Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

January came in like a lion and went out like a lion, leaving behind in its wake a pile of snow and bone chilling winds that would make even the most fervent acolyte of global warming curse Al Gore, the high priest of the cult. GW cultists these days insist on calling their peculiar faith “climate change,” which is probably what Mr. Mark Twain had in mind when he said, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute; it’ll change,” or words to that effect. A neighbor across the lake, Tony Procrastinate (not his real name) who has just given up the last of the New Year’s resolutions he made at the beginning of the month, insists that Winter dumped three feet of snow on his property, and it is pointless to try to convince him that his snow footage is an accumulative figure, the present couple of feet having been added to the unshoveled couple of feet left over from the last storm. Mr. Procrastinate neglected to clean up his property last time because… well, he had turn...

I Cried For A Year In March, 2009, Mathew Fitzsimmons, an assistant attorney general in Attorney General Dick Blumenthal’s office, found himself peppered by a battery of uncomfortable questions in Judge James Bentivegna’s Superior Court in a case involving Valerie and David Hoffman. Before Dick Blumenthal’s office fell on her like a ton of bricks, Valerie Hoffman, a small business woman, owned an herbal internet company, and her husband David was a house builder. A small independent contractor, David would buy land, put a house on it, sell the house and use the proceeds to repeat the process. Any monetary interruption in the business chain, he knew, would prove fatal to his livelihood. Valerie had been cited by the state’s Consumer Protection department on a few complaints, information that made its way to George Gombossy, recently installed at the Hartford Courant as the paper’s consumer protection bulldog. Because of the connections between the Courant and Dick Blumenthal, whose beam...