Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

One could only imagine what might have happened at the Hartford Courant’s editorial board offices if one of their investigative journalists had discovered that former Governor John Rowland, now a radio talk show host, had failed to pay his mortgage “several times,” having been sued by a bank anxious to recover mortgage payments from a dead-beat politician. Brains would have exploded.

Just because President Barrack Obama wants to skin the millionaires, this does not mean that he counts no millionaires among his campaign contributors. The same fat cat one per centers upon whom Mr. Obama is prepared to shower crony capitalist bucks will undoubtedly contribute lavishly to national Democratic campaigns. And even those who are not so favored will be happy to throw a few hundred thousand into the collection basket as a down payment on Mr. Obama’s elephant ears. Over the years, the purchasing power of the dollar has declined precipitously, the result of inflation brought on by the unwillingness of presidents and congresses to pay down the national debt with tax increases and spending cuts. For this reason, it takes more worthless greenback to buy ear time and a place at the table. A million bucks ain’t what it used to be. Even if all the millionaires in the United States were by some swish of the magic wand to become as greedy, selfish and slothful as Mr. Obama a...

THERE WILL BE NO POSTINGS TO THIS BLOG IN NOVEMBER Q: Whither the Connecticut Republican Party? A: It’s good question. I put up a blog recently that was a review of a Chris Shays interview with Dennis House on “Face the State.” Mr. House asked Mr. Shays whether he thought Connecticut had drifted so far to the left as to make it impossible for Republicans to win a seat in the U.S. Congress. Mr. Shays is running as a Republican for Senator Joe Lieberman’s seat. Mr. Shays said “Absolutely,” he thought the state had moved very far to the left. The blog produced a response from Jon Kantrowitz, a liberal commentator who is himself an articulate unabashed progressive. “By the way,” Mr. Kantrowitz wrote, “it's true - the state has gone too far to the left to elect a Republican - and thank goodness for that!” There are some few Republicans about who are not as thankful as Mr. Kantrowitz, though it is difficult to disagree with the major premise of his proposition -- namely that ...

“ The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones ." So said Mark Anthony in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Cesar” during Cesar’s funeral oration. Anthony, who took no part in the assassination of Cesar, the bloody work of Brutus and others, all honorable men, was determined that the good Cesar did should not be buried with his bones and that the evil done by his assassins should not outlive them. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s farewell speech before the senate serves a like purpose. Farewell speeches by senators of long standing and exit interviews recorded in newspapers are like brief autobiographies, and there never yet was an autobiographer who was not the hero of his own reminiscences. Eventually, the encomiums are overwritten by sober historians far removed from the partisan atmosphere that colors all the deeds, evil and good, of their subjects. Mr. Dodd’s errors in office lie just beneath memory’s skin . His three decades in the senate are hard...

The prospect of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd leaving the Senate has caused usually smiling Irish eyes to swell with copious tears. Vice President Joe Biden was among the ballers, according to a report in the Irish Times . Mr. Dodd, who owns a cottage in County Galway, will be leaving the Senate at the end of his term. He has spent 35 years in the House and Senate, some of it profitably. Ireland, once the tiger of Europe, has been suffering from the same financial crisis that plagues most of the Western World. In the Unites States, the housing crisis, precipitated by a degradation of lending standards, is thought to have precipitated the financial crisis. Both Dodd and newly re-elected U.S. Representative Barney Frank of Massachussets played a role in the lowering of banking standards. In neighboring Canada – remarkably free of Dodds and Franks and Countrywides and Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs – there is no housing crisis. At the Dodd reception, held in the Irish Embassy in Washington...

Even the New York Times , a publication that can hardly be accused of harboring black thoughts about the usual culprits in the U.S. Congress, referred last August in a news story to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two quasi-private business enterprises cosseted by the Democratic Congress, as “wards of the state.” Previously, each had been designated a Government Supported Entity (GSE). In a news story – the editorial board of the Times, predictably listing left, has already predictably endorsed Connecticut’s attorney General Richard Blumenthal for Congress – reporter Gretchen Morgenson snickered that Fannie and Freddie, now become wards of the state sucking the blood from taxpayers, “got just two mentions in the 1,500-page law known as Dodd-Frank: first, when it ordered the Treasury to produce a study on ending the taxpayer-owned status of the companies and, second, in a ‘sense of the Congress’ passage stating that efforts to improve the nation’s mortgage credit system ‘would be incomple...

The Financial Reform bill, now known as the Dodd-Frank bill for Senator Dodd and Representative Frank, passed the Senate last Thursday by 60-37, with the help of three Republicans. It passed the House on June 30. When signed by the President (probably this week), it will become law. Its 2319 pages make it the longest bill in the history of financial regulation. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was 31 pages; the Sarbanes Oxley was 66 pages. In its 2319 pages could be found by any reporter Section 342, the Office of Women and Minorities. In our July 7 column, we reported this Office was no longer in the bill. A mistake. How did it happen? Not seeing it mentioned in the media, we assumed that it had been deleted. Its first mention was on Internet July 8, the day following our column. It was inserted by its discoverer, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, of the Manhattan Institute, who was searching for derivatives. The bill says that gender- and race-employment ratios must be observed in the publ...

The sheer complexity of the … [Dodd-Frank] bill is certainly a threat to future economic growth. But if you sift through the sections and subsections, you find much more than complexity to worry about -- Economist John B. Taylor The 2,319-paged financial reform bill of Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank “widens” the regulatory net, installs “better shock-absorbers,” and “provides a road-map for big firms that fail,” according to the Wall Street Journal. It is supposed to prevent future bail-outs, but it may facilitate them. Here follows a sampling of its provisions. How it will work out, even Senator Dodd says he cannot anticipate, though President Obama, a little behind on reviewing the history of business cycles, anticipates that the bill will ensure that a financial crisis will never happen again. A radio caller dubs the bill the “Frank-Dodd Fraud bill.” What’s in the Bill? The Federal Reserve retains oversight over thousands of community banks. Th...

Those who have not read U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s regulatory bill need not avoid commenting upon it. The U.S. Congress has demonstrated it is not necessary to read a bill prior to an up or down vote on it. And Dodd’s bill is long, in excess of a thousand pages. Lately, Congress seems to be interested in writing epics where a poem might do, and the average senator’s eyes glaze over after ten pages. By way of example, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose staff is capable of engorging itself on thousand page bills and spitting out digestible briefing memos, claims not to have read a ten page Arizona bill he disapproved of publicly – very likely because his staff had already worked up a narrative in conflict with the factual substance of the bill. Holder also implausibly claimed he was not briefed on the Arizona bill. It would have been impossible for the attorney general to denounce a piece of legislation as possibly racist when he knew the legislation did no more than pattern it...

Let’s say you start off with a chair, then you remove the left forward leg, then you remove the seat, then you remove the backrest – do you any longer have a chair? Some people would answer “No.” The Hartford Courant, under the inspiration of current owner Sam Zell, a real estate poobah who has no intellectual or emotional connection to the people of Connecticut, now has dumped a major political reporter, Mark Pazniokas, the paper’s Washington Bureau chief, Jesse Hamilton, its Religion Reporter, Elizabeth Hamilton, a business reporter, Robin Stansbury, a handful of greenies -- environment reporter David Funkhouser, Steve Grant and Anna Marie Somma -- sportswriter Matt Eagan, itowns editor Loretta Waldman and itowns reporter Nancy Lastrina, two administrative assistants, a couple of feature copy editors and a library staffer and researcher. The Courant previously has shed staff through attrition and early retirement. The latest round of bodies were shot behind the curtain, so to speak, ...

Sen. John McCain’s 2006 letter warning about Fannie and Freddie and GSE’s precedes Sen. Chris Dodd’s touching concern for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by a significant margin. A late September story in the Hartford Courant noted that, “that although Dodd amassed a strong rhetorical record on the housing crisis, it was not until 10 months ago that he introduced legislation aimed squarely at the industry, with a bill banning practices that drove up fees for home buyers, providing millions for foreclosure counseling and strengthening the oversight of government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac> By that time the walls of Jericho were already crumbling. “At a hearing just seven months ago,” according to the Courant story, “Dodd deflected critics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying the two firms remained healthy sources of credit, even as other mortgage firms collapsed. “'The system is under siege,’ Dodd declared, ‘and it is the GSEs that are riding to the rescue...

In the wake of the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, not to mention derivate failures such as Wall Street and Main Street, the conflict of interest prize of the decade must go to New York US Rep. Barney Frank. “It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?” The Fannie Mae executive was Frank’s domestic partner Herb Moses. Frank met Moses in 1987, the year Frank uncloseted himself as a gay, and the two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998. Moses was not without a sense of humor. In 1991 he wrote in the Washington Post, “I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus. On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.” Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that there was no funny business going on, conflict of interest wise, but skeptics were doub...

Navigating among the founders is always a perilous business, most especially for commentators who quote them to give heft to their own views. Just when you are thinking that John Adams is a crusty old republican who does not translate well into a modern idiom, he tantalizes you with this tasty morsel on lawgivers: “One useless man is a tragedy. Two are a law firm. More are a congress.” We like to think of Thomas Jefferson, the American herald of liberty, as a friend of the press, until we remember that he was soundly beaten up by the papers of his day in one of the most vicious American campaigns in history and nursed a grievance poured out in letters that, he surely knew, would see the light of day and ring out through the ages: “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” And again: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” And again: “I read no newspaper now but R...

Firms that were undercapitalized during the housing mortgage failure are now going under. On Black Sunday, Lehmen Brothers tanked, Merrill Lynch quietly sold itself to the Bank of America, and AIG, a major insurer, was tottering. When AIG put its hand out to the Federal Reserve for a 40-billion- dollar bridge loan to stay afloat while it raised needed capital, the Fed said no. It had already pledged to spend up to 200 billion dollars of taxpayer money to help rescue the government-chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage underwriters and another troubled investment banking firm, Bear Stearns. Briefly, the brokers at the failing firms were buying up bad mortgages, repackaging them as stock options and making money hand over fist on the mortgage bubble, which eventually ruptured. When the bubble broke, none of the firms had stored away enough capital to handle the whips and scorns of outrageous fortune. Sen. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the senate banking committee whose elections ha...

"Depend on it, sir: Nothing so concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight." – Samuel Johnson Nothing yet from Dodd on spanking Fannie. In the business world, the prospect of failure has precisely the same effect. In a failure free environment, we can forgive ourselves everything. Failure never touched the souls of the nincompoops responsible for the home financing fiasco because they always knew deep in their bones that, if they failed, their generous Uncle Sam would come to their rescue and pick up their tab. And that is exactly what has happened with Freddie Mac and Fannie May. The so called “rescue” of these frauds by the federal government is itself defective because there is no failure component in the rescue effort, no element of fear that would restrain future frauds from following the same path to taxpayer perdition. Every single governmental program should be blessed with a fear factor. The chief problem with government and quasi-governme...

We know the places where Senator Obama lived as a child, and we know his white grandfather wanted Frank Marshall Davis to be his mentor. We know Davis mentored him from approximately age 14 to 18. We know Davis was a black communist writer and poet. We don’t know the details of what Senator Obama did in Chicago.* We could know more but the University of Illinois, apparently at the instance of Bill Ayers who stored the Annenberg Challenge Project files there, has denied investigator Stanley Kurtz access to those 132 boxes containing 947 files. Obama says he was a “community organizer” in Chicago. The organization for which he community-organized was. The years were probably 1985 to 1988, when he left to attend Harvard Law School. About his relations with Bill Ayers, “domestic terrorist”—the FBI’s characterization—Senator Obama reveals only that he’s that “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” These, then, are the themes of his pre-U.S. Senate experience: community organizin...

We know the places where Senator Obama lived as a child but not why he chose Chicago nor what he has done which bears upon the requirements of president.* Experience? Leadership? Of his activities in Chicago prior to running for the U.S. Senate, he says he was a “community organizer.” The organization for which he community-organized was ACORN. The years were probably 1985 to 1988 when he left to attend Harvard Law School. About his relations with domestic terrorist William Ayers, he revealed only that he’s that “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” These are the themes of his pre-U.S. Senate experience and leadership, community organizing and William Ayers. On community organizing, much is known about ACORN. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), organized in 1970, physically seized an empty building owned by the City of New York and put squatters in it. The City later gave ACORN the building. The mortgage-giant Fannie Mae between 1980 and 2007 gav...

There are some saints among the sinners in the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac shakedown of the U.S. Congress. One of the saints is the Wall Street Journal, which for years has inveighed against the dangers involved when private profit is yoked with governmental power. In a recent column, Paul Gigot, the Editorial Page Editor of the paper, puts it this way: “The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power. You create political monsters that are protected both by journalists on the left and pseudo-capitalists on Wall Street, by liberal Democrats and country-club Republicans. Even now, after all of their dishonesty and failure, Fannie and Freddie could emerge from this taxpayer rescue more powerful than ever. Campaigning to spare taxpayers from that result would represent genuine 'change,' not that either presidential candidate seems interested." The WSJ does not hesitate to name the sinners. Here is a rundown of previous postings by th...