Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal thinks Donald Trump Jr. may have colluded with Russian operatives to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency. Other leading Democrats have asserted that President Donald Trump is a traitor. Blumenthal believes that recent emails may demonstrate " bombshell evidence of criminal intent " on the part of Trump Jr. But then, Blumenthal believes lots of things. There was a time when he believed he had served as a marine in Vietnam, but he didn’t. In the absence of a crime, there can be no criminal intent – just unfulfilled intent. There is little question that Trump Jr. and other Trump operatives intended to receive and possibly make use of promised data dirt damaging to Hillary Clinton when the Trump amateur opposition research team met with a Russian lawyer who failed to deliver the dirt.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post is not among the ardent defenders of prospective Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The good news, Mr. Cillizza writes in “The Fix,” is that Mrs. Clinton will not be wearing an orange jumpsuit anytime soon: “The FBI has recommended that no charges be brought following its investigation of the former Secretary of State's private email server.” “Here’s the bad news,” Mr. Cillizza added, “Just about everything else.  It’s hard to read Comey’s statement  as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She  did  send and receive classified emails. The setup  did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team  did  delete emails as personal that contained professional inform...

Russia’s Doors, Putin’s Time There are, and always have been, three doors to Russia, every one of which has been jealously guarded first by Russian Czars and in the Communist era by Russian Czars posing as proletarian workers such as Josef Stalin. There is a Western point of access (Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states), a Middle Eastern point of access (Afghanistan, Iran) and a Southern point of access (China). Access doors open both ways and, depending upon one’s point of view, President of Russia Vladimir Putin has now either opened or shut all the doors. It would be paradoxical, though never-the-less true, to say he has shut the doors by opening them. Mr. Putin was featured as Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2007. That year, China’s leader Hu Jintao was featured as a runner up.

Why Lose Iraq Now? “The thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that have gone to stabilizing Iraq,” is in danger of being compromised, according to Marisa Sullivan, deputy director of the Institute for the Study of War, writing in The Hill . Charles Krauthammer On Lamduckery Life as a politician does not end when the politician decides to throw in the towel. Sen. Chris Dodd has months to go before he rests; so, for that matter does retiring Gov. Jodi Rell. Dodd and Rell are both lame ducks. But should anyone suppose lame ducks are dead ducks, Charles Krauthammer offers a warning . The prospect of re-election is a restraint. Remove the restraint, and you have left but two internal restraints: honor and shame. When the lame duck congress returns after the upcoming elections, Krauthammer writes, “The only thing holding the Democrats back would be shame, a Washington commodity in chronically short supply. To pass in a lame-duck session major legislation so ...

“ You can go to live in Turkey but you can’t become a Turk. You can’t go to live in Japan and become Japanese. But . . . anyone from any corner of the world can come to America and be an American.” -- Ronald Reagan Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and to our creed of liberty and democracy .” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt In 1776, we declared ourselves independent and committed ourselves to certain principles and ideals. Our ideals, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, implemented in the Constitution, go back to the Magna Carta, common law, Athenian democracy, and the Hebrew covenant. What does it mean to be an American? Opportunity , reward for hard work, respect for talent, entrepreneurship, leader in productivity, respect for education; the chance to get ahead, to name a few characteristics. What makes us a nation is our heritage, but we ar...

Political commentary here in Connecticut, the land of steady liberalism, is not dangerous or witty or even humorous; it is dull and repetitious, which is one of the reasons newspapers are foundering. The Harford Courant, which bills itself as the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, has fallen on hard times. In fact, it has now fallen into the unforgiving clutches of Sam Zell , a real estate mogul who seems to believe that newspapers should be more like blog sites and should operate on four rather than six cylinders. The Courant is in the process of being downsized or, in the lingo of its new owner, “right-sized.” Apparently right-sizing is a synonym for “made profitable.” We all know how real estate moguls make profits. As the press goes, so goes the state. Connecticut too is foundering, flopping around on the sand like a beached minnow, gasping for breath. The narrative in newspaper land could be more exciting, but the ideological mix on most editorial pages...