Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers , a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law. Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credi...

Blumenthal sworn into office by Biden in a mock ceremony The leading Democrats scrambling up the presidential campaign greasy pole are former Vice President in the Obama administration Joe Biden, 29 percent in a Quinnipiac poll, followed by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, 19 percent in the same poll, both of whom have had past sweet and sour relationships, none of them the subject of congressional hearings,  with communist Russia. President Donald Trump continues to be slammed by Democrats owing to his still alleged warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, collusion with the Ruskies having been put in the cooler after the Mueller investigation, but these two… not so much. Biden’s questionable relationship with Ukraine, a country that had in the past locked horns with Russia numerous times – in 1932, Joseph Stalin created a man-made famine to haul Ukraine into the Soviet orbit – recently re-surfaced in a New York Times piece that is certain to catch th...

“If you want a vision  of the future, imagine a  boot  stamping on a human  face  – forever” – George Orwell. CBS News has announced that Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for All" bill would, according to Sanders himself, "get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year." The bill is a universal health care, one size fits all, tax financed, proposal. Connecticut's U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, CTMirror reports , was one of 14 co-sponsors of Sanders’s bill. “In my view,” Sanders said of his bill, “the current debate over 'Medicare for All' really has nothing to do with health care. It’s all about greed and profiteering. It is about whether we maintain a dysfunctional system which allows the top five health insurance companies to make over $20 billion in profits last year.” But, of course, the Sanders bill has everything to do with health care. If adopted into...

Mrs. Sherman When June Sherman was receiving her baccalaureate degree in 1943 from the University of North Carolina, I was doing a William Blake: My father cried, my mother wept Into the wicked world I leapt. Mrs. Sherman knew William Blake… he was a friend of hers. She knew Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickenson, and the world of literature that was my comfort when I was a callow student in her Honors English class at Windsor Locks High School in the early 1960’s. My very first production under her guidance was a book review of Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” I received an A/D on the report. When I showed the paper, scarred with red ink and marginalia, to my father, he said, “I don’t understand the grade.” “Well, the A is for content, and the D is for sentence structure and spelling.” He wrinkled his brow – spelling was my personal demon – but I could see he was half-pleased. The paper was covered with remarks made by Mrs. Sherman, and I paid p...

Note: Sad to say, it is becoming increasingly impossible to talk about issues vital to the country without mentioning, if only in passing, leading Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, a media sponge far more absorbent than Connecticut’s  own U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. Trumps supporters are enthusiastic, but some Republicans are riven with nagging doubts. I have tried in the Q & A format below to say some few things about current presidential nominees, both Republican and  Democratic, always  bearing in mind the useful advice offered by Connecticut’s own Mark Twain: “When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”    Q: Who are the Trump Supporters?

Here in the United States, we supposed we had washed our hands of aristocratic pretensions after the American Revolution.  So packed with aristocrats was France prior to its own revolution that the sans culottes had to resort to the guillotine to rid the country of the pestilence. The absence of aristocrats following the French Terror paved the way for  Napoléon Bonaparte , which paved the way for a restoration of the monarchy and the consequent re-emergence of French aristocrats. The same road to power was traced in imperial Rome following the destruction of the Roman Republic. Though a bloodline aristocracy in the United States was never possible, George Washington and many of the founders feared the emergence of a political aristocracy. When Napoleon, First Council of France and later Emperor, heard Washington was to retire as President to return to Mount Vernon, thus refusing a permanent directorship, he said that, if Washington did this, he would be the gre...

Governor Dannel Malloy – former New York State prosecutor, former Mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, a progressive, chief of the gayest administration in Connecticut history, architect of both the largest and second largest tax increases in state history, “Porcupine” (a self-description popularized by political humorist Colin McEnroe)   – recently turned off the light during press conference on the budget, the most expensive in state history. Mr. Malloy had been taking questions on the budget, each reporter being given one. A short follow-up session occurred. The interrogatory took about thirty minutes, at which point Mr. Malloy and communications director Mark Berman proposed that the remained of the briefing should be conducted “off the record.” Reporters were asked whether they were comfortable with such an arrangement. When Waterbury Republican American reporter Paul Hughes expressed his discomfort, Mr. Malloy said he could leave. There was no point in con...

A few weeks ago, Democrats and their sounding boards in the increasingly irrelevant media fired a shot across Republican Presidential candidate Mario Rubio’s “yacht,” hoping to sink his candidacy. It turned out the yacht was a fishing boat; but, no matter, Democrats had made a point. Republicans are rich – therefore insensitive to the vast yachtless middle class. Republican candidate for Governor Tom Foley suffered the same scrutiny -- with this difference: Foley really was rich, and his yacht did not resemble the creaky boats used by Mr. Rubio’s Cuban forbearers to escape the remorseless tyranny of the Castro brothers, both communists who long ago had declared war on yacht owners and political opponents and gays and others who opposed their brutal autocratic regime. Fidel Castro had a yacht. (See the picture above showing uber-rich Lowell Weicker canoodling with Fidel on his yacht.) Mr. Weicker, Maverick U.S. Senator and Governor of Connecticut, also had a yacht. The Castro ...

Let’s begin with a logically sound axiom: What you don’t know about moral delinquents – particularly if they are politicians – can’t hurt them. During the administration of John Kennedy, a likeable, highly charismatic president, it was no secret among reporters whose business it was to keep people informed that the president had a woman problem: He liked them – very, very much -- and bedded as many of them as possible. The attitude of the media towards Kennedy’s satyriasis was enlightened: Why make much ado about hypersexual disorder if Kennedy’s affairs did not materially affect his presidency? Suppose Mr. Kennedy had been a genius mathematician. Would his frequent sexual encounters distort the veracity of his mathematical computations? Of course not. Why then make much ado about Kennedy’s erotic liaisons if they did not interfere with the functioning of his office? This separation of eroticism and the man was, during the Kennedy years and before, the operative attitude of...

How To Beat Your Wife According to the Toronto Sun a new book by Hazrat Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi details the permissible limits of wife beating and spousal control. The book sold out in Toronto. “Page 45 contains the rights of the husband, which include his wife’s inability to leave ‘his house without his permission,’ and that his wife must ‘fulfil his desires’ and “not allow herself to be untidy ... but should beautify herself for him ... “In terms of physical punishment, the book advises that a husband may scold her, ‘beat by hand or stick,’ withhold money from her or ‘pull (her) by the ears,’ but should ‘refrain from beating her excessively.’” Infanticide Is Ethical The newest Orwellian term for infanticide is, according to William Saletan of Slate Magazine is “after birth abortion.” Slate, a left of center publication, begins its vigorous attack on permissible infanticide with a reference to the “crazy religious right.” Slate wants us to know that craziness is no...

At long last, the Democrats may have found their Sarah Palin, a Republican Vice Presidential candidate much criticized for having said, probably not in jest, that one could see Russia from Alaska. In an extensive interview with Hartford online radio network’s “ On The Horn ”, 5th District U.S. House candidate Chris Donovan several times referred to North Korean dictators as monarchs (not butterflies), a flub that would portend alarming ignorance in lesser Republican candidates. Mr. Donovan called both the elder Kim Jong IL  and his peachy-cheeked son “kings.” Here is a transcription of Mr. Donovan's remarks on Korea: "Horn: We have things going on in North Korea I want you to comment on… What do we do with places like North Korea, where we have the boy king? "Donovan: Well, it’s still pretty much of a mystery right now. We’re seeing more of North Korea than we’ve seen in decades. I mean, the stories that were told to the populace about the former king and his ex...

Laura Colarusso of the Daily Beast reported on former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s last trips before becoming a Hollywood mogul: “And being a short-timer doesn’t have to crimp anyone’s style. Take former Sen. Chris Dodd, the Democrat from Connecticut. After announcing in January 2010 that he wouldn't seek reelection, Dodd traveled to Brazil, Argentina, India, Spain, and the United Kingdom on the taxpayers’ dime. As chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, he signed off on close to $27,000 worth of foreign travel for himself, including a $2,000 trip to Cuba just before leaving office. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, Dodd’s new employer, said that the former senator’s trips were ‘especially important to bilateral and multilateral relations and the global harmonization of financial regulations.’" The $2,000 tax payer trip to Cuba possibly was undertaken to bid a fair fond farewell to Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Mr. Dodd and Mr. C...

It seems as if Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has, in his dotage, become an anti-Castroite. "The Cuban model,” Castro said recently, “doesn't even work for us anymore,” a sentiment that easily could have gotten the speaker a 20 year sentence in one of Castro’s prisons had he been anyone other than Castro. George Will offers an analysis of the 84 year-old Marxist and one of his enablers, Jean Paul Sartre . Will ends his column by calling for an end to the boycott of Cuba: “Today, U.S. policy of isolating Cuba by means of economic embargoes and travel restrictions serves two Castro goals: It provides an alibi for Cuba's social conditions and it insulates Cuba from some of the political and cultural forces that brought down communism in Eastern Europe. The 11th president, Barack Obama, who was born more than two years after Castro seized power, might want to rethink this policy, now that even Castro is having second thoughts about fundamentals.” All very well and good, b...

Retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro issued a report card of sorts on the administration of President Barack Obama from his perch in the state controlled media where he maintains a column. Sad to say, relations between Cuba and the United States have soured – again – after an impertinent American bureaucrat announced the United States was alarmed by Cuba’s treatment of its prisoners, one of whom died in February after a long hunger strike. Castro and Cuba, a distinction without a difference, were irked when Cuba was included earlier in the year on a list of countries the United States considers state sponsors of terrorism. In an essay at the end of March, Castro characterized Obama as a "fanatic believer in capitalist imperialism" but Castro folded a few sweets into his column, praising Obama "unquestionably intelligent. I hope that the stupid things he sometimes says about Cuba don't cloud over that intelligence.” In his lengthy piece, Castro praised Obama f...

A citizen of Castro’s Cuba, a hotel cook and taxi cab driver, perhaps weary of the slender tips he has been receiving since Castro came to power in 1956 , takes a drag in his cigarette outside the Xanadu hotel, built in the 1920’a by U.S. millionaire Irenee du Pont de Nemours and expropriated by the Castro regime, and tells a Reuters reporter, “Not one person here has anything against the Americans. Let them come to Varadero in their boats or whatever because for us the Americans mean one thing -- more money.” Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez speculates whether the “Cuba sí, Yankee no!" proposition is destined for the ash can of history. Supposing the island is to be flooded by U.S. Tourists, she wonders, “What would party militants think if they were told to accept those who until recently they were told to hate?" Bloomberg news reports that Latin American “leaders” such as the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez will press President Barack Obama for an end to the Cuban embargo pu...

Actor Benicio del Toro, who plays Che Guevara in an upcoming film called “Che,” walked out on reporters who questioned him a little too closely on the real Che. "I'm getting uncomfortable," Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie's portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. "I'm done. I'm done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don't give a damn,” The Washington Times reports. The reviews in Castro’s Cuba were more soothing: “'Del Toro is spectacular in the role of Che, not only in his physical resemblance but also in his brilliant interpretation,' wrote Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. 'After more than five hours of screening, the Cuban public gave its endorsement with a strong ovation.'” The good news is that Che – the actor, not the real McCoy – executed no reporters. Che's preference -- the real Che, not the actor -- was a bullet to the back of the head, a grace...

In 1983, a gang of criminals trained in Cuba under the enlightened administration of Fidel Castro, pictured to the left schmoozing with a well known US senator and sometime later the governor of Connecticut, knocked over a Wells Fargo office in West Hartford and absconded to Cuba with $7.2 million. Following a 1986 visit to Cuba, Weicker told The Village Voice that Castro was "a man of enormous intellect and idealism. Castro has been known to snow people but he didn't snow me. We flew all over the place and I saw what he has done with my own eyes. By Caribbean standards, it's Park Avenue." It is not known whether during his brief visit Weicker asked Castro to turn over Wells Fargo robbers to his custody. All were members of a Puerto Rican terrorist gang called Los Macheteros, a group affiliated with the Armed Forces of National Liberation linked to 130 bombings, a few murders and about a dozen robberies. According to the FBI, Los Macheteros, among other radical Indep...

Bill Ayres has become little more than a radical cartoon. Only pedagogues could take him seriously, and his election as vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers, suggests they have done so. American education has been deteriorating roughly since early 70’s when Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” became part of the curriculum in teacher’s colleges. Freire’s idea was that the pedagogue or teacher was an oppressive creature so long as he taught his students, for teaching implies the conveyance of ideas or, as Freire would prefer to frame it, propaganda. Learning, however, is a liberating activity. Oppression in the classroom therefore would end when the teacher no longer taught a subject to his students. To become liberators, teachers must become “learning facilitators.” They may shuck off the imputation that they are indoctrinators or prop...

Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s non-obituary is beginning to appear in newspapers, now that he has officially surrendered his position as president of Cuba. Castro held the position, bayonet in hand, ever since he seized power in Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959. The communist dynasty now falls to his brother Raul, 76 years young. Despite keystone cop like attempts to remove the now ailing dictator and relieve Cuba of its incubus, the most serious of which was President John Kennedy’s Bay of Pig’s fiasco, Castro’s Cuba has been relatively free of the usual plots and mayhem associated with communist regimes. Other communist leaders were not so lucky. Trotsky died at the hands of an assassin sent to Mexico by Stalin, who dispatched the war hero and party theoretician with a hatchet. Stalin , “the Breaker of Nations,” authorized the Great Purge of 1937-39, which eliminated opposition from the Old Bolsheviks, and anyone else he thought might oppose his steely will. Stalin himself was poisone...