Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Hester, I have a modest proposal. I was talking to a friend of mine, a politically connected tradesman and a marine retired from service. Everyone should be advised that there is no such thing as an ex-marine. I doubt this is true in all cases, but marines, when they grow old, tend to lose some conventional inhibitions. I suppose that’s true of most of us. Conventions can be a smothering blanket, but in the winter one wants warmth. Inhibitions gone, friends are the next to ditch us. Anyway, my marine friend is full of salty expressions. Comradeship arouses in men, especially when engaged in battle or sports, the scatological imperative. People, he says, think politicians are helpful – compassion and do-goodism is after all in their job specs -- and so people turn to them when in distress, even when the distress is caused by the self-same politicians. But, my friend says, politicians the world over are concerned chiefly with acquiring power and utilizing it to their be...

Eventually, necessary information trickles up to Connecticut’s left of center media. On April 23, days after Governor Ned Lamont announced a date positive for the partial re-opening of Connecticut’s shuttered economy in June, CTMirror ran a story titled “ Coronavirus is breaking the food supply chain .” But Coronavirus is doing no such thing. The supply chain has been broken by the very first, intentional national recession. And the national recession has been caused by businesses shuttered by politicians who have settled upon the shuttering of businesses as a way to contain Coronavirus.

Campaign money raised by DeLauro and challengers Those of us who paid close attention to the Republican presidential primary of 2016, which gave us President Donald Trump, and the current Democrat primary, which could give the country its first socialist president in Bernie Sanders, though this seems increasingly unlikely, have come away from these rough and tumble experiences thinking that political anarchy in the country’s two major parties is perhaps more ruinous than party bossism. Primaries, it is true, did get rid of the party bosses. Old news hounds will remember with some affection Connecticut Democrat Party boss John Bailey, the last of his kind in the state. All of the stink and corruption associated with party bossism remain, and incumbents are no more likely to be dispossessed of their power in the new system than they were under the iron rule of the bosses. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the French say -- the more things change, the more they rem...

Democrats across the nation and in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, all-Democrat since 2009, are assembling their adjectives to describe a recent vote in the U.S. House on the question of an “impeachment resolution,” which is not at all the same thing as a vote in the House on a bill of impeachment. In an impeachment proceeding, the U.S. House of Representatives produces and then votes yes or no on a bill containing articles of impeachment. If the vote carries in the Democrat controlled House, it then passes to the Republican controlled U.S. Senate, which conducts a trial. If a sufficient number of senators, sitting as a jury, find the offender guilty of the charges specified in the bill, the offender is removed from office, the only punishment that can be visited upon an impeached government official.

Connecticut Democrats ran against Trump in the last off-year presidential election, and he was not on the ballot. There were no ringing defenses of Trump among Connecticut Republicans, who tend to be rather shy on the subject of Trump’s accomplishments, the most important of which involves jobs produced in Connecticut by Trump’s aggressive military procurement policy. Electric Boat, Sikorsky and Pratt & Whitney are producing jobs and hiring new workers at a record pace, all of which will, during the next 20 years, produce tax revenue for a state still mired in a recession that ended elsewhere in the nation about 10 years ago. Despite Connecticut’s 30-year-long descent into economic turmoil, Connecticut progressives did very well in the 2018 elections. Hard won Republican gains in the General Assembly were wiped out, and the progressive caucus in the Democrat dominant General Assembly is now approaching 50 percent. In 2020, Trump will be on the ballot in Connecticut, desp...

Realistically, what is the possibility that President Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office before the next election? Impeachment is a two-step process. First there is an impeachment proceeding in the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by Democrats; then there is a trial in the U.S. Senate, presently controlled by Republicans. If the bill of impeachment is accepted by the House and the trial in the Senate is successful, the offender – in this case President Donald Trump – is removed from office, the only punishment allowed in an impeachment proceeding. Since the Senate is controlled by Republicans, the possibility that Trump will be removed from office before the next election is remote, so improbable that it ought not to be taken seriously. Pelosi’s “impeachment investigation,” announced before a transcript of a telephone conversation between Trump and newly elected President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky had been released to the public, is an effor...

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet… In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.   -- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The title of the story, “ As Democrats drift left, liberal firebrand Rep. Rosa DeLauro finds herself squarely in the center ,” was unintentionally confusing.

Blumenthal and DeLauro To impeach or not to impeach? That is the question? Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has said no. And US Representative Rosa DeLauro, congresswoman for life in the impregnable 3rd District in New Haven County, last held by a Republican 36 years ago, has seconded the motion. DeLauro has occupied her seat, unruffled by Republican challengers, for 28 years. DeLauro is married to Stan Greenberg, a pollster and consultant whose opinions on things Democrat are held in high esteem by Democrats DeLauro invites to their plush digs in Washington DC. Who says you can’t enrich yourself supping at the public trough?

The recently re-installed Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, will be the featured speaker at the Connecticut Democrat’s annual fundraising dinner. Pelosi is known, among other things, for her ability to bring home the bennies, and Connecticut Democrats no doubt will be happy to receive them – not that the state’s Democrat Party is, by any measure, a poor waif begging for pennies on street corners. The Annual Gathering of Democrats used to be called “The Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner.” But Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, generally regarded as the father of the modern Democrat Party, were both booted from the marque some years ago because both were slave owners. Jackson, in addition, displaced Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in what later became known as “ The Trail of Tears .” Upon ejection, the Ha...

I’d like to thank Bob Hurd for inviting me here so that we might have a chat together. I’d also like to congratulate Dan Champagne for wining a slot in the General Assembly. He will be stepping into state Senator Tony Guglielmo large shoes, but there is no doubt he will be able to fashion his own foot print. Welcome to the viper pit, Dan. You may want to stomp on a rumor that’s been floating around. It’s being said in some quarters that you ran for the state Senate because you missed butting heads with Mike Winkler. Michael is at a safe remove from Dan over in the House, but legislators sometimes bump into each other in the elevators and corridors of the General Assembly, not to mention its intersectional bathrooms.

Connecticut’s gerrymandered First District, the eagle’s aerie for the last 20 years of US Representative-for-life John Larson, may in the future develop progressive cracks. Have Connecticut’s “safe” Democrat districts become suddenly vulnerable to attack – certainly not from moderate or right of center Republicans, but from newly animated progressives? Representative-for-life Rosa DeLauro of the 3 rd  District may be less vulnerable than other more moderate Democrats in Connecticut’s US Congressional delegation, because she is, and has been for a long while, the tip of the progressive spear point in Connecticut. But DeLauro too is getting on – she is 75 years young – and while the spirit may be willing, frail human bodies are subject to all the ills flesh is heir to. Here in Connecticut, progressives now have a legitimate claim on Democrat politicians in the state’s General Assembly. Almost half of the legislature’s Democrat caucus is made up of progressives. And their br...

Q: I have lots of questions. A: I’m sure I do not have lots of answers. Q: I’ll ask the questions anyway. A: You always were persistent, an indispensable virtue among good reporters. Q: You were a reporter once, right?. A: No, a columnist. Reporters dig up the truffles, columnists make use of them in their pâtés. Q: When did you start publishing Connecticut Commentary? A: About 2004, thirteen years after then Governor Lowell Weicker destroyed the character of Connecticut, once a magnet for companies seeking to escape the withering hand of autocratic government, by instituting his ill-advised income tax. Q: And you were writing columns back then as well. A: Before then. I’ve been fulminating for more than 35 years. The income tax, a new revenue stream saved the Democrat dominated General Assembly the necessity of pruning back spending over the long term. It resulted in a catastrophic, uninterrupted increase in spending, the efficient cause of the...

Some time ago, a Connecticut Trumpeter confessed to this political writer that he had been having a recurrent nightmare. Military procurements during the Obama administration have been slender. Connecticut is still referred to in some corners as “the provision state” because, since the Revolutionary War, Connecticut has provided the national military with provisions. It continues to do so; Pratt&Whitney, Electric Boat and Sikorsky are very much going concerns. Obama’s military budget was considerably more modest than Trump’s, as the President never tires of reminding the country. Dollars spent on the military are, to no one’s surprise, good for Connecticut. Federal dollars spent on military procurements produce Connecticut jobs, which produce funds that replenish the state’s treasury -- all good, all the time.

As July rose and June set, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy surprised everyone by announcing his retirement from the high court. Kennedy’s leave-taking will allow President Donald Trump to appoint yet another justice; this when leftists in the United States have yet to recover from his last appointment, Neil Gorsuch. It is difficult to pigeonhole Kennedy ideologically. According to the  Cato Institute , a reliable conservative organization, Kennedy’s judicial philosophy does not fit neatly on a conservative or liberal grid: “Most terms he agreed with Cato’s position more than any other justice and so he’s also sometimes known as the Court’s ‘libertarian’  justice. There’s some truth to that, even though he often reached results that libertarians liked for reasons that [supported} dignity and civility rather than classical-liberal or natural-rights theory.” Kennedy’s announcement brought the mourners out in droves, pitchforks in hand. U.S. Represe...

It was a trifle embarrassing, but U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy was able adroitly to dodge the bullet. “This week,” the   Journal Inquirer reported “Murphy dodged questions about [receiving campaign] tainted money from Spitzer, and instead focused on contributions from average people.” Elliot Spitzer, a former New York Attorney General and Governor, resigned blushingly in 2008 to dodge impeachment following reports in the New York Times, the JI reported, “that he had patronized prostitutes, highlighting a meeting for two hours with a $1,000-per-hour prostitute…

So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes - with the exception of their occupation -- Karl Kraus U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro has invited professor Bandy Lee of Yale to address “a gathering of fellow Democrats” at her lavish digs in Washington DC. The subject of the gathering will be President Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. As do many Democrats, Dr. Lee thinks Trump is batty, according to an item in CTMirror : Recently Lee and two professors from Columbia – a university named, unfortunately, after Columbus – released a statement signed by 100 psychiatrists that said, “We believe that (Trump) is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threat.” The Trump threat was a twitter taunt in response to a statement from batty North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that said, in effect, my nuclear weapons are bigger than yours. Sigmund Freud is reported to have sai...

In politics, there are two kinds of riches: personal riches – Democrat Dick Blumenthal, weighing in at $67 million, is among the eight richest Senators in Congress – and campaign riches . Democrat U.S Senator Chris Murphy, who complains often enough that hustling campaign dollars wastes time he might otherwise more profitably spend demonizing the NRA – which recently signaled its support of a bill championed by Murphy and fellow NRA demonizer Blumenthal, the “Fix NICS Act of 2017”, that would reinforce requirements that federal agencies report all infractions to  the National Instant Criminal Background Check System -- currently has about $6 million in his campaign kitty . Most people could not name Murphy’s likely Republican challenger. None of them have yet hit the $60,000 mark.

There is a hole in the state’s clean election law. Rigorously observed, the law is supposed to prevent state politicians from wresting campaign contributions from contractors and other business associates whom political officials oversee. The hole is quite legal, but it violates what ethicists sometimes call the “spirit of Connecticut’s clean election law.” The clean election law was adopted in Connecticut soon after then Governor John Rowland was sent packing to prison for the first time on corruption charges. The hole most recently became apparent when Attorney General George Jepsen, once Chairman of the state Democratic Party, persuaded a host of Connecticut lobbyists, business executives and deep pocket one-percenters to cough up campaign contributions for Mark Herring, a friend of Jepsen who finds himself in a tight race for Attorney General of Virginia. The controversy surrounding Jepsen and Herring may or may not be – the reader must forgive the irresistible ...

“If you don’t know where you are, how can you get to where you’re going? That’s why you’ve got to take stock of yourself every so often” – a waitress to a customer in a diner. Q: You’re getting on in years; isn’t it time for some sort of summing up? A: I don’t see any pressing need. Q: You’ve written a great deal about politics in Connecticut… A: … most of it lying dead in newspaper morgues… Q: Maybe so, but a record has been established in Connecticut Commentary for those who wish to consult it. Has anything changed because of your writing?

The Republican plan to abolish and replace Obamacare has now collapsed. After much huffing and puffing, Republicans pulled their replacement plan, such as it was, shook the dirt of medical care reform from their feet, and vowed to move on to the next big issue -- tax reform. One imagines U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, who made some frantically intemperate remarks in the House before the Republican replacement plane crashed and burned, was delighted. U. S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, move over: Mrs. DeLauro has now become the chief progressive maenad of the U.S. Congress. She brought to her performance suitable demagogic props, a large sign that said “Get Old People,” the words arranged horizontally and the first letter of each word – G-O-P – in fierce bold script. C-Span captured the historic moment here. Mrs. DeLauro was not wearing her pussy hat at the time; so the members of the House were spared that indignity.