Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The story was titled “ Murphy ‘Country should be scared’ of Republican partisanship over Ukraine .” The story was an accurate review of U. S. Senator Chris Murphy’s appearance on Meet the Press early in October. Murphy was meeting the press to “push back” at “Republican critics of the impending House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine.” Murphy admonished, “This entire country should be scared that at a moment when we need patriots, what we are getting is blind partisan loyalty.” The interviewer, a cringingly sympathetic Chuck Todd, did not remind Murphy in his interview that, during a trip to Ukraine with Republican U.S.   Senator Ron Johnson, Murphy also had intervened in an on again off again Ukrainian investigation of the country’s natural gas producer, Burisma and, inescapably, Democrat candidate for president   Joe Biden’s roll in firing a prosecutor whose investigation of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, h...

Realistically, what is the possibility that President Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office before the next election? Impeachment is a two-step process. First there is an impeachment proceeding in the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by Democrats; then there is a trial in the U.S. Senate, presently controlled by Republicans. If the bill of impeachment is accepted by the House and the trial in the Senate is successful, the offender – in this case President Donald Trump – is removed from office, the only punishment allowed in an impeachment proceeding. Since the Senate is controlled by Republicans, the possibility that Trump will be removed from office before the next election is remote, so improbable that it ought not to be taken seriously. Pelosi’s “impeachment investigation,” announced before a transcript of a telephone conversation between Trump and newly elected President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky had been released to the public, is an effor...

Anyone who has ever gotten himself in trouble -- many of us from the age of 12 to 20, though perhaps not in trouble criminally -- knows that there comes a point in a richly deserved punishment when the agony, despair, and humiliation trails off into a healing repentance. Many of the great novelists -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky in “Crime and Punishment,” Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Victor Hugo in “Les Miserable” -- have written persuasively about that spiritual pivot point. Much more than most of us, Hartford Community Court Judge Raymond Norko has seen men swing, as from a hangman’s noose, between punishment and rehabilitation. The lower depths pass before him daily. That parade is a dispiriting experience, particularly when the level of criminal activity is such as to allow a restorative punishment that may -- just may -- set the foot of a potential hardened criminal on the road to a life in which crime plays no part. One of the great failings of jurisprudence in our time is that th...

Primaries are intra-party struggles. They answer the question: Who will represent Republicans and Democrats in the general election? In the past, questions of this kind used to be determined by party bosses in smoke filled back rooms. A John Bailey, the last Democrat Party boss here in Connecticut, used to gather together party regulars and decide, for instance, that everyone would back John F. Kennedy for president and Abe Ribicoff for governor. Applying a little pressure and buying off the more principled of the pols with a local project certain to gain them votes, all would emerge from the meeting in amicable agreement, and a party convention would put the gentlemen on the ticket. Everyone had a cigar, a shot of Jim Beam, and yet another putatively successful campaign was launched. This arrangement did not prove satisfactory to reformers. A concerted assault on the smoke filled back rooms ensued, after which primaries were instituted. Someone stuffed Bailey, put him in a political m...

Several years ago my brother Jim, bruised by the treatment he had received at the hands of a Hartford Insurance Company CEO, journeyed to Columbia, South Carolina in search of a job. Because he had been approaching retirement age, the company decided to toss Jim out of their plane with half a parachute. The Puff Adder CEO, having ruined the company, was trying to save some money, if not his skin, by reclaiming benefits awarded to his workers by earlier more successful CEOs; this involved firing (downsizing) people, usually males of a certain age, company men now close to retirement. Over the years – Jim is now safely retired and no longer within reach of lying, rapscallions who would not know how to run a lemonade stand, let also a multi-billion dollar business -- my brother writes me from Eden taunting e-mails like this: “Y’all, I see your property taxes are climbing up and up there. Our guys have just submitted a legislative plan to get rid of them.” And now, Jim tells me, quintessen...

Very likely the fullest if not the best write up on Rudy Giuliani so far.

Kevin Rennie a Hartford Courant moderate Republican highly praises the prospective Republican Party chairman, Rob Simmons, in his most recent column. "Simmons would be a high-profile chairman who could command attention and is conversant on important issues. In addition, Simmons is not afraid to take the fight to the Democrats… "Simmons has already met with the new chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the political organization of House Republicans. He talked about the "investment" the party needs to make in moderate Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest. The party can be shrilly conservative and stay in the minority, or it can stop emphasizing losing social issues and have a shot at winning the seats it needs. "If you regularly present a right-wing agenda, you isolate moderates…" “At the distance of 13 months before the presidential caucuses begin, Simmons thinks 2008 could be a good year for Connecticut Republicans. Two popular...