Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Apparently, snowballs do have a chance of not melting in the fiery furnace. A Hartford paper reported over the weekend that all seven members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have “offered sharp criticism after newspapers revealed the administration’s sweeping government surveillance programs, which monitor cellphone and internet traffic in the name of national security.” U.S. Representative Jim Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, thought the monitoring program was too intense and overbroad: “I feel like the government is breaking all kinds of precedent here in increasing the intensity of its surveillance. There's a balance to be struck and generally it feels like we have lost that balance in favor of over-intrusive investigation and [data] collection." Having opposed covert national security operations during the administration of George Bush, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy had little choice but to object to the expansion of the program und...

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act ” -- George Orwell George Orwell, like Jonathan Swift before him, is one of those large writers who simply straddle ideological categories. He was fortunate enough – or unfortunate enough, depending on one’s point of view – to have been born in what the ancient Chinese call “interesting times,” the bloody and totalitarian 20th century. The revolutionist speaking truth to power often appears among us with a rope braided by the reigning powers draped about his neck. He steps towards gallows with a wan smile on his face.

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.

The important thing to remember about Watergate – other than the notorious cover-up, the stonewalling, the raft of lies told to the media, the imperious claims of “executive privilege” – is that nobody died there. Some of the principal presidential miscreants responsible for Watergate were rounded up, paraded before various congressional committees and suitably harassed by the media. Some of them sang to avoid a term in jail, others went to the hoosegow. A grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” – President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson -- in March of 1974, and Mr. Nixon was secretly named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Nixon, Time Magazine said, was undergoing “daily Hell and very little trust.” The fires of Hell were stoked and the trust disappeared altogether when a “smoking gun” tape was produced showing Mr. Nixon approving a plan to cover...

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...

The decisions made by two key political players in Connecticut, Gov. Jodi Rell and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, not to defend their seats in the upcoming election gives the lie to assertions often made by opponents of term limits that they would diminish the intellectual substance of the office vacated. After Rell announced she would not run again for governor last November, a number of Republicans and Democrats rush to fill the vacuum, leaving in their wake other positions to be occupied. Wounded by allegations that his relationship to the businesses he was regulating as head of the powerful banking committee was too cozy, Dodd adroitly stepped aside. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal then leapt, some said too precipitously, into the breech, and when Blumenthal announced he was permanently separating himself from an attorney general position he had occupied for more than two decades, secretary of state Susan Bysiewicz announced her availability, some said too precipitously, leaving h...

Whoa! Mr. Gregg Levine of FireDogLake has launched several rhetorical missiles at the highly partisan Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for Chris Dodd’s seat in the U.S. Senate: “Those who know Dick tell me that he is the quintessential finger-in-the-wind politician. Hell, just listening to this short interview on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show , I got the image of some classic Hollywood film caricature of the blowhard, entrenched, do nothing, say anything gasbag. So, what struck me while listening was which way this weathervane thought the wind was blowing.” Mr. Levine is disappointed both with Blumenthal’s hawkish view on President Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan and the attorney general’s public disagreement with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder concerning the proposed trial of terrorist Kahlid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court. Mr. Levine quotes an offending passage from Blumenthal’s interview: “I am determined to chart my own course in Washing...

Everyone very likely will recall the Moody-Rell-Arts And Tourism incident, then Gov. Jodi Rell’s Teapot Dome scandal. Lisa Moody, Rell’s chief aide, ordered that an address list of art and tourism organizations be put on a disk, which she then shared with Rell’s re-election campaign committee. It was assumed at the time, by very nearly everyone who had access to a computer keyboard, that the campaign committee would use the names to furnish funds for “Snow White.” This mini-Teapot Dome affair was stopped in its tracks by a vigilant press. The incident delighted anti-Rellites in both the opposition party and the media. Then Speaker of the House Jim Amann strummed the chord of corruption until the strings on his rhetorical harp broke, without once asking why Bill DiBella had not followed Ben Andrews to jail. And the media began humming “Schadenfreude, My Schadenfreude” in its sleep. The moral epigones guessed Moody was far more corrupt than U.S. Rep. John Murtha, the powerful Chai...

New York has turned its bloody thumbs down to the prospect of a civil trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in the city he terrorized several years ago. Attorney General Eric Holder, with a wink and a nod from President Barack Obama, wanted to try KSM in New York, but the city fathers nixed the deal, partially on grounds of traffic congestion. It seemed as if the New York venue was set, but late objections were raised by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Charles Schumer, among other Big Apple politicians, and the president, or perhaps Holder, relented and began to look around for venues on the United States mainland less congested than New York. There were, of course, muted political reasons involved. Elections are looming in New York, as elsewhere in the country, and Obama’s notion that terrorists should be tried in civil rather than military courts is not quite as popular in the former home of the Twin Towers as it is with Holder or, for that matter, Mayor of New Haven John DeSte...

"Please don't allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man," Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich said, and with that he announced his appointment of former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris as his choice to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s senatorial seat. Some people, among them the man whose seat Burris is to fill, were not amused. Said the president-elect, "Roland Burris is a good man and a fine public servant, but the Senate Democrats made it clear weeks ago that they cannot accept an appointment made by a governor who is accused of selling this very Senate seat. I agree with their decision, and it is extremely disappointing that Governor Blagojevich has chosen to ignore it. I believe the best resolution would be for the Governor to resign his office and allow a lawful and appropriate process of succession to take place. While Governor Blagojevich is entitled to his day in court, the people of Illinois are entitled to a functioni...

At the time president Bill Clinton pardoned a wealthy contributor to his campaigns, Mark Rich, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder was the number 2 man in the Justice Department. Clinton had fired all the US attorneys connected with the previous administration and appointed new faces in the department. At the time of the pardon, Rich was the largest tax defrauder in the United States. In sworn testimoney before Congress, Holder claimed he had “only a passing familiarity" with the case against Rich. The Washington Times is now reporting: “Correspondence with the Justice Department and testimony secured by Congress from other witnesses show that 15 months before the pardon, Mr. Holder met privately with Mr. Rich's attorney and received a presentation about what Mr. Rich's defense believed were flaws in the government's case. "Mr. Holder, then serving as the No. 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department, later took the rare step of contacting federal prosecut...

In 1983, a gang of criminals trained in Cuba under the enlightened administration of Fidel Castro, pictured to the left schmoozing with a well known US senator and sometime later the governor of Connecticut, knocked over a Wells Fargo office in West Hartford and absconded to Cuba with $7.2 million. Following a 1986 visit to Cuba, Weicker told The Village Voice that Castro was "a man of enormous intellect and idealism. Castro has been known to snow people but he didn't snow me. We flew all over the place and I saw what he has done with my own eyes. By Caribbean standards, it's Park Avenue." It is not known whether during his brief visit Weicker asked Castro to turn over Wells Fargo robbers to his custody. All were members of a Puerto Rican terrorist gang called Los Macheteros, a group affiliated with the Armed Forces of National Liberation linked to 130 bombings, a few murders and about a dozen robberies. According to the FBI, Los Macheteros, among other radical Indep...