Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the Hoffmans have reached a settlement on the three-year-old case. Blumenthal’s press release following the settlement is written in his usual triumphant mode. The case was a losing proposition for Hoffmans going in, and it is instructive to ask why. The final settlement, reached after years of litigation, demonstrates that the forces arrayed against the Hoffmans – which include, by the way, a compliant media – could not be overcome. Never-the-less, some battles are worth fighting, if only to make a record that would not exist when one chooses simply to lie down in the path of an irresistible force. In the Hoffman case – and more strikingly in the New England Pellet (NEP) case – some of Blumenthal’s questionable methods were closely scrutinized by this blog. The attorney general’s methods are as simple and effective as those employed in 15th century by the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who was inclined to settle matters of religious...

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s recent dip in the polls, owing to his multiple lies concerning his service in Vietnam, is now bending in a more favorable direction for him. Analysts are busily interpreting the uptick in a recent Rasmussen poll. National commentators still insist that Blumenthal lied rather than misspoke when he said, addressing some veterans groups in which media presence was light, that he had served in Vietnam. After the single questionable reference in a New York Times front page story had spurred other papers to search their archives, other Blumenthal misspeakings soon surfaced. The multiple instances in which Blumenthal asserted he had served in Vietnam threw into doubt the attorney general’s assertion that he misspoke. In a June 3rd story in the National Journal.com for instance, Jamie Shufflebarger wrote : “Blumenthal said or implied on numerous occasions that he had served in Vietnam during the war. He most famously said in '08 that ...