Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The title of the piece in CTNewsJunkie was “ Blumenthal, Murphy Seek Repeal of Law Shielding Gun Industry From Consumer Negligence Lawsuits .” If the law “shielding the gun industry from lawsuits,” the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, were to be removed, the manufacturer of an illegally acquired firearm used by Frankie “The Razor” Resto sometime ago to murder the co-owner of an EZMart in Meriden, Connecticut -- after Resto’s victim already had handed over to him the demanded cash -- would be at the mercy of rapacious prosecutors such as US Senator Dick Blumenthal.

According to a story in a Hartford paper , the city’s mayor, Luke Bronin, a rising star in state politics, “declined to comment on the dispute” between Hartford teachers and their nominal patron, the Hartford Board of Education. The dispute is about contracts and the inability of the people of Hartford to finance years of overspending. A few months ago, Bronin, unable to meet his contractual obligations, sought a bailout from state taxpayers. Bronin leapt from the Malloy administration frying pan, where he served as Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief council, directly into the fire as mayor of a city teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and his former boss was only too happy to bail out his protege by flooding the city with state tax balm. The Hartford school board is seeking concession from teacher union representatives, and the concessions will, if ever they bear fruit, make future state bailouts less burdensome to an all-Democrat political he...

The charge made by Connecticut’s  State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC ) against State Representative Rob Sampson and State Senator Joe Markley is that the two made statements in joint campaign mailers that, according to a story by  Christine Stewart in CTNewsJunkie , “were cast in such a way to oppose an individual [Governor Dannel Malloy] who was running for statewide office in 2014. He said by joining the Citizens Election Program and receiving tens of thousands of dollars to run their campaign meant they agreed to restrict their spending to candidates who were in the race.” Examples of the offending statements were listed by Sampson and Markley in a media release:

An obedient Democratic National Convention soldier, U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty has always eagerly followed orders, according to hacked  emails dumped on the general public by Wikileaks. The dump coincided with the opening of the Democrat National Nominating Convention in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. CtNewsJunkie reports   that “A majority of the emails involve her [Esty’s} participation in a DNC conference call with reporters a few months ago regarding the issue of gun control. The call followed Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s appearance at the NRA leadership forum.” The false exclusive connection between the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association (NRA) – Democrats own guns too --promises to loom large in the upcoming General Election, owing to the efforts of Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, and the state’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation.

"The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life” – Karl Kraus. It’s a great puzzle for those who think seriously about getting and spending. During his second winning campaign for governor, Dannel Malloy took tax increases – but not increases in borrowing, the last refuge of spending scoundrels -- off the table. Echoing George H.W. Bush’s boast at the 1988 Republican National Convention, Mr. Malloy invited Connecticut voters in so many words to read his lips: NO NEW TAXES. And yet, even Mr. Malloy’s own Office of Policy Management guru, Ben Barnes, has told us that we shall have to get used to sluggish tax receipts, at least for the foreseeable future. Mr. Malloy has pledged to hold Connecticut’s Municipalities harmless, and so it will be difficult for him to pass the state’s budget woes to towns by reducing their revenue allotments. He has pledged not to renegotiate state ...

When Republican candidate for governor Tom Foley addressed the Connecticut AFL-CIO , he was perhaps more frostily received than he may have imagined. Foley’s address to the crowd was summarized by one newspaper this way: “The Greenwich businessman devoted much of his speech in an attempt at convincing the delegates that, if elected, he will not propose legislation similar to the collective bargaining regulations passed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The anti-Scott Walker crowd wasn’t buying it. And when Mr. Foley sought to explain a phrase he had earlier used – “Looking for a Wisconsin moment in Connecticut… means I'm hoping we go from one-party rule to more balanced government, as Wisconsin did in 2010. It does not mean I will change the way collective bargaining works in our state." – titters arose.

The Headline on the story was “ New State Laws Take Effect: Gas Taxes, Gun Restrictions, Pool Safety ” and, in the body of the story, Governor Dannel Malloy was quoted to this effect after he had been questioned on his increase of Connecticut’s gas tax, already the highest in the nation: “I wasn't governor in 2005. I wasn't the minority leader of the House or the minority leader of the Senate in 2005.'' In 2005, during the administration of Governor Jodi Rell, the Republican governor and the Democratic dominated General Assembly had decided to increase the tax as part of a long term plan. Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, and the Democratic dominated General Assembly this year decided to play the role of bystanders and let the tax increase happen.

CTNews Junkie reports : PTR, a Bristol-based semi-automatic weapons manufacturer, started looking at a move south when the state made the sale of its guns illegal in Connecticut following the massacre of 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown.

Now that Republicans have been cut out of the budget loop by Governor Dannel Malloy and progressive leaders in the General Assembly, future budgets will be assembled by Mr. Malloy, tax hungry progressives in the state legislature, SEBAC, a coalition of union leaders authorized to negotiate contracts with the state, and economists at the tax gobbling University of Connecticut (UConn). According to a story that ran in CTNewsJunkie , “Economists at the University of Connecticut recommended Thursday looking at instituting a statewide property tax to close more than $1 billion funding gap in the state’s education cost sharing formula.” In the UConn report, contributing economist Stan McMillen notes that Connecticut has underfunded its statutorily required share of educational funding to municipalities for the last 5 years by about $1.09 billion. The UConn report weighs a few gap filling options, including a sales tax increase to 8.3 percent and a boost in the income tax of 13.8 perc...

Governor Dannel Malloy at first allowed that legislators who were to create bills assuring Connecticut citizens would not be exposed to another mass murder incident such as had occurred in Sandy Hook should take their time and craft a bill that would suit the purpose. Then he jumped ahead of his own gubernatorial commission and publically announced his own prophylactic measures, for which he received some mild criticism: How was the legislature to write an effective bill in the absence of hard data furnished by three investigatory bodies, the most important of which was the criminal investigation? Apparently, Mr. Malloy took this objection to heart, because he then issued strong signals that the various commissions should be allowed to complete their assignments so that a proper bill might be written.

State Senator Len Suzio held a news conference in the Legislative Office Building, sparsely attended by the public but well attended by the state’s media, to call public attention to what he regards as serious failures in Connecticut’s newly adopted and Orwellian named early release Risk Reduction Earned Credits program. The title of the program begs the question -- Risk Reduction for whom? Certainly Ibrahim Ghazal’s risk of getting murdered as he was peaceably going about his daily business at an EZ Mart store in Meriden was not reduced after the program was hastily adopted in a legislative session normally devoted to budget fixes. A Democratic dominated General Assembly joined at the hip to the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years, Dannel Malloy,   has made it possible for ambitious Democrats to pass hastily contrived bills through a sausage making assembly line that in the past was considerably more thoughtful and deliberative.

Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the state Senate Don Williams have been closeted together discussing two bills: a jobs bill pushed by Governor Dannel Malloy that appears to have bipartisan support in the General Assembly and Mr. Donovan’s signature minimum wage bill. Mr. Donovan, running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5 th District, dearly wants to push his bill raising the minimum wage 50 cents over two years through the General Assembly, and to this end he announced last week that he intended to attach his bill to a budget implementer. After meeting with Mr. Williams for a little more than an hour, Mr. Donovan appeared to be uncertain which donkey’s rear he would attach his tail to, according to a story in CTNewsJunkie . Mr. Williams, who can count up to 36 without stumbling, is convinced he lacks the votes in the Senate to pass Mr. Donovan’s minimum wage hike, a point he pressed upon Mr. Donovan sometime before the soon to be ret...

What might be called Connecticut’s social gospel is prospering under the hand of progressive Governor Dannel Malloy. Should anyone doubt that Mr. Malloy is a born again progressive, he has only to pay heed to remarks the governor made at a progressive panel discussion in Washington D.C., the epicenter of modern Democratic progressivism. When president CEO of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, asked Mr. Malloy to display his progressive credentials, the governor unscrolled a partial list that included: • The passage of Connecticut’s new earned income tax credit program • The decriminalization of marijuana use in small portions, “the third most robust of its kind in the country,” according to CTNewsJunkie • The passage of a law providing in-state public college tuition rates to undocumented Connecticut students • A new law outlawing discrimination against transgendered individuals • The implementation w...

Much fuss was made during the gubernatorial campaign by former Mayor of Stamford Dannel (then Dan) Malloy concerning the adoption of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the subject of Governor Malloy’s very first Executive Order. The old way of accounting, which had given rise to budget finagling that allowed governors and legislators less scrupulous than Mr. Malloy to fudge budget figures, was supposed to give way to GAAP, an accounting process that would scrub politics of distasteful gimmickry. “An implementer bill passed Tuesday by the House,” according to a story in CTNewsJunkie, “postpones the full implementation of GAAP until 2014 and eliminates the $1.5 billion deficit a transition to GAAP would create. But it also promises to spend about $100 million a year over the next 15 years starting in 2014 to pay down the $1.5 billion GAAP deficit and in order to ensure that deficit doesn’t grow it allocates about $75 million in fiscal year 2013 and $50 million in 2014.”...