Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Around this time of year, prior to the elections, numberless political commentators become Republicans – if only in spirit – the better to advise leading Republicans in the Grand Old Party what they should think and say and do about the many problems besetting Connecticut. Their daddies voted for Goldwater in 1964, they tell us. Their mommies subscribed to National Review in the glory days of Reagan. They remember with some affection William Buckley’s attempt to snatch the New York mayoralty from the jaws of John Lindsey and Abe Beame. Asked by a New York Times reporter what he would do if he actually won the election, Mr. Buckley replied he would hang a net on the first floor of the New York Times building to catch the falling bodies. Virtually all of them used to vote Republican when the Republican Party in Connecticut was sagacious enough to put up moderates such as Chris Shays for office, hardly noticing that in the interim all the moderate Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Con...

Robert Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut's Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of The Hartford Courant's Place Board of Contributors. His columns appear frequently on the paper’s op-ed pages. The Liberal Arts at UConn are, as elsewhere in academia, very liberal. Mr. Thorson is certain he knows how the rest of us will know when gas prices are “high enough.” The attentive reader will notice that Mr. Thorson did not write “too high” but used the formulation “high enough.” That is because Mr. Thorson ardently believes that gas prices in Connecticut, now cresting above $4 and heading towards $5, are not as high as they should be. The price of gas will be high enough, Mr. Thorson advised in a column published on May 5, 2011 , when: “… drive-through lanes at fast-food restaurants and doughnut shops would not be lined with mostly oversized vehicles carrying mostly oversized people toward food energy. “…the carpool lanes on local interstate...

Democrats in Connecticut are more efficient than Republicans in utilizing human resources. During the last non-presidential election, national Republicans on the right appeared to have caught up with the left. It was owing in large part to the most animated wing of the Republican Party – patriot tea party people, but libertarians and conservatives as well -– that Republicans were able to bring into the U.S. Congress and state houses across the nation a rich harvest. In Connecticut, the harvest was meager -- and bitter. Republicans sent two new senators and 15 House members to the General Assembly, but they lost the governorship by the thinnest of margins, in part because of a stubborn resistance among status quo Republicans to the party’s most active element. Perhaps members of the town committees and the Republican Party Central Committee thought they could harness the storm they saw brewing elsewhere in the nation without also making room in the breast of the party for the lightn...

At about the same time that Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo had declared his state “functionally bankrupt" and warned public-employee unions not to expect any pay hikes over the next three years, Governor Dannel Malloy showed up in New York at the annual gathering of the Regional Plan Association -- a research and planning advocacy group focused on New Jersey, New York and Connecticut – to lament the want of investment in infrastructure. Mr. Malloy, whose approach to state deficits is the obverse of Mr. Cuomo’s, chastised "governor after governor, legislature after legislature," for their short-sided indifference to infrastructure needs and confessed he was “more than happy, even as I decry what's happening in our nation, to put in my bid to get any dollars Florida or New Jersey or any other state wants to send back to Washington." On the same day Mr. Malloy was dilating on “Malloy’s Way” in New York, some 750 concerned citizens in Connecticut were gather...

A study led by James Fowler , according to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, shows that liberalism is determined by social activity during adolescence + DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene. The researchers determined that people "with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults." A pill to cure or enhance liberalism may be on the way.

There was nothing ambiguous in the statement released by the six retired Episcopal bishops concerning a decision made by Connecticut Bishop Andrew Smith. After the consecration of gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the Anglican Church throughout the world was riven. Here in Connecticut, six priests from the conservative Anglican American council, differing with Smith who supported Robinson’s consecration, petitioned to associate their congregations with a bishop that was, in their view, more orthodox. Smith’s response was Cromwellian: He delivered to the priests a notice that their removal was imminent – unless they reconsidered and chose to remain affiliated with him, a course of conduct their consciences forbade. Smith’s letter of removal provoked an ardent response from six retired bishops. “Bereft of the faith which alone establishes true unity in the Church,” the bishops wrote, “(Smith) now attempts to impose unity by uncanonical coercion against six faithful clergy in his...