Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut commentators were shocked – SHOCKED! – to find that Grover Norquist, founder and president of  Americans for Tax Reform , an organization that opposes all tax increases, and Governor Dannel Malloy, a progressive, though less progressive than Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont or progressive love-child Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, should both agree that minor drug use should not be criminalized. Mr. Norquist objects to mandatory sentencing for minor drug use because he rightly believes that sentencing should be a judicial rather than a legislative function. Bill Buckley, considered by some to have midwifed the modern conservative movement, thought the same and proposed that drug use should be decriminalized.

Gerald and Natalie Sirkin, whose writings have appeared on this site before, wade into the Global Warming swamp and surface with some sound data. GLOBAL-WARMING CYCLES (11-15-06) By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin Europe is stepping up its campaign to persuade the United States to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and stop global warming. The British Government has just released a report commissioned by Parliament, the Stern Report, which finds the future cost of global warming to be very high and the cost of implementing Kyoto very low. How can any country turn down such big benefits at such low costs? One reason the U.S. is not leaping at the bargain is that the cost and benefit estimates of the Stern Report are questionable. The Stern Report estimates that the cost of cutting emissions to 60% to 80% below the 1990 levels would be about 1% of global domestic product. However, other estimates range as high as 16%. As Jerry Taylo...