Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Pelosi “When in doubt  tell the truth . It will confound your enemies and astound your friends” ―  Mark Twain It looks like Majority Whip James Clyburn has let the political cat out of the bag. National Democrats have larded with ideological pork a massive $1.8 trillion dollar rescue plan brought forth to mitigate Coronavirus, stopping in its tracks a bill designed to stop the pandemic in its tracks. “The Senate bill that Democrats stopped,” the New York Post notes, “would have given nearly every American $1,200, with $500 for every child. It would have allocated $250 billion for unemployment insurance, $350 for a small business loan program, more than $100 billion to hospitals, $11 billion towards vaccines, $4.5 more to the CDC, $20 billion to veterans’ healthcare, $12 billion for public education, another $10 billion to airports, and $5 billion to FEMA.”

At least one Briton thinks President Barack Obama is rude and arrogant . How quickly is the bloom off the rose. The James Carville/Stanley Greenberg/Barack Obama attack machine has found a sumptuous target in Rush Limbaugh, according to Politico . President George Bush having retired, Beltway Democrats, not entirely shunning the politics of fear, are in desperate need of a new face to grind beneath their boots. Carville is the author of “And The Horse You Came In On,” an attack on the rude attackers of former president Bill Clinton. Greenberg is a Clinton era pollster who now provides info to President Barack Obama’s administration. Both Greenberg and his wife, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, have been generous in the past to Rham Emanual, chief sniper of the Obama administration, having provided Emmanuel with a free Washington DC rental for many years. A Miami abortion clinic doctor is in trouble, according to a report in the Sun Sentinal , for having killed a baby. And Secretary of...

The requirement that the state balance its budget yearly is one of the few effective checks on spending left to us. State Rep. Andy Fleischmann of West Hartford, having drunk deeply from the well of current political rhetoric, proposes removing it. “If you believe it makes sense for government to stimulate the economy to help reduce the severity of the current downturn,” he writes in a Hartford paper , “then — whether you’re a groundskeeper, gas station owner or governor — you should join me in pushing Connecticut to alter its constitutional requirement to balance the state budget each fiscal year. “That’s why I introduced legislation requiring state government to balance its budget over the course of the 10-year business cycle — not in a single fiscal year. This simple change will allow our state to pursue policies that reinforce — rather than undermine — the recently enacted federal stimulus plan.” After cutting unnecessary services, Mr. Fleischmann would have state government issue ...

Through his White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once sent a political opponent a dead fish by mail, President Barack Obama is signaling that the bipartisan honeymoon is over, according to a story in Politico . It did not take long for Obama to figure out that bipartisanship is overrated, particularly when one is the titular head of a party that controls congress. It was the stimulus package that tipped the scales. “Meeting with reporters Thursday night, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that there were times during the stimulus debate when ‘I don’t think we were sharp about the benefits’ of the legislation, letting Washington process dominate the message. “Reflecting as ‘somebody who has been in this town,’ he observed that ‘there’s an insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship here and we allowed that to get ahead of ourselves.’ “But Emanuel said that they recognized they had overdone their initial outreach to Republicans and had offered ‘a sharp messag...