Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Blumenthal sworn into office by Biden in a mock ceremony The leading Democrats scrambling up the presidential campaign greasy pole are former Vice President in the Obama administration Joe Biden, 29 percent in a Quinnipiac poll, followed by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, 19 percent in the same poll, both of whom have had past sweet and sour relationships, none of them the subject of congressional hearings,  with communist Russia. President Donald Trump continues to be slammed by Democrats owing to his still alleged warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, collusion with the Ruskies having been put in the cooler after the Mueller investigation, but these two… not so much. Biden’s questionable relationship with Ukraine, a country that had in the past locked horns with Russia numerous times – in 1932, Joseph Stalin created a man-made famine to haul Ukraine into the Soviet orbit – recently re-surfaced in a New York Times piece that is certain to catch th...

“If you want a vision  of the future, imagine a  boot  stamping on a human  face  – forever” – George Orwell. CBS News has announced that Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for All" bill would, according to Sanders himself, "get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year." The bill is a universal health care, one size fits all, tax financed, proposal. Connecticut's U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, CTMirror reports , was one of 14 co-sponsors of Sanders’s bill. “In my view,” Sanders said of his bill, “the current debate over 'Medicare for All' really has nothing to do with health care. It’s all about greed and profiteering. It is about whether we maintain a dysfunctional system which allows the top five health insurance companies to make over $20 billion in profits last year.” But, of course, the Sanders bill has everything to do with health care. If adopted into...

Bob Woodward, author of “All the President’s Men” and several other political bodice rippers, is at work on a book about President Barack Obama. The White House, according to a story in the New Republic , is understandable nervous. Why? Well, because Woodward has been in the habit in a few of his books of introducing unverifiable dialogues and other Balzacian devises to pad his narratives. Woodward’s books are only incidentally historical narratives. They are, in reality, narratives that prove a thesis, sometime foreshadowed in their titles – “slants,” in Emily Dickenson’s luminous phrase, that tell a poetic truth: Nixon was a crook; Bush was befuddled; Obama was... Some in the Obama administration no doubt are thinking : Who needs this? As we all know, the Obama administration has enough problems to contend with – what with the great mess he has inherited from former President George Bush: two wars , one of which, thanks to Bush, is winding down; a collapsed capitalist economy; owne...

At the Latin American Summit in Trinidad, President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, no longer the gun toting communist dictator who moved Indian tribes around throughout his country as if they were pieces on a chess board, did what hard-boiled anti-American revolutionary pimps do best: He unfurled a fifty minute stem winder accusing the United States of everything but successfully overthrowing the Cuban dictatorship of the Castro brothers. Ortega was determined not to let the usual crisis in Latin America go to waste and, despite warm overtures from the American president, he was in no mood to re-write his harangue. It has been reported that President Barack Obama sat placidly through the discourse, occasionally taking notes. Confronted later during a photo opportunity with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and asked what he thought of the speech, “Obama said, “"It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked twice to comment on...

Bill Ayres has become little more than a radical cartoon. Only pedagogues could take him seriously, and his election as vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers, suggests they have done so. American education has been deteriorating roughly since early 70’s when Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” became part of the curriculum in teacher’s colleges. Freire’s idea was that the pedagogue or teacher was an oppressive creature so long as he taught his students, for teaching implies the conveyance of ideas or, as Freire would prefer to frame it, propaganda. Learning, however, is a liberating activity. Oppression in the classroom therefore would end when the teacher no longer taught a subject to his students. To become liberators, teachers must become “learning facilitators.” They may shuck off the imputation that they are indoctrinators or prop...

The following information, which includes a critical commentary, was taken from Sen. Chris Dodds’ official site . “From his time in the Peace Corps as a young man to his 25 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” according to the site information, “Chris Dodd has worked to strengthen America through bold engagement.” Dodd joined the Peace Corp. and later the National Guard, some think, to avoid a bold personal engagement in Vietnam. An example of Dodd’s “bold engagement” is provided on the site: “Dodd Was a Leader in Ending U.S. Military Assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, which Opened the Door for Successful Elections in 1990.” There are two paths in Latin America. Hugo Chavez, the dictator of Venezuela mentioned only in passing on the site referenced, has taken the path more traveled by tyrants on the way up. Having seized the oil industry and crushed opposition newspapers, Chavez is now in the process of consolidating his power. A week ago, he threatened the Catholic Ch...

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...

“ My mother cried, my father wept, into the wicked world I leapt ” – William Blake In her forthcoming best seller, rumor has it that Ann Coulter will apologize profusely for using the “F” word – no, not that one – while adamantly refusing rehab. Meanwhile, over on the less far right, Jonah Goldberg of National Review On Line has offered a luminous piece on the Wilsons , Joe and Valerie Plame. And Binny turned 50 on Saturday. Assuming he is yet alive, Osama bin Ladin will have celebrated his fiftieth birthday on March 10th. A celebrant, Abu Yacoub , offered his good wishes on a website commonly used by insurgents and possibly by CNN. Said Mr. Yacoub, “Osama bin Laden turns 50. God protect our leader, our Sheik Osama bin Laden. God reward him for his words and actions.” He will Mr. Yacoub, He will. Someone has turned up a article written by Winston Churchill in 1937, “How The Jews Can Combat Persecution,” that seems to assign partial blame to Jews for the reprehensible way they were trea...

On the political stump in Dover, New Hampshire, US Sen. Chris Dodd , running for the presidency, declined to give a stump speech and instead took questions from the crowd. Concerning President Bush’s terms in office, Dodd said, “"We've been on six years of on-the-job training and look where we are." And later he asked rhetorically, “How are we losing a public relations battle with Hugo Chavez?" Dodd gave no hint to the largely admiring crowd what he would do as president to win the public relations battle with Venezuela’s increasingly leftist dictator. Following a path well worn by the ailing Fidel Castro, Chavez recently warned his opposition in Venezuela that he plans to nationalize the oil industry. While Bush slept, Daniel Ortega, running on a non-progressive pro-Catholic platform, became president of Nicaragua. As previously noted here and elsewhere , Dodd has had valuable experience negotiating with the Ortega brothers in that war swept country. When a voter a...

This is no joke. US Sen. Chris Dodd announced his bid for the White House, according to a report in the Hartford Courant , “on the Don Imus radio show.” Dodd's Connecticut campaign will feature the ubiquitous Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as his state chairman, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, once Dodd’s Chief of Staff, will serve as the senator’s national co-chairman – further proof, if any were necessary, that incumbent politicians now have become petite political parties. Is it not possible to recruit the state Democrat Party chairman to serve in the role assigned to Blumenthal, who certainly is not in need of further press coverage? Dodd, who has about $5 million in his campaign kitty, is on the campaign road to Iowa and South Carolina. One way to win political support in such important campaign states is to purchase it, and $5 million will come in handy for this purpose. The Journal Inquirer of Manchester earlier reported that Dodd has spread his largess around in local races bo...

The Sandinistas are back in power in Nicaragua, and Democrats here in the United States are back in power in the House of Representatives. Daniel Ortega, much chastened since his days as a Nicaragua’s communist dictator, won the presidency of the country, causing old Contra hands to mutter under their breath, “There goes the neighborhood.” Sen. Chris Dodd and ex-president Jimmy Carter no doubt will be dispatched to Nicaragua to quell the flames of revolution. Governor Jodi Rell swamped her Democrat challenger, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, but her victory is likely to be a Pyrrhic one, because Democrats now have a veto-proof majority in the legislature; which is to say, they may safely ignore Rell and the Republicans. Connecticut is now officially a one party town. The day after the Rell Tsunami, the Hartford Courant strewed some palms at the governor’s feet. Rell “…won that office on her own by politely ignoring her Democratic challenger's attacks,” the paper enthused. And, the ...

President George Bush’s efforts to support democratic movements everywhere in the world – but most especially in former soviet block nations like Ukraine – may come back to bite him in Latin America. Under the increasingly anti-democratic regime of Vladimir Putin, Russia appears to be sinking back into the ice age of Breshnev styled communism. Putin seems to be especially perturbed that Bush backed pro-Western Victor Yushchenko as president in the former soviet colony. Chavez was warmly received by Putin in Moscow just before Ukraine asserted its independence of its former overlord and gave the boot to Moscow’s preferred candidate. When the Bush administration recently lodged a formal protest with Russia for having supplied the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez with some 100,000 AK-47 rifles, the protest likely fell on deaf ears. The rifles – to be used, reliable analysts suppose, to support left wing movements in Latin America, and also to arm communist street gangs charged with el...