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Larson besieged

  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’s Cri de Coeur

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...

Budget Flimflammery

“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.”   ...

What’s New?

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...

Liquidate State Debt Through Spending Reform

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...

Is Lamont On His Way Out In A Democrat Party Neo-Progressive Coup?

Liberal [neo-progressive] Democrats, we are told by the Hartford Courant , are angry at Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, and their anger has suddenly overflowed. The anger directed at Lamont, by most accounts a halfhearted neo-progressive – has yet to reach Thermador.  It has been stoked by Lamont’s “high-profile veto of an affordable housing bill written by Democrats and his endorsement of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race.”   Lamont’s operative principle on the question of affordable housing, though he dare not say it, is that price controls generally make goods and services, including housing, less affordable and less available.   Pointedly, Lamont’s endorsement of Cuomo was a signal that Lamont had not changed his “moderate” ideological stripes. In an era in which Connecticut neo-progressives have command of most of the levers of political power, Lamont continues perversely in the tried and true fashion of past Connecticut governors. He i...

Marx in the Post-Modern World

Dr. Ivan Pongracic My wife Andrée tells me the State of Connecticut is fortunate to have among us the Blake Center for Faith & Freedom in Somers Connecticut, and not just for aesthetic reasons. The Blake Center is a brick-by-brick replica, of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in Virginia once owned by the founder of Friendly’s Ice Cream.   The Blake Center is an outpost of Hillsdale College in Michigan, and Hillsdale is a wonder of the post-modern world, a financially independent college that has promoted for more than 170 years “the diffusion of sound learning” as the best means of preserving “the blessings of civil and religious liberty and intellectual piety.”   On June 26th the Blake Center hosted Professor of Economics Dr. Ivan Pongracic, William E. Hibbs/Ludwig Von Mises Chair of Economics at Hillsdale College who, it was promised, would guide the audience, 120 strong packed elbow to elbow, in “an assessment of socialism’s failure.” Pongracic believes that...

Is PURA’s Gillett Becoming Hillary Clinton?

Moody’s Ratings has, once again, downgraded its credit outlook for CL&P, Connecticut’s largest electric utility, according to the Hartford Courant .   And Moody’s Vice President and Senior Ratings Officer Jeff Cassella pulled no punches in pinning the tail on the donkey.   Cassella explained in blood-soaked prose exactly why Moody’s had lowered CL&P’s rating from 3A to Baa1: “The downgrade of The Connecticut Light and Power … primarily reflects a Connecticut regulatory jurisdiction that is currently the least credit supportive utility regulatory environment in the U.S. This environment has been characterized by higher political scrutiny as well as inconsistent regulatory decisions and rate case outcomes … Given the challenging Connecticut regulatory environment, it is uncertain whether CL&P will be able to consistently maintain strong financial metrics going forward.”   Downgrades increase business costs because banks consider ratings when companie...

Is U.S. Senator Chris Murphy Detached from Reality?

On June 22, Jessica Bravo and Ken Dixon of Hearst Connecticut Media reported: “While Trump said the U.S. military completed the operation [a bombing raid that destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites] that resulted in the sites being totally ‘obliterated’ on Saturday night and ‘must now make peace,’ with an Iranian regime that is the ‘bully of the Middle East,’ national political figures led by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy warned that Trump is now putting the United States at-risk. Murphy, D-Conn., called Trump ‘a weak and dangerously reckless president’ who is now putting America ‘on a path to a war in the Middle East.’"   Pointing to “briefings he has received,” from whom Hearst does not tell us, Murphy declared that his intelligence shows “Iran poses no imminent threat to the United States. ‘That makes this attack illegal,’ Murphy said in a statement. ‘Only Congress can declare pre-emptive war, and we should vote as soon as possible on legislation to explicitly deny President T...

The Political Underpinnings of the One Party State

Connecticut’s General Assembly biennial session has ended. Conservatives and right of center moderates in the state will be put in mind of Gideon Tucker’s quip: “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”   Connecticut voters, too many of whom have left the state for greener pastures elsewhere, have long understood the inverse connection between taxes, state regulations and a vibrant economy. Just as wide awake voters know that a tariff is a hidden tax on consumption, so the same voters know that a regulation is a tax and a drag on productivity. Profits and creative business development are casually linked. When business profits are drained off by taxes and regulations, creativity, the lifeblood of successful business enterprise, is curtailed.   Voters also know that whatever you tax tends to disappear. If you raise the tax on millionaires – the so called “idle rich” progressive politicians intend to plunder to pay for their impro...

The Trip, What Could Go Wrong

Mt. Washington Steamboat We were attempting, in part, to recover the joy and peace we had experienced during an earlier trip to Lake Winnipesauke in Laconia, New Hampshire. When we arrived at our destination after a four hour drive, we discovered – or rather my vigilant wife Andrée discovered, with a shriek -- “Oh no, Dublin’s dog bag is not here!”   She was, as usual, right. The bag containing Dublin’s food and other necessities for seven days was resting placidly on our dining room table in Vernon, Connecticut, awaiting transportation to Laconia.   “You’ll have to go back and get it.”   The going and coming took eight hours. Naturally, there were traffic delays owing to highway work that, as best I could tell, ended about 3:00 in the morning. I arrived back in Laconia at 4:00, the typical weary traveler. I felt as if I had just crossed the Sahara Desert on a tortoise. One of the worksites took a half hour to travel 0.2 miles to an exit, but when you find you...