Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Facing what is certain to be a hard fought gubernatorial campaign, Governor Dannel Malloy vowed that he would not intervene (read: invest state tax money in) a pre-arranged deal between officials in Hartford and the owners of the New Britain Rock Cats to reposition the baseball team in Hartford. Chis Powell, managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer  and the paper’s chief political columnist, noted wryly that any such “investment” on the part of Mr. Malloy would be redundant, since state taxpayers already provide Hartford, as well as other large non-self-sustaining cities in Connecticut, with sufficient funds that more than offset any expenses involved in relocating and housing the team. The Malloy administration certainly has sufficient experience in providing tax funds to a number of companies in Connecticut that have moved from one town in the state to another, but this time, perhaps because of the proximity of an election, Mr. Malloy has turned his face to the wall. He...

New England CableNews (NECN) reported   t hat “A man U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal helped to free from Florida's death row more than 25 years ago has been charged in a different case with killing his wife in North Carolina.” While working at a private law practice in 1986, current U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, for more than 20 years Connecticut’s Attorney General, agreed to represent Joseph Green Brown, convicted falsely on rape and murder charges.

When a friend discovered some politician knee deep in a ripe scandal, he used to call him up and ask, “Does your mommy know you’re doing this?” His ratio of calls made to calls returned was abysmally low. Apparently, Mrs. Gloria Beccaro, the 85 year-old retired nurse and mother of William Beccaro, a lawyer for the Connecticut State Senate, didn’t know what her son was doing, according to a columnist for the Connecticut Post. "They (People for Excellence in Government) list me as chairman?" Beccaro asks. "Why am I chairman? I don't know anything about this." “Alright then, what does she do for the PAC? "’They reimburse you most every month for your cell phone service,’ I point out. ‘What exactly do you do for the PAC?’ “Beccaro: ‘Cell phone? I don't know. I don't even have a cell phone. What would they be doing reimbursing me?’" Pouring over the financial report of the People for Excellence in Government (PEG), Connecticut Post Column...

The touchstone for liberals, as everyone including liberals may be aware, is the future, largely an imaginary construct. The hope and change mantra of the Obama administration occurs in a future those living in the present are busily constructing. It’s a work in progress. Former President Bill Clinton constructed his successful campaign on hope not only because he claimed to be from Hope, Arkansas. The theme song of Clinton’s Camelot was Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” with its refrain, “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone” – and good riddance to it. Mr. Clinton’s boast that he was “the man from Hope,” technically true since he was born in the hospital there and lived in the town for a very short while, was later lampooned by political docudramatist Michael Moore. Mr. Clinton’s formative years were spent in Hot Springs, a town with a far different cachet. Dee Brown, the author of “Wounded Knee,” was interviewed in Mr. Moore’s film on the possible connection betw...

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...

It took Dalhousie University professor Jason Brown six months and some advanced mathematical analytical techniques to crack the code behind one of the most mysterious sounds in music: the "prraaaaaangg" sound at the beginning of the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night."

“On the last night of the Republican convention,” Jim Geraghty observed in the latest issue of National Review , “MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reacted in outrage to a comment by Hawaii governor Linda Lingle... Said Olbermann: 'I’d love the governor or anybody else repeating those talking points to give us the names of those news organizations that have actually questioned whether or not mothers have a right to sit in office. But we haven’t heard that list yet.' His colleague Chris Matthews agreed: 'I sit here waiting for that list of major news organizations who have questioned her motherhood or her right to become vice president, given her motherhood. I don’t think it has ever happened.' “Glad to oblige.” And oblige he does. NBC News anchor Brian Williams: “Are [working women with several children] wrong when they express fears or doubts that she should be able to do this, that she should be doing this?” Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn: “And I think if you’re talking ...

If you are an accolade of one of our more modern secular faiths -- say, the ministerial alliance of MoveOn.org or the Non-Sectarian, Non-Religious Atheists Association of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens -- whether you like Barack Obama or not, and there is a there there to like, will depend less on Obama and more on your own deeply held secular and/or anti-religious beliefs. If you think the whole religious business is hokum, you will not appreciate Obama’s brand of hokum. In the anti-religious theatre of thought and action, it is not possible to loathe the war but love the soldier. Hitchens, for one, cheerfully threw off that imposture when, shortly after the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, he vigorously and publicly attacked the corpse. A convert to America from Merry Old England, Hitchens is in some ways more American than apple pie; so, for that matter, was DeToqueville. As a confirmed atheist, Hitchens has never been comfortable with religious prattle. Since hypocrisy remains the o...

The best that can be said of Ron Howard’s film adaptation of Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” is that the film maker has taken a theologically deficient, profane, anti-Christian fictional page turner and made of it a theologically deficient, profane, anti-Christian soporific film. A movie that four decades ago might have been banned in Boston now has been panned in Cannes. Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycut wrote, “For those who hate Dan Brown's best-selling symbology thriller 'The Da Vinci Code,' the eagerly awaited and much-hyped movie version beautifully exposes all its flaws and nightmares of logic.” BBC News entertainment reporter Caroline Briggs wrote, “Scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman has produced a script that is clunky in parts and downright cringeworthy in others." "Nothing works really,” wrote Stephen Schaefer of the The Boston Herald. “It's not suspenseful, it's not romantic, it's certainly not fun. It seems like you're in there forever and you...