Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) does not anticipate a quick resolution to the nation’s very first intentional recession. A recession, as everyone knows, is a business slowdown accompanied by predictable after effects: unemployment, an increase in welfare rolls, a reduction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a consequent reduction in national and state revenues, and political caterwauling among politicians jockeying for political position. Recessions in Connecticut have been extraordinarily long-lived. It takes the state about ten years to recover from recessions. Connecticut has yet to recover total jobs lost from the most recent recession, which ended elsewhere in the country in June 2009. “Hartford County’s economy,” HBJ reports, “is projected to experience an 18.3% contraction in the second quarter, equivalent to a $3.9-billion economic loss, StratoDem Analytics data shows.

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - Otto von Bismarck A Hartford paper’s Sunday edition crackles with a front page story that asks and answers the tormenting question: Is progressivism dead ? The paper’s emphatic answer is – no, not yet, certainly not in Connecticut. The paper notes in passing the whupping progressive Democrats took in the off year elections, though the account spares the wounded the most important details.

The charge is that Lisa Moody, Governor Jodi Rell’s chief aid, committed an offense against the spirit of ethics regulations – or, in current parlance, an “appearance of impropriety” – when she obtained from Connecticut’s burgeoning Art Community a list of potential donors and sent the names on to campaign workers who squeezed the innocent dears for campaign contributions. The charge, as answered by the Rell campaign and the governor herself, is that the list was available to any citizen who cared to obtain it, including news reporters. Neither Rell nor Moody, according to the view from the governor’s office, committed an impropriety when the list was sent to purse squeezers in the Rell campaign. To this Democrats have countered: It’s not what but when. Ethics regulations prohibit the gubernatorial staff from campaigning on the state’s dime. Multiple investigations are in process. State auditors have sifted through the ethical debris and sent their findings along to Attorney General Ri...