Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree -- Russell Long Connecticut has suffered – precisely the right word – from three massive tax increases.   The first was the 1991 Lowell Weicker Income Tax, which sent a clear message to contiguous states and businesses both inside and outside our borders: Connecticut has surrendered a no income tax hedge that had given it an advantage over bordering states such as New York and Massachusetts; and the state had committed itself to increases in taxation and spending. The Weicker body blow was repeated twice during the administration of Governor Dannel Malloy, approval rating 28 percent. Mr. Malloy, who lame-ducked himself last week, is the author of both the largest and second largest tax increases in state history.

There is a funny side to politics. Politico reports Kristin Davis , the Manhattan Madam who accommodated former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer ’s sexual fantasies when his political rocket was in the ascendancy, is fully prepared to run against her former client should he decide to enter the Big Apple’s comptroller race. And Connecticut’s pro partial birth abortion advocate in the U.S. House of Representatives Rosa DeLauro feels that Sen. Joe Lieberman should face a run-off election owing to his stubborn opposition to President Barack Obama ’s universal health care initiate. Of course, there is no provision in the U.S. Congress for run-off elections. But obviously DeLauro, who has locked horns with the pope and bishops united against partial birth abortion, feels about run-offs the way the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky felt about God when he said if there were no God, men would be forced to invent Him. The Connecticut General Assembly, led by Chris Donovan and...

It is easy to think that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” the book that helped to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, was a contemporary of yet another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky. They both lived in cursed “interesting times,” Dostoevsky at the end time of the Czars, and Solzhenitsyn at a time when Soviet communism began to stink in men’s nostrils. Dostoevsky, the author of “Poor Folk”, imprisoned by the Czar for subversive activity, was sent packing to Siberia, where he spent several years in the harsh Russian winters concocting “The House of the Dead,” his fictional novel that drew on his prison years. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for subversive activity by modernity’s version of the Czars, the Politburo, and he spent his time concocting “A Day in the Life of Ivan Desenovich,” which drew on his prison years. A faithful biographer of Dostoevsky, tells us that the Czar had arranged a tormenting send off for those early socialists, writers...