Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

An attempt by Connecticut state government to stick the nose of a regulatory camel into the state’s home schooling tent has been vigorously resisted for months by hundreds of homeschooling parents in open hearings -- to no avail. The Democrat dominated General Assembly – no doubt with the connivance of politically powerful educational union heads – successfully fashioned a bill, PA 26-37, that allows the regulation of homeschooling in Connecticut.   Livy Stanford of the Hartford Courant reported on July 23, “The nation's largest homeschool advocacy organization is calling on the U.S. Department of Education to investigate a new state law that provides oversight of homeschooling families, alleging that it violates the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, protecting the privacy of student education records ... Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Home School Legal Defense Association, told the Courant … ‘There's not a single state in the nation that says before ...

  “Remember, you are judged by the company you keep” -- Rose Pesci to her son Don, 1950   All the encomiums let loose by twinkling Democrat Party stars following the death of political icon John Droney were appropriate and – dare I say it – understated.     “Droney was known as a pro-gun, conservative Irish Democrat who owned guns and enjoyed hunting,” Chris Keating tells us in a front page, top of the fold Hartford Courant story – “CT leaders mourn a Democratic insider and mentor who once represented Trump. ‘His impact was generational.’” In addition, Droney “once represented Trump.” We shall not see his like again; at least those of us who are advancing toward old age and the yawning grave at warp speed.   “Droney was a key player in multiple Democratic campaigns over a span of more than 50 years,”   Keating tells us, “including the stunning upset in 1988 by then-state attorney general Joe Lieberman over three-term Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr....

The Fox News headline is attention-getting: FBI snares an American heir indicted for allegedly bankrolling anti-cop, pro-Hamas communist revolution . So too is the lede: “The Justice Department and FBI have a new communist financier in their crosshairs for alleged financial crimes: James "Fergie" Cox Chambers Jr., the estranged bad-boy heir to the Cox cable empire.” Spanish police, we learn, “… detained Chambers on the luxury island of Ibiza, in response to an international arrest warrant, according to sources. Chambers is allegedly wanted for money laundering and providing support to Hamas, following years of financing anti-Israel and anti-West organizations and protests. The transnational network he helped fund and support is kicking in to cast him as a victim of the Trump administration's ‘fascism,’ while critics are cheering the arrest as long overdue.”   Where else but on a “luxury island” should one expect to find a billionaire bad boy? And “Fergie” has been...

“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold – lest the marrow of your bones runs cold,” an English Fairytale reminds the bold hero of the tale. That is excellent advice for politicians who wish to succeed in attaining and holding office.   In primary elections, we find, bold politicians may be as bold as they wish.  General elections, however, are horses of a different color.   In a general election, the election deciders are far less narrow-minded than are the more energetic electors in primaries because the election field is wider. The danger always is that bold primary messaging may leech into general elections and undermine the gent who has proposed the abolition of police departments and prisons. The wiser, more Machiavellian option is to draw a veil of ambiguity around the abolition of police departments in primary elections and then – after you have been elected to office -- abolish the police department.   Kevin Rennie -- once a moderate Republican legislator in Con...

Graham In The Wisdom of Father Brown ,   G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”   Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly and unexpectedly of a ruptured aorta, brought on according to a preliminary post-mortem by hardened arteries, never had that problem.   By most accounts following his death, both from Republicans and Democrats, Graham was able to traverse the usual mine-sown partisan political ground without loss of limb or humor.   His relationship with Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is a case in point.   The two – one an anti-Trump Democrat, the other a pro-Trump Republican -- have frequently traveled to Ukraine during that country’s darkest hours.   Both set their faces against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absurd notion that Ukraine “is not even a country” shortly before invading the country and dragging piec...

Elliot, Lamont “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” --  Mark Twain   In the opinion of most political commentators in the state, including reporters, Lamont is a moderate Democrat.   A dispassionate answer to the question might be: It depends what you mean by “moderate. That goalpost has been moved leftward by New England Democrats within the past few decades, most severely within the political lifespan of Lamont.   The governor was first brought to public notice when he defeated incumbent U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 2006,   twenty years ago. Although Lamont gained the endorsement of the state’s Democrat Party and won the primary, he lost to Lieberman in the general election.   Four years later in 2010, Lamont ran for governor on a platform promoting balanced budgets, job creation and economic com...

Sanders and Platner Graham Platner, running for the U.S. Senate against Susan Collins in Maine, has lost considerable support among establishment Democrats in the face of allegations that were known long before they disembarked from the Platner bandwagon.   On July 7 Politico  reported, “ More than half of the Senate Democratic caucus has called for Graham Platner to drop out of the Maine Senate race, less than 24 hours after POLITICO reported that a woman the oysterman once dated had accused him of sexual assault… Most Democrats previously stuck by Platner even as his beleaguered campaign battled scandal after scandal in recent months. By Tuesday, the tide had turned firmly against Platner, with 38 of the Senate’s 47 Democratic senators calling for him to drop out as of early Tuesday afternoon.”   What was the straw the broke the donkey’s back?   It was not the “Nazi” tattoo Platner proudly sported throughout his questionable assignations. Correcting som...

The Homeric Odyssey, the world’s most justly celebrated homecoming story, is a fable about the salvation of more than Odysseus. The recent film The Odyssey may save Hollywood as well. People, all of whom are story-swapping creatures, still yearn for captivating narratives, and Hollywood has been drifting away from captivating narratives for decades, part of the reason it has lost a good portion of its audience. Casablanca , staring Humphry Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was captivating; the cartoonish Toy Story, the nation’s first entirely computer-animated feature film, was merely entertaining and novel.   Literary scholars are still disputing whether The Odyssey attributed to Homer, a blind poet, was written by a single hand or whether it was a product of multiple narratives, much like the books of the Bible.   And, of course, scientifically minded historians hope to clear up any confusion through a discovery of historical facts. A movie soon to be available, The Odyssey , i...

Someone – not a fan of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political redoubt – has given us a brief preview of DSA’s political and cultural platform.   And here it is: An oxymoron is an impossible combination of terms, such as “square circle” or “democrat socialist.”   We know from history that socialism, once matured, is both anti-democratic and anti-republican. The official title of the Soviet Union was “the union of soviet socialistic republics.” In fact, the union was a political construct that demanded at the point of a sword or a grueling stretch in Joseph Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago absolute and unquestioned compliance with an overbearing command state. The central command was Stalin and his Pretorian Guard, or Hitler and his black shirts, ruthlessly anti-democratic and anti-republican by nature.   The official shortened title of Germany’s post Weimar Republic under Adolf Hitler was the Nazi Party, the Nationa...

Roger Sherman -- a Connecticut delegate to The Constitutional Convention and the only founding father who signed all four key U.S. founding documents: the Continental Association, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution -- proposed on July 16, 1787 a plan of governance that solved a seemingly intractable problem. The larger and smaller states had been engaging in a representational debate that had brought the national Convention to a standstill. The solution to the problem, called at the time The Great Compromise or the Connecticut Compromise, was one of those solutions that really did solve a pressing problem.   The proposal by Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, also a delegate to the national convention, answered the question: How should representation in the new Constitutional national Senate be apportioned among large and small states?   The large states believed that representation should be based proportionally on the contribution ...

In the age of Google, it is becoming increasingly impossible to plead ignorance, especially when the prospective dunce is a U.S. Senator.   Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, not up for reelection until January 3, 2031 -- plenty of time for “misspeaks” to be flushed down the memory hole of the average Connecticut voter -- has been denounced by Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, neither of whom are ardent supporters of proto-fascist, according to left-leaning Democrats and media outlets, President Donald Trump.   The always entertaining New York Post puts it this way: “MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski blasted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for not denouncing a controversial Mamdani-endorsed democratic socialist – urging Dems to ‘call out crazy’ within their own party … During MS NOW’s ‘Meet the Press’ Sunday, Murphy feigned ignorance when he was asked about Darializa Avila Chevalier, the contentious House candidate who called forme...