Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

According to the authoritative New York Post’s “ Page Six ,” Jon Peter’s auto-biography “Studio Head” was a case of premature ejaculation. Leaks from the book proposal reached all the usual sounding boards before Peters withdrew “Studio Head.” "Somehow this proposal has become a kind of Holy Grail of gossip,” Peter is reported saying in the Post, “and I have become Hollywood's 'Man Who Knows Too Much.' I have been besieged by potential lawsuits and threatened litigation by some of the most important figures in the world of show business. What's worse . . . is the fact that I consider all these people my friends . . . I want my book to be a celebration of, never an attack upon, the remarkable people I have known and worked with . . .” Vanity Fair, printed some choice excerpts from Peter’s celebration of his friends. “In the late 60s,” according to Vanity Fair , “ Peters caught his second wife, actress Lesley Ann Warren, in bed with Warren Beatty and chased the actor...

The item in the Courant about Rep John Larson , a new powerhouse in the US Senate, is mercifully short, only a little more than 200 words. The Courant buried it in the fat of its folds on page 100043B. Now if only Rowland got that kind of inattention – the name of the “business” is not even mentioned – he still might be governor. It remains for a reporter more curious than Mark Peters and a newspaper more agressive towards Democrats than the Courant -- which, during the late election, endorsed all the US Democrat congressional candidates -- to find out who is the Peter Ellef of the group. And how much do these guys make anyway? According to the Courant story, “A federally funded technology center in East Hartford that has been championed by U.S. Rep. John B. Larson has appointed the congressman's chief of staff," Elliot Ginsberg, as its first chief executive officer. The three year old center, which employs 35 people and "relies primarily on federal and state funding...

Judge Peter Zarella, nominated by Governor Jodi Rell to be the next Chief Justice of Connecticut’s Supreme Court, begins his masterful disquisition on the separation of powers doctrine, printed in the Connecticut Bar Journal under the title “ Judicial Independence at a Crossroad ,” with a quote from Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost, like Walt Whitman before him, first gorged himself on all things American before spewing out his poetic pearls; and with either poet it may truly be said that little from sea to shining sea was beyond their ken. Some of Frost’s poems are shockingly political; others, like “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” are allegories that outline the central truths of the American experience. One has the same feeling reading Zarella’s “Judicial Independence at the Crossroad.” Everything American and familiar is here: Montesquieu on the laws; John Locke, the tutor of the founders who established our tri-partite form of government and thereby destroy...