Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Every newspaper and news outlet in Connecticut should be screaming from the rooftops in favor of multiple -- far more than two – debates between Governor Ned Lamont and his Republican challenger Ryan Fazio. Multiple debates between the two would reveal, however imperfectly, the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates.   Debates -- the more, the merrier -- cut across the grain of modern political perceptions. Should Lamont be re-throned for a third term as governor in the absence of serious campaign debates, he may rightly credit an indifferent “business as usual” state media for his uncontested victory. Lamont’s handlers, we know, will be advising him to maintain a low profile and use his dazzling record in office as a blind hiding his imperfections in plain sight. Lamont has so far relied on his millions to purchase anonymity from a variety of sources that over the years have produced an artificially, highly attenuated public persona, the result of choreographed public app...

  Lamont Hartford Courant reporter Livi Stanford writes in a front page story -- CCSU president steps down – “Toro’s resignation follows the scandal-plagued departures of two Connecticut State Colleges and Universities chancellors. Last week, an independent review examining Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system’s response to sexual harassment allegations against former interim Chancellor O. John Maduko found ‘serious failures in how CSCU responded to concerns about sexual harassment and gaps in the Board’s process for selecting the former interim chancellor,’ according to an announcement Board of Regents Interim Chair Ari Santiago sent to the CSCU community.”   Toro is “Central Connecticut State University President Zulma Toro [who] resigned Wednesday following an investigation into a complaint alleging the workplace culture under her leadership was oppressive, bullying and intimidating.”   The reaction to Toro’s resignation is not at all unusual. ...

Mamdani George Bernard Shaw, the wily old Fabian Socialist, once said about patriotism, with a wily old Fabian Socialist sneer, “Patriotism if you must, but please – no parades.” Of course, Shaw knew very well that patriotism is a parade, among other things.   The history of the word “patriot” itself shows some antagonistic stretchmarks. It was used as an insult by British patriots of uppity American anti-British revolutionists during the prospectively successful American Revolution. But, as Americans often do, they assigned a new positive meaning to the word -- and held parades during which, as John Adams tells us in post-revolutionary days, flags were flown, martial arms were displayed, the sky burst into patriotic flames, and everyone went home with smiles on their faces.   The war on the American flag – just a piece of cloth – and patriotism, and Christopher Columbus statues, is a relatively recent phenomenon celebrated by anti-American patriots, though not, Shaw...

Kosta, Yahoo One can only hope that Konstantinos “Kosta” Diamantis will be writing a memoir while vacationing in Greece.   The former Connecticut deputy budget director and head of the state’s Office of School Construction Grants and Review, we are told in numerous news stories, fled to Greece on September 17, 2026, just before his scheduled federal sentencing for a major corruption case.   Convicted in October 2025 on 21 federal counts -- including bribery, extortion, conspiracy, and making false statements to federal investigators – prosecutors tell us that Kosta abused his authority over state school construction contracts (worth about $8.5 million) to pressure contractors for bribes between 2018 and 2021.   According to a recent story in CTMirror , Diamantis sent a “rambling ten page email to his attorney in which he cast “the prosecution as ‘politically motivated.’ He also said that the Department of Justice was ‘weaponized’ against him, copying language ...

We are a couple of months in front of an off-presidential year election. Before we go to the polls, we should brush away the political cobwebs that prevent us from seeing clearly what is right under our noses, and so …   What is debt inflation?   Inflation is a contributory cause in high prices, but inflation is not the same as high prices. Inflation is a government caused market distortion, a reduction in the purchasing power of money.  Combined with currency devaluation, it can significantly erode the real value of a currency both domestically and internationally.   There are, we know, numerous ways to discharge debt. Ordinary people discharge debt by increasing their income and paying off the debt. There are different ways to increase your assets to pay off a debt. You might increase your working hours, get a raise from your boss, or turn to a life of crime and rob a bank. In any society in which criminal activity is punished, this last option is not, in the long ...

  Lamont and Gillett In proving foresight may be vain/The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley – Robert Burns   At a minimum, the Connecticut Freedom of Information (FOI) law and its Commission, responsible for enforcing the FOI law, have been entrusted by the state legislature to assure an open political process and to guard against insufferable political effronteries to the law.   In brief, the law stipulates that politicians and administrators of the public’s business cannot do anything they like all the time; there are limits to the nearly limitless arrogance of Connecticut’s one-party state, always verging, as is common in one-party states the world over, on the razor’s   edge of imperious arrogance.   In an age in which politicians wish to conduct the public’s business privately and off the record, the internet and legal propinquity threaten to spoil the best laid plans of mice and men.   That is exactly what happened whe...

News on debates – indeed, news about any subject – is always after-event reporting. Every observant reporter and columnist knows that a modern debate, federal or state, and a report on a debate are two different events.   Most scholars agree that widespread coverage of the Lincoln/Douglas debates – note the plural – was broadly “fair” precisely because newspapers at the time were partisan. Carrying on a tradition since the first raucous presidential debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the two principal combatants in the Lincoln Douglas debates could rely on a party committed media. To put it in rude terms, Lincoln had his media and Douglas his.   There were seven Lincoln Douglas debates impartially disbursed throughout Illinois. The media at the time was stenographic. Debates were reported nearly in full, but the Republican media touched up Lincoln’s remarks while leaving Douglas’ remarks as they were. The Democrat media did the same. When modern scholars a...

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past – George Orwell   The quote most often deployed in defense of the sentiment – “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” -- has been misattributed, Reuter’s fact checkers tell us, to Edmond Burke. A cynic might say, “Well, if Burke didn’t say it, he should have.”   Scouring Burke’s texts, the fact checkers have concluded Burke may have said something similar, but no cigar. This is what Burke said: “No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”   For anyone who has spent much time wandering through the dim corridors of politics, The ...

Part of the reason Connecticut’s overtaxed residents are suffering from an affordability crisis is that they are also suffering from an energy shortage. If the supply of energy were sufficient to meet the demand for energy, the price of energy would be lower. All Connecticut legislators who have even a nodding understanding of the law of supply and demand – called a “law” because   economic laws are and should be both predictable and inescapable – should have known before they went gaga over a promising new and untested energy source, turbine windmills, that   energy affordability is directly related to all   Connecticut businesses.   If you don’t have sufficient energy production, all goods and services become more expensive, and if the assets of those who purchase the byproducts of energy -- all goods and services produced in the United States – do not increase commensurately, their affordability quotient will be reduced. To put it in the simplest terms possibl...

Imitation, the wits tell us, is the sincerest form of flattery – when the imitation is sincere. When Democrats repeat in reverse the policies and political rhetoric of President Donald Trump, they come not to flatter Trump, but to bury him.   Perhaps the most important question for Democrats right now is: Why has their unabating anti-Trump rhetoric failed so miserably to dethrone Trump in the public’s estimation? We know all the anti-Trump chatter – and the many impeachments, and the many suits, three attempted assassinations and the usual anti-Trump sour-pudding one finds in many of the Associated Press reports -- has not in the least dented Trump’s own estimation of himself.   Most people put this down to his self-celebratory egomania, an offshoot of what they suppose is his tendency towards authoritarianism or Caesarism.   Given the 250-year-old republican constitutional order that American Democratic Socialists (ADS) hope to repeal, Caesarism, as it is current...

  AG Willim Tong The problem with the META settlement is that, unlike a trial, it settles none of the crucial questions surrounding the settlement. In fact, a settlement might properly be defined as a clever strategic device designed to prevent a clear discussion of the issues that prompted the settlement. Henry Kissinger is reported to have said the United States rarely settles its most pressing problems; instead, it “amicably bids them goodbye.”   This goodbye bid will cost the redundantly rich META CEO Mark Zuckerberg about $17 billion, pocket change for him. At least he will not have to suffer the nuisance of a trial or lean overmuch on the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In his recent non-testimony before the U.S. Congress, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci repeatedly hobbled on that crutch, boring to tea...

Marxism as an economic theory failed most as soon as the mewling babe was out of the crib. In a piece    reprinted in the Epoch Times by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation – “The  Coup in Search of a Philosophy” -- Surse Pierpoint tells us: “In 1925, John Maynard Keynes dismissed Marx’s ‘Capital’ as an obsolete economic textbook that no serious economist would still assign. He was not being contrarian. By the time he wrote that, the marginal revolution of the 1870s had already done the intellectual work: Jevons, Menger, Walras, and later Wicksteed, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled the labor theory of value that Marx’s entire economic system rested on. Among economists, the argument was over, and Marx had lost it.”   Henry Ford is reported to have said about history, “History is bunk.” Shortly after Das Capital had been loosed on the world, economic “experts” pronounced Marx’s theory of value -- bunk. In years...