Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Martha Dean, the Republican nominee for attorney general, made a fruitless plea to Courant reporter Mathew Kauffman at the end of his front page story, “Martha Dean Embroiled In Custody Battle: Experts In The Case Say It Has Taken A Toll On Martha Dean's Son,” a heartfelt cry into the belly of the beast: "’You're straying into territory that involves a 12-year-old boy and somebody who has lied profusely,’ she said, repeating a frequent assertion she has made in court about her ex-husband. ‘This is serious stuff. Do not go there. This is not appropriate for journalism. It has nothing to do with running for attorney general. It's just the luck that I got stuck with, in having married somebody like this, and we're trying to do the best we can to get through this.’" But go there Kauffman did. At the center of Kauffman’s story is a psychological evaluation of Dean plucked from Superior Court documents that trace a messy divorce. Messy divorces, almost always ...

The decisions made by two key political players in Connecticut, Gov. Jodi Rell and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, not to defend their seats in the upcoming election gives the lie to assertions often made by opponents of term limits that they would diminish the intellectual substance of the office vacated. After Rell announced she would not run again for governor last November, a number of Republicans and Democrats rush to fill the vacuum, leaving in their wake other positions to be occupied. Wounded by allegations that his relationship to the businesses he was regulating as head of the powerful banking committee was too cozy, Dodd adroitly stepped aside. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal then leapt, some said too precipitously, into the breech, and when Blumenthal announced he was permanently separating himself from an attorney general position he had occupied for more than two decades, secretary of state Susan Bysiewicz announced her availability, some said too precipitously, leaving h...

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...

Assuming the dead don’t vote in Massachusetts, it is very likely that Republican Scott Brown will win the election. Just prior to the Massachusetts election, featuring heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy state Attorney General Martha Coakley and upstart Brown, The Hill reported that Dodd, “a longtime friend and ally of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), blasted the Republican candidate to permanently fill Kennedy's seat over Brown's stance against the health bill before Congress. "’Health care was the cause of my friend Ted Kennedy's life,’ Dodd said in a fundraising letter for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). "’So it sickens me that the Republican running to take Ted's place is vowing to be the 41st vote to kill health care reform,’ Dodd added.” Commentators and reporters who will in the short run determine the meaning of Brown’s successful capture of a seat that had been owned by Democrats for half a century will be chewing ove...

Not only will the new program become the default coverage for the uninsured, but Democrats intend to game the system to precipitate—or if need be, coerce—an exodus . . . of private insurance. Soon enough, that will be the only “option” left. -- The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2009 A new report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers warns that the increasing cost of health care is not sustainable. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that individual and corporate income taxes would have to rise through 2050 by 90 percent even without “public option,” the new middle-class entitlement. The CEA Report, titled, The Economic Case for Health Care Reform, mentions among its solution: People should get used to less medical care. Betsy McCaughey, long-time critic, argues that a superior way is to reduce government’s share of the costs, which will not be done by ousting the private health-care insurers through the new radical public option. President Obama wants the hea...

The new Administration had not yet begun when a bill to enlarge SCHILD, an insurance plan supposedly for children and twice previously vetoed by President Bush, was passed by the House with no amendments allowed. One significant change is that new immigrants no longer have to verify their status to qualify for inclusion. This quasi invitation to free health care is an incentive to Mexican residents to move to the United States. Still unveiled is Senator Kennedy’s task force, which he, long determined to play a major role in health care, organized to write the health-care bill. Still another player is President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader. Simultaneously approved by the President is Daschle’s new Federal Health Board (FHB). He will head it. Its members will be named by President Obama with the consent of the Senate. The FHB, which Daschle likens to the Federal Reserve Board, will make decisions in health care as ...

Burton Hersh, the author of two books on the Kennedys and an authoritative book on the founders of the CIA, “The Old Boys”, was ambivalent about writing Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. At first, Hersh wanted to keep the book narrowly focused, “though honest.” Too wide an historical orbit, he thought, “was likely to scorch out sources and friends whom I have cherished since the middle sixties.” But he had become privy through his contacts to new information, and the book flowered under his hand. Hersh’s scorched friends and sources are not likely to be indifferent to the book. Nor is anyone else who reads it. The face page at the beginning of Bobby and J. Edgar carries a quote from Ralph Martin’s Seeds of Destruction: “John F. Kennedy ‘told his good friend John Sharon that if he had his life to live over again, he would have a different father, a different wife, and a different religion.” Sometimes in the f...