Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

While President Barack Obama was doubling down on his discredited narrative concerning the attack by terrorists on the Benghazi consulate, in the course of which Mr. Obama’s personal minister – that is what an ambassador is; the personal minister of the president – was murdered, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had targeted Tea Party groups for what may turn out to be punitive audits.

It should surprise no one that Governor Dannel Malloy is on the road again selling the usual product. This time, because elections are looming, he will be followed by Republican candidates for governor anxious to peddle their own prescriptions for what ails us. Returning from a Middletown town hall meeting, though some in the audience objected to the format , Mr. Malloy sent around a sermon to the Hartford Courant . He began by noting that “ Every budget is about setting priorities. That's true for every family in Connecticut, especially during tough economic times. It is equally true for state government.” Indeed, are we to suppose that President Barack Obama has set no priorities because he had presented no budget to Congress during his first term?

The most important question to be decided when Gov. Dannel Malloy presents his budget to the legislature in February is: How much? What will the distribution of spending and tax cuts be like? Mr. Malloy has said often enough, during and after his campaign, that the budget nut – a $3.5 million deficit in each of the next three years -- will be hard to crack. Both spending cuts, generally referred to by Democrats as “painful,” and tax increases, possibly less painful for a Democratic caucus that under the leadership of Speaker of the House Chris Donovan and President of the Senate Don Williams has tended to trim its politics to union interests, are in the offing. Republicans in the legislature certainly will offer a stiff resistance to tax increases, which are regarded in GOP quarters and many places in the world outside Connecticut as business disincentives. But Mr. Malloy, Mr. Donovan and Mr. Williams may well ask in this regard: How many battalions do Republicans have? In Connecti...

It seems as if Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has, in his dotage, become an anti-Castroite. "The Cuban model,” Castro said recently, “doesn't even work for us anymore,” a sentiment that easily could have gotten the speaker a 20 year sentence in one of Castro’s prisons had he been anyone other than Castro. George Will offers an analysis of the 84 year-old Marxist and one of his enablers, Jean Paul Sartre . Will ends his column by calling for an end to the boycott of Cuba: “Today, U.S. policy of isolating Cuba by means of economic embargoes and travel restrictions serves two Castro goals: It provides an alibi for Cuba's social conditions and it insulates Cuba from some of the political and cultural forces that brought down communism in Eastern Europe. The 11th president, Barack Obama, who was born more than two years after Castro seized power, might want to rethink this policy, now that even Castro is having second thoughts about fundamentals.” All very well and good, b...

It is fascinating that the First Amendment is of enormous concern today as it was to our Founding Fathers. It was not originally in the Constitution, which nearly prevented the Constitution from being ratified. Madison opposed adding it to the Constitution but in the end had to give way. To secure ratification, he had to promise that once the Constitution was ratified, it would be added, and so it was. The Supreme Court on January 21 invalidated laws that made certain kinds of political speech by corporations a crime. Critics fear corporate corruption or a diminution of democracy or both. Thus: "What a terrible day for American democracy. . . . [A] deeply divided Supreme Court has essentially given corporations free rein to drown out the voices of the American people, rejecting the secret democratic principle of 'one person, one vote.'"—Senator Dodd "[W]e’re being told that an extremely vituperative expression of disdain for a candidate for president in Ame...

Afghanistan is a man trap. It’s worse than a quagmire. George Will , a conservative columnist, has called for a withdrawal of American troops from the country.

In a recent column, George Will calls Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger “the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had.” The flight of workers and entrepreneurial capital from California to other less tax punishing states has been in process for many years. More people have moved out rather than into California for the last four years. Connecticut also has been losing population to the South for as many years, though no one yet has bestowed upon Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell the same unflattering remark, possibly because her opponents in the Democrat dominated state legislature have been complicit in the out migration. Connecticut's total out migration from July 1990 to July 1997 was approximately 186,000. Connecticut and Rhode Island were the Nation’s only States to have a smaller population in 1994 than in 1993. There are other points of similarity between Connecticut and California. According to Will, “If, since 1990, state spending increases h...

Political commentary here in Connecticut, the land of steady liberalism, is not dangerous or witty or even humorous; it is dull and repetitious, which is one of the reasons newspapers are foundering. The Harford Courant, which bills itself as the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, has fallen on hard times. In fact, it has now fallen into the unforgiving clutches of Sam Zell , a real estate mogul who seems to believe that newspapers should be more like blog sites and should operate on four rather than six cylinders. The Courant is in the process of being downsized or, in the lingo of its new owner, “right-sized.” Apparently right-sizing is a synonym for “made profitable.” We all know how real estate moguls make profits. As the press goes, so goes the state. Connecticut too is foundering, flopping around on the sand like a beached minnow, gasping for breath. The narrative in newspaper land could be more exciting, but the ideological mix on most editorial pages...

At some time in the future, it is not impossible to imagine a fresh faced, third year college student, perhaps studying rhetoric – if only they will bring it back as a course of study in colleges – laboring over a thesis that has as its center piece the recent so called “debate” between Democrat presidential candidates senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The paper might be called “A comparative Study in Wiggles.” Concerning her “sniper under fire” remarks, Clinton said, “On a couple of occasions in the past week, I said some things I knew weren’t the case. I’m embarrassed by it. I’ve apologized for it.” Not too much wiggle room there: “I said some things I knew weren’t the case” means, to put it in the vernacular, “I lied,” or more tenderly, to borrow a phrase from Huck Finn talking about Mark Twain, I told “a stretcher.” Here is Obama on his “bitter” statement: “I think there’s no doubt that I can see how people were offended. It’s not the first time that I’ve made … a statemen...

The jury sitting on the meaning of the Iowa and New Hampshire canvasses is now in. The Journal Inquirer Following Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire win, the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer unburdened himself in the form of a “Memo to Barack: This will not be easy.” The editorial makes the following points: • Barack has had to fight for what he is and has, while Hillary has had both her senate seat and her senate re-election “handed to her.” • Hillary was President Bill Clinton’s “consort.” The words “wife” or “First Lady” apparently are not in the editor’s lexicon. • The Clintons were not civil to the newly elected George Bush. The editorial page editor, who has been around for awhile, was uncomfortable with early Polls after Iowa showing Barack defeating Hillary by 10 percentage points. • “You mess with the Clinton’s at your peril.” • “The Clintons see the presidency as their due - their property. Theirs. Their whole campaign has been: Restore the monarchy.” • The Clinton’...