Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

A day before the primaries, Citizens For Change (CFC) has released the names of those candidates who thus far have “publicly committed to the people of Connecticut that they will address the numerous public policy challenges confronting our state and our nation,” according to the group’s press release. CFC is inviting all candidates to sign its COMMITMENT FOR CONNECTICUT documents the group has made available on its website at http://www.cfc.us/ . Richard Olivastro, a spokesman for CFC, said that 17 candidates have led the way for others by signing the documents. They are: United States Senate : Peter Schiff United States House of Representatives : Mark Greenberg, Dan Reale, Rob Merkle, Justin Bernier, Scott DeShefy; LT Governor: Mark Boughton CT Attorney General : Stephen Fournier CT Treasurer : Jeff Wright CT Secretary of the State : Jerry Farrell CT State House : Kathryn Brown, Ken Nelson, John Searles, Malvi Lennon CT State Senate : Neil Nichols, David Pia, Len Suz...

Ray Hackett, the Norwich Bulletin’s editorial page editor , has lost patience with Denise Merrill, the Democratic Assistant Majority Leader in the state House of Representatives who is leaving her position to run for Secretary of State. “She came in last week,” Hackett wrote in a barbed editorial, “for an editorial board meeting for candidates in the Aug. 10 primary. I expected her to dance around or avoid any accountability for the state’s fiscal mess. I was flabbergasted by her unbridled arrogance — arrogance that is only surpassed by the depth of the debt — $3.5 billion — that she had a hand in creating.” Hackett was astonished when Merrill blamed the $3.5 billion state debt “she had a hand in creating” on George Bush – “I kid you not.” Trumpeting the Democratic Party line, Merrill claimed that Democratic lawmakers “’cut’ $8 billion over a two-year period from the state budget. But when we asked her where those cuts were made, her response was: ‘I don’t know.’” Two kickers mak...

The Republican Party nominee for Secretary of State Jerry Farrell has an enviable theatrical talent. The present Commissioner of Consumer Protection is captivating the on the stump, and on Saturday, July 24, he will be holding a “Shred State Spending” event for residents in the towns of Middletown, Durham, Middlefield, Portland and Cromwell, who are encouraged, according to a press release, “to drop off their home and office paper clutter including personal documents and meet Jerry. The campaign has hired Shred It, Inc. with headquarters in Cheshire to perform the shredding with its mobile services. “The event will be held in the parking lot of FUTURES, Inc. at 158 Broad Street at 8:30 am through 11:30 am. Set up for the event will begin at 7:15 am.” Other similar events in other parts of the state will follow. Virtually all Republicans running for office this year have professed a concern in their ads and campaign literature on the ruinous consequences of state debt. Connecticut,...

Blumenthal And The Abuse Of Ex Parte Attachments There is no rule on earth, Cardinal Henry Newman once said, to which there is not at least one exception. Ex parte attachments of assets may best be viewed as an exception to the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution. That amendment, in its procedural due process clause, secures the citizens of the United States in their property, which ordinarily cannot be seized by agents of the state without a hearing before a judge. The 14th amendment requires the state to ensure that no one is deprived of "life, liberty, or property" without a fair opportunity to affect the judgment or result. The exception is necessary because those accused of crimes – when found guilty – are called upon to surrender their assets as a part of their punishment, and an ex parte attachment prevents accused persons from disposing of their assets through fraudulent transfers or, in the case of drug kingpins, mobsters and career criminals, by using ...

Blumenthal and the Media It would be a considerable understatement to say that the relationship between Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Connecticut’s media is cordial. The great failing of the state’s media is that it seems to be unwilling -- or perhaps unable -- to mine below the surface of the attorney general’s all too frequent press releases. In a recent focus group finding , a matter of fierce controversy between Gov. Jodi Rell and her opponents, it was determined that Blumenthal was at least as popular if not more so than Rell, whose rating after a bruising budget battle with Democrats was 59%, low for the governor. Focus group participants said of Blumenthal, according to a report in the Journal Inquirer , that he was “a strong leader they would have faith in to lead them out of the budget deficit problem… One participant thought that Blumenthal was on television and ‘out there’ as much as the governor.” Connecticut’s media has a good deal to do with Blumenthal’s...

King Lear, dethroned by court intrigues, responds to his faithful daughter when threatened with imprisonment: “ No, no, no, no! Come on, let's go to prison. The two of us together will sing like birds in a cage. We will be good to each other. When you ask for my blessing, I'll get down on my knees and ask you to forgive me. That's how we'll live—we'll pray, we'll sing, we'll tell old stories, we'll laugh at pretentious courtiers, we'll listen to nasty court gossip, we'll find out who's losing and who's winning, who's in and who's out. We'll think about the mysteries of the universe as if we were God's spies. In prison we'll outlast hordes of rulers that will come and go as their fortunes change .” Winning is not always a blessing; losing is not always a curse. And Lady Fortune is sometimes a strumpet. Prior to the final tally this year, there was gossip galore. Bill Curry , who now writes a political column for the Har...

The Hartford Courant’s across the board endorsements of Democrat liberals this year begs the question: Are newspaper endorsements effective? First of all, it should be noted that in choosing to endorse all Democrats and no Republicans for U.S. congressional positions, the paper invites speculation that it is throwing babies out with the wash water. The Republicans against whom Courant editorial board members voted this year are all moderates, not the fire breathing conservatives that swarm past the Mason Dixon line. The Courant -- which tends to react to conservatives pretty much in the way the devil reacts to holy water – has somewhat plausibly supported moderate Republicans in the past, arguing that the vital center in American politics, the intersection where liberalism and conservativism meet and conspire to compromise, is worth preserving. By any rational accounting, Rep. Chris Shays, is a moderate Republican: He is the author and enabler in the House of the Shays-Meehan campaign ...

The good ship Chris Shays, captained by the besieged Republican congressional representative who this year is defending his seat against former Westport First Selectwoman Diane Farrell, ran aground when Shays said, in an address before a Jewish group, that the guards at Abu Grab were practicing a perverted form of sex rather than torture on their prisoners. Shays was immediately attacked by partisan bloggers. “What could he have been thinking?” was the general refrain. And soon the editorialists weighed in. It has been suggested in recent days that the failure to provide enemy combatants with habeas corpus protection is a form of severe deprivation, and Shays’ remark was taken by those in the United States who wish to wrap the torturers of Daniel Pearl in constitutional cellophane as, to say the least, intolerant. Can a distinction be made between the torture of Pearl, a journalist whose head was sawed off by enemy combatants – the event was videoed and aired on Arab television – and t...

Sen. Edward Kennedy came to Connecticut last week to give Ned Lamont, the netroot heartthrob, a leg up in his campaign against Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lamont is the Democrat nominee for the senate in Connecticut; in an odd twist of primary fate, Lieberman is the petitioning candidate. Shortly after Lamont pushed Lieberman off the cliff in a Democrat primary, many of Lieberman’s former comrades in the U.S. Senate – prominently in the Northeast, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Kennedy – threw him over in favor of the new kid on the block, arguing that good Democrats must support the nominee of their party. The Ned and Ted love fest at the Clifford House in Bridgeport provided several amusing moments. In one of his recent ads, Lamont claimed to be running against a politician who had “been in Congress too long,” but not quite as long as Kennedy. Lamont also promised to refrain from bringing home pork, unlike Kennedy, without whose efforts the Big Dig in Boston might not have been a spectacu...

If Dianne Farrell’s strategy is to tie President George Bush around Republican Rep. Chris Shays’ neck like an albatross, hoping that a distaste for Bush is transferable to Shays, it is a fair bet that this strategy will fail. It will not work because it has not worked. Shays has been careful to inoculate himself from the conservative virus in all his campaigns. Shays’ shtick is that he is, like Lowell Weicker before him, a maverick – his own man. Anti-war lynch mob bloggers have seen through that particular façade in the case of Lieberman, who has earned their displeasure by departing from far left orthodoxy – most especially on the war in Iraq. The progressives’ beef with Lieberman is that he has not driven enough nails into Bush’s coffin, proof positive, in their opinion, that he is a faux Democrat. What anti-Shays agitators ought to be asking is this: “What sort of a campaigner can defeat Shays,” and they should be willing to approach the question in cold blood. Conservatives, cham...

The average Democrat voter – Joe Sixpack as he is sometimes called – may be excused for his confusion this year. On the one hand, he has been asked by First Selectwoman of Westport Dianne Farrell to rally to her cause because her opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate, Chris Shays, is a war hawk; on the other hand, Farrell herself has endorsed the candidacy of current U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is -- a war hawk. "Joe is a longtime friend,” Farrell has said, “and he has endorsed me and my campaign in the past. We'll have to agree to disagree on the war . . . but we agree on so many other issues," women's privacy rights, the Family Leave Act and fair wages among them. Lieberman has come under fierce criticism from party activists for adopting a position on the Iraq war that seems to them supportive of President George Bush’s Mid-East policies, and yet Farrell has accepted an endorsement from the leper, hoping to escape the leprosy. Can she embrace the Lieberman with...