Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror notes in a recent story -- Larson lost to a younger challenger. Could Blumenthal face a similar test? – that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is getting on in years. The seventh oldest U.S. Senator, Blumenthal is now 80 and, Pazniokas reminds us, other Democrat political anchorites have recently lost elections in primaries to a new generation of politicians weary of patiently waiting their turn in the political queue.   “Blumenthal is up for reelection in 2028 when he will be 82,” Pazniokas tells us. “He hasn’t confirmed what he’ll do in two years, but he said he’s taking the steps to prepare for another campaign — in the event he runs again.”   “Taking the steps” involves taking in political contributions for an, as yet, unannounced senatorial campaign. This may be politically expedient, and it is perfectly legal, but some political pecksniffs tell us that the practice is immoral, little more than a clever deception. Democrats in politic...

  Roger Sherman Roger Sherman, students of American History will know, was a Connecticut patriot, the only Founding Father of the United States to have signed all four major U.S. founding documents.   Sherman served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. He was a justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and a treasurer of Yale College. An early supporter of American independence, he represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence and helped draft the Articles of Confederation.   Sherman is best known, even among journalists who have not cracked a book on the American founding since their college years, as the author of “The Connecticut Compromise.” The Constitutional Convention was hopelessly deadlocked on a question that had bedeviled patriots since the Roman Republic had been crushed first by Caesar and later by barbarian hoards from the north: In a true Republic, who should decide what should be d...

Not everyone in Connecticut is content with a new bill -- HB 5001, signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last May -- that prohibits, according to Livi Stanford of the Hartford Courant , “law enforcement from being within 250 feet of an election site without permission from state election officials, except in specific narrow exceptions.”   The new law, we are told, “is causing frustration among some police chiefs and lawmakers. Non-compliance with the law is now classified as a Class C felony.” The bill was approved, according to Stanford, “in a straight party line vote with no Republicans voting for the bill.”   Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican who opposed the bill said, “This is a direct shot at law enforcement officers. It’s a direct effect on the municipality because it creates a real problem for police officers to do their job in these locations. Departments across Connecticut can’t fill their ranks, and   some police officials strenuously objected t...

L'État, c'est moi (English:"I am the state") – attributed to King Louis XIV   Some Democrats are beginning to pin the Socialist tail on the donkey. Democrat Party fixture James Carville has threatened to leave the party if it does not soon begin to organize an effective resistance to a rampant socialism. “ Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party,” Carville fumed recently. “One of us is going to leave. It might even be me. If he becomes a voice in the Democratic Party, I’m out. I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.” Democrat U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who appears increasingly to be a party of one, has publicaly protested the American Democratic Socialists (ADA) as a threat to democracy. The party’s official manifesto warmly embraces such eventualities as open borders, the abolition of the US Senate, the popular election of US Supreme Court Justices. One hopes, perhaps in vain, that...

Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has blackened U.S. Senator Rand Paul with an imputed charge of McCarthyism.   Katherine Pugh, a reporter for Just the News , writes:   “A Democratic senator accused the GOP committee chair of employing similar tactics to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, known for leading aggressive anti-communist investigations, at a contentious hearing with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Tuesday … Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., cited two X posts by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from December of 2024 and 2025 that were mentioned in a statement by Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, after being thrown out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing for trying to make a statement as his client repeatedly invoked the 5th Amendment to avoid answering questions … Paul's posts read: ‘the power of some of us must be used for good, like putting Fauci in jail,’ and ‘I want to give him a subpoena and a ...

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...