Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont delivered his second State of the State on the first Wednesday in February to a General Assembly bulging with eupeptic progressives. Democrats have been in charge of the budget writing General Assembly for the last few decades. It is true in Connecticut, as elsewhere in the nation, that the governor proposes budgets to the legislature, but it is the legislature that disposes of budgets, usually in close consultation with governors of the same party. Lamont’s State of the State address was launched two days after President Donald Trump delivered before a bitterly divided U.S. Congress his State of the Nation address. Trump failed to shake Speaker of the U.S. House’s proffered hand at the beginning of the hostilities, and Nancy Pelosi ripped up the presidential signed State of the Union address at the end of the hostilities, which show no sign of abating.

“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...

Former U.S. Comptroller General and candidate for Governor took some time out of his busy day to answer a couple of questions. See below. Connecticut Commentary :  In your campaign literature, you style yourself a “turnaround specialist,” and your background suggests you have walked the walk. You served as Comptroller General of the United States for 10 years under three different presidents, Reagan, Bush (41) and Clinton, during which time you “led a widely praised transformation of the GAO and spearheaded related efforts for the accountability community both domestically and internationally.” The state of Connecticut certainly could use a CPA governor who can add one and one and get two. Other governors have in the past more or less fudged the numbers through overly optimistic revenue projections and outright thievery – by flitching money from so called “lock boxes” and using the loot to balance chronically out of balance budgets, relieving the pressure, such as it is, on th...

I began writing “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State” more than 23 years ago because early on I glimpsed the dark at the end of the tunnel, and I was determined to make a record of the destruction of Connecticut, so that, years in the future, if anyone, poking his or her head above the rubble, wished to consult a record that tried valiantly to answer the questions – What went wrong, and who were the culprits?– he or she would have a faithful reference point. Today, I have an opportunity to render an abbreviated version of the longer account. I plan to touch here on the wrong-headed policies that have led us into the dark tunnel, some of the personalities involved, the rise of progressivism in Connecticut under the stewardship of Governor Dannel Malloy, the political repercussions of unsound policies, and what the French have called “the treason of the intellectuals.” Not to paint too bleak a picture – people generally don’t want to hear bad news – I should s...

The address below was given at Meriden’s Fourth Annual Lincoln Day Dinner The day is named after Abe Lincoln, and well named too. I suppose this year those attending these remarks will thank God – who else? – that they are not called upon to celebrate the Jefferson, Jackson Bailey Dinner, which used to be a day of feasting and merriment for Connecticut Democrats. This was before conscience stricken Democrats re-named their annual event. They did so because Democrats decided, three quarters of a century after President Jackson died, that he had owned slaves – who knew? -- and was not kind to American Indians. Though somewhat debased, Jackson, revered as a populist, is still regarded as the founder of the modern Democratic Party. Lincoln owned no slaves and, in fact, prosecuted a bloody Civil War to emancipate them. He had a wicked sense of humor, unlike the stern, forbidding, disputatious and humorless Andy Jackson. On one occasion, in the midst of a speech, a heckler in the aud...

All the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, as well as the state’s progressive Governor, are supporting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for President rather than the amiable Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Sanders is the grandfatherly, flower-child socialist who recently buried Mrs. Clinton in the nation’s first New Hampshire Democratic Party primary: Sanders 59, Clinton 38, a real whopping. Some argue that returns from both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are indicative rather than definitive. Mrs. Clinton, who has as many cat-lives as Achilles heels, is expected to survive the Sanders drubbing. Lady Clinton has oodles of cash on hand, a wealth of down-and-dirty political campaign experience, a morally flawed ex-President husband, and the unenthusiastic backing of the Democratic Party establishment. Mr. Sanders has so far proven to be a worthy adversary, but there are cracks in the Sanders foundation that Mrs. Clinton seems...

Dave Walker, who is running for Lieutenant Governor on the Republican Party ticket, is recognized by most credible political observers as perhaps the most over qualified candidate for Lieutenant Governor in state history. He is a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame and for ten years was the Comptroller General of the United States. When Mr. Walker talks about budgets, financing and pension viability, people listen. Mr. Walker is also attuned to fine nuances in political campaigning. He is not running for governor, he says, because he had moved to Connecticut only four years ago and wishes to respect the political pecking order. Very few people in the state think that, were he governor, Mr. Walker would know less about the finance side of government than his budget chief.

State Senator Edward Meyer of the 12 th District has decided, following nine year run in the General Assembly,   to call it a day. A New Haven paper  is reporting that Ted Kennedy Jr. will decide within two weeks whether he wishes to occupy the soon to be vacant seat. Mr. Kennedy is the son of the late Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy.

In Hungary, of all placed, novice U.S. Senator Chris Murphy got McCained. U.S. Senator John McCain made a pit stop in Budapest on his way to Munich where he led a large congressional delegation to the Munich Security Conference, a catch basin for “defense ministers, international arms dealers, oil sheiks and angry Ukrainians,” according to  Jeffery Goldberg of Bloomberg News . Mr. Goldberg suspects that Mr. McCain met the press in Hungary “so that the delegation would be asked questions about a woman named Colleen Bell,” a soap opera producer chosen by President Barack Obama to serve as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Ms. Bell’s creds are much weaker than those of the late Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya who was murdered, according to a whimsical notion peddled by the White House, by a crowd of “ protesters ” dissatisfied with the quality of a brief film made by a relatively unknown auteur.  All ambassadors are the personal representatives of the president...

The Hill, a much respected Washington D.C. publication, reports that Senator Dick Blumenthal, “not a businessman by trade,” has never-the-less acquired a fortune by “his marriage to the daughter of a New York real estate magnate.” His marriage has given Mr. Blumenthal “an impressive investment portfolio.” Mr. Blumenthal is not alone among Connecticut’s Democratic politicians in having acquired fortunes through family members. U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, married to pollster and consultant to Democratic political stars Stan Greenberg, also falls within the bounds of Connecticut’s millionaire one-percenter politicians.

There will be a bottom to Benghazi when the laggard main stream media gets to the bottom of it. The very latest news on the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi is that “ four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress,” according to Fox News, which has been unrelenting in its coverage.

The lede in a Daily Mail story covering the affair CIA chief General David Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell was carefully fashioned:   “President Obama faced allegations of a major political cover-up last night over the resignation of CIA chief General David Petraeus, who had an affair with a married woman. “Congress is expected to investigate claims that the affair was hushed up to protect Obama’s re-election campaign.” The “cover-up” is a two’fer: Congress is now investigating both the failure of the White House to extract ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens from a compound under siege by terrorists and the Petraeus affair. Both Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have declined to make an appearance before a congressional committee investigating the terrorist raid on the consulate in Benghazi, and in both cases a White House cover-up has been intimated . Neither of the two Democrats newly elected to Connecticut’s all Democrat Congressional dele...

Former President Bill Clinton’s hour upon the stage at the Democratic National Convention – actually, it was 48 minutes – was mostly a 5,896 word defense of Obamacare. Following his speech, the fact-check vultures at the Washington Post dampened some of his fanciful political rhetoric. Mr. Clinton is sometimes lovingly remembered by both moderate Democrats and Republicans as a president who was willing to reach across party lines to slay ungovernable deficits. During his first term, Mr. Clinton cut spending and raised taxes on upper income taxpayers. Because the economy of his day had been revved up by traditional methods employed by his predecessors – tax reductions and moderate regulatory reform – Mr. Clinton was able to use additional revenues pouring into the treasury to offset an alarming deficit . The budgets offered by Mr. Clinton and affirmed by the U.S. Congress were in balance – indeed, they contained surpluses -- unlike the current the non-budget offered by President...

Following are some points made to a legislative committee considering the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut and its replacement by life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with some common sense comments: Capital punishment entails a grave and present danger that the innocent will be convicted and executed. There is no evidence of this in Connecticut in the modern period. Only two people have suffered capital punishment in the last half decade: Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky and Michael Ross. There is no question that both were guilty; which is to say, both committed the crimes of which they were accused. Mr. Taborsky, executed in 1960 for capital felonies committed in 1950, killed six people and shot, pistol whipped or injured others in a series of particularly henious crimes that became known at the time as “The Mad Dog Killings.” Mr. Ross was executed in 2005 after having been convicted of the rapes and strangulations of several young women. Mr. Ross’ last t...

Here is Kevin Rennie’s response to a stunning disclosure made by the New York Times, on the front page no less, concerning Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s non-service in Vietnam: “Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s campaign for the United States Senate has been holed below the waterline by a devastating New York Times expose of Blumenthal’s false claims to have served in Vietnam. The piece, fed to the paper by the Linda McMahon Seante campaign, is accompanied by a chilling 2008 video of Blumenthal blithely making the false claim. The ‘brilliant’ Blumenthal provides a stunningly inadequate response, with the universal weasel word ‘misspoken’ appearing in the piece. It’s followed by a non-sequitur quote: ‘My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam,’ he said.” And the story arrives on the equivalent of today’s breakfast table, a packed e-mail cache, with a video showing the U.S. s...

The state House’s so called “deficit mitigation” bill passed unanimously but ran into a problem in the Senate, where Republicans opposed the measure on a party line vote. The bill draws $373.3 million from President Obama's federal stimulus package and $281.7 million from the state’s "rainy day fund'' for fiscal emergencies. It incorporates $280.6 million in dubious temporary cuts and revenue increases, $50 million in contract cancellations by the governor, $49.2 million in labor savings yet to be negotiated with state-employee unions and $40 million in federal Medicaid funds. It is important to pause here and notice that deficit mitigation relates only to the current hole in the bottom of the state’s treasury; the Damoclean sword hanging over the heads of both legislators and the governor is a hefty $8 billion projected “shortfall” in revenues. The word “mitigation” is a euphemistic fig leaf that hopefully will not signal to taxpayers that the state has a gaping hole ...

"...the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed." -Pegeen Mike, in The Playboy of the Western World “What does it mean to “co-purchase” a house together with someone like Ed Downe?” a curious blogger asks on the popular web site Connecticut Local Politics. It’s a timely question. Land records in Washington show that US Sen. Chris Dodd made three real estate purchases there. Dodd, it would appear, is not only an accomplished congressman; he is a super real-estate maestro. 1) 508 E Street, S.E. Washington DC was co-owned by the Dodds and Sanford Bomstein and wife. Bomstein was the bagman implicated in Sen. Tom Dodd’s scandal. Chris Dodd's father was censured in 1967 by the Senate for using campaign funds for personal purposes. That property was sold to Sean Roach for $10 (that’s ten dollars, no decimal error), and the filing date was 8/20/95. You can buy a lot (no pun intended) for ten dollars in Washingto...

The Democrat primary campaign, writes Noemie Emery in National Review , certainly is not without irony: “A campaign in which a feminist trailblazer [Geraldine Ferrero, once a Vice Presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket] is called a racist by a post-racial healer [Sen. and would-be president Barack Obama] who indulges a racist bible thumper [the silver tongued Rev. Jeremiah Wright] is a little too strange for their minds to keep up with, but it is the long termed result of the world they created. They never dreamed that the diversity codes they cooked up could snap back and attack them. But they could, and they have.” “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” Obama said some time before he dismissed his pastor as a crank and a demagogue, “just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” The “some” to whom Obama was referring were Obama backers, ardent Democrats all. Ferraro, who l...

According to recently released tax information, the former First Couple earned $109 million over the past eight years, a tidy sum that puts them among the top .01% of taxpayers. The Wall Street Journal reminds us that, with the Clinton’s, charity begins at home. “Meanwhile, the Clintons also made liberal use of the charitable deduction, claiming $10.2 million in charitable giving over the eight years. Intriguingly, nearly all the donations went to the Clinton Family Foundation, which has disbursed only half the money. The Clintons can thus use the foundation for, er, strategic giving, such as the $100,000 it donated last year to a local South Carolina library – the day after Mrs. Clinton debated in that key primary state. There are other examples of such politically targeted philanthropy, and it's worth noting that most of the foundation's disbursements came only after Mrs. Clinton announced her Presidential run.” Mark Penn, pollster in chief of the Clinton campaign, has been ...

A report from the Connecticut Post by Peter Urban suggests that the attempt to defame Army General David Petraeus by MoveOn.org has created a backlash: “House members voted 341-79 on Wednesday to condemn ‘in the strongest possible terms the personal attacks made by the advocacy group MoveOn.org impugning the integrity and professionalism’ of Petraeus.” Among those voting in favor of the condemnation were all five Connecticut representatives, including freshman Rep. Chris Murphy. Through direct contributions and independent expenditures, the group provided Murphy with $500,000 for his successful campaign against former Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson. The U.S Senate , Chris Dodd dissenting, condemned the ad in late September. Federal Election Commission filings show that MoveOn.org since last year spent more than 90% of $3 million in independent expenditures targeting a dozen Republican candidates, including Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, both of whom are running for president. The group...