Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” – a remark attributed by Mark Twain to Disraeli Len Suzio lost his seat to incumbent State Senator Dante Bartolomeo in a hard fought contest in 2014 by 1% of the vote and won the seat back in 2016 by 2.8 % of the vote.  His is a particularly difficult seat for Republicans; registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the 13th District roughly by a two to one margin. Think of Sisyphus rolling his stone up a perilously steep incline.

The reader should note the quotations marks around the word “plagiarism.” The quote marks are intended to bracket the word in doubt because plagiarism often lies in the mind of the accuser. Note to the reader: I borrowed this thought from someone else, changing it slightly from “beauty lies in the mind of the beholder,” a sentiment some have traced to Plato. Was Shakespeare plagiarizing when he borrowed heavily from Montaigne and Boccaccio? Or, as seems more likely, was he merely capturing their bright flags? We are not the inventors of the words we use to encapsulate our thoughts. In fact thoughts themselves have a parentage. C. S. Lewis put it this way: You cannot invent a new primary color. The attribution game is, in some cases, a tangle that has ensnared many an “expert.”

The blithe fairy – whoever he or she is -- that projects job figures in Connecticut is an incorrigible eupeptic. The state Department of Labor has retrospectively downgraded projected job growth figures for both 2014 and 2015, and many are the politicians in Connecticut who are pretending to be shocked, SHOCKED, at the new and more accurate figures. In 2015, jobs in Connecticut increased by a slender 11,600, not the 22,600 projected by the figure’s fairy at a time when Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly were putting together their budget. The Department of Labor also has retrospectively downgraded the projected job figures for 2014. Accurate job figures are important because the projected revenue from such data is used in balancing budgets. The new figures confirm what others have long suspected : that Connecticut is still mired in a business slowdown, years after the overwhelming majority of states have recovered jobs lost during “The...

I’m going to put some figures before you in the hope they will not put you to sleep. Americans – mindful of a dictum attributed to Disraeli by Mark Twain that there are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies, and statistics – tend to drift off as soon as you drag out the numbers. But, I assure you, these numbers are reliable and pertinent to this discussion. The figures immediately below are taken from Pew Research, because that organization is less prone to “lying” – or, if you prefer, statistical manipulation -- than most politicians on the make who fluff figure for their own sometimes nefarious purposes. For six decades, since the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, black unemployment, relative to white unemployment, has hardly budged.  You may recall the official title of MLK’s march on Washington: “The March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty .” Today, as then, black unemployment is double that of whites. There will always be discussions concern...

Here is President Barack Obama holding forth in an ad released in September: “Now Governor Romney believes that with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy, and fewer regulations on Wall Street, all of us will prosper. In other words, he’d double down on the same trickle-down policies that led to the crisis in the first place.” That is the core message of the Obama-Biden campaign. Mr. Obama has repeated the claim often, and Vice President Joe Biden took it for a ride around the block in his recent debate with Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Unfortunately, the theory recently collided with fact checker for the Washington Post Glenn Kessler, not a conservative or a member in good standing of the much abused and misunderstood Tea Party movement, who awarded the claim three out of four “Pinocchios,” which places the statement alongside such whoppers as “the earth is flat” and “Vice President Joe Biden is a gentleman.”

“ There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics ” – Benjamin Disraeli Actuarial figures supporting claimed budget savings in Plan A2 -- son of Plan A, a slightly revised budget that Governor Dannel Malloy months ago submitted to the General Assembly for approval -- have been called into doubt for some time. The Malloy budget approved by the Democratic controlled General Assembly early in May, for instance, contained a savings line that could not be actuarially verified. The Malloy budget simply assumes a savings of $270 million arising from a commitment from state workers to devise ways of saving money. When Republican leaders -- who have been successfully cut out of the budget negotiation process by Mr. Malloy and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly – questioned the assumptions that underpinned the projected savings, Malloy communications director Colleen Flanagan intemperately responded that the figures had been verified by their actuaries and they we...

In 1835, Benjamin Disraeli, then a young man on the cusp of a promising political career, achieved anonymity. Under cover of a pseudonym, Disraeli began to belabor his political opponents in a series of columns written for The Morning Post, a political journal of the day. Something of a dandy – Disraeli’s manner of dressing easily might have brought a blush to the cheek of Lady Gaga – the future prime minister of Britain and accomplished novelist had a way with words. He was, without question, one of the most captivating rhetoricians of his time. John Campbell, later to become the first Baron Campbell, was, Disraeli wrote, “a base-born Scotchman, a son of the manse, that course Pict,” a “booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie.” Daniel O’Connell, a Member of Parliament for Dublin, one of Disraeli’s most persistent critics, was “an incendiary and a traitor.” Not to be bested, O’Connell replied in kind that Disraeli was “a living liar,” a “miscreant” who possessed ...