Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Middle East, we are told, is complex. That is true, but there is little point in making the complex more complex. We in the West should remember that partisanship and corruption grow in the crevices of complexity. If there were little confusion, we would have no need of experts to smooth a path for us through the complexities. The simplest explanation for an occurrence is usually the best. We should apply Occam’s Razor, which holds that the more assumptions you must make, the more unlikely your explanation, to all complex conundrums.

Like a quiescent vampire snoozing by night in his coffin, the prospect of tolls, which the No Tolls CT group thought it had slain, is now showing signs of new life. This may be Governor Ned Lamont’s third or fourth – one loses count – toll proposal iteration. According to a story in a Hartford paper, Lamont is proposing tolls only on bridges “ as low as 40 to 80 cents under revised plan .” What a bargain, as compared with his previous proposals. Lamont, during his campaign for governor, first proposed a trucks only toll on numerous gantries – one loses count. The No Tolls CT movement -- perhaps the first real populist, in the sense of popular, movement in Connecticut since the much abused Tea Party movement a decade past – pretty much slayed the toll dragon after Lamont, now elected governor, expanded his proposal to include pretty much anyone in the state traveling on   a major highway. The Tea Party movement was more or less buried under an avalanche of spending and cor...

Former U.S. Comptroller General and candidate for Governor took some time out of his busy day to answer a couple of questions. See below. Connecticut Commentary :  In your campaign literature, you style yourself a “turnaround specialist,” and your background suggests you have walked the walk. You served as Comptroller General of the United States for 10 years under three different presidents, Reagan, Bush (41) and Clinton, during which time you “led a widely praised transformation of the GAO and spearheaded related efforts for the accountability community both domestically and internationally.” The state of Connecticut certainly could use a CPA governor who can add one and one and get two. Other governors have in the past more or less fudged the numbers through overly optimistic revenue projections and outright thievery – by flitching money from so called “lock boxes” and using the loot to balance chronically out of balance budgets, relieving the pressure, such as it is, on th...

There may be only three or four ways to win an election, but there are a dozen ways to lose one. There seems to be a general agreement among thoughtful Republicans that Tom Foley, the Republican nominee for governor in 2010 and 2014, lost to Dannel Malloy because his campaigns lacked what might loosely be called the social angle. Both campaigns left voters wondering what might be the difference between the Democrat and Republican candidates. Oz Griebel entered a primary against Foley for governor in 2010 and lost, possibly because Republicans were unable to distinguish between Foley and Griebel. Foley, as it turned out, was richer; his ties to conservatives in his party were not the ties that bind. The Foley 2010 campaign was businesslike rather than conservative on economic issues; even then Connecticut was sloshing around in alligator infested, muddy waters. And Foley was AWOL on social issues. His was the usual losing Republican campaign. On the economy, Foley pla...

Q: You believe the state of Connecticut is in crisis. A: Yes, and I’m not alone. There are two crises; the state itself, by which I mean its people and businesses, is in crisis; and state government, sometimes mistaken for the state, also is in crisis. To a certain extent, the first crisis is driven by the second. Q: These two are not the same? A: They are never the same. Lincoln spoke of a government of, by and for the people, but if you pause over that formulation and think about it, you will discover the two are not the same. In a perfect representative system, differences between the two are slight; state government and the larger, real state are close cousins. But that can never be the case in a republic in which government operates by force. This is the present condition in Connecticut, and the state has been in this mode for a long while. We have had single party government in the General Assembly, Connecticut’s lawmaking body, for almost half a century. When the...

I began writing “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State” more than 23 years ago because early on I glimpsed the dark at the end of the tunnel, and I was determined to make a record of the destruction of Connecticut, so that, years in the future, if anyone, poking his or her head above the rubble, wished to consult a record that tried valiantly to answer the questions – What went wrong, and who were the culprits?– he or she would have a faithful reference point. Today, I have an opportunity to render an abbreviated version of the longer account. I plan to touch here on the wrong-headed policies that have led us into the dark tunnel, some of the personalities involved, the rise of progressivism in Connecticut under the stewardship of Governor Dannel Malloy, the political repercussions of unsound policies, and what the French have called “the treason of the intellectuals.” Not to paint too bleak a picture – people generally don’t want to hear bad news – I should s...

Is there yet another tax hike in our near future? Thinking people think so. Republican leaders in the General Assembly hit the tax increase chord repeatedly in the recently concluded elections, and apparently voters responded to it. The Republicans picked up seats in the Senate, which is now a fifty-fifty proposition, 18 Democrats and 18 Republicans. The GOP also gained seats in the House. In a recent TV interview, Governor Dannel Malloy said he would not rule out another tax hike, more budget cuts were in the offing, and recurring deficits were the fault of his predecessors. Parsing Mr. Malloy at this point should not be difficult. During his first campaign, Mr. Malloy said Connecticut shoulders would have to lift the weight of deficits caused by other governors, but the burden would be fairly distributed between cuts and tax increases. Two tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history, demonstrate beyond doubt that taxpayers have shouldered the...

The state of Israel must survive, and this is not a walk in the park. Israel is surrounded by noxious Arab powers that long for its utter destruction, the most ambitious of which is Iran, now on the path to becoming a nuclear tipped hegemonic power in the Middle East. Once the enemy of the United States, Iran is a fierce and energetic enemy of both Israel and the United States, which it regards as “The Great Satan.” Since the fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country has become both more Islamic and belligerent. These two, a puritanical reform of Islam and an increase in theologically inspired violence, seem to walk arm and arm together in this sorry veil of tears.

“ The moderate eastern Republican fell victim to Republican extremists from within, such as William F. Buckley, and the party started to disintegrate ,” so says former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, who lost his position in the Senate when he was challenged by then Attorney General Joe Lieberman. Mr. Lieberman, a Democrat of long standing, was not an extremist conservative; neither, for that matter was Bill Buckley. But let us be generous and allow Mr. Weicker his point, for purposes of examination. What practical effect, if any, has Mr. Buckley’s conservativism had on Connecticut, which is part of the eastern seaboard? The honest answer to the question would be next to none. If politics in Connecticut were a dog, conservatives would represent the tip of the tail. And tails wag dogs only in the fevered imagination of ideologues. All past Republican Party members of Connecticut's US Delegation – Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays – were fiscal conservative...

After paying court to Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget address, a eupeptic Republican noted that he sounded like Ronald Reagan. Another, unused to taking leaps of faith, said if only Mr. Malloy had done at the beginning of his term in office what he had said in his current budget address, we wouldn’t be in this fix. General Electric’s leave-taking may have served as a splash of cold water in Mr. Malloy’s face. Aetna, it appears, may be looking for an exit. Sikorsky has been sold, and other insurance companies, in part reacting to a failing Obamacare, are commingling in an effort to cut costs. More than a quarter of the total number of 893,851 active professional physicians reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation have now declined to participate in the new plans under the Affordable Care Act, a number of states have declined to set up exchanges, and UnitedHealth Group , the nation's largest health insurer, having lost more than $500 million on exchange plans, warned l...

In case anyone has not noticed, we are in the midst of a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values epoch.  Last week, the United States Supreme Court raised the roof on marriage to accommodate gays, striking down with one bold stroke state laws governing marriage that the justices and the editorial board of the New York Times thought primitive and unnecessary. Gov. Dannel Malloy, WFSB reported , “called the decision historic and had a LGBT pride flag flying at the Governor's Residence in Hartford on Friday. ‘This is a historic moment, and we should recognize and celebrate its significance. Equality, freedom, justice and liberty – all recognized by the Supreme Court in this ruling that moves our nation forward,’ Mr. Malloy said.” His administration, Mr. Malloy has said previously, is the gayest in state history and has been full of historic moments.

Q: Some people think you are a misanthrope. GG: I must regretfully reject the compliment. Q: Compliment? GG: It’s no small thing being a misanthrope. You must dislike or mistrust everyone . Unfortunately, I haven’t the energy to be so democratic in my antipathies.                                                                                                                        ...

Someone – could it have been the ghost of Tom D’Amore ? – has suggested that the Republican Party should open its primaries to unaffiliateds. An unaffiliated is someone who, for reasons not perfectly understood, does not wish to   formally affiliate with political parties. Tom D’Amore, now entertaining Jacob Javits Republicans in Heaven, was Senator Lowell Weicker’s majordomo when Mr. Weicker was in Washington DC fighting the good fight against Reagan Republicans. For a time, Mr. D’Amore, at the insistence of Weicker, was the Republican Party Chairmen in Connecticut. As Chairman he pledged he would not preside over the destruction of the Connecticut GOP and then introduced the idea of permitting unaffiliateds to vote in Republican Party primaries, an idea that went over like a lead balloon,  once thoughtful Republicans had discovered that the idea would prevent Ronald Reagan conservatives from making inroads into the Connecticut GOP, perhaps heaving Mr. Weicker ...

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, the bad conscience of Connecticut’s Republican Party, has surfaced once again in one of his usual haunts, the Hartford Courant , a paper that has in the past managed to oblige Weicker’s whimsy, whether he was muscling the General Assembly into passing an income tax or torpedoing Republican campaigns against then US Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, or supplying the Republican Party in Connecticut with the rope Weicker suspected it would use to hang itself. Having appointed his majordomo, Tom D’Amore, as state GOP Chairmen, D’Amore proposed that the Republican Party should allow independents to vote in party primaries, thus assuring the election for life of then US Senator Weicker. At the time, D’Amore assured the party’s central committee that he had not assumed his responsibilities as Chairman to preside over the demise of the Republican Party. Republicans declined the offer of the rope; D’Amore later was replaced by a cha...

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - Otto von Bismarck A Hartford paper’s Sunday edition crackles with a front page story that asks and answers the tormenting question: Is progressivism dead ? The paper’s emphatic answer is – no, not yet, certainly not in Connecticut. The paper notes in passing the whupping progressive Democrats took in the off year elections, though the account spares the wounded the most important details.

Do debates determine elections? On occasion, they do. Those defending the proposition that debates are determinative point to the Nixon-Kennedy contest of 1960. And of course the Lincoln-Douglas debates still are held up in the history books as demonstrating the political utility of vigorous debates. It is sometimes forgotten by those who urge the importance of debates that Stephen Douglas, not Abraham Lincoln, emerged the victor in their Senate contest. The Lincoln-Douglas debates later were assembled into a book by Lincoln. Widely distributed, the book helped him to win the presidential election of 1860. The format of the Lincoln-Douglas debates – a 60 minute opening statement from the first candidate, followed by an alternative 90 minute statement from the second candidate, followed by a 30 minute rejoinder  from the first candidate  -- became, with some adjustments, the template for most future political debates. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were moderated by L...

Dave Walker, who is running for Lieutenant Governor on the Republican Party ticket, is recognized by most credible political observers as perhaps the most over qualified candidate for Lieutenant Governor in state history. He is a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame and for ten years was the Comptroller General of the United States. When Mr. Walker talks about budgets, financing and pension viability, people listen. Mr. Walker is also attuned to fine nuances in political campaigning. He is not running for governor, he says, because he had moved to Connecticut only four years ago and wishes to respect the political pecking order. Very few people in the state think that, were he governor, Mr. Walker would know less about the finance side of government than his budget chief.

Coolidge Henry Mencken, who scorched most American presidents in his writings, lowered the temperature a bit when he wrote about President Calvin Coolidge: “Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver [Woodrow Wilson] and followed by two more [Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt]. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.” Mencken was mostly right about Mr. Coolidge: There were no thrills while he reigned because he attended diligently and persistently to the sometimes quiet but always necessary and indispensable tasks of the presidential office.  “Never go out to meet trouble,” Coolidge advised. “If you just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you. ”While a very good public speaker, Mr. Coolidge was the o...

Americans used to wait a decent interval before they set about re-writing history. An example of a recent re-write may be found in an op-ed written by Mark Bowen, who writes for the New Republic. The piece is a glowing review of Ben Affleck’s new film “Argo.” In the course of his review, Mr. Bowen punctures what he understands to be two grave misunderstandings: 1) that former President Jimmy Carter was too weak to foresee and prevent the Iranian hostage crisis; “in fact, he prepared and launched one of the boldest covert military efforts in American history,” and 2) that President Ronald Reagan “proved to be a lot more willing to deal with the mullahs than Carter ever was.” In other pieces written by Mr. Bowen ,   the author of “ "Guests of the Ayatollah" is constrained to mention in passing some similarities between the Iranian crisis and recent difficulties in Benghazi, the site of the murder by terrorists of American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Ame...

In a meeting with the Editorial Board of the Danbury News Times, Republican Party Senate hopeful Chris Shays told editors on Tuesday “he will take his fight for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to an August primary,” perhaps not the most useful way to influence Republican Party convention delegates to choose him to represent the party in what promises to be an expensive and contentious battle for a U.S. Senate seat presently held by Joe Lieberman. Mr. Shays had done the math. “Only 25 percent of voters in Connecticut are Republicans,” Mr. Shays says, “and only 20 percent of them vote. So now 5 percent of the electorate are (sic) going to vote in the Republican primary, and of that 5 percent, 2½ percent plus one are going to decide. … We know who those 150,000 voters are who are going to vote and we can target them and make our best case.” The worry among Republicans is that Mr. Shays' promised primary, should nominating conventioneers once again choose party competitor...