Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It would be a considerable understatement to say that Mayor John DeStefano of New Haven is everyman’s liberal; he is every liberal’s liberal. A piece written by Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent, “ A Mayor’s Moment Of Truth ,” very likely came as a shock to confirmed liberals in Connecticut, a state bluer even than Massachusetts. Progressives, liberals with attitudes, one supposes were even more distraught. Listening attentively, the thud, thud, thud of bodies falling from third story windows in New Haven might have been heard by those without wax in their ears in the corridors of power in Hartford. What? DeStefano? Even he? A few days before a fireball of union revulsion, supported by a group of White House affiliated brown shirts, burst over Wisconsin , Mr. DeStefano faced his own moment of truth in New Haven and decided to say no to a police union. The results were predictable. The police marched on Town Hall. Busy agitating in Wisconsin and other hot spots of union res...

Paul Bass’ estimate of the state of the state election is fairly accurate: “Connecticut went true blue—bluer than ever. Malloy will have become the first Democrat to win the governor’s office since 1986. Democrat Richard Blumenthal captured an open U.S. Senate seat the party had seemed until only recently in danger of losing. And all five of the state’s U.S. House seats went to Democrats again—even though the 4th and 5th District appeared at times heading to turn red. Democrats also swept the under ticket constitutional offices.” While Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz has called the gubernatorial election in favor of Dan Malloy, Republicans may contest her finding in court. For someone who had been found by Connecticut’s Supreme Court to have lacked the requisite court experience to serve as attorney general, Bysiewicz certainly has been spending an inordinate amount of time in court. Nationally, Republicans appear to have swept the boards: They won back the U.S. House of Repr...

Admirers of the Douglas-Lincoln debates may be disappointed when they discover that the Blumenthal-McMahon debates will not determine the election. In fact, the Douglas-Lincoln debates very likely did not of themselves determine the presidential election held two years later in 1860. Then as now, events were in the saddle and rode men. Ours is a time that will be tutored by events we have haughtily ignored. In Lincoln’s day, public debates reached the people through a highly partisan press, and speeches, as well as debates, were more polished and sonorous. Lincoln stands as a bridge between the tail end of the post Edwardian age and the modern period -- best represented by the bloody casualty figures at Gettysburg and the beginnings of the great fortunes of the rapacious robber barons of The Gilded Age, a heaping up of personal wealth that could not have been accomplished in the absence of a command economy, itself the result of the Civil War. In Lincoln’s day, the media w...

Let’s play Connect The Dots. Dot 1: Sen. Hillary Clinton, wife and co-president of ex-President Bill Clinton plans to run for president on the Democrat Party ticket sometime in the near future, some think as early as 2008, when current President George Bush will retire to Crawford, Texas and Cindy Sheehan will move her “Bring The Troops Home Now!” show to, some think, Chappaqua, New York, the present residence of the Clintons. Dot 2: Hillary Clinton was visited recently by Ned Lamont, the Connecticut giant killer who, with a little help from his friends, recently bested Lieberman in a primary and has now become the nominee of his party for the U.S. Senate. Lamont’s friends include a pirate ship of bloggers -- among them Marcos Zuniga Moulitsas, captain of the good ship DailyKos – who hate, bloody hate, anyone associated with the Democrat Leadership Council, a bunch of candy-ass wimps and wimpettes who just don’t know what it means to be a Democrat. Dot 3: Bill Clinton, Hillary’s husban...

Paul Bass, who now writes a regular column for the Hartford Courant, would have told you a little more than a year ago that it’s legal but not kosher for politicians to accept campaign contributions from contractors with whom they do business– provided there is no quid pro quo. Here is a piece from the Yale Daily news, dated September 30, 2005, in which Bass gave a get-out-of-jail pass to John DeStefano: For the most part, DeStefano has managed to avoid any implications of corruption during his decade in City Hall. A notable exception occurred in 1998, when a scandal broke over a zero-interest loan his then-executive assistant, current Ward 4 Alderwoman Andrea Jackson-Brooks, received from the Livable City Initiative. Controversy ignited over a number of other controversial loans from LCI, and in the ensuing scandal, which involved an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office, DeStefano fired three top aides, including Jackson-Brooks. But DeStefano's popularity and reputation...

Paul Bass is – or was—the editor of the New Haven Independent, a left leaning blogpaper. The Hartford Courant’s Northeast Magazine picked him up as a columnist after longtime political columnist Michele Jacklin left the paper to join Mayor John DeStefano’s gubernatorial campaign. Jacklin has since left the DeStefano campaign for parts unknown. Bass recently penned in Northeast Magazine a broadside against Sen. Joe Lieberman, universally reviled by Connecticut’s leftist bloggers, that opened to rave reviews from the Kossacks , the blogging storm troopers of the left in the state’s Democrat Party. Many of the approving reviews have appeared in Connecticut Local Politics , a political blog site that sports an accompanying communication space frequently visited by earnest leftists. The proprietor of the site led off with an adulatory comment: “Wow. This editorial by Paul Bass is one of the harshest and most unflinching portrayals of Sen. Lieberman's political career that I've ever ...

1) We can afford things we really can’t afford if we can get a millionaire to pick up the tab . Here is an illustration of the fallacy plucked from a story written by Paul Bass for the New Haven Independent, a blogpaper: “John DeStefano is not waffling when it comes to Gov. Jodi Rell's plan to wipe out the estate tax and further enrich the state's richest 2 percent. DeStefano's opponent for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Dannel Malloy, has been waffling on the issue. (He's from Stamford, after all.) So DeStefano continued pressing the issue Monday at a senior center in Hartford; he called for tax breaks to help seniors afford long-term care instead of an estate tax rollback. Click here to read Christine Stuart's report. The issue, first raised on this site, represents the one real policy difference between DeStefano and Malloy.” New Haven Mayor DeStefano wants to give tax breaks to seniors – a political group both more numerous than millionaires in Connect...