Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, all Democrats, are not dummies. Savvy professional politicians, they know that the way to President Donald Trump’s heart is through the mouth of Ben Carson, Trump’s U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary. In a Journal Inquirer news report   on June 21,2018, we find four members of the delegation – U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, plus U.S. Representatives Joe Courtney and John Larson – thanking Carson for having taken the time at their urging to visit a house in Connecticut the foundation of which was crumbling because the cement used to make the foundation was contaminated with pyrrhotite, a mineral that causes deterioration when exposed to groundwater.

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea -- T.S. Elliot Kevin Rennie, a Harford Courant columnist, is regarded by some in politics as the Torquemada of Connecticut commentators – especially in matters of what one might call political ethics. Many politicians have felt his bite and winced.

It is fascinating that the First Amendment is of enormous concern today as it was to our Founding Fathers. It was not originally in the Constitution, which nearly prevented the Constitution from being ratified. Madison opposed adding it to the Constitution but in the end had to give way. To secure ratification, he had to promise that once the Constitution was ratified, it would be added, and so it was. The Supreme Court on January 21 invalidated laws that made certain kinds of political speech by corporations a crime. Critics fear corporate corruption or a diminution of democracy or both. Thus: "What a terrible day for American democracy. . . . [A] deeply divided Supreme Court has essentially given corporations free rein to drown out the voices of the American people, rejecting the secret democratic principle of 'one person, one vote.'"—Senator Dodd "[W]e’re being told that an extremely vituperative expression of disdain for a candidate for president in Ame...

We often say here in America that politicians with a past are carrying a lot of baggage into office with them. Hillary Clinton’s baggage, as everyone who has not slept through the past two decades may have realized, is husband Bill. And no, I am not referring to what the press used to call in Bill’s Monica Period the president’s sexual “peccadilloes.” We like to turn our pages on our pasts, and America is after all the land of second chances. Most Americans were quite willing to forgive Bill his “indiscretions” about five minutes after the cigar incident. The few women in Bill’s past who were crying “infidelity” – and in at least one case “rape” – were dismissed, even by the feminists, as implausible publicity hounds. No, all that lies in a past that, despite William Faulkner’s misgivings, is over. Faulkner said the past was not over, “It is not even past.” Hillary’s big problem is with husband Bill’s warmongering. In a review of two recent books on Hillary, “Hillary Clinton: Her Way” ...

File this one under “Politics makes strange bedfellows” – or, as the case may be, strange bedpersons. NewsMax reports that Senator Hillary Clinton, widely reported to be a liberal, is doing it with Rupert Murdock, the closest thing the 21st century has to newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Mr. Murdock buys ink by the shipload and is widely perceived to be a conservative. “Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corp. empire that includes conservative favorites like the Fox News Channel and the New York Post, will be hosting a New York senatorial fund-raiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.” The same paper reports that Sen. John McCain may be uninvited to give a commencement speech at the New School in New York. Students repulsed by the senator’s craven attempts to curry favor with conservatives have collected 1,000 signatures and presented them to New School President former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb, who favors the appearance. Kerry is widely regarded as a liberal and obviously does not a...