Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In any tousle between business and government, business usually has the last word, and more often than not the word is, “We’re outta here.” Sikorsky Aircraft, a Connecticut company of long standing, has initiated two rounds of job cuts. Early in 2010, Sikorsky President Jeff Pino, “under marching orders to raise the division's profits,” according to a news story , boasted to stock analysts, “We've nearly tripled the amount of direct production labor hours from 2006 to 2009. And for the first time in the history of our company, more than half of our hours are outside of Connecticut. We're very proud of that because outside of Connecticut, as I told you last year, by definition is low-cost sourcing." Having met his goal of a 10 percent profit margin in 2010, Pino presently is aiming for 14 percent by 2014. Playing its strategy close to its vests, company officials declined to share details of the cost saving cuts with Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delega...

According to a story in Investment.com , the $5 monthly fee bank of America intends to impose to recover losses incurred by the Dodd-Frank bill probably should be named the Dodd-Frank fee. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act put a limit on fees banks could collect from sellers when their customers make debit card purchases — cutting 44 cent fees to 21 cents. “Throwing their weight around at the height of the banking crisis, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut vowed to stick it to banks. They blamed them for the mess to cover up the fact that they forced banks to lend to favored constituencies who could not repay. “The two Democrats pushed through the much-vaunted Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed and touted as one of the signature accomplishments of his presidency. “That act, which included a micromanaging amendment on fees, carried a $2.9 billion implementat...

The first rule is this: If you are going to put yourself through the trouble of admission, no qualifiers will be allowed. You cannot say, “Yes, it is true that I allowed my bachelor’s pad in Washington D.C. to be used by an acquaintance as a bordello servicing both gay and straight clients, but… A “but” is a backdoor exit to your national humiliation and will not escape the notice of the usually soporific mainstream media, which tends to be more forgiving of so called “sins of the flesh” committed by Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, an out of the closet gay guy who, several years ago, provided one of his friends the opportunity to frolic with his clients in his Washington D.C. bordello. Mr. Frank was exposed by the frothing right wing media. The exposure, however, put no serious dent in the congressman’s bumper; and, after a few months, Mr. Frank was permitted to get along with his congressional business, joining former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, in impo...

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...

The estimate of the state of the state elections by Paul Bass, a writer for The New Haven Independent, is fairly accurate: “Connecticut went true blue—bluer than ever. Malloy will have become the first Democrat to win the governor’s office since 1986. Democrat Richard Blumenthal captured an open U.S. Senate seat the party had seemed until only recently in danger of losing. And all five of the state’s U.S. House seats went to Democrats again—even though the 4th and 5th District appeared at times heading to turn red. Democrats also swept the under ticket constitutional offices.” Departing Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz has called the gubernatorial election in favor of Dan Malloy. Two days after the election, the Associated Press, citing an 8,424 vote lead by Foley with all but 1.5 percent of precincts counted, withdrew its call of Malloy as the winner. Later in the day, the AP announced that it had missed figure in New Haven. Republicans may contest Bysiewicz’s finding in court. ...

Paul Bass’ estimate of the state of the state election is fairly accurate: “Connecticut went true blue—bluer than ever. Malloy will have become the first Democrat to win the governor’s office since 1986. Democrat Richard Blumenthal captured an open U.S. Senate seat the party had seemed until only recently in danger of losing. And all five of the state’s U.S. House seats went to Democrats again—even though the 4th and 5th District appeared at times heading to turn red. Democrats also swept the under ticket constitutional offices.” While Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz has called the gubernatorial election in favor of Dan Malloy, Republicans may contest her finding in court. For someone who had been found by Connecticut’s Supreme Court to have lacked the requisite court experience to serve as attorney general, Bysiewicz certainly has been spending an inordinate amount of time in court. Nationally, Republicans appear to have swept the boards: They won back the U.S. House of Repr...

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...

President Barack Obama is due in Connecticut on September 16th in Stamford to raise money for U.S. Senate candidate-State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, and Mr. Blumenthal’s office has just released a media report that the attorney general-U.S. Senate candidate will show up for the event. Mr. Blumenthal’s statement is straightforward enough. Over a twenty year period, citizens of the state have come to expect straight-talk from Attorney General Blumenthal: “I look forward to welcoming the President of the United States to Connecticut. It is an honor to have his support and his assistance. His visit will make a difference for us, energizing our supporters and helping us raise the resources we need against my opponent who is spending an unprecedented $50 million on her campaign.” A carefully crafted caveat was delivered by Blumenthal spokesman Marla Romash : “Dick has always said when he agrees with the President he’ll stand with him and when he doesn’t he won’t … The bottom line ...

Democratic leaders in the U.S. House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Caucus Chairman John Larson, have sent out to their troops a memo that outlines the general defense House members will be using during the election season to deflect impertinent charges from their Republicans opponents. The memo is about two pages long, considerably less than the 2,319 page Dodd-Frank Bill that reorganizes American enterprise or the 1,990 page Health Care Bill that, for the first time in U.S. history, compels young American citizens to purchase a product, health insurance, they may not want or need. Given the brevity of the letter, Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. congressional delegation might even read it. Most congresspersons, including the issuers of the memo, neglected to read either the Health Care or the Dodd-Frank bill in it’s entirety, and Pelosi famously quipped about one or the other or both of them that they would have to be passed so that House members who voted for them would know what’s in th...

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...

Rob Simmons, though he withdrew as an active candidate in Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race, has – not inadvertently – left his name on the ballot, a ploy considered provocative by Linda McMahon and her supporters. McMahon is the Republican Party primary nominee for the position. Simmons has his supporters, some of whom consider McMahon’s campaign against sometime Attorney General Richard Blumenthal – news on the street is that the attorney general’s appearances at the office are increasingly infrequent – a long shot. McMahon has whittled down Blumenthal’s early lead, but she has not been able to shake from the race either Peter Schiff or Simmons. Unlike Schiff, Simmons has one foot in and one foot out of the race. He has pronounced his formal challenge dead, though he will leave his name on the ballot through the primary on August 10. There are two very different kinds of Simmons supporters. Some stalwarts who supported Simmons over McMahon and Schiff have continued to urge Simmo...

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...

Thursday’s Hartford Courant shows a picture of US Sen. Chris Dodd above the fold looking for all the world like a man who has seen the beginning of the end, and over his head there is a bothersome headline in three quarter inch caps proclaiming DODD’S FLIP-FLOP. What to make of all this? A senator has flip-flopped? Oh my! What is the country coming to? The headline, the picture and the story follow a stunning interview with Wolf Blitzer in which Wolf pins Dodd’s ears back, slams him to the floor and dances on his chest? But Wolf Blitzer is a jerk; always was, always will be. Some will say he is doing his job. Possibly -- if it is the job of a jackal to lunge into the side of a wounded wilderbeast. Jackal? Wilderbeast? What the…. There should be something in us that recoils whenever we see jackals advancing on a corpse. Dodd, who all his political life had shown some mastery of the legislative sausage machine, got caught up in it this time. The organ has swallowed the organ master. The...

The one question reporters and commentators seem not to want to touch – for pretty much the same reason most of us stay clear of downed power lines – is this: When the chief political writer for a prominent newspaper leaves the paper and is hired for pay by a politician either in office or running for office, is the person’s future contributions to the paper tainted in any way by small-“c” corruption? After all, the returning scrivener is in a perfect position to provide journalistic favors for favored political parties, the downed power line. The question hangs over the head of Michele Jacklin, who has written a Democrat paint by the numbers opinion piece for the Hartford Courant , “Rell Evokes Regan, But Counting on Obamabucks.” In a Manichean world in which the universe is divided between the forces of good and evil, there are good ideas, those proposed by President Barack Obama, and bad ideas, the operative ideas of the Reagan era: small government, manageable taxes and a vigorous ...

A distressed Harry Reid, the Democrat US Senate Majority Leader, opened a vein in the well of the senate a few days ago. Pity and concern for the auto workers' union poured out. The bloodletting on behalf of the Big 3 auto makers was, as it turned out, an entirely useless gesture, because soon to be ex-President George Bush a day later hinted he would give the auto workers everything they wanted – and then some. Congressmen and others allied with the auto workers' union wanted a no strings attached bridge loan of $14 billion to tide the Big 3 over until a new administration, possibly more accommodating, was installed in Washington. More responsible legislators wanted either a) the Big 3 to declare bankruptcy so that the companies could trim the fat from their paunches, reorganize their business practices and emerge from the process leaner and more prosperous, or b) to assign a “car czar” to oversee the process or reorganization before bail out loans were made. The bridge loan ...

Let’s get the sex out of the way right off the bat: Here is the now notorious pic of Hillary Clinton being groped by President Elect Barack Obama ’s communication director . Hillary’s response was amusing; she said she was happy that the offender was taking an interest in the Secretary of State’s office. Bill, one suspects, was not amused, but it’s wonderful that Hillary’s bruising primary and general election campaign has not dented her sense of humor. She’s gonna need it. OJ Simpson got tossed in the caboodle for attempting to recover some sports memorabilia, a fitting end, some thought, to Simpson’s eternal dance on the rim of a volcano. State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was in the news multiple times this week; we forget what brought him before the cameras, possibly random speculation concerning his run for governor or for senator – in the event the star-crossed Sen. Chris Dodd finds himself in the calaboose along with OJ. “In the midst of the worst economic situation s...

Here on the far left, there are two kinds of bad guys: good bad guys and bad bad guys. Jesse James is an example of a good bad guy. Like US Rep. Barney Frank and US Sen. Chris Dodd, he had developed over a period of years the good bad habit of shaking down the Big Boys – large banks, trains full of wealthy commuters -- and distributing their ill gotten gains among the oppressed, some of whom were his friends. Billy the Kid was a good bad guy. He shot up a lot of bullies, some of them sheriffs, was a true white knight toward the ladies and, a Byronic romantic, allied himself with what he thought was the honorable side in a violent range war. Bit of bad luck there. Al Capone was a good bad guy: He rid Chicago of lots of bad bad guys, mostly by shooting them. He was anti-prohibitionist at a time when even FDR’s first Vice President, John Nance Garner, was tippling in the White House to protest temperance leagues. Like Charlie Rangle of New York, he was indifferent about paying taxes. In ...

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...

As we approach Thermador, the party conventions, things, as Alice in Wonderland once observed, become curiouser and curiouser. In a Freudian slip, Democrat Party chairman Howard Dean called the Republican Party the “white party.” Mr. Dean is white. Democrat Party Central has opened on former Governor of Massachussetts Mitt Romney an aggressive assault reminiscent of the attack launched by former Russian President and string puller Vladimer Putin against Georgia, a U.S. ally in the Iraq war that in the near past and may again, assuming Putin has his way, become a prisoner in chains of Moscow. “He is the most intellectually inconsistent politician in the history of politics. I have never seen anyone so completely without any commitment to any particular principle and so willing to say whatever he thinks will help him win the next election," said Rep. Barney Frank of Mr. Romney. In a story that includes the above quote, Mr. Lee Davidson of Deseret news reminds us that Rep. Frank “h...