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.

Writing in National Review ,  Red Jahncke, president of Townsend Group International and a Connecticut political columnist, advises that Republican members of the General Assembly should not sign off on what is being called a compromise budget, because a solution to long-term financial obligations -- AKA “fixed costs” -- has been excised from the only budget to have passed in both Houses of the General Assembly, a Republican production. “There is actually one document,” Jahncke writes, “which provides insight into the fundamentals driving the state’s fiscal deterioration: the Executive Order Resource Allocation Plan for Fiscal Year 2018 by which Malloy has been running the state since July 1 in the absence of a budget.”   The figures Malloy relies upon in this document are stark and brutal—but they are reliable:

Perhaps the governors of the states should hand out victimization certificates along with birth certificates because – when everyone is a victim, no one will be a victim, and that may help to put an end to the victimization of non-victims nonsense. Students at Yale, we have recently discovered, are victims. One may wonder whether a graduate of Yale or Harvard has been the more victimized. Are any of them more victimized than the fatherless children in Connecticut's shoot-up capitol city, Hartford, which a few months ago was proclaimed the murder capital of New England? Everyone, it seems, wants to get in on the action. In academia, the victimization scam may end in the destruction of the liberties of scientists. Among the most oppressed victims in the 21 st century, we discover, is tortured Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, who appeared before U.S. Congress at the end of March to declare himself victimized. Consider his bleeding wounds.

In most fairy tales, the way out of the dark forest is the way in -- in reverse. Sometimes the hero of the story will take care when entering the bewildering forest to lay out the way back by leaving behind markers, beans strewn on the ground, so he will not forget the entrance and exit routes. The moral of all these tales is the same: if you’ve make a mistake, reverse your errors. It is a lesson politicians in Connecticut might take to heart. With a little courage and the virtue of foresight, the lucidity of remembrance brought to bear on current difficulties, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. In a recent piece in National Review , senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Stephen Eide gives us a summary view of Connecticut’s weaknesses. The top marginal income-tax rate in Connecticut now stands at 6.99 percent, Eide writes, “almost two points higher than the 5.1 percent in neighboring Massachusetts. The income tax has generated a flood of new revenues — $126 bill...

"We're careening, literally, toward a constitutional crisis. And he's [Judge Gorsuch] been nominated by a president who has repeatedly and relentlessly attacked the American judiciary on three separate occasions, their credibility and trust is in question" Blumenthal on CNN  President Donald Trump is irascible and prone to childish fits of personal outrage, but his dealings with the judiciary are not quite as bloodcurdling as those of President Andrew Jackson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party.

We all know how it works: If you are a politician who outpaces your opponent in money and lustrous fame, you hide-out during elections, contextualize yourself by feeding the media tons of approving releases put together by a faithful staff -- and await reelection. Dick Blumenthal, presently Connecticut’s Senior U.S. Senator, is such a person. A millionaire by marriage and an incumbent, he has the riches of King Croesus in his campaign kitty. His Republican opponent, Dan Carter, is the poor boy of the current campaign for the U.S. Senate. According to a recent report in CTMirror , “Blumenthal’s campaign reported having more than $5.3 million in its war chest as of June 30, after having spent more than $1.6 million, while Carter’s campaign reported only about $70,000 in cash on hand.”

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, up for re-election this year, brusquely but effectively brushed aside Hartford Courant reporter Daniela Altimari's timely and legitimate question; after all, it’s still a free country, and refusing to comment on pointed questions is one of the most often used tools in the toolbox of incumbent politicians with high favorability ratings. Asked to comment on charges that President Barack Obama had paid Iran $400 million in ransom for  four American hostages, Mr. Blumenthal waved away the reporter by refusing to comment and then took to his heels. This is not the first time Mr. Blumenthal hit the mattresses when he found himself face to face during an election period with a reporter who had asked him a legitimate but politically prickly question.

What follows below is an abbreviated commentary on Donald Trump that may be found in an upcoming issue of National Review. All the commentators are credible conservatives. A full throated version may be found here .

Bill Curry -- who lost an election, honorably I might add, to John Rowland -- is usually aggravating, in the good sense, and pushing his party with Archimedean fervor to the left. It was Archimedes who said “Give me a spot outside the world where I may place my lever, and I will move the world.” The Democratic Party, most especially in his own state, has obliged Mr. Curry in one respect; it has put up between itself and Mr. Curry a political Berlin Wall that, in a recent piece in Salon , he valiantly and sometimes confusedly attempted to breach.

Not all corruption is equal. In a recent column, “ A Kennedy Stirs Connecticut's Politics ,” Kevin Rennie sideswiped departing Republican leader Larry Cafero, who is to the Republican Party what Rocky Marciano was to boxing, a hard slugger: “Cafero got snagged in a 2012 federal investigation into campaign contributions and legislation. He was caught on video as an informant deposited $5,000 in cash into a refrigerator in Cafero's office. The money was converted into campaign contributions from straw donors, and the scheme was revealed last year during the criminal trial of a campaign aide to former Speaker of the House Christopher Donovan. “What a mess Cafero leaves in his wake. His gelatinous, silent deputies, Reps. Themis Klarides and Vincent Candelora, have disgraced themselves beyond repair for failing to take a stand for honor during this long fiasco. They will wear Cafero's deep stains for however long they remain in public life.” And the sins of...

Some notable politician who is not Catholic really ought to come to the defense of Catholics – because they are now under assault from anti-Catholic Catholic politicians. Just as there is no anti-communist so fierce as an ex-communist, so there is no anti-Catholic quite so energetically opposed to Catholic orthodoxy as a Catholic politician on the make and in need of votes from others who may share his distaste for all things Catholic. The uninterrupted assault on Catholics, the Reverend Robert Barron points out in National Review , is bone wearingly old. Arthur Schlesinger, the reliably liberal historian and social critic, used to say that a poisonous anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States, an early bloom that washed upon our shore with the arrival of the Mayflower. In the Boston of Sam Adams’ day, anti-Papists used to place an effigy of the pope in a chair that was paraded through the streets – Boston’s version of the English Guy Fawkes celebrati...

Around this time of year, prior to the elections, numberless political commentators become Republicans – if only in spirit – the better to advise leading Republicans in the Grand Old Party what they should think and say and do about the many problems besetting Connecticut. Their daddies voted for Goldwater in 1964, they tell us. Their mommies subscribed to National Review in the glory days of Reagan. They remember with some affection William Buckley’s attempt to snatch the New York mayoralty from the jaws of John Lindsey and Abe Beame. Asked by a New York Times reporter what he would do if he actually won the election, Mr. Buckley replied he would hang a net on the first floor of the New York Times building to catch the falling bodies. Virtually all of them used to vote Republican when the Republican Party in Connecticut was sagacious enough to put up moderates such as Chris Shays for office, hardly noticing that in the interim all the moderate Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Con...

The first half dozen of 689 reasons to vote against President Barack Obama is listed below. For the remaining 683 reasons, see National Review magazine here. https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/314773/689-reasons-defeat-barack-obama 1. Because he was not the one we were waiting for. 2. “Forward.” 3. Because Julia needs to get off her lazy, federally subsidized butt, get a real job, and pay for her own damned birth-control pills. 4. Because lots of people fail at their first real job. 5. Because “Winning the Future” was not a very good slogan back in 2005 when it was Newt’s. 6. Because the country is ready for its first African-American former president.

National Review, the county’s premier conservative magazine, wacked Newt Gingrich with a big stick in its December 31 pre-Iowa vote issue. The magazine featured on its cover a zany cartoon of Mr. Gingrich on the moon with a lead line above its masthead – “The Editors: Against Gingrich.” There are four feature articles on Mr. Gingrich, all cripplingly critical: “’How Speaker Newt Balanced The Budget’ (and why president Newt would not)” by Kevin Williamson; “‘Amnesty Again’ (Gingrich’s plan would reward criminals and make the law arbitrary)” by Kris Kobach; “‘Some Shade Of Green’ (The former Speaker has a longstanding love-hate relationship with environmental reform)” by Jonathan Adler; and perhaps most devastating, “‘The Gingrich Gestalt’ (You take a dubious record. You take some wacky ideas, you take a narcissistic personality…)” by Mark Steyn, more politically astute than the late Christopher Hitchens and just as dangerous. Together the articles do not represent, shall we say...

It is often said, mostly by conservatives, that the main stream media is biased in a liberal direction. Over the years, some studies confirming bias have drifted in: Slate magazine, for instance, polled its writers and discovered – big surprise! – that about 90   percent of the lads and ladies identified themselves as liberal. A similar poll among the writers at, say, National Review likely would show a like degree of bias in a conservative direction. But these are not hard news sites. Some time ago, a more “scientific” study was done in connection with major news outlets, and again – big surprise! – the pollsters discovered that a preponderance of mainstream news writers were liberal. The authors of that study may or may not have been surprised to discover the Wall Street Journal’s news pages -- not its commentary pages, which are widely recognized as conservative – rate, according to a study done by Tim Groseclose, as the most liberal in the nation. Until Mr. Groseclose, t...

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...

Those who have not read U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s regulatory bill need not avoid commenting upon it. The U.S. Congress has demonstrated it is not necessary to read a bill prior to an up or down vote on it. And Dodd’s bill is long, in excess of a thousand pages. Lately, Congress seems to be interested in writing epics where a poem might do, and the average senator’s eyes glaze over after ten pages. By way of example, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose staff is capable of engorging itself on thousand page bills and spitting out digestible briefing memos, claims not to have read a ten page Arizona bill he disapproved of publicly – very likely because his staff had already worked up a narrative in conflict with the factual substance of the bill. Holder also implausibly claimed he was not briefed on the Arizona bill. It would have been impossible for the attorney general to denounce a piece of legislation as possibly racist when he knew the legislation did no more than pattern it...

Shortly after a Kamikaze pilot in Texas drove his plane into building occupied by the Internal Revenue Service, leftist bloggers began to speculate, on very slender evidence, that the pilot may have been connected with Tea Party protestors. His obvious preference for communism over capitalism in a sign off letter he left behind soon spoiled that hastily constructed thesis. But the faulty thesis begs the question: Who are these people who call themselves Tea Party Patriots. In an effort to arrive at an answered to that question, the National Review Institute commissioned McLaughlin & Associates to study two separate groups of Tea Party Patriots: the “6 percent of the 1,000 likely voters polled in mid-January who told McLaughlin that they had participated in tea-party rallies and the additional 47 percent who said they ‘have not participated in a tea party protest but . . . generally agree with the reasons for those protests.’” The results of the study are certain to disappoint t...

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s advertising blitz hasn’t helped much. A recent Quinnipiac University poll puts it this way: “Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd trails former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, a likely Republican challenger 48-39 percent in the 2010 Senate race, but he is inching up in his job approval to a negative 42-52 percent approval rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.” U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has not poured money into advertising and outreach efforts to salvage support within the Democratic Party after his slide in the polls, is even-steven: The poll shows Lieberman with an approval-disapproval rating of 46-46. Dodd’s rating is 42-52 percent. Dodd's slippage among independents, whose party affections are nil and whose ideology is eclectic, will be crucial in an election. Among independents, Dodd’s approval-disapproval rating is a near fatal 56–27 percent. President Barack Obama’s approval-disapproval rating has fallen below that of Gov. Jodi Rell...

Maryland tried to soak the rich, but they swam off. Trying to settle what liberals here in Connecticut call “a revenue problem,” a cash shortage in their budget, Maryland legislators enacted a higher tax bracket for “millionaires.” Here in the land of steady bad habits, Democrats are seeking to plunder “millionaires” who earn more than $750,000; call them mini-millionaires. Democrats hope to raise $1.5 billion in increased income taxes and $125 million in new fee increases to pay for their improvident spending. The Democrat plan, almost certain to face a gubernatorial veto, would raise the state income tax on couples earning more than &170,000 by 7.5%, a 50 percent rate increase. Maryland boosted its top bracket to 6.25 percent. Result? One third of Maryland’s “millionaires” disappeared from the tax roles and took up residence in Virginia, Delaware and Florida, all less tax punishing states. And now, even though Maryland is colleting more money from its vanishing “millionaires,” it...