Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Eventually, necessary information trickles up to Connecticut’s left of center media. On April 23, days after Governor Ned Lamont announced a date positive for the partial re-opening of Connecticut’s shuttered economy in June, CTMirror ran a story titled “ Coronavirus is breaking the food supply chain .” But Coronavirus is doing no such thing. The supply chain has been broken by the very first, intentional national recession. And the national recession has been caused by businesses shuttered by politicians who have settled upon the shuttering of businesses as a way to contain Coronavirus.

We all remember where we were when Walter Cronkite brought us the news. I had just finished playing ball and took a shower in the gym at Danbury State Teachers College, now Western Connecticut University. The weather that day, November 22, 1963, was fairly mild, around 50 degrees. Cars were parked in the lot, students crowded around some of them. The girls were weeping, the boys somber, a look of fury and shame on their faces. “What’s the matter?” I asked “Kennedy has been shot,” one of the girls said, weeping bitterly.

Fasano and Looney “The numbers add up. I’m here to solve problems — not to study problems. ... Let’s get this thing started in an honest and comprehensive way.”   -- Governor Lamont to Connecticut's media. Democrats may have been thinking that among the many blessings Connecticut’s overtaxed citizens should thank  God for this past Thanksgiving was – tolls. We are told that Governor Ned Lamont and “legislators” – read, Democrat legislators -- had decided, during a closed conference two days before Thanksgiving, to present a trucks only tolls “compromise” bill to the General Assembly before Christmas. And a Merry Christmas to you too. This may seem, in Yogi Berra’s memorable phrase, like “deja vu all over again” to folks gathered around the Thanksgiving table this year, many of whom have arrived in Connecticut from less tax predatory states. Connecticut’s state and local tax burden is 12.6%, second in the nation behind New York, according to a 2019 rep...

Chris Powell This sort of thing should happen more often. Early in June, someone asked Chris Powell, a fierce defender of open government, to address the annual general meeting of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information. Powell is one of those newsmen with a sense of humor, rare these days, who really does believe that the distribution of knowledge is indispensable to a flourishing democracy. And public intelligence involves unimpeded access to the organs of government, an access routinely threatened by hegemonic, one-party government.

I’d like to thank Bob Hurd for inviting me here so that we might have a chat together. I’d also like to congratulate Dan Champagne for wining a slot in the General Assembly. He will be stepping into state Senator Tony Guglielmo large shoes, but there is no doubt he will be able to fashion his own foot print. Welcome to the viper pit, Dan. You may want to stomp on a rumor that’s been floating around. It’s being said in some quarters that you ran for the state Senate because you missed butting heads with Mike Winkler. Michael is at a safe remove from Dan over in the House, but legislators sometimes bump into each other in the elevators and corridors of the General Assembly, not to mention its intersectional bathrooms.

Remarks by Chris Powell Vernon Republican Town Committee American Legion Post 14 Vernon, Connecticut Saturday, February 16, 2019 For the first two decades of my adult life I was a Democrat. I became a Republican back around 1991, if for peculiar reasons that may be best explained by a scene in the old Marx Brothers movie “Horse Feathers.” Maybe you remember it. Groucho has been appointed president of Huxley College and announces that the problem with Huxley is that it has been neglecting football for education. So he appoints himself coach of the football team in time to coach it for a game against Huxley’s big rival, Darwin College. There’s a very confusing play on the field and Groucho ends up in the Darwin huddle. Groucho’s son runs over to him and says, “Dad, Dad -- You’re coaching the wrong team.” Groucho replies: “I know that but our team wouldn’t listen to me.”

Themis Klarides, the leader of a much reduced Republican contingent in the Connecticut House of Representatives, is fair-minded, but not the sort of woman who will suffer fools – and, more importantly, political frauds – gladly. She may allow two strikes, but three strikes and you’re out. Very early on, Klarites drew a bead on the Malloy administration, which sought to marginalize Republican influence over political affairs by loudly shutting the door on Republicans such as Klarides. A shrewd judge of character, she carefully catalogued the quills Governor Dannel Malloy had been throwing about. Malloy had described himself as a bristly porcupine, a self-designation that stuck and struck because it was inconveniently true.   As a Republican leader in the House, Klarides did not suffer gladly Malloy’s lordly indifference. It was either Malloy’s way, Republican leader in the Senate Len Fasano noted early in Malloy’s first term, or the highway. But then, what is the po...

Ned Lamont, who won a Democrat primary against sitting Democrat U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in 2006, has entered the gubernatorial contest. There is little reason to believe that Lamont will be able to effect an ideological course correction within the Democrat Party. Lamont will in part be self-financing his campaign. In a preceding election, Lamont self-funded his $12.7 million campaign, having pledged not to accept money from lobbyists. The temptation on the Democrat side to choose a candidate who is not, shall we say, poor will be almost irresistible. The Republican Party fell prey to self-financing candidates several times in the last few elections, and the results were disappointing. Lamont claims he has been “actively involved in this state” and points to his service on the board of selectman and finance board in Greenwich, a background in practical politics much less fulsome than that of Governor Dannel Malloy.

Connecticut, as everyone who has been leaving it knows, is in a bad way. How bad is it? The state is still recovering from a recession that had ended elsewhere in the nation in June 2009. For eight years, we have been hobbling along and are now the only state in the nation that has yet to recover from the recession – which is, as everyone who has been leaving the state knows, a slowdown in business activity. There are two very good reasons why Connecticut has been so laggard: 1) Governor Dannel Malloy’s first tax increase, the largest in state history, and 2) Governor Malloy’s second tax increase, the second largest in state history. But then, we were forewarned.  Lowell Weicker did caution us during his campaign for governor that raising taxes in a recession would be like throwing gas on a fire, only a few months before he instituted his income tax, over the heated objections of a Republican Party rump in the General Assembly. When Weicker was met by the largest rally...

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” -- Voltaire Chris Powell would blush to hear someone say it, but his retirement from the Journal Inquirer in January will leave a gaping hole in Connecticut journalism. Fortunately, Powell’s voice will still ring out in columns. The press notice announcing his retirement was placed amusingly on the right side of the paper’s obituary page.

Connecticut has had three “heroic” governors within the past four gubernatorial election cycles. Governor Lowell Weicker was the first. His legacy is inseparable from his income tax, and it was his income tax. In a rare moment of humor, Weicker suggested the tax should be named after his Lieutenant Governor, Eunice Groark, who broke a tie in the State Senate, assuring the passage of the income tax bill through the General Assembly sausage making process. Groark declined the honor.

Everyone in Hollywood wants to be a libertine -- like the Marquis de Sade, who also was an amateur revolutionist -- or perhaps they wish to emulate ex-Presidents John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Kennedy was a tolerable Catholic because Catholic dogma did not live loudly in him, and the husband of Hillary Clinton was permitted indiscretions with cigars and interns because he was a hale fellow well met with a photographic memory, whereas ordinary politicians rely on Google and an expensive staff of brash know-it-alls. To be an artist, after all, is to be in perpetual revolt against the usual pieties, conveniently listed in the Decalogue. Marriage among the Hollywood elite, for instance, is considered but a temporary interruption of multiple liaisons, and adultery, sex outside the boundaries of marriage -- “You shall not commit adultery” -- is rampant.  Andy Rooney, whom everyone will admit was a nice guy, had eight wives, the same as Henry VIII, none of them executed fortunate...

In most fairy tales, the way out of the dark forest is the way in -- in reverse. Sometimes the hero of the story will take care when entering the bewildering forest to lay out the way back by leaving behind markers, beans strewn on the ground, so he will not forget the entrance and exit routes. The moral of all these tales is the same: if you’ve make a mistake, reverse your errors. It is a lesson politicians in Connecticut might take to heart. With a little courage and the virtue of foresight, the lucidity of remembrance brought to bear on current difficulties, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. In a recent piece in National Review , senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Stephen Eide gives us a summary view of Connecticut’s weaknesses. The top marginal income-tax rate in Connecticut now stands at 6.99 percent, Eide writes, “almost two points higher than the 5.1 percent in neighboring Massachusetts. The income tax has generated a flood of new revenues — $126 bill...

In Dan Carter, who is challenging Dick Blumenthal for a seat in the U.S. Senate, the State Republican Party may have found its “happy warrior,” a title the Democratic Party once bestowed on Hubert Humphrey. Looks and presence in politics are not everything, but they are not nothing. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, whether he is debating or attending a garage sale, manages to look like the Old Man of the Mountain before the slide. Stiff, foreboding, resolute, unbudgeable – most especially on the matter of partial birth abortion, parental notification and the selling of baby parts, all issues that place him very far from his Connecticut constituents. And he is preachy, the very image of a Harvard-Yale educated aggressive Attorney General on the hunt for delinquent business owners, thought abortion in its grosser forms is the one profitable business in the United States that Blumenthal adamantly refuses to regulate.

When President Barack Obama arrived in Cuba on Palm Sunday along with his retinue, so large that they displaced twelve journalism students from Central Connecticut University who were dispatched to other quarters fifty miles from Havana to make room for Mr. Obama, Raul Castro, still kicking at 85 years, did not greet the President at the airport. It should be noted before passing on  that Communist Cuba under the Castro brothers was never a hospitable place for foreign journalists. A Cuban acquaintance tells me that the Castro brothers pulled a Queen Elizabeth on the lame duck President: Some mountains will not go to Muhammad. When Mr. Obama visits England later this year, Queen Elizabeth will not attend his arrival in London; instead, the President and his traveling retinue will be transported to Windsor Castle, where he will be received right royally. Monarchs, even when they are decorative rather than functional, retain the privileges of monarchy. But the Castro brot...

After paying court to Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget address, a eupeptic Republican noted that he sounded like Ronald Reagan. Another, unused to taking leaps of faith, said if only Mr. Malloy had done at the beginning of his term in office what he had said in his current budget address, we wouldn’t be in this fix. General Electric’s leave-taking may have served as a splash of cold water in Mr. Malloy’s face. Aetna, it appears, may be looking for an exit. Sikorsky has been sold, and other insurance companies, in part reacting to a failing Obamacare, are commingling in an effort to cut costs. More than a quarter of the total number of 893,851 active professional physicians reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation have now declined to participate in the new plans under the Affordable Care Act, a number of states have declined to set up exchanges, and UnitedHealth Group , the nation's largest health insurer, having lost more than $500 million on exchange plans, warned l...

Some people – the Kennedys are among them – consider rules and regulations merely as obstacles to be surmounted on the path to political glory. It is a well-worn path often trodden by the great and near great. In Connecticut, the path offers special immunities from criticism for incumbent Democrats. Gore Vidal , who left us more than two years ago, memorably described the Kennedy clan descending on Washington D.C. after John Kennedy had been sworn into office as president. He said it was like watching the Mafia descend on a small, northern Italian town, and his was a friendly voice. First Lady Jackie Kennedy and Mr. Vidal shared a stepfather, the stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss.

Do debates determine elections? On occasion, they do. Those defending the proposition that debates are determinative point to the Nixon-Kennedy contest of 1960. And of course the Lincoln-Douglas debates still are held up in the history books as demonstrating the political utility of vigorous debates. It is sometimes forgotten by those who urge the importance of debates that Stephen Douglas, not Abraham Lincoln, emerged the victor in their Senate contest. The Lincoln-Douglas debates later were assembled into a book by Lincoln. Widely distributed, the book helped him to win the presidential election of 1860. The format of the Lincoln-Douglas debates – a 60 minute opening statement from the first candidate, followed by an alternative 90 minute statement from the second candidate, followed by a 30 minute rejoinder  from the first candidate  -- became, with some adjustments, the template for most future political debates. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were moderated by L...

President John Kennedy formulated the phrase “a rising tide lifts all the boats.” In an address to the New York Economic Club in 1963 Mr. Kennedy spelled out what he meant by the phrase. In a time of sluggish growth, rising taxes and improvident spending, Mr. Kennedy proposed to reduce marginal taxation, a measure that would, he was convinced, spur business activity and INCREASE tax revenue. Following the implementation of the Kennedy tax reforms, the tide manifestly rose. After Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was able to use the increased revenue occasioned by Mr. Kennedy’s reforms to water his own garden, the Johnson “Great Society” programs. By imposing upon Connecticut the largest tax increase in state history, Governor Dannel Malloy lowered all the boats – with predictable results. Connecticut’s economy, whipped by a malingering recession, has moved forward at a snail’s pace. The national recession ended three years ago, according to the...

This campaign year Governor Dannel Malloy had hoped to present voters with a tax rebate drawn from a budget surplus. The rebate, a slender $55 per person, disappeared because the budget surplus disappeared. On Tuesday, the bad news filtered down from the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis; state income tax receipts for the current budget ending June 30 will fall $357 million short of what had been budgeted. The crystal ball gazers in the Malloy administration affected surprise; the governor was disappointed. He wanted everyone to know, however, that in the event Connecticut produces a future surplus, some of the over-taxation would be remitted to taxpayers by Mr. Malloy, assuming the governor is returned to office in the next election cycle. A number of economists, the usual culprits, were trotted out to explain who killed Cock Robin.