Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

I’d like to thank Dennis Swanton for inviting me here.  I want to touch on two areas of interest tonight, national and state government --they impinge on each other -- and end with a prayer to God to save us from ourselves. Otto von Bismarck used to say “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let us hope it’s true. We’ll need a little divine intervention if Connecticut is to survive as a prosperous and welcoming state.  If you feel inclined to chuckle along the way, don’t restrain yourselves. Laughter is therapeutic. I’m hoping we might be able to bat around some questions in the Q&A that will follow. “All politics is local,” said Speaker of the US House Tip O’Neill. The phrase is pretty common, though it is most often associated with O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s Democrat counterpart in the glorious -- for conservative Republicans -- 1980’s. In many other ways, the 80s were a painful regurgitation of the 60s.  I’m ...

Even though no member of “the squad” – Democrat congressional representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts – is participating in the national Democrat primary debate now underway, the drift of Democrat politics post primary has been set by them and, of course, Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. Primaries bring out political extremists who, along with a 24-7 media, set the party narrative. Before primaries became common in both parties, candidate selection was made by party bosses in smoke-filled back rooms, and eccentrics in the parties were allowed their fifteen minutes of fame during national conventions. Party bosses disappeared long ago; more likely, they have gone underground. And national conventions are now regarded as prime-time political shows, essential for generating campaign funding and spreading political gospels through sympathetic media outlets. Over the years, party c...

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet… In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.   -- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The title of the story, “ As Democrats drift left, liberal firebrand Rep. Rosa DeLauro finds herself squarely in the center ,” was unintentionally confusing.

O ne of my college professors – let’s call him Stringfellow – spoke in long, flowing sentences, each of which might easily have been parsed into sparkling separate mini-poems. He liked Faulkner, disliked Hemingway, and tolerated Tennessee Williams for two reasons. Williams consciously structured some of his plays on classical Greek models – compare “Suddenly Last Summer” with Euripides’ “The Bacchae” – and Tennessee, he thought, was a name one could conjure with, as Wallace Stevens did adeptly in "Anecdote of the Jar," the first line of which runs, “I placed a jar in Tennessee/ And round it was, upon a hill …” One day, a student asked Stringfellow – this would have been in the middle 60’s – “When do you plan to join the 20 th century?’ to which Stringfellow replied, “It would be a very wicked thing to wish to be a part of the 20 th century.”

Now that Democrats have reclaimed the castle from marauding Republicans, State Senator Martin Looney is flexing his considerable muscles. Looney is the President Pro Tem of the State Senate and, as such, is one of two important gatekeepers steering bills through the legislature; the other is Speaker of the State House of Representatives Joe Aresimowicz, quite literally bought by unions. Aresimowicz is education coordinator employed by AFSCME. Looney’s political turf is Half of New Haven, which last saw a Republican mayor 68 years ago, and Hamden, politically a vassal of New Haven, home of Yale College. Looney has been in politics for a quarter century, and his tenure has taught him a thing or two. Both Looney and Aresimowicz are progressives very much in the mold of Presidential contender Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, socialist presidential contender Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new face of Democrat socialism, a US Representative from N...

It was one of those pictures, courtesy of CTMirror , that says more than a thousand words. The old Democrat Party chairman, Nick Balletto, credited by most progressives as having produced two of the most successful winning campaigns of any prior chairman in recent memory, is being tenderly embraced by the new chairwoman, Nancy Wyman, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Lieutenant Governor, while Governor elect Ned Lamont caresses Balletto's back, no knife visible in his hand. Lamont’s Lieutenant Governor, the personable Susan Bysiewicz, lips tightly sewn, looks on diffidently. Why did Lamont think it necessary to stiff Balletto?