Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut has just been bowled over by a bomb cyclone, a rapidly strengthening area of low pressure. In the area where I live, all the houses went dark – for three days and nights. Throughout Connecticut, about 41,000 energy consumers lost power. And winter is coming. CTMirror tells us there is a stalemate over long-term transportation funding between legislators and Governor Ned Lamont. The battle of the political egg-heads is “about to create an immediate crisis: With $30 million in promised local aid months overdue, fall tree trimming and winter snow removal are at risk.” The recent outage was caused mostly by falling trees that are singularly uninterested in Lamont and tax hungry legislators. The General Assembly in Connecticut has been controlled for the last three decades by Democrats whose reckless spending proclivities have been responsible for much of the budget outages during this time.

Here is an addendum to Rahm Emanuel’s now infamous apothegm, “Never let a crisis go to waste,” especially when you are responsible for having produced the crisis: to leverage the crisis you have caused so that it will be politically useful, it is vitally important to fob-off on the opposition the logical and inevitable consequences of your own failed policies. Emanuel, once a Barack Obama campaign maestro, is now the Mayor of shoot’em up Chicago, a failed Democratic city in a failing state. Politics, in both our state and nation, has become a Darwinian struggle among political insiders in which the most fit rise to the top. And the fittest are those whose narratives, partly fiction, are the most compelling; the narratives themselves occasionally have only a remote connection to a) the truth, and b) objective reality; i.e. the real-world consequences of prevailing political programs.

It was Rahm Emanuel, then consigliore to the Obama administration, now mayor of crime infested Chicago, who once reminded us that clever Harvard educated politicians and street organizers should never let a crisis go to waste. Progressives in the General Assembly have wholeheartedly adopted Emanuel’s view. In his most recent budget, likely unbalanced, Malloy will present to the General Assembly a progressive measure that would “shift $407.6 million, nearly one-third of the annual cost of municipal school teachers’ pensions, onto cities and towns — a move that would hit the state’s wealthiest communities the hardest,”  according to CTMirror . So some say. It is worth noting that the “progressive tax by other means” will draw down municipal resources, weaken town government and pave the way to a false solution: the replacement of town governments with a regional structure overseen by a state that, unlike municipal governments, is chronically incapable of balancing its ...

Rham Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s campaign guru now running for mayor of Chicago, famously cautioned, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” In the year following Mr. Obama’s accession to the presidency, the Obama administration was able to put into practice Mr. Emanuel’s admonition because Democrats had acquired enough seats in congress to snuff out Republican opposition. It is a considerable understatement to say that the Obama administration then proceeded to spend money like a drunken sailor, and it may be an insult to drunken sailors who, after all, stop spending money when they hit the floor. Here in Connecticut, owing to accommodating governors and a Democratic dominated legislature, the Obama paradigm has for at least two decades produced red ink by the barrel. On the Republican and Democratic side, people are beginning to think our crisis should not be permitted to go to waste. But solutions differ widely. The gubernatorial office in Connecticut has now fallen to Democrats...

Jane Hamsher, the political femme fatal who ran on her site a picture of Sen. Joe Lieberman in blackface to help Greenwich millionaire Ned Lamont’s campaign, is attempting a little triangulation of her own now that President Barack Obama seems to have made common cause with the redundantly wealthy denizens of Wall Street. She has combined with the decidedly non-progressive Grover Norquist to throw Rham Emanuel down the mineshaft . Emanuel is Obama's Disraeli. The Norquist/Hamsher combo is very unusual. Norquist is one of the best conservative-libertarian organizers on the planet. In fact, if the Republicans ever do regain the reigns of power in Washington, before the country is flat broke, it would be well if they allowed Norquist to form the entire government -- including the Supreme Court. “If Obama/Rahm want to triangulate against progressives (and they do), they’re not the only ones who can make cause with people on the other side of the aisle. If that’s wha...

What’s coming at us – at warp speed – down the red-brick road is an economic catastrophe. Things are really bad when the Chinese, our dept patrons, begin to throw Ben Franklin our way. According to an article in the British Telegraph , former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive Cheng Siwei admires Ben Franklin enough to have read him, which is more than can be said for President Barack Obama’s economic advisers: “Mr Cheng said the root cause of global imbalances is spending patterns in US (and UK) and China. “’The US spends tomorrow's money today,’ he said. ‘We Chinese spend today's money tomorrow. That's why we have this financial crisis.’ “Yet the consequences are not symmetric. “’He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing,’ said Mr. Cheng. “It was a quote from US founding father Benjamin Franklin.” The Chinese problem is that the country’s leaders -- far more persuasive than, say, send’em-a-dead-fish Rahm Eman...

Obama maintains—with the support of the AARP—that overall, his changes in health-care are helpful to seniors and will save them thousands of dollars. Not so. Seniors are the big losers under ObamaCare according to Betsy McCaughey , the expert who has studied all the congressional plans. To make the cost deficit-neutral, which Obama declares is the goal, $500-$550 billion must be taken away from Medicare spending: less to nursing homes, drugs, protocols, to minimize the handicaps of disability. As a starter, the use of specialists should shift to primary-care doctors, on the misconception that the elderly overuse specialists. Betsy McCaughey reports that studies have shown that for heart patients, a shift to primary care results in a higher death rate. Primary-care physicians frequently misdiagnose heart patients, who are more often readmitted to the hospital. They die sooner. Dr. Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, has written extensively in favor of abandoning efforts to hel...