Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The publication in the New Haven Register of one of my columns produced a letter of protest on 4/12/17 from climate scientist Michael Mann. Both the original column and Mann’s response may be found in Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State here “ The Curse Of Victimology .” The gravamen of the column and blog, put in a single sentence, is this: Scientific matters in dispute should not, and perhaps cannot, be decided by courts. The blog and column also touches on victimology. Corollary: Courts should not be used by “scientists” as a thumbscrew to silence legitimate scientific inquiry.

Even Greece at the height of its powers had a “gadfly.” The Greek term was used by Plato to signify the rather uneasy relationship between Socrates and the political scene in Athens. Plato described Socrates as the goad of Athens, a city he compared to a dimwitted horse. Athens, as we all know, had the last word in its dispute between the city’s most famous gadfly and city fathers who could not abide what Socrates himself called the sting of truth: “If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” Socrates considered his role as that of a public critic whose purpose it was “to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth." Athens convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city and forced hemlock upon him as a remedy to quiet his fearless outspoken tongue. Not to put Senator Len Suzio in quite the same category as Socrates or even Jeremiah, the irritating prophet who compared Egypt to “very fair heifer” but note...

UConn is raising its tuition. Is anyone surprised? The surprise, if any, might be checked at the door after reading the latest edition of Ted Mann’s magnum opus covering the first year of Connecticut’s first Democratic governor in twenty years. Both Governor Dannel Malloy and the crowd of Malloyalists surrounding him are highly ambitious. They believe previous governors have been treading water. The state now has a progressive reformist at the helm who wants to “reinvent – his word – the state of Connecticut. As is the case with most modern progressives, education is a political palliative – good for what ails you; when you run out of options, boost education. Reformation, naturally, is costly, but politically popular. In the hands of Mr. Malloy and the Democratic legislature, any reform of education is likely to advance the interests of teachers at the expense of taxpayers. Jonathan Pelto, himself an ardent liberal, reminds us that Mr. Malloy pointedly did not extend his “Share...

Ted Mann has written for the Day of New London a multipart opus on the Malloy administration that purports to be an inside look at the “malloyalists,” Mann’s term for the Brights surrounding Connecticut’s first Democratic governor in 20 years. The difficulty with all such accounts is that embedded journalists tend to be stage managed by the principal actors in the drama. And the malloyalists are energetic stage managers. George Bernard Shaw was no admirer of autobiographies; they were all self-serving, carefully edited to show the hero of the piece in the best light. To the extent that a putatively objective piece of political drama approaches autobiography, it will be practically useless. A biography of Napoleon written by his butler might be useful, Shaw thought. But autobiographies – not so much. An account of the Napoleonic years written by Madam DeRemusat, Lady in Waiting to the Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s cast-off wife, is useful to historians precisely because the lady, s...

Sometimes the whale swallows Jonah, and sometimes Jonah swallows the whale. No one can be sure who has swallowed whom until Ted Mann’s magnum opus, a three week series on Governor Dannel Malloy, is published by the Hearst papers. In a teaser, the Connecticut Post writes: “Reporter Ted Mann spent a year inside the Malloy administration's inner councils, a year of extraordinary access to the governor and the men and women who tried to change the very nature of government in Connecticut. Read his riveting three-week series, beginning Sunday, Dec. 4, in the Hearst Connecticut Newspapers.”

Some people in Connecticut, not a few of whom would be pleased to see their friends and acquaintances occupy Governor Jodi Rell's position, already have decided, perhaps prematurely, that it would be perfectly proper to haul the governor off to jail without observing the usual niceties. “First the verdict,” says the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Wonderland, “then the trial.” Most reasonable people would agree that the Queen of Hearts got it backwards. Very quick out of the shoot was Kevin Rennie , a Hartford Courant columnist who first congratulated Ted Mann of the New London Day for having performed a public service “by reporting on documents related to a polling deal dressed up as public policy that smelled so bad it put Snow White in a foul mood.” Snow White is former Democratic House Speaker Jim Amman’s sobriquet for the governor. Then Rennie plunged the sword in up to the hilt: “Even John Rowland, who went to prison for corruption, did not engage in the dirty enterprise t...

Talking a bit off page to a reporter for The Day , Democrat Rep. Ted Moukawsher of Groton blurted out the truth. “The tax package,” he said, “… sort of just appeared, and I don't think we were invested in it. It was like budgeting by press conference. It was whatever someone decided was a counter to the governor's (latest) press conference and whatever sort of proposal she had. The leaders didn't really consult with membership at the Senate or the House level, and then when it didn't work out the way they expected it to, they never came back to us and said, 'Well, how about this?' It was really kind of weird. They never consulted us and then they abandoned us afterward. We went from being this mighty majority to being this feeble, fractured, kind-of disorganized group.” The blustery Speaker of the House Jim Amann of course was singing a different tune. “They must be ... brain-dead,” Amann said concerning disgruntled members of his party in an interview with Ted...