Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It would take someone like Murray Kempton to do justice to the Rowland “tragedy,” admittedly a much misused and overused term. Unfortunately, Mr. Kempton – ever the gentleman, friend to the lonely and crushed – died in 1997, and we shall not see his like again. Bill Buckley, whose like we shall not see again, said of Kempton   that he was a “socialist — a sworn enemy of all anti-Communist legislation, sworn friend of militant unions” also “the finest writer in the newspaper profession,” disposing of a “wit and irony and a compassion which is sometimes unruly.” Buckley, who had a genius for friendship, then added that Mr. Kempton was “a great artist and a great friend.” Innocence, of course, is the essence of tragedy, and we know after a trial and an appeal – soon to be followed by more appeals, until Mr. Rowland runs out of money, at which point all the lawyers will disappear – that Mr. Rowland is NOT innocent. Mr. Kempton would not have focused on the trial or the ap...

WARNING TO THE CARELESS READER: WHAT FOLLOWS IS NOT – REPEAT NOT – AN ASSERTION OF INNOCENCE BY REASON OF STUPIDITY IN THE LONG RUNNING ROWLAND/LISA WILSON FOLEY/BRIAN FOLEY CORRUPTION CASE. It’s a he said, he said controversy. The parties in dispute are former radio talk show host John Rowland’s attorneys and the attorneys for Lisa Wilson Foley, who was, at the time she was charged and found guilty of a misdemeanor by prosecutors, a failed candidate for the US House of Representatives in the Connecticut corruption infested 5 th District.

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous. Q: It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after the election. Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy’s Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, and this thunderclap caught the notice of some papers. GG: Yes, Barnes may have been, if only for a moment, the Jonathan Gruber of Connecticut. Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of (President Barack) Obama’s Health Care initiatives, is on record as having said in various venues that Obamacare was intentionally deceiving, and necessarily so because most Americans, who are far less bright than MIT professors, would have rejected Obamacare had its architects been more honest than either Gruber or Obama. It’s true that Henry Mencken once said no one ever lost money by underestimating t...

For those familiar with the politics of personal destruction, it will not come as a surprise to learn that the National Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has compiled a “Dirt Book” on Mark Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Connecticut’s 5 th District, a seat presently held by Democrat Elizabeth Esty, the wife of Daniel Esty, appointed by Governor Dannel Malloy to head the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).  Mr. Esty arrived at DEEP from Yale University and announced his intention of returning there in January. He was replaced by Rob Klee, chief of staff of DEEP under Mr. Esty. Mrs. Esty defeated Andrew Roraback, since appointed by Mr. Malloy to Connecticut’s Superior Court.  Mr. Greenberg engaged in the 2012 Republican primary but stepped aside after the his party’s nominating convention had settled upon Mr. Roraback, a fiscal conservative whose positions on social issues were left of center...

The FBI was a major player in the drama. And everything that has happened on the public stage should convince Connecticut’s General Assembly that the state needs an Inspector General to uproot corruption before the FBI enters the theater.  When federal prosecutors turn up on the scene, Grand Guigno unfolds. John McKinney, a Republican running for governor this year who has not yet been drawn by federal prosecutors into the mire, has proposed just that. His proposal has been received in silence by Democratic leaders in the General Assembly who control political business in the chamber. The FBI intervention began when the struggle for the 5 th  District U.S. Congressional seat left vacant after Chris Murphy’s elevation to the U.S. Senate seemed to be a contest between then Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan and an assortment of Republican hopefuls that included longtime State Senate leader Andrew Roraback, a late entry into the Republican primary, and three R...

What a difference a campaign season makes. It was not so long ago – in March 2012 – that Governor Dannel Malloy was valiantly trying to tamp down efforts among General Assembly progressives to raise the minimum wage in Connecticut to $9.25 an hour from $8.25. A story issued from Rick Green of the Hartford Courant: “ Quassy Stands To Lose If Minimum Wage Rises: Even 50-Cent Hike Could Cost Over $150K, Owner Says .” Mr. Green interviewed a minimum wage employer, George Frantzis of Quassy Amusement Park on Lake Quassapaug in Middlebury, Connecticut, who pointed out that the prospective boost in the minimum wage would force him to take measures. Mr. Frantiz told Mr. Green that a minimum wage increase would force Quassy to “cut back on recently approved plans to expand a water park. There would be fewer raises for returning employees,” not to mention business lost from the absence of a water park.

Robert Braddock, the hapless finance director for the Chris Donovan U.S. House campaign, took the bullet bravely enough. Outside the courtroom in which he was sentenced to 38 months for having accepted fraudulent campaign contributions for Mr. Donovan, Mr. Braddock spilled the beans. FBI agents, Mr. Braddock told the media, offered him a deal he had bravely refused. The FBI, directing Donovangate from behind the curtain, wanted to wire-up Mr. Braddock so they might haul in a larger catch – perhaps Mr. Donovan himself – but Mr. Braddock refused to cooperate because, unlike FBI “rats” Joshua Nassi and Raymond Souci, a certain private code of honor kept him out of the FBI sting operation.

“I seen My Opportunities and I Took ’Em” -- George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany Hall boss”  Patrick Castagna, an FBI informant, was wearing an FBI wire, but the chatty if cynical Ray Soucy, a former union leader and political wheeler dealer, was unaware of this, and so he went on and on and on, sounding for all the world like turn of the century Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt holding court at his bootblack stand.

This is the sort of headline successful politicians do not want to see in their political resumes: “Feds Subpoena Middletown Health Center s Records Relating to Officials Including Wyman and Malloy's Budget Chief.” Last December, a grand jury subpoenaed documents – e-mails, paper communications and other records – from a host of democratic officials and aides including Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy 's budget cruncher, Ben Barnes,   the governor’s Secretary Office of Policy and Management.

Governor Malloy has told the Appropriations and Finance, Revenue & Bonding committees through his Office of Policy and Management Secretary Ben Barnes that he will not resort to tax increases to backfill what Mr. Malloy calls a $365 million “shortfall” in his budget. Mr. Malloy has been less assertive concerning “a deficit of as much as $1.2 billion projected for the coming fiscal year -- a shortfall of 6 percent -- saying only that he has ‘no intention of raising taxes,’" according to a story in CTMirror .

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Connecticut roughly by a two to one margin. The largest group in the state is unaffiliateds, sometimes called independents. In a primary contest, a Republican hoping to be nominated by his party will trim his message to a right of center audience; a Democrat, contrary-wise, will appeal to a left of center audience. The “center” in American politics is not a static position; it is a statistical average determined by one’s disposition to side with right or left positions.

Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the state Senate Don Williams have been closeted together discussing two bills: a jobs bill pushed by Governor Dannel Malloy that appears to have bipartisan support in the General Assembly and Mr. Donovan’s signature minimum wage bill. Mr. Donovan, running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5 th District, dearly wants to push his bill raising the minimum wage 50 cents over two years through the General Assembly, and to this end he announced last week that he intended to attach his bill to a budget implementer. After meeting with Mr. Williams for a little more than an hour, Mr. Donovan appeared to be uncertain which donkey’s rear he would attach his tail to, according to a story in CTNewsJunkie . Mr. Williams, who can count up to 36 without stumbling, is convinced he lacks the votes in the Senate to pass Mr. Donovan’s minimum wage hike, a point he pressed upon Mr. Donovan sometime before the soon to be ret...

  Somewhere on the route to education reform Governor Dannel Malloy bumped into Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, teachers unions and their affiliates in the General Assembly, among them the powerful Speaker of the state House of Representatives, Chris Donovan. Mr. Donovan, the most progressive Speaker since Irv Stolberg departed the General Assembly and left this veil of tears, leapt into politics from a stint as a union representative, and the marks of the union negotiator are etched into the fabric of his being. Some poor ink stained wretches suspect that the evisceration of Mr. Malloy’s education reforms -- the central pillars of which are frequent teacher evaluations tied to continued employment and teacher salaries tied to student performance – are, at least in part, related to Mr. Donovan’s union affections. On March 27, two intrepid reporters, Christine Stewart of CTNewsJunkie and Brian Lockhart of the Hearst chain of newspapers, set out probe Mr. Don...

There was a point during the Cheshire murder trial when one of the defense attorneys representing accused murderer Joshua Komisarjevsky became concerned that small pins worn by family members of the murder victims might unduly prejudice the jury against their client. The judge in the case, Jon Blue, ruled that the pins were not so indiscrete as to trip the prejudices of jurors. The pin challenge by the defense followed by some months the publication of an interview Mr. Komisarjevsky gave to a reporter while incarcerated that was, the First Amendment still being the law of the land, widely covered by several state newspapers. The Komisarjevsky prison interview was fashioned into a hastily written book that found its way into libraries across the state. An effort was made, unsuccessfully, to pry the book from the hands of aggressive librarians conversant with the First Amendment. Mr. Komisarjevsky, a very talkative fellow, also made a statement to police shortly after he was appreh...

Gov. Jodi Rell is being played for a sucker yet again. Last time around, the governor refused to sign a budget that she could not in good conscience support, chiefly because the budget contained a progressive income tax feature long opposed by Republicans. Republican leaders at the time argued that a progressive income tax was regressive on the revenue side. Working its way through a malingering recession, the state had experienced a sharp fall off in revenue because a) despite the absence of a progressive feature in the income tax, the bulk of revenue pouring into the state treasury was “contributed” by the state’s wealthier citizens, and b) revenue held by this group had been severely diminished by the recession, c) resulting in a net loss of revenue to the state. One Democratic stalwart, nodding affirmatively to the analysis, suggested that only a broad based income tax could make the state solvent. This was George Jepsen, once Chairman of the Democratic Party, out of office ...

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 ...

A sharp political analyst, Karl Marx -- who, appropriately enough, wrote for the New York Tribune -- used to talk about “the correlation of forces.” Marx was a lousy economist but a keen observer of people, countries, events and political movements. By the correlation of forces, Marx meant all the important powers that shape politics, the plow that forms the furrow in which politics flows and determines its course. The correlation of forces drifted to the top of my mind about two weeks ago when Gov. Jodi Rell surprised all of us by pulling a pin from her grenade and fragging the Democrat controlled legislature. The ensuing fireworks have been instructive. All the usual suspects retreated behind all the usual barricades. Roy Occhiogrosso, who has become the unofficial voice of the Democrat Party in the media, characterized Rell’s budget, on the Shelly Sindland show, as “a fairy tale.” Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy was sitting beside him, and for once his wits failed him. He migh...

The Hartford Courant has dropped an editorial hammer on soon to be Speaker of the House Chris Donovan’s baby, a deficient bill that would open Connecticut’s health insurance pool to municipalities, smaller businesses and non-profits. Sean Matterson, chief of staff to New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, no shrinking violet when it comes to accepting state taxpayer handouts, claimed in a letter to a legislator that, far from saving his city $8.6 million, Donovan’s brainchild “would result in no savings from current costs.” Having done the math, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton says, according to the Courant, the bill would cost his city $5 million. The folk who claimed Donovan’s insurance pool bill would save Danbury $2.8 million… er…“forgot to include retirees in their calculations, an astounding math mistake no self respecting insurance company concerned with getting and spending would make.” Over in Massachussetts – formerly Taxachussets – few people have bought into the state’s new insurance...

V.I. Lenin used to say that if you label an idea properly, you do not have to argue with it. On a similar line, if you find that a proposed amendment in Connecticut’s General Assembly is “not germane,” even when it is germane, you do not have to consider it. That is what was done by Majority Leader in the House of Representatives Chris Donovan in the case of a Republican alternative budget submitted by Republicans as an amendment after Democrats and Governor Jodi Rell had decided to skip school. Rather than confront the serious problems facing the state, which include but are not limited to a vanishing surplus and mounting spending, the Rell-Democrat combine chose not to tinker with a budget that later will require either severe spending cuts or crippling increases in taxes. This dereliction of duty, some have speculated, is related to the coming elections. Democrats, some critics have said, are loathed to raise taxes to cover anticipated deficits and burgeoning spending increases bef...

During her budget address, Gov. Jodi Rell embarked on a spending spree with a smile, even as she announced that “We must not embark on a spending spree of new programs and policies.” The governor pledged $1.3 billion more for transportation improvements, $5.5 million for universal pre-school pilot programs, $57 million more for public education, $20 million for embryonic stem-cell research, and on and on… Rell surprised many of her Republican well-wishers by raising what used to be called “sin taxes’ and popping the lid on the state’s spending cap in an effort to gain revenue from the federal government by taxing nursing home property; this after the governor wisely pointed out that, from the point of view of costs to taxpayers, there is little difference between the three forms of government – municipal, state and federal – since the same citizen shells out money for all three tax collecting agencies. A Democratic leader came closer than he may have wished to the truth when he said th...