Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Hillare Belloc’s “Advice to the Rich” was lost on the Castro brothers: “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine, and remember – soon, you will die.” Fidel Castro, Cuba’s deathless tyrant, died full of years a  very rich man , his foreign bank account stuffed with other people’s money, though one would never guess it reading Jesse Jackson’s encomium.

Here in the United States, we supposed we had washed our hands of aristocratic pretensions after the American Revolution.  So packed with aristocrats was France prior to its own revolution that the sans culottes had to resort to the guillotine to rid the country of the pestilence. The absence of aristocrats following the French Terror paved the way for  Napoléon Bonaparte , which paved the way for a restoration of the monarchy and the consequent re-emergence of French aristocrats. The same road to power was traced in imperial Rome following the destruction of the Roman Republic. Though a bloodline aristocracy in the United States was never possible, George Washington and many of the founders feared the emergence of a political aristocracy. When Napoleon, First Council of France and later Emperor, heard Washington was to retire as President to return to Mount Vernon, thus refusing a permanent directorship, he said that, if Washington did this, he would be the gre...

Election nonsense behind him, Governor Dannel Malloy, the workaholic, is fully prepared to lead Connecticut’s ship of state over the shoals that lie ahead in his second term. He is quoted in one publication to this effect : “No one’s ever outworked me. So I can do more things and still get the job done because I love to work, always have.” Mr. Malloy has a genius for saying things that are quoted but not quotable. That is because, unlike Abraham Lincoln, he tends to speak off the cuff. Mr. Malloy suffers from dyslexia, a developmental reading disability that occurs when the brain does not properly recognize and process certain symbols. He has valiantly overcome his disability. Because Mr. Malloy has difficulty reading, one may not expect a Gettysburg Address from him anytime soon. Mr. Lincoln wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address: Ditto with his second inaugural address, which some presidential scholars consider his finest prose poem. Mr. Malloy’s dyslexia is no...

In the course of writing political columns, a bad habit I’ve been nurturing for more than 30 years, people have sometimes ask me, with a note of desperation in their voice, will things in Connecticut ever change? These people generally are either conservatives or libertarians and therefore immune to the usual political nonsense. The Democratic Party has been in charge of the state roughly since the Mesozoic Era. Will we ever sniff change in the air, they wonder? It’s a serious question: What will it take to shake people in Connecticut from their lethargy – to wake them up before the plane we’re all traveling in finally crashes into the mountain? We’re perilously close to that. Only a month ago, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) released its 12th annual survey of businesses in the state , and the news was bleak. The organization surveyed 377 in state companies and found that 82 percent had a negative or somewhat negative opinion of Connecticut as...

Chairman Mao Swallows Dodd It may be only a matter of time before the Chinese swallow Hollywood, and along with it lobbyist-in-chief Chris Dodd, according to a piece in the Financial Times : “A consortium led by Chinese media entrepreneur Bruno Wu is scouring Hollywood for film companies to acquire, in a sign of China’s growing interest in the US entertainment industry.” Malloy Makes Himself At Home In Davos “Economic and political elites,” otherwise known as snooty suicidal capitalists, are due to meet in Davos Switzerland for their usual shindig. This year progressive Democratic governor of Connecticut Dannel Malloy will be in the crowd. Klaus Schwab, host and founder of the annual World Economic Forum, sums up the tenor of the meeting, according to a report in Breitbart : "We have a general morality gap, we are over-leveraged, we have neglected to invest in the future, we have undermined social coherence, and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of f...

By Natalie Sirkin “The federal bureaucracies en masse are exogenous factors weighing on an economy that is taxed, regulated and coerced almost to death” -- Donald A. Benedetti The rationale for the food-safety act is food-contamination. Has there been any? Indeed there has. Examples are E. Coli and salmonella outbreaks in peanuts, eggs, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, spinach, and a million pounds recalled of sausage and salami. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 5,000 people die every year from food-contamination and 76,000 people are hospitalized. These problems come from large-scale industrial food production or industrial agriculture, not from the small farmers covered by the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010—but “one size fits all.” Safety is the rationale for the bill, fueled by competition to industrial agriculture from organic farmers whose business is growing rapidly. The Senate’s food safety bill, S.510 , passed easily last December 7 with...

The good news is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived home from her Chinese trip without having unduly upset Chinese leaders. The Chinese overlords are, after all, the custodians of much of the debt in the United States, which has increased precipitously after the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The bad news is no walls came tumbling down. Life in China for Christians is just as nasty, brutal and short as it was before the courageous secretary of state set foot in the country. The feeling among some Christians is that if Hillary were a delegate to Rome in the days of Nero, she would have been talking to the engaging emperor about the weather, or climate change, studiously ignoring the strange goings on in the coliseum, where Christians were being harassed by lions and bears. While Hillary was rattling her tin cut before the Chinese overloards, President Barack Obama was promising to present to the Democrat controlled US Congress a budget that cuts in half the nation...