Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Hartford Courant, assaulted by the paper's columnist and ex-radio talk show host Colin McEnroe as being insufficiently empathetic to Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, invited Friends of Dodd (FOD) to weigh in on the senator’s sterling virtues. The shade of former Gov. John Rowland, towards whom all the commentators celebrating Dodd’s spotless career in the U.S. Senate were insufficiently empathetic, hovered over the whole enterprise like Banquo’s ghost. McEnroe wrote that the Courant had “engaged in an unattractive feeding frenzy,” displaying “a tabloid-style headline that was so garishly loaded as to constitute a real lapse in journalistic standards.” The “political establishment, with one or two exceptions, has shown itself to be utterly without spine.” They have repaid the kindnesses shown them “by treating him like a pin pulled hand-grenade. They stand 80 yards from the blast site feebly waving.” A lament for Connecticut's beleaguered ex-governor perhaps? Nope. It’s...

The poor, says the good book, we shall always have with us. Lately, we are not so sure about the rich. As information trickles down to the general public via news reports, the rich – which in Connecticut would be anyone in anyway associated with AIG, considered by many to have poisoned the public marketplace with toxic derivatives – are heading for the foxholes. Over in Scotland, an anti-capitalist vigilante group calling itself Bank Bosses Are Criminals attacked the house and car of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. “A storm of controversy has engulfed Sir Fred over the £16.9 million pension he negotiated as he was made to leave RBS for his part in bringing the bank to its knees,” the Times Online has reported. One of the ringleaders of the vigilante mob later e-mailed a helpful note: “We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitu...

Thursday’s Hartford Courant shows a picture of US Sen. Chris Dodd above the fold looking for all the world like a man who has seen the beginning of the end, and over his head there is a bothersome headline in three quarter inch caps proclaiming DODD’S FLIP-FLOP. What to make of all this? A senator has flip-flopped? Oh my! What is the country coming to? The headline, the picture and the story follow a stunning interview with Wolf Blitzer in which Wolf pins Dodd’s ears back, slams him to the floor and dances on his chest? But Wolf Blitzer is a jerk; always was, always will be. Some will say he is doing his job. Possibly -- if it is the job of a jackal to lunge into the side of a wounded wilderbeast. Jackal? Wilderbeast? What the…. There should be something in us that recoils whenever we see jackals advancing on a corpse. Dodd, who all his political life had shown some mastery of the legislative sausage machine, got caught up in it this time. The organ has swallowed the organ master. The...

The federal reserve has just shuttled $85 billion of taxpayer’s money to American International Group (AIG). Opensecrets.org Discloses that AIG, compared to other companies, “has been the most nonpartisan in its contributions, splitting evenly the $9.7 million it has contributed over time. Sen. Chris Dodd, chair of the Senate banking committee, has racked up the most from AIG, with a total of $281,400, while Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, takes second with $116,400. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama collected $103,000 and $82,600 from AIG, respectively.” Lawmakers were more heavily invested in AIG than any other company: “Twenty-seven lawmakers owned stock in AIG last year, worth between $6.4 million and $20 million. Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.), one of the richest members of Congress, was at the top of the list of congressional investors, owning stock worth between $2.8 m...