Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

in hoc signo vinces -- "In this sign, you will conquer." In one of our catechism classes, Sister Mary Immaculata asked us to distinguish between a sign and a symbol. Correct answer: A sign IS the thing it symbolizes. The Christian cross is a sign, not a symbol. It was “a sign of conquering” for the Emperor Constantine, who had a dream before the Battle of the Milivan. The legend of Constantine’s dream comes to us from a very close and reliable source, Lactantius, a poor man patronized by the emperor who wrote the first biography of the conqueror who Christianized Europe. The sign Constantine saw in the sky, Lactantius tells us, was a "staurogram", or a Latin cross with its upper end rounded in a P-like fashion.

The New York Times has now weighed in on Caroline Kennedy’s fitness to serve as senator from New York. According to a lede from a recent story, even the true blue New York Times is having a problem wrapping its headlines around the idea: “She has not held a full-time job in years, has not run for even the lowliest office, and has promoted such noncontroversial causes as patriotism, poetry and public service. Yet Caroline Kennedy’s decision to ask Gov. David A. Paterson to appoint her to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat suggests that she believes she is as well prepared as anyone to serve as the next senator from New York — and is ready to throw her famously publicity-averse self into the challenge of winning back-to-back elections in 2010 and 2012. Already, some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress have begun asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname. Representative Gary Ackerman, a Queens Democrat, told a radio host on Wednesday that...