few variations from the same script. Harris added, “I am deeply disturbed by the shooting in Utah. Doug [her husband] and I send our prayers to Charlie Kirk and his family.”   Democrats lately have had some problems praying. Someone in the U.S. Congress indelicately suggested that the august body observe a moment of silence following Kirk’s assassination, during which individual legislators might offer a prayer following the recent slaughter of a prominent and much respected Republican and committed evangelical Christian. After a prayer spoken aloud was requested, the assembly immediately bubbled with indignation. Kirk was slaughtered. Shot in the neck by an...

The reader may have read often in Connecticut’s media of the state’s burgeoning surplus. There are three things that may be done with a surplus of tax funds: 1) The surplus, a tax over-charge, may be returned to taxpayers, much in the way an overpayment may be returned to business customers by non-greedy, non-felonious capitalists; 2) the surplus may be applied to the liquidation of current debt; or 3) the surplus may be used to finance new spending.   The Democrat progressive community in Connecticut, operating on the principle that taxes must always increase and never decrease, generally prefers option 3).   If a portion of the surplus is used to spur new spending, the accumulative debt in Connecticut will remain the same, and progressives will have asserted progressivism’s abiding central principle: deficit financing is good because a good government needs an ever increasing tax load to finance progressivism. When taxation becomes too obviously burdensome progressiv...