Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Blumenthal and Schumer The papers are full of news reports concerning Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long awaited investigation. Both Republican and Democrat antagonists in the apparently never ending President Donald Trump soap opera are claiming vindication. Briefly, the Horowitz report makes and defends two primary claims: 1) that the OPENING of the Trump investigation was justified, and 2) that the prosecution of the investigation on the part of the FBI had been mishandled. Attorney General William Barr and the State Attorney from the District of Connecticut, John Durham, have been roundly criticized by U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who has praised the Horowitz report in extravagant terms as an “authoritative objective report [that] completely demolishes President Trump’s false claims and right wing conspiracy theories that the Russian investigation involved political bias or other improper motive[s]. It explodes President Trump’s fictitious narrative about a ‘wit...

“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you”  ― Friedrich Nietzsche And when you look into Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh looks into you. The U.S. Senate hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court began with a bang – interminable bangs by energetic protesters -- and ended with a whispered sigh. “ Senate concludes Kavanaugh hearing; confirmation likely ” the Chicago Tribune noted. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was “likely” from the get-go. One of Kavanaugh's bitterest opponents in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, admitted days before the hearing that Kavanaugh would be confirmed – because confirmation of Supreme Court justices is a political affair, a matter of votes and numbers, and the party with the most votes in Congress ultimately wins. During his interrogatories with overtly hostile Democrats, all of whom seemed to be reading from the same scrip, Kavanaugh’s character came through the screen, as they say in Hollywood. He was pe...

The Malloy-teacher gap just got wider. According to a “factcheck” story in CTMirror  , claims made by Governor Dannel Malloy concerning his role in protecting teachers’ pensions are a bit of a stretch. The leadership of the Connecticut Education Association (CEA), one of Jonathan Pelto’s targets before the penniless Mr. Pelto withdrew from the gubernatorial race, has been touting Mr. Malloy as the “first governor in Connecticut’s history to annually fully fund teacher pensions during his first term in office and guarantee full funding in the future.” Other governors certainly have short-sheeted the teachers’ pension fund. However, CTMirror notes, the leadership “doesn’t mention that Malloy had little choice but to do so. His hands effectively were tied by   legal guarantees   put in place by Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the 2007 legislature.”

  Andy Thibault has written a moving tribute to Larry Cohen, the longtime libertarian commentator who had a regular column in the Hartford Courant. All of us, whatever our political persuasions, used to thrill to Larry’s commentary. In deep blue Connecticut, Larry was a fish out of water, and even seeing a conservative piece scarring the usual uniform commentary pages of the Courant – a rarity beyond belief – invariably sent a thrill up the leg of conservatives and libertarians, and never more so than when Larry, pitchfork in hands, took off after one or another slovenly liberal, some of whom signed his pay checks. For conservatives and libertarians, reading a Cohen column in this setting was like hearing a stone speak: You were just struck dumb.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief. It now appears that the Nappier flapdoodle had little to do with race. Ms, Nappier told the Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender that she was stopped by police after she had dropped off a friend and questioned whether being black, in a black car, in a black neighborhood at night might have aroused police suspicions. It turns out that police were called to the scene for other reasons. According to police union Vice President Nazario Figueroa, officers were dispatched to 385 Barbour Street, a well-known narcotics outlet, for an emergency call the exact nature of which they did not know. "The car,” Mr. Figueroa told WNPR reporter Jeff Cohen , “is going into this area where we have an unspecified incident call. Most officers need to think out of the box. So she [the female officer responsible for impounding Ms. Nappier’s car] may be thinking maybe this vehicle is related to that call. She's always thought it was kind of suspicious tha...

The Whistleblower Trap Priscilla Dickman, all 5 foot 2 of her, has been wiggling on former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s torture rack for six agonizing years. The end in sight keeps disappearing over the horizon whenever her case comes to a decision point. Ms. Dickman, a union steward when she was in the employ of the UConn Heath Center (UCHC), all 110 pounds of her, is still fighting for what most of us would consider decent justice, but it eludes her whenever she stretches out her hand to grasp it. Not that she is dispirited, not at all. She has been conducting the civil side of her case pro se (by her self) and in the intervening six years has cast serious doubt on the proposition that a fool has himself for a lawyer. The criminal and civil side of her case is being handled by John Geida of Embry Neuser, while Norm Pattis is handling Ms. Dickman’s habeas charge of innocence. Early on in Ms. Dickman’s ordeal, she was represented for a number of years by union lawyers who ...

The legal ball that state Senator-elect Joe Markley tossed into the Superior Court has been batted by Judge Henry Cohen back to the Department of Public Utilities Control (DPUC). Mr. Markley, striking a blow for Connecticut citizens and good government, filed a suit in October against the DPUC for having permitted a fee to appear on energy bills that anyone with half a brain would recognize as a disguised tax. In 2000, the state legislature initiated energy deregulation in Connecticut. Having made inquiries of the state’s two largest energy distributors concerning the cost of deregulation, legislators were told the bill would run about $1.7 billion. Rather than raise the money for deregulation though a forthright tax, it was decided to pay for deregulation through bonding. The bonds used to pay the cost were securitized by the imposition of a fee on electric bills amounting to about $15 per month. The Competitive Transition Assessment (CTA), which has been appearing on electric bi...

The Environmental Protection Agency has never said the air is safe to breathe and never will--as clean-air expert Joel Schwartz has pointed out--because the day it does, is the day it is out of a job. EPA writes the regulations under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 for the six pollutants—seven, the Supreme Court having just added another, carbon dioxide. Three times EPA has declared new standards, each one tougher, for ground-level ozone, first at 0.12 parts per million for one hour, then at 0.08 parts per million for eight hours, and in March at 0.075 ppm for eight hours. This latest change, declares EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, is “the most protective” in history from air “simply too dirty to breathe.” (EPA defines as “unhealthy” anything above its latest arbitrary standard.) Each time the standard is changed, the new standard is always the most protective in history, since it is always tighter than the standard it replaces. EPA declares that tightening the ozone ...

The Pesci Prize for distinguished commentary, awarded in lieu of the Pulitzer Prize, this year has been bestowed on Laurence Cohen for his entrée “A Spell Is Broken.” Mr. Cohen writes a regular column for the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s state-wide left-leaning daily. The award committee has not been able to determine whether Mr. Cohen, once associated with the Yankee Institute, actually is on the staff of the paper, now owned by the mercurial Sam Zell, a real estate magnate who lately has threatened to make the paper profitable. Mr. Cohen’s winning column is reprinted below. Don Pesci, commenting on the entrée, said, “Cohen is always good for what ails'ya, but this one is a rib tickler. Many of us can’t understand why Zell doesn’t let Cohen write the whole dammed paper.” There were no runner-ups. A Spell Is Broken Laurence Cohen April 11, 2008 What was the likelihood that the Connecticut General Assembly was going to pass up the opportunity to forgive women accused of being w...

Whenever liberals in Connecticut get in trouble – not often – they like to drape the “moderate” mantel around their shoulders and strut and preen, Chanticleer-like, before Connecticut’s largely liberal press. Just look at me! This cocky imposture puts me in mind of a story told by Bill Buckley, I think at a gathering at his house in Stamford. Traveling in Ireland visiting pubs, Buckley noticed that no matter where a conversation began, it ultimately was steered in the direction of religion. Someone had mentioned a prominent local atheist, and Buckley, taken aback, remarked, “You mean to say there are atheists in Ireland!!!” Oh yes, he was told – “But you have to understand: There are Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.” In Connecticut, there are liberal moderates, many of whom write for newspapers, and conservative moderates. But really – wink, wink – the whole lot is programmatically liberal. Colin McEnroe, a talk show gabber, is instinctively liberal, as is his sometime gues...

The item – longtime Hartford Courant columnist to leave DeStefano campaign – was noted in a brief Courant AP story of a little over 100 words. Whither Michele Jacklin? Guess the gals and guys at the Courant don’t consider this a story, otherwise one of her confederates at the Courant easily could have called Jacklin and asked whether there was any truth the rumor that she planned to join the Ned Lamont campaign as an aide to Tom D’Amore, presently an aide to Ned Lamont, who is currently hankering after Senator Joe Lieberman's seat in Congress. D’Amore was formerly chief cook and bottle washer for former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the snoring bear who was defeated by Lieberman. D’Amore, Weicker and the gals and guys at the Courant were all once very simpatico. The close ties between political writers and politicians in Connecticut borders on the incestuous. In any case, there are three possibilities: 1) Jacklin retires from politics and rides off into the sunset, not lik...

The Able Danger disaster will soon be coming to a newspaper near you. Much of the information contained in this column can be found on various blog sites, both liberal and conservative, now crackling with the story. This is what is known so far about the brewing scandal: • Able Danger, an intelligence unit established by the Pentagon in 1999 to identify al-Quada affiliated members and cells for U.S. Special Operations Command, hit pay dirt sometime in August or September of 2000. According to a military intelligence official and U.S. Rep Kurt Weldon, who claims to have spoken to four people involved with Able Danger, the intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of an al-Quada cell named “Brooklyn” by the internet sleuths because of the cell’s loose connection with Brooklyn, New York. Atta and two other cell members went on to achieve notoriety by steering planes into the Trade Tower buildings in New York, killing upwar...