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...

“Life goes on without’ya…” – Just a Gigolo Answers to the larger Watergate questions – What did the President know, and when did he know it? – must await the final report of Special Prosecutor Robert Muller. In the meantime, the dreaded mainstream media is always able, if willing, to provide convincing answers to smaller but significant questions, not the least of which concerns the traditional relationship between the Director of the FBI, who may be dismissed for cause, and the President – any President – of the United States. The investigatory functions of the FBI, everyone will agree, are independent of the president in this sense:  while the president has the constitutional power and authority to dismiss the FBI Director, this option by no means guarantees that a specific investigation involving the president will be dropped. Indeed, during his recently concluded congressional interrogation former FBI Director James Comey asserted publicly, for the first time under o...

Q: President Pro Tem of the State House of Representatives Martin Looney appeared recently on “Face the State” with Dennis House and seemed – though in politics, appearances may be deceiving – to have repudiated progressivism… A: I don’t think he’s ready to give up on progressivism just yet. You cannot have strongman government without progressivism. He did point out a major, perhaps fatal, failing. Q: You quoted what he said in one of your columns.

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker – now retired from public affairs and living the life in Old Lyme  – once again has stepped forward on the public stage to tell  Republicans in Connecticut what they must do to save themselves from the destruction wrought upon their party by Lowell Weicker, among others. The first thing they must do is to abandon the ideas of former President Ronald Reagan and embrace the ideas of Mr. Weicker. And of course if Republicans in his overtaxed and over-regulated tottering state saw fit to nominate for public office people just like Mr. Weicker, that would be a cherry on the state’s cake. And, oh yes – let us not forget – Mr. Weicker and his enablers on the Hartford Courant’s editorial board want the Connecticut GOP to open its primary doors to unaffiliateds.

A few weeks ago, Governor Dannel Malloy said that people in Connecticut would have to wait until May to discover whether he would run again as governor. He then surprised everyone by tossing his hat into the ring during a recent bond hearing meeting. In fact, the campaign had begun much earlier; the cake was baked even though it lacked the cherry on top. Before his official declaration, Mr. Malloy had said he was much too busy running the state to engage prematurely in a political campaign. He told one reporter that it would be inopportune for him to engage in a political campaign before Republican gubernatorial aspirants had an opportunity to beat up on each other? The pretense was a great tease, strategically necessary but still an obvious imposture. The Republican gubernatorial field has now been fully fleshed out. Martha Dean, who previously had engaged in campaigns for the Attorney General, was a little late, but she got in before the door closed.

M en are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions -- Niccolò Machiavelli     A bit of advice for Democrats in Connecticut: First of all, stop worrying. You outnumber opposition Republicans by a margin of two to one, and there is no viable third party on the horizon, just a few Tea Party groups vowing to end the public careers of middle-of-the-road Republicans.

On “social issues,” as defined by Democrats in the Northeast, here is no “there” there within the Republican Party’s ancient regime. Northeast Republicans have only one election card on their table – the economy, stupid. There ain’t no more.  Slothful Northeast Republican Parties have permitted Democrats to define all the social issues; for them, such subjects as abortion on demand, gay marriage and the abolition of the death penalty are strictly verboten.  Among gentlemen Republican moderates in Connecticut, discretion on social issues has been the better part of valor for more than two decades, which may help to explain why there are no more social issue averse Republicans in New England.

Now that Republicans have been cut out of the budget loop by Governor Dannel Malloy and progressive leaders in the General Assembly, future budgets will be assembled by Mr. Malloy, tax hungry progressives in the state legislature, SEBAC, a coalition of union leaders authorized to negotiate contracts with the state, and economists at the tax gobbling University of Connecticut (UConn). According to a story that ran in CTNewsJunkie , “Economists at the University of Connecticut recommended Thursday looking at instituting a statewide property tax to close more than $1 billion funding gap in the state’s education cost sharing formula.” In the UConn report, contributing economist Stan McMillen notes that Connecticut has underfunded its statutorily required share of educational funding to municipalities for the last 5 years by about $1.09 billion. The UConn report weighs a few gap filling options, including a sales tax increase to 8.3 percent and a boost in the income tax of 13.8 perc...

The split between Connecticut’s two major parties is most dramatic on the question of spending. Governor Dannel Malloy took a pledge early in his administration, after he had imposed upon the state the largest tax increase in its history, reminiscent of a pledge made by former President H.W. Bush: No new tax increases. Internal pressures were such during the Bush administration that the president reneged on his pledge. The pressures are always there, especially in tax prone Connecticut. It was the fashion during the administration of Republican Maverick turned Independent Lowell Weicker to regard deficits as revenue rather than spending problems; and, of course, the solution to a revenue problem is to boost revenue.

Following the slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook, there was some muttering very early on concerning a possible connection between mass murderer Adam Lanza, his penchant for playing violent video games and the killing of 20 students and 6 faculty members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Very quickly, public attention became focused, almost fetishistically, on the kinds of weapons Mr. Lanza brought to the school – two semi-automatic pistols, a semi-automatic Bushmaster long rifle and a shotgun that Mr. Lanza left in the trunk of the car he apparently stole from his mother, whom he murdered before leaving for the school.

The question before the house now that Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan has been bested in a Democratic primary by former state Representative Elizabeth Esty is: Will Mr. Donovan join a majority of Democrats in Connecticut and support the people’s choice for the U.S. Congress in the 5 th District? Mr. Donovan was defeated in the recently concluded Democratic primary by a large margin: Esty's final vote total was 12,678 to Donovan's 9,212 and Roberti's 6,583. In the general election now upon us, Republicans have chosen state Senator Andrew Roraback to lead a Republican Party effort to reclaim the 5 th District; Nancy Johnson, considered a moderate Republican, held the seat for nearly a quarter of a century before she was ousted by current U.S. Representative Chris Murphy. Within the Republican Party, moderate politicians have all but disappeared everywhere within New England. Former U.S. Rep Chris Shays, defeated in his primary contest for the U.S. Senate b...

The death penalty in Connecticut, after several previous attempts, was abolished today by the Senate in a 20-16 vote. The House is certain to pass the abolition bill, and Governor Dannel Malloy has pledged to sign it into law. Senator Edith Prague, who voted in favor of abolition before she voted against it, this time voted to abolish the death penalty prospectively. A prospective rather than a retrospective abolition of the death penalty, it is said by proponents of abolition, will leave untouched the death sentences of eleven inmates awaiting execution on death row,. After an emotional meeting with Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor of a home invasion Cheshire in which two now convicted murderers took the lives of his wife and two daughters, Mrs. Prague famously said of one of the two murderers convicted and sentenced to death, “They should bypass the trial and take that second animal and hang him by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.” But emotional res...

The ConnCAN media release is below. Click on the actual report (see link below) to find your own town's standings. ConnCAN relies on a methodology much more accurate than that used by Connecticut State Board of Education number crunchers. The chart that records reporting differences between the state and the more accurate figures  is itself an eye opener. ConnCAN, here and elsewhere, shows itself to be the primary educational watchdog in the state. __________________________________ Massive racial gaps persist; substantial economic impact on state NEW HAVEN—Today, ConnCAN released a new issue brief, “Connecticut Graduation Rates.” Using data from the Class of 2008 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), the brief analyzes graduation rates by race and gender, in Connecticut and nationally. The brief also discusses the economic and social impact of not graduating from high school prepared for college and careers. Click here to read the "Connecticut Gradu...

The idea behind the “Comeback America Initiative” (CAI) and “No Labels” (NL) is commendable. Social and political problems, to the extent they are not considerably worsened by partisan bickering, cannot rightly be characterized as Republican or Democratic, which may mean that men of good will can come together to settle seemingly intractable issues while leaving at home their partisan slings and arrows. Such is the theory. In the real world, politicians, in whose hands lay the fate of nations, are partisans, and solutions to problems are various. For instance, the Republican Party solution to debt control is to cut back on spending, while Democrats prefer to increase taxes. A “moderate” solution to debt build-up would seem to involve a bit of both. This calculus works fine so long as the solution admits of compromise. The wise King Solomon reminds us that in the matter of splitting babies in half, all compromise solutions would be both immoderate and murderous. At the Hartford C...

The late Bill Buckley announced the mission of National Review Magazine , a publication he started and still the best conservative nursery bed of ideas, when he pledged that NR would stand “athwart history, yelling STOP, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Then as now, much of the nation – and nearly all of Connecticut – was a bastion of a fervent but mischievous liberalism. So, at National Review, there was much yelling of STOP over the years. Mr. Buckley, surely the most prolific conservative in the nation, lived for many years in Stamford, Connecticut in house nestled in a quiet cove but painted shocking pink. When his wife Pat, every inch Bill’s competitor in wit, was asked “Why pink?” she responded – “to attract the sailors.” Although not always the case, Connecticut’s congressional delegation is, some people will have noticed, now entirely made up of liberals. Present U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy styles himself a progress...

Robert Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut's Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of The Hartford Courant's Place Board of Contributors. His columns appear frequently on the paper’s op-ed pages. The Liberal Arts at UConn are, as elsewhere in academia, very liberal. Mr. Thorson is certain he knows how the rest of us will know when gas prices are “high enough.” The attentive reader will notice that Mr. Thorson did not write “too high” but used the formulation “high enough.” That is because Mr. Thorson ardently believes that gas prices in Connecticut, now cresting above $4 and heading towards $5, are not as high as they should be. The price of gas will be high enough, Mr. Thorson advised in a column published on May 5, 2011 , when: “… drive-through lanes at fast-food restaurants and doughnut shops would not be lined with mostly oversized vehicles carrying mostly oversized people toward food energy. “…the carpool lanes on local interstate...

The banner headline in the Hartford Courant read “ Budget: It’s A Deal .” And an accompanying photo showed Governor Dannel Malloy pressing the flesh of various Democrats whose votes were crucial in passing the Democratic Tax Plan. President of the Senate Don Williams was mildly applauding, an enigmatic Mount Rushmore smile playing upon his face. Sen. Edith Prague, the most obliging senator state union leaders ever bought, was half out of the picture, also applauding. Mr. Malloy was pitched forward, grasping the hand of Rep. Susan Johnson, eager to launch Connecticut forward on a path of prosperity, gratefully accepting plaudits from Democrats in the legislature who had helped him set in budget stone their preferred Tax Plan. Significantly, the second half of Mr. Malloy’s budget, a Savings Plan that includes the “shared sacrifice” Mr. Malloy has demanded from state workers, is still in process of being negotiated. The cost savings part of Mr. Malloy’s budget has, so far, been writte...

Former President Lyndon Johnson, who was also a shaker and mover in the U.S. Senate, once said of former President Gerald Ford, his colleague in the Senate, that he was so dumb “he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” Johnson acknowledged that Mr. Ford was “a nice fellow,” though he did have a bad habit of banging into things, but Mr. Ford, Mr. Johnson said, “spent too much time playing football without a helmet.” None of this political campaign roughage was intended as a compliment, but Mr. Johnson operated at a time when such personal attacks were considered de rigueur. Mr. Johnson admired folk who could do more than one thing at a time, possibly an acknowledgement that problems faced by senators and presidents are multifaceted and must be solved in a variety of ways by bringing to bear against them a variety of means. Consider public education. It is still possible, by a variety of means, to snatch it from the rubble. Public education is one of those federal-state-m...

By Natalie Sirkin It was originally feared that the tea parties might turn into a third party, but that has not happened, at least not yet. Not a third party, they present no threat the Republican Party. With luck, they may turn the Republican Party into a major party; the Republican Party may turn the Tea Party into a ghost. So far, they have helped, garnering 63 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate (two more in doubt) and a huge 680 in local legislatures, giving the Republicans the advantage in the next election by gerrymandering their states into voting districts. They supported 116 candidates, including Marco Rubio (won by 19 points), Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul, Dan Coats, Ron Johnson and Pat Toomey, who won. They backed some who lost, including Carl Paladino in N.Y., Buck in Colorado, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Where did they come from? Commentators have not found their intellectual leaders. It is because the tea partiers are not in Wash...

One of the shrewdest commentators of the American scene is British transplant, now an American citizen, Christopher Hitchens , whose sole blind spot is religion. Hitchens is a militant atheist. Here is Hitch on the Republican field: “Only one of these men has any poetry about him. John McCain, the white-haired old lion in winter, embarking on his last hurrah, quixotically indifferent to money or polls, can still bring a lump to the throat. Stubbornly loyal to his comrades in uniform, adamant for victory in Iraq, he commands a certain respect of the kind that professional image-builders can only dream of. This may not turn out to be the year for old lions, but it’s nice to know, amid all the moisture and bogus emotion, that the country can still produce them.” And on the Clintons: “The first-time voters started to gravitate to Obama in ever-bigger droves, as did a surprising percentage of the women. This was simply not the time or the place for a politician to be appearing cynical or of...