Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

By Daria Novak The current Wuhan Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has focused much-needed attention on China’s dual-use bio-research programs. “Dual-purpose bioresearch refers to bioscience research that can be used for beneficial purposes or abused for harmful ends,” wrote four Chinese scientists from Wuhan last summer, according to a Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity. One of the researchers, Yuan Zhiming, is director of the Chinese National Biosafety Laboratory and a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The three other researchers include another WIV researcher, Ma Haixia, a Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Liang Huigang, and Xiang Xiaowei of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Together they explained that China lacks a law solely dedicated to biosafety regulation, or a complete supervisory system for handling new biotechnologies. These scientists are not the only ones aware of the deficits in China’s biosafety regime...

For Republicans in Connecticut, editorial endorsements from many papers – but most especially from the Hartford Courant – provide a momentary, fleeting pleasure. In primaries, the Courant does tend to endorse some non-incumbents. But in general elections, the paper’s endorsements tend to favor incumbents who have, unsurprisingly, more practical experience in the contested office. For the most part then, incumbents have an insuperable advantage over challengers seeking the endorsement of the paper’s editorial writers and administrators. Whether this arrangement is pragmatic or not depends, to borrow phraseology from former President Bill Clinton, on what you mean by “pragmatic.” The dark side of pragmatism is opportunism, a cold, sportsman like estimate of political possibilities. When St. Thomas More accuses Thomas Cromwell of being a pragmatist in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” he intends no compliment. “ALICE: They say he's [Cromwell] a very penetrating la...

The 2nd District, the largest geographic district in Connecticut, tens to float between Democrats and Republicans. Daria Novak, a personable, energetic Republican, ran for the seat on the Republican ticket once before. She received the Republican endorsement but was challenged in a primary, and former newscaster Janet Peckenpaugh was selected to face current U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney. Ms. Peckenpaugh lost to Mr. Courtney in a year in which Republicans elsewhere in the country did remarkably well. Ms. Novak is back for a second go round. Having served during the Reagan administration in the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC and overseas, Ms. Novak is not unfamiliar with foreign policy. She speaks fluent Chinese and has a comprehensive understanding of domestic policy and economics. Ms. Novak received an MA in Political Science from the University of Southern California and is a graduate of the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and Georgetown University’s Institute of Comparative ...

It was Henry Clay who said he’d rather be right than be president. The cynic perhaps would retort that such a selfless sentiment could only issue from a man who had never been president; though, Lord knows, Mr. Clay, always ready to serve his country in any capacity, certainly gave it a good try. Drafted for president a few times, he was frustrated by unavoidable political events beyond his control and lost each time, some would say, to lesser men. A Whig leader in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, said Mr. Clay was "my beau ideal of a great man." And Sen. John Kennedy cited Mr. Clay as one of the five greatest senators in U.S. history. It must be supposed that Mr. Clay took his defeats with a certain degree of equinimity. Rob Simmons very well may be the Henry Clay of Connectiut. Mr. Clay’s Whig party, which later evolved into the Republican Party, was strong enough at that point and later to allow for what might be called “second acts” -- and even third and fourth acts. Th...

The Iowa caucuses are important because the line up after Iowa will set the direction of Big Media predictions. They will provide the frame for political narratives until the next primary. Iowa is the first horse race determiner in the nation. Appearing on Charlie Rose, David Yepsin , the Des Moines Register’s political columnist, has set the ball rolling. Obama has managed to position himself as an agent of change by resurrecting motifs used by the inexperienced Bill Clinton in his first presidential bid. Perhaps the most interesting Yepsin comment concerns Barak Obama’s positioning; in political horse races, positioning is determinative. “Barack Obama’s message this year is pretty much the one Bill Clinton was using in the 1992 about the need to change,” Yepsin noted. If Mrs. Clinton comes in third in Iowa, that would be very damaging for her because, “it would energize all her challengers.” If Obama wins, Yepsin speculated, “you could see a repeat of what we saw when John Kerry came...

The successful prosecution of “Scooter Libby" – for lying to a grand jury – was a spectacular failure because it did not answer the question “Who outed Valerie Plame as an undercover agent?" There will be no further prosecutions in the case because the prosecutor fingered the wrong man: Scooter Libby did not blow Plame’s cover, because she was not an undercover agent. Prosecutor Fitzgerald packed his bags and went home after his flawed prosecution of the case because he fingered Libby rather than Richard Armitage, chief aide to then Secretary of state Colin Powell, as the primary leaker. Libby’s troubles began with a column written by Sun Times columnist Robert Novak , who testified to the grand jury under oath that Libby had said nothing to him about Plame. “While my column on Wilson's mission triggered Libby's misery,” Novak wrote in a recent column, “I played but a minor role in his trial. Subpoenaed by his defense team, I testified that I had phoned him in reporti...

“Tell the truth,” says the poet Emily Dickenson, “but tell it slant.” The poetry resides in the slant. Bill Curry , a liberal Democrat who twice ran for governor and now writes a column for the Hartford Courant, is Connecticut’s politician poet in residence. Personally, I’ve always considered it unfortunate that Curry had not prevailed over former Gov. and felon John Rowland. Had he won in one of his two attempts to be governor, the state almost certainly would have been spared a messy gubernatorial prosecution and threatened impeachment, and not only because Curry can be as honest as the day is long – when it suits his purpose – but also because the state’s liberal press is somewhat laggard in the matter of applying to Democrats the lashes it distributes with such relish to Republicans. I do not doubt – as have said or intimated many times in this space – that Rowland got what he deserved, and before commenting further on Curry’s column on “Scooter” Libby, I wish to state without equi...

Way back in August of 2005, US Sen. Chris Dodd advised anyone who cared to take his advice that President George Bush should not appoint John Bolton as an ambassador to the United Nations while the Congress was in recess because Bolton “lacks credibility,” is “damaged goods” and “doesn’t have the confidence of the congress.” In fact, no one knew at that point whether Bolton had “the confidence of the congress,” because Dodd and others, by means of what the media euphemistically had called a “filibuster,” kept the nomination from coming to a vote in the congress. The so-called “filibuster” was really more like a work stoppage, and if Bolton was “damaged goods,” the goods had been damaged largely by Dodd. This is how clever senators assure that presidential appointments should not be made to the UN. First, by means of a work stoppage they prevent the congress, sometimes called “the greatest deliberative body on earth,” from deliberating and then voting on appointments. Then they demand f...

It seems like only yesterday that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was homing in on Karl Rove. Top vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby, second in command to Vice President Dick Cheney, was said to have leaked the name of Valerie Plame to a reporter and blown her CIA cover, apparently in retaliation for a piece written in the Wall Street Journal by her husband, Joe Wilson, that questioned President Bush’s rational for prosecuting a war in Iraq. Plame was a CIA analyst and not an undercover agent at the time her name was released. But this made no difference. Hot on the chase and anxious to bag Cheney and Rove, the mainstream media devoted an ocean of ink to the subject, and it was widely speculated that Libby was executing a dirty trick on the Wilsons on orders from Rove, the Svengalli of the Bush administration. It all turned out to be a lot of sound and fury , signifying nothing . According to recent more accurate reports in the New York Times, it was not Libby, but rather R...

A report early in February from Chris Cillizza, the Washington Post’s political blogger, disclosed that Sen. John McCain, big media’s favorite moderate Republican, will be in Connecticut on March 17 to raise funds for Governor Jodi Rell’s campaign. Just in time too. Some Democrats were beginning to wonder whether Rell, whose continually high approval rating has astonished both friend and foe, had become “a party of one.” She had successfully defied the expected Republican position on stem cell research and other hot button Republican issues, proving that there is a little McCain in all of us yearning to bust out. Cooption of the kind practiced by the usual Connecticut Republican moderate is intended to anesthetize the opposition. Given Rell’s stratospheric approval rating, some Democrats are asking, does she need McCain to raise funds for her? Or is it possible that McCain, bitten with presidential aspirations, could use a boost from Rell? Perhaps McCain’s March appearance may be mu...