Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Shortly after the so called Homeschooling Bill was introduced in Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly, homeschooling parents arrived in mass at the state Capitol building to testify against it. The parents, accompanied in some instances with their children – all patient and well behaved – protested that the bill was poorly conceived, unnecessary, created rather than solved problems, and short circuited both parental rights and the hitherto uncontested authority of municipalities over school matters.   The proposed bill required, according to a Hartford Courant report, that home schooling parents previously unmolested by state regulations register with the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) “to gain clearance to educate their kids. There were thousands of written testimonies against the bill, endless phone calls and emails to legislators and the governor, and when the bill passed two weeks later, there was a lot of bitterness.”     The...

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” — H. L. Mencken   President Donald Trump, who made himself available during the off-presidential elections in various states, maintained his distance from Connecticut. Some political commentators regard the state as an   east coast extension of Gavin Newsome’s California, increasingly left wing and impervious to right reason. One homegrown poll published shortly before final votes were tallied showed Trump with a disapproval rating of 70%, not at all surprising. A count of citations unfavorable to Trump in Connecticut’s media likely may be closer to 90%.   Like Governor Ned Lamont, no fan of the president, Trump is a lame duck chief executive. In the most recent polls, Lamont is shown beating Republican challenger Ryan Fazio by 20 percentage points. The governor, as previously mentioned , enjoyed insuperable advantages. Lamont is embarking on his third term i...

Everyone in Connecticut knows that our state’s Democrat Party has become an ungainly hegemon concerned principally with denying Republicans a place at the state’s political table. That is one of the reasons there has been to date only two brief and inconclusive gubernatorial debates between Governor Ned Lamont and his Republican challenger Ryan Fazio. The Connecticut debates were not political contests in the fashion of the Lincoln Douglas debates. They were largely media shows. Lincoln and Douglas, pretty evenly matched, debated six times in is strategic areas of Illinois, during which the media served as stenographic reporters.   The Democrat Party hegemon in Connecticut may remind some of the giant in the fairy tale who, in hot pursuit of the princess, finds himself with one step far beyond her. Giantism in politics has invariably pointed the way to tyranny. Following the advent of the Stalin era in the Union of Soviet Socialist (emphasis mine) Republics, there was the unit...

Fazio and Lamont The off-year presidential elections will soon be over. Few expect breathtaking surprises. It is traditional in national off-year presidential elections for the party out of power, in this case Democrats, to gain seats in the U.S. Congress. In Connecticut, Democrats are expected to hold back an anticipated Republican eddy. Republicans have been telling us recent polling is defective. Nationally, Republicans are expected to lose some seats in the U S Congress. Statewide, Democrats are expected to maintain their margins. The obvious question at this point is: What comes next?   The tradition mentioned above concerning off-year presidential elections may be the only tradition that, for the time being, the rebels without a cause among American Democratic Socialist (ADS) are willing to tolerate. Their revolutionary movement calls for a unitary national legislature – no more U.S. Senate -- additional seats as socialist ballast to be added to the U.S. Supreme Court, a ...

Connecticut Dems Connecticut Democrats have little to worry about for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is:  political problems become worrisome only when the opposition party or an independent media has the political resources and the inclination to exploit the problem.   We know that Connecticut’s Democrat Party has been for 30 years and more the unquestioned dominant party in our state.   This dominance is longer-lived in the state’s cities, now dependent on majority Democrats for funding. Hartford’s last Republican mayor was Ann Uccello who presided as mayor from 1967-1971.   Political dominance, once attained, is relatively easy to maintain – particularly in a state like Connecticut in which the media, far less independent than it had been during the golden age of bipartisan government in Connecticut, partly for business reasons favors the hegemonic party in power.     One of the reasons “power corrupts, and absolute power...

Elci The trouble with bad    manners, Bill Buckley once said, is that they sometimes lead to murder.   Buckley was perhaps the most well-mannered contrarian journalist in the business, and he had a genius for friendship.   Considering the disposition of political forces in Connecticut – Democrats own the state, lock, stock and barrel -- most contrarian journalists would necessarily fall on the Republican side of the political barricades. They would also be conservative or libertarian.   Buckley s last significant collection of his writings -- Happy Days Were Here Again -- was subtitled, provocatively, “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.” Those who knew him well will testify that Buckley could handle disagreement without flyting off the handle.   Buckley’s irrepressible good humor always stood him in good stead. Asked by a New York Times reporter during his run for mayor of New York City against John Lindsey what he would do if – miracle o...

Sanders When we talk about political campaigns, we often resort to military terminology. In the United States, the campaign wars seem never ending. The chief problem with campaigns is that they are distortion mechanisms constructed to capture votes, which is why German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” The quotable Bismarck could be disarmingly honest, as in, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”   For truth in politics, we look to disarmed retired politicians rather than active vote-hungry politicians.   In war, capturing the flag is an indication of a battle won, and so too in political campaigns. We think of accurate accusations of genocide, for instance, as a battle for the moral soul of a constituency. For this reason, it seems to Jews in the United States a false flag to accuse the state of Israel of genocide. The children of Buchenwald and Auschw...

  Fazio The story in the Hartford    Courant -- Where has CT GOP’s Fazio worked? What to know as governor’s race comes to vote – may be much ado about nothing, to quote Shakespeare.   The governor’s race will “come to a vote” in less than a month and so, from the point of view of loyal opposition, it is well timed. The opposition research folks who are paid for turning over political rocks – always selectively -- probably should be given a raise on this one.   The Courant tells us Ryan Fazio’s professional background includes roles in commodities trading, growth equity, and energy/agriculture sectors, but he has not publicly named the companies he worked for — a fact highlighted by the Hartford Courant as a point of political scrutiny.   All political politicians come from somewhere and, at the end of their political confinement, much too long in many cases, they go somewhere to cash in on their political service.   Republicans generally...

  DeLauro The invitation reads, all in caps: “REP ROSA DELAURO TO SPEAK AT SACRED HEART UNIVERSITY ABOUT BEING CATHOLIC IN CONGRESS.”   An enticing preview of DeLauro’s upcoming remarks was provided by Kimberly Schwartz, the Director of Communications at Sacred Heart University in   Fairfield Connecticut:   “U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro will address the Sacred Heart University community in a talk titled ‘Being a Catholic Member of Congress in a Changing World.’”   On the matter of abortion, DeLauro’s views are heterodox rather than orthodox. That is to say, DeLauro’s views on abortion are not those professed unchangingly by the Catholic Church roughly from the 1st to the 21 st century. The orthodox view of the Catholic Church on abortion is available to anyone -- Catholic politician or not – who has a finger and access to a computer.   However much the world has changed in the intervening centuries, the orthodox position of the Catholic...