Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont is an imitative politician, which is okay, provided your model is a fitting one. Connecticut, we know, is not New York. Indeed, it is precisely because Connecticut is not New York that New Yorkers, in pre- income tax days when Connecticut state government was far less rapacious, flooded into the state. The New York expatriates were looking for a modest state government and settled in Fairfield County, then aflame with job opportunities. New York City is an international port of call; Connecticut, not so much. Coronavirus is most virulent in Fairfield County because Fairfield County,  contiguous to New York, is New York’s watch pocket, to some degree a bedroom community many of whose residents either work in New York City or travel there on business. Fairfield County is not Hartford. For all these reasons, thoughtless imitation in the absence of political discernment, far from being the sincerest form of flattery, may be a dangerous form of narcissism...

“When the fiscal year closes,"Governor Ned Lamont said after he had dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” of his budget, "Connecticut will have the largest rainy day fund in history and this budget maintains and grows our reserves, providing reliability and predictability for our taxpayers, businesses, and those looking to invest in our state well into the future.” Lamont did not bother to pause and ask, “Why does the state need such large reserves, the largest in state history?”

Buddy Cianci – the once, and perhaps once again, Prince of Providence – is, to mix metaphors, the Pete Rose of Rhode Island politics. We all know what Mr. Cianci did in office. When he was good, he was very good; when he was bad, he was very bad. A typical view of former jail bird and radio talk show host Cianci, may be found, following an announcement by Mr. Cianci that he is considering another run for Mayor, on the Linkedin site .

Former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley is not yet Abe Lincoln, who made ample use of humor on the political stump, nor is he Mark Twain, whose political barbs give 21st century progressives stomach cramps:  “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”  “All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.” That quip by Mr. Twain would not have passed muster with the anti-idiot-discrimination crowd.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – Newton’s Third Law of Motion The best way to persuade someone in Connecticut to vote for you is to buy their vote. Progressives, who nowadays take money from the middle class and give it to one-percenters, do this with a certain reckless abandon: Does anyone truly believe that that Aetna Insurance Company really needed the money given to it by Governor Dannel Malloy to survive? Of course there are problems when the money to purchase a vote in Connecticut is taken from taxpayers who, given the parlous state of the economy after the Democratic hegemon has taken its share, are drowning in high taxes and liberty strangulating regulations. To be sure, the debts of the average Connecticut taxpayer are considerably less than those of national taxpayers following four years on President Barack Obama’s economic death row. But almost always the state taxpayer and the national taxpayer are one and the same person, since ...

Tea Party folk across the nation and in Connecticut tend to be more active politically than, say, sunshine patriots. What has been said here often enough bears repeating: The Tea Party is not a party; it is a movement grounded in the notion, not at all un-American, of a politics of limits. By way of example, the U.S. Constitution marks a limit, as does the Bill of Rights or any statutory law. Right reason marks a limit. The laws of nature and of nature’s God mark a limit.

As the John Rowland-Brian Foley FBI investigation unfolds, it will be important to bear in mind that neither Mr. Rowland nor Lisa Wilson Foley, Brian Foley’s wife, is an active politician. According to a report in the Register Citizen , “A federal grand jury is investigating Rowland’s connections to the 5th District Congress campaign of Lisa Wilson-Foley. Rowland worked as an “unpaid volunteer” consultant to the campaign while at the same time being paid $30,000 by Apple Rehab, a company owned by Wilson-Foley’s husband.” Mrs. Foley is running for the U.S. Congress and has not previously held office. Mr. Rowland is a radio talk show host for (WTIC) and an ex-felon who resigned his position as governor of the state. After having pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to steal honest service, Mr. Rowland spent a year in prison and four months under house arrest. Following his release, Mr. Rowland was hired by the Waterbury Chamber of Commerce to drum up business for the city, aft...

The conversation below has been lifted from Richard Bronson’s new book, “The War at the Shore,” an account of the struggle between Donald Trump and Steve Wynn over control of Atlantic City gambling interests. These words, perhaps harsh, were uttered by Ernie Newton before he ascended to Connecticut’s State Senate, according to Lennie Grimaldi , and well before Mr. Newton was carted off to prison for having accepted political bribes. Now a repentant sinner, Mr. Newton is the Democratic Party nominee for his old senate seat in Bridgeport, where else?      But for pure naked All-American avarice, the prize goes to a certain clown named Ernest Newton II, the Democratic state representative from Bridgeport … “I have an idea,” said Ernie “What is it?” I said. “You lend me some money. Cash, of course, Then, I forget to pay you back? How’s that?” “I said, Senator, I can’t do that.” To which he replied: “Well, here’s what you can do. You can get the hell out of m...

In the good old days, before the advent of campaign finance reform, a stretch in prison was no bar to election. Mayor Michael Curley of Boston, a colorful mob-connected figure in Massachusetts politics who made good on his campaign pledge to get the washerwomen of the city off their knees, ran the city from prison. Mr. Curley later rigged out all the washerwomen of Boston with long handled mops. It may well be the case that a stretch in jail was the booster that rocketed Mr. Curley into a long and eventful career in politics. Mr. Curley received news that he had been elected to Boston’s Board of Alderman in 1904 while cooling his heels in prison on a fraud conviction: He had fraudulently taken a civil service exam for two men applying for postmen in his district, and the stint in prison helped to burnish his reputation among the poor Irish of Boston as someone who was willing to go to the mat for those in need. During his career in politics, both as Boston Mayor and a U.S. Sena...

One would have thought that former Governor John Rowland would have been safe from criticism after he had wandered into the profession of journalism following his stint in prison for having deprived the citizens of Connecticut of honest services. As everyone knows, journalism, in the form of gossip, is the second oldest profession in the world, following close on the heels of prostitution which, as we recently have learned, is legal in Cartagena Columbia. Prostitution in Connecticut still is illegal, though an enlightened legislature has long since legalized “gaming” (AKA gambling) in order to tax it and fill the state’s depleted treasury with money gathered by the world’s third oldest profession, politics. Journalism is the natural evolution – some would say the perfection –of gossip. Could it be possible that that the crudely drawn depictions in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in France are first attempts at political cartooning made by the prehistoric ancestors of some politic...

The New Left, both in Europe and the United States, is the old left reanimated by an economic downturn. In France, former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon is being pushed forward politically by a favorable communist wind at his back. It is said that M. Mélenchon’s public rallies rival those of President Nicolas Sarkozy in size and intensity. The Financial Times reports:  “His policies, including rescinding the new EU fiscal discipline treaty, raising the minimum wage from €1,200 to €1,700 a month and confiscating all income above €360,000 a year, go far beyond even [France’s chief socialist] Mr. Hollande’s proposal to tax income above €1m at 75 percent.” M. Mélenchon’s poll numbers have surged from 5 percent two months ago to a high of 17 per cent in more recent days, a reaction in conformity with Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion: To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. M. Mélenchon’s recent popularity is undoubtedly a reaction to austerity ...

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...

“Some people wonder all their lives if they’ve made a difference. The Marines don’t have that problem’ – Ronald Reagan If there is anybody in the state of Connecticut who does not know that current Senator Richard Blumenthal has a Vietnam problem, his or her voting rights should be taken away for chronic inattention. During Mr. Blumenthal’s senatorial race against various Republicans, among them former U.S. Rep Rob Simmons and former CEO of World Wide Wrestling Linda McMahon, it was revealed that Mr. Blumenthal had told some stretchers about his service in the U.S. Marines. Mr. Blumenthal, then hanging on to his attorney general position as if he were a drowning man grasping for a straw and assiduously avoiding media exposure, said several times that he had served in Vietnam when in fact he remained stateside during the war. And any lipstick put on that pig during his campaign did not help to restore the honor marines so value . Mr. Blumenthal was one of two U.S. congressmen fe...

Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was violently attacked by the media of his day and responded with a more than adequate self defense, the “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” used to say, “Throw enough dirt and some will stick – stick but not stain.” But Newman could not have been familiar with modern modes of politicking: UTube videos, blogs written by furious partisans, offshore political operations that are little more than "non-partisan" campaign finance producing operations in disguise, and sleepy eyed journalists, themselves partisan, who are willing to overlook their mud splattered political opponents. But a bright warning line ought to be drawn somewhere. An ad approved by embattled U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy that craftily connects Sam Caliguiri with former Waterbury Mayor Phil Giordano throws a bucket of mud on Caliguri’s reputation. Mr. Murphy’s challenger is, after all, a politician and ought not to expect to remain unbloodied in a hotly contested political campaign. Even so, t...

Tom Foley, the Republican Party nominee for governor, went to bed on Thursday thinking well of himself and woke up on Friday a near criminal. Two of his Republican primary opponents have called upon him in tones once used by James Cagney to “come clean” and release his arrest records. According to a story written by Jon Lender, a superb digger and investigative reporter at the Hartford Courant, Foley was arrested 29 years ago for having bumped a car with his car. Foley was charged with first-degree attempted assault for having “rammed a vehicle, placing the occupants in fear of serious physical injury,” according to a July 2, 1981 story in the Southampton Press newspaper. The charges were later dropped. The second arrest involved a dispute with his wife during what is described as a messy divorce. In politics, divorces are a dime a dozen, though not always messy. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, for instance, shed about half as many wives as Henry VIII, apparently without incid...

At the end of the “do nothing” legislative session, Rep. Chris Caruso and Senator Diana Urban, the co-chairs of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, had a press conference the subject of which was ethics reform, but another senator, Edward Meyer, unexpectedly showed up, commandeered the microphone and rained on their propaganda parade. “I want to state a different opinion,” Meyer said as reporters recorded the interruption of an otherwise placid media opportunity. According to a report in the Journal Inquirer , “The Guilford lawmaker then charged his two House colleagues on the GAEC panel with producing a ‘watered down’ pension sanctions plan designed to shield unionized state employees, questioning their resolve to affect a linchpin of the Democratic base. ‘It looks self-serving,’ Meyer said. ‘It looks union-biased.’” The king was stripped naked of his trappings and the two co-chairs of GAEC gasped with astonishment. Of course, it didn’t take Caruso long to recover t...

The interest in soon to be former state Sen. Lou DeLuca has flagged, especially among news reporters, at exactly that point at which it should be most intense. DeLuca announced that he was resigning last Wednesday, made a very pretty speech in which he once again admitted wrongdoing, and was as quickly forgotten as yesterday’s hasty pudding. Everyone went back to sleep, hardly noticing that nothing of any note, other than DeLuca’s resignation, had been settled. Predictable people said predictable things. Republican Sen. John Kissel said “It put an unfortunate chapter behind us.” Sen. Andrea Stillman, a Democrat, offered that the conclusion would have been the same had the legislative committee investigating DeLuca completed its work. Sen. Majority Leader Martin Looney, a Democrat, breathed a sign of relief. “Obviously,” he said, “the Committee will be concluding its work today.” But of course. It was never the work of the committee to devise and implement procedural rules to prevent fu...

Ads, as everyone knows, are primarily messaging instruments. This is true also of political ads. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s latest ad features his five year old daughter Grace. The title of the ad is – do not blush – “Amazing Grace.” The referential message here is religious, though the text of the message is obscure. In the ad, Dodd says, “I was blessed to become a first time father at age 57,” and he reminds everyone that Grace was born on Sept 13, 2001, two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York. Following a black and white photo of baby Grace, another photo shows the senator’s new family, wife Jackie and daughter Christina. This is Dodd’s second marriage. "I want my campaign to be about all of our children,” Dodd remarks, “and the kind of world we give them." Dodd says he wants to increase the security of the country, stop global warming and "restore our moral leadership." A following ad will picture Dodd as a young Peace Corps voluntee...

Very likely the most exciting race in Connecticut next year will be in Bridgeport, where the man, Rep. Chris Caruso, will face the machine. Bridgeport, like most of Connecticut, is a one horse town. The Democrat Party has run it ever since Caruso’s Great Granddaddy was knee high to a toadstool. The machine’s choices recently have been rather unfortunate. Federal prosecutors, using RICO statutes, bagged two Bridgeport worthies in recent years: former Mayor Joe Gannim and former state senator Ernest Newton, both now cooling their heels in jail. Someone from the Bridgeport machine probably told Bridgeport's current mayor, John Fabrizi to take a hike after his recent admissions of drug and alcohol abuse. Caruso , the White Knight of Bridgeport, has been openly contemptuous of Bridgeport's shakers and movers, calling them "clowns" and applying to them other sobriquets not designed to win him friends among party regulars. With the backing of Bridgeport's kingmakers, the...

Rep Chris Caruso , the inspector Jarvet of Democrats, was decidedly upset. “Maybe Mr. Healy can fill me in on what ethics violations occurred,” he told a reporter. "In all fairness here, Don Clemons hasn't been charged with anything. We have no authority in this area. I know [Healy] is desperate to latch onto something. He should first call his Republican friends because they control the U.S. attorney's office. Before he starts shooting his mouth off, he should call Kevin O'Connor, the Republican appointee. He'd get a quicker answer that way." State Rep. Don Clemons, who is considering running for mayor of Bridgeport in November, was present in the summer of 2004 at a private meeting attended by former NBA basketball star Charles Smith and the notorious state Sen. Ernest Newton, now cooling his heels in prison for various offenses that Caruso found intolerable when they were committed by agents of former Republican Governor John Rowland. At the meeting, then S...