Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one”  ―  C.S. Lewis,  That Hideous Strength Morality through the ages has always been an OK-Not-OK proposition. Some things were just not to be suffered gladly and, before the ascendancy of the new morality, it generally had been agreed that society had a moral obligation to impose sanctions on persistent cultural deviants. This proposition was heartily rejected by the sons and daughters of the Woodstock Generation, some of whose adherents are now pontificating from the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress. In connection with the presumed manifold sins of prospective U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one longs for a voice rising above clamorous moral maenads in the Democrat Party – saints Schumer, Blumenthal and Feinstein, U.S. Senators all – “Let he  ( and, to be fair, she) who is without sin cast the first stone.” It is impossible at this p...

In the course of writing political columns, a bad habit I’ve been nurturing for more than 30 years, people have sometimes ask me, with a note of desperation in their voice, will things in Connecticut ever change? These people generally are either conservatives or libertarians and therefore immune to the usual political nonsense. The Democratic Party has been in charge of the state roughly since the Mesozoic Era. Will we ever sniff change in the air, they wonder? It’s a serious question: What will it take to shake people in Connecticut from their lethargy – to wake them up before the plane we’re all traveling in finally crashes into the mountain? We’re perilously close to that. Only a month ago, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) released its 12th annual survey of businesses in the state , and the news was bleak. The organization surveyed 377 in state companies and found that 82 percent had a negative or somewhat negative opinion of Connecticut as...

You know it’s over when all the notable politicians have taken their bows, this time draped in the winding cloth of Sandy Hook’s victims. On Sunday, a week after Christians, some of them, went to their churches to memorialize the resurrection of the Christ, and 15 weeks after Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School armed to the teeth with weapons owned by his mother, whom he murdered with a still legal 22 caliber rifle, there slaughtering six heroic staff members of the school and twenty innocent children, the Hartford Courant ran on its Opinion page a series of columns surmounted by the eye catching headline, “Will This Stop More Newtowns?” By “this” the Courant intended to indicate the anti-gun legislation newly passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly. The mercifully short but emotionally inconvenient answer to the question is – “No.”

The season of joy and merriment once again is upon us, and anti-Christmas fascists are out in force . In the “greatest deliberative body on earth” – that would be the U.S. Congress – we find that senators “may use officially related funds to mail holiday cards to constituents,” but they may not use “the frank to mail holiday cards,” even though the funds from both sources come from the same plundered taxpayers. The prohibition against sharing joyous greetings in the House is considerably more forbidding. House members must submit official mailings for review to the congressional franking commission. The Grinches there regularly tell House members that no Holiday Greetings – and especially not ‘Merry Christmas’ – can be sent in official mail. Just prior to Christmas, an inquiring reporter who called the commission “for clarification” was told that “Merry Christmas” always and everywhere was verboten. Also House members may not, under pain of de-frankification, wish their constit...

At the beginning of November, there occurred on the blog site “Connecticut Local Politics” a fruitful discussion concerning the yet nascent conservative movement in Connecticut. The disputants fell into one of two pews: There were those on the left side of the church who, biting their knuckles, supposed the state was falling into the clutches of wicked national conservatives; and there were those, myself among them, on the right side of the church, who pointed out that the powers that be in the state, what ever the drift nationally, were moderate Republicans, a vanishing species, and left of center Democrats, with nary a conservative in sight. Politically, Connecticut has rested for years -- now uneasily -- in the hands of liberal Democrats. Presently, the state legislature is full of progressives, captained in the House by a former union steward, the redoubtable Speaker of the House Chris Donovan , and in the senate by a committed progressive, Don Williams. The legislature has en...