Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal backed Sen. Hillary Clinton for president, not his “good friend” U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. However, Blumenthal is backing Dodd as a Vice Presidential candidate in the Barack Obama administration, should Obama succeed in defeating likely Republican nominee for president Sen. John McCain. A reporter for ctnewsjunkie , Christine Stuart, caught up with Blumenthal at one of his hourly (only kidding) news conferences and put the question to him: Assuming Dodd vacated his position to run with Obama as Vice President, would Blumenthal be interested in occupying his seat in the U.S. Senate? “’Of course I have an interest in the senate seat.’ Blumenthal then explained that he doesn’t think the Countrywide mortgage issue that has dogged Dodd in recent weeks should be anything more than a ‘minute blip on any national candidate’s resume.”

“ It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable " – John Stuart Mill Gov. Jodi Rell this year conspired with the Democrat leadership in the legislature to shut down a promising Republican alternative budget. There’s something old and something new in all this. In times past, other Republican governors have joined the Democrat leadership and blissfully ignored objections coming from the loyal opposition. Former Governor John Rowland was notorious for beating up on the loyal opposition within his own party to bring in expensive Democrat crafted budgets. And former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, had been practicing the art of subtly and not so subtly undermining the efforts of his party ever since he emerged mewling from the political cri...

Even after the Rowland corruption scandal, life goes on. But sensitive noses have detected the odor of fish in the air, and an amendment to Senate Bill 956 seems to give off a radiant glow, like the proverbial mackerel in moonlight. Two writers at the Hartford Advocate – a paper not known for its conservative leanings; see Alan Bisport’s frequent eruptions on the moronic and possibly traitorous Bush II regime – have zeroed in on the legislation and found it wanting. The amendment, the brainchild of liberal state senators Edith Prague and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Andrew McDonald, is a gerrymandered piece of legislation, slipped surreptitiously into a bill extending compensation for prison workers to account for times when they travel to and from their jobs, and cunningly designed to benefit only one constituent – as well as a law firm that has contributed to the campaigns of both obliging legislators. The genesis of the bill’s subsection, signed into law by a somnambulant Gov. Jodi...