Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

This writer has said several times in various columns and in his blog, Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from A Blue State , that the off-year presidential election on November 6 th would test whether people in Connecticut trusted the dubious claims of politicians or the obvious empirical evidence displayed right under their noses. He has quoted George Orwell on the point, who once said that the most difficult thing for a writer to do is to see the thing that lies right under his nose. “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote in an essay titled In Front of Your Nose . “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we  know  to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right...”

All budgets are plans for the future. The budget worked out between Gov. Jodi Rell and the leaders of the dominant Democratic Party in Connecticut’s state legislature, principally Speaker of the House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams, will go to press a little more than two weeks before the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions to be held in Hartford on May 21-22. There are no surprises in the budget, which patterns, with almost ridged precision, the template of past budgets in which gapping holes were filled with chewing gum and hopeful views of the future. Democrats, heedless of the warning signs everywhere apparent, are convinced that a rising tide will in the near future lift all the boats, Connecticut’s little bark among them. Collectively, the Democratic legislative caucus is Pangloss, drawing hope from the future rather than the past. Pangloss was a character developed by Voltaire in Candide who, despite the horrors inflicted upon ...