Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Ned Lamont There are both advantages and disadvantages to chief executives elected to office from outside the political box. One of the greatest disadvantages relates to political navigation. Asked about Governor Ned Lamont’s first year in office, Republican leader in the State Senate Len Fasano said, “It’s a lack of understanding in that building that has been an impediment to the governor closing the deal” on transportation. “I think the business principles and brains are of value, but they are nullified if you can’t navigate the building.” On the matter of transportation, Lamont’s two pilot fishes in the General Assembly are President of the State Senate Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz. The Democrat majority in the General Assembly is headed by Looney, a fixture in the General Assembly for 26 years, and Aresimowicz, a union employee fearful of fouling his own nest.

  I can’t imagine how you can think philosophy and wine are similar—except in this one respect, that philosophers sell their learning as shopkeepers their wares; and most of them dilute it, too, and defraud customers  — Lucian, “The Sale Of Philosophers” Governor Ned Lamont has two serious problems. The first is his inexperience in Connecticut politics, which makes him the plaything of lean and hungry Democrat leaders who have a wealth of experience in Connecticut politics. And the second is  Red Jahncke . “First, it was diversion. Now it’s ‘interception,’” Jahncke writes in the  Connecticut Post . His article should have been titled “What a wicked web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

A Self-Interview February 2017  Q: I’ve heard you say on Jim Vicevich’s radio program that progressivism as we’ve known it during the past few years of the Obama administration may be a spent bullet? A: Yes and no. Q: Give us the “yes” first. A: Barack Obama is a spent bullet. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, Obama might have had a brief afterlife. That did not happen; instead, the country turned, pretty resolutely and in anguish, to Donald Trump, the horse of a different color. The left continues to show its disappointment. Anarchists join a protest march at Berkley and succeed in storming a Starbucks; Trump’s cabinet nominations are delayed; and then there is that tar-bush speech by Elizabeth Warren in the course of which she quoted the late Edward Kennedy on U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, recently appointed Trump’s attorney general. Quoting Kennedy, Warren said ,  "Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Ame...

U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly has shut down a criminal Grand Jury investigation into questionable election funding by Connecticut’s Democratic Party, according to stories in multiple Connecticut papers.  Democrats, one must suppose, are breathing a huge sigh of relief. Grand Jury investigations are always fraught with danger because they are Star Chamber proceedings in which attorneys generally are able to persuade jurors to support charges filed against defendants who are not permitted defense representation. The old joke is that a halfway capable U.S. Attorney would be able in a grand jury proceeding to convict a grapefruit of jaywalking. Apart from a brief announcement that the grand jury had been shut down, Ms. Daly made herself unavailable for questioning. “A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Deidre M. Daly,”  a Courant report read , “would not comment.” The “no comment” means that answers to all the important questions will be buried with the decision not to pro...

Q: What do you think of the Donald Trump Presidential campaign so far? You haven’t said much about it in Connecticut Commentary, just two meager posts. A: Connecticut Commentary is devoted to Connecticut politics. The Trump campaign is hugely successful. It will have been the third successful Presidential campaign we’ve seen in the last decade. The first two were campaigns run by President Barack Obama. In fact, some argue that the lame-duck President is STILL campaigning: He just can’t stop himself; success pulls him into the void. Mr. Trump may be the first Twitter President . When the Borgias in the 15 th  and 16th centuries wanted to rid themselves of a pestiferous political opponent, they spiked his drink with poison, or they arranged to have brown-shirts meet him in the street to induce a change of mind with clubs and swords. American politicians needn’t go to all that trouble -- they have Twitter. Mr. Trump is a fabulous Twitterer. Here is Mr. Trump on the inoffen...

The deficit is back. Like an aging coquette, it appears and disappears around corners, smiling fetchingly at us: Here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day. It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after Governor Dannel Malloy, the seven members of  Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation, members of the all-Democratic State Constitutional Offices and Democrat legislators who dominate the General Assembly were returned to office. Faced with an “unexpected” state deficit, Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy's Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, a thunderclap that caught the notice of some papers. Mr. Barnes may have been mistaken by some, if only for a moment, for Jonathan Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s Health Care initiative. Mr. Gruber is on record as having said in various venues that Ob...

Formal endorsements may not mean very much in the modern political theater, which tends to rely on political hype produced by paid assassins, Twitter feeds and political Facebook sites, but this one might prove to be the exception that proves the rule. Reticent former Governor Jodi Rell has fulsomely endorsed Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley. “For far too long,” Mrs. Rell wrote , “Connecticut has been under one-party rule — not the balanced two-party system our founders intended. Governor Malloy, with the support of the Democrat-controlled legislature, enacted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history — a tax increase that has acted like a brake on the economy.

Coolidge Henry Mencken, who scorched most American presidents in his writings, lowered the temperature a bit when he wrote about President Calvin Coolidge: “Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver [Woodrow Wilson] and followed by two more [Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt]. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.” Mencken was mostly right about Mr. Coolidge: There were no thrills while he reigned because he attended diligently and persistently to the sometimes quiet but always necessary and indispensable tasks of the presidential office.  “Never go out to meet trouble,” Coolidge advised. “If you just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you. ”While a very good public speaker, Mr. Coolidge was the o...

Searching for the real Saint Nicholas presents the usual problems. Historians in the age of the saints were not interested in removing certain doubtful accretions from their hagiographic accounts. It is very difficult, if not impossible, at this remove to separate the historical wheat from the chaff in the legends of old Saint Nick; and doing so would be inadvisable – because legends also affect history; in fact, the legend may have a more profound effect on events than what we moderns call historical facts. It does not help that the legend and hagiography of Saint Nicholas of Myra (4 th century) is in some measure intermingled with the life of Nicholas of Pharroa, monk of Sion and Bishop of Pinara (6 th century). Church records in the 6 th century were more complete than those of earlier centuries because the Christian church only began to flourish after a long period of severe persecution had ended. Nicholas of Myra (in present day Turkey) is a saint of the persecuted ch...

Henry Mencken, every good journalist’s journalist, was a prolific writer. Asked if he ever got tired cranking out newspaper stories and commentary, he said -- never. During his whole journalistic output, Mr. Mencken said, he felt like a little boy with two stomachs in a candy store. Many of his writings were devoted to Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, which he hugely enjoyed as a buffoonish spectacle. Of Mencken and conventions, Murray Rothbard wrote:

The loser in a  political dispute is always willing to negotiate with the winner, if a possible detente will restore some of the loss. To the chicken in the mouth of the fox, compromise is an enticing proposition. The fox, who has the chicken in his jaws, naturally will be negotiating from “a position of strength,” as the diplomatists say, and so would in any negotiation be loath to surrender an advantage that has been conceded to him in a power struggle. Mr. Murphy, in a discussion with theeditorial board of the New Haven Register , has identified himself as a progressive, ticking off some of the identifying marks of progressivism : “I don’t think being a strong Democrat is mutually exclusive with being someone who cares about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle,” Murphy said. “I am a progressive when it comes to my views on the war and when it comes to my views on the environment and health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in a strong envir...

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class. They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem. Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer. George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president.   Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, n...

Andree in Malta “It’s not what you known that counts. It’s not even who you know that counts. It’s what you got on who you know that counts.” -- Sicilian saying It may be possible that there is a Sicilian crouching in the soul of every journalist worth his ink. My recommendation for people who travel is to allow for a bit of serendipity in their trip. Malta, for Andree and me, was the serendipitous part of our travels to Italy and beyond. Why, it may be asked, Malta? Because of Mary from Malta, of course. We met MFM while living in Bethel Connecticut some years ago, when the world was young and Europe was not on the point of economic collapse. Mary and her husband lived next door, and Andrée and she struck up a friendship that revolved around Malta, a mystery my wife had not yet penetrated. Andrée is a voracious reader of mysteries -- and people. When after several trips to Europe we became poorer and poorer – owing mostly to politicians on this side of the pond who do n...

The season of joy and merriment once again is upon us, and anti-Christmas fascists are out in force . In the “greatest deliberative body on earth” – that would be the U.S. Congress – we find that senators “may use officially related funds to mail holiday cards to constituents,” but they may not use “the frank to mail holiday cards,” even though the funds from both sources come from the same plundered taxpayers. The prohibition against sharing joyous greetings in the House is considerably more forbidding. House members must submit official mailings for review to the congressional franking commission. The Grinches there regularly tell House members that no Holiday Greetings – and especially not ‘Merry Christmas’ – can be sent in official mail. Just prior to Christmas, an inquiring reporter who called the commission “for clarification” was told that “Merry Christmas” always and everywhere was verboten. Also House members may not, under pain of de-frankification, wish their constit...

In an illuminating piece in National Review Online , editor at large Jonah Goldberg points out that President Barack Obama’s “change” is hoary with age: “There’s an old saying: The oldest word in American politics is ‘new.’ Only in that sense is there anything new to Barack Obama.” Obama’s “vision” parallels that of Woodrow Wilson, a progressive president and “… the first to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to enlightened government. His new idea was to replace it with a 'living constitution' that empowered government to evolve beyond that document’s constraints. The Bill of Rights, lamented the progressives, inhibited what the government can do to people, but it failed to delineate what it must do for people.” In an essay on style, journalist Henry Mencken let loose on the twenty-eighth president (1913-1921), whose speeches Mencken found stirring but vacuous: “Two or three years ago, at the height of his illustriousness, it was spoken of in whispers, as i...

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...

According to a Gallup Poll , most Democrats want the primary race between senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to continue. However, nervous Nellies in the Democrat leadership remain nervous. Huge beads of sweat continue to pour from party leader Howard Dean’s forehead, and Chris Dodd continues to hover between strangling Hillary and smooching her. The longer the primary goes on, Dodd said, the more committed people become. Better to cut the thing off while people are yet malleable: "The problem as this thing goes further down the pike is that your supporters, the intensity, increases. Your loyalty deepens. Your feelings about the other side deepen. ... The question is really whether these other folks out there, who have really invested a great deal of their lives in this effort for the last two years, are going to be willing to sort of pat each other on the back and go charging off for eight weeks." The tingling at the back of the neck that every genuine reporter and po...