Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It was a trifle embarrassing, but U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy was able adroitly to dodge the bullet. “This week,” the   Journal Inquirer reported “Murphy dodged questions about [receiving campaign] tainted money from Spitzer, and instead focused on contributions from average people.” Elliot Spitzer, a former New York Attorney General and Governor, resigned blushingly in 2008 to dodge impeachment following reports in the New York Times, the JI reported, “that he had patronized prostitutes, highlighting a meeting for two hours with a $1,000-per-hour prostitute…

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) awarded Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal a dubious distinction. Citing four categories – Dubious Dealings, Fabricating Law, AG Imperialism/Usurping Legislative Powers and Predatory Practices – Blumenthal was crowned “the worst attorney general in the United States.” He had some fierce competition: Eliot Spitzer, New York’s attorney general, had not yet been toppled from his hobby horse by consorting with prostitutes. Among the categories not mentioned by CEI was the misuse of fraudulent affidavits to secure from judges ex parte seizures of assets. An ex parte proceeding permits judges to invest prosecutors with the authority to seize the assets of persons they are investigating -- without a hearing before a judge. Two cases now wending their way through various courts, one involving a tea and herb vendor and the other a wood pellet distributor, graphically demonstrate Blumenthal’s abuse of ex parte attachment...

In 2007, the Competitive Enterprise Institute compiled a report titled “The Nation’s Top Ten Worst State Attorneys General.” Topping the list at number one was Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal; Elliot Spitzer, drummed out of office by a sex scandal, was third. Bill Lockyer, number two in the 2007 listing, has since been elevated to State Treasurer of California, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. If Blumenthal does decide to run for governor, there are ten other “worst” attorneys general who will be vying for the first position. “Over the past decade,” said Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “attorneys general have increasingly usurped the role of state legislatures and Congress by using litigation to impose interstate and national regulations and to extract money from out-of-state defendants. The worst offenders flaunt such abuse of power, with the most notorious of the lot … boasting that he ‘has redefined th...

According to an AP report , former Attorney General and Governor of New York Elliot Spitzer was hoisted by his own petard because the so called “dirty tricks” commonly employed by attorney generals in this the land of the free and home of the brave were not transferable once Spitzer had become governor of New York. The canary who sang to Albany County District Attorney P. David Soares was Spitzer’s former communication director Darren Dopp. Before Dopp began his employment with then Attorney General Spitzer, he was a reporter for the Associated Press. In his previous capacity, Dopp likely would have gone to jail to protect his source. As communications director for Governor Spitzer, Dopp was just a yeoman functionary attempting to burnish the public persona of his boss. He was successful in this possibly because he had friends in high places within the journalistic community. When Dopp was threatened with jail, he began to sing. Dopp told Soares that Spitzer had “directly ordered him ...

The press today – and by that I suppose we shall have to include such organs of the media as YouTube and MyLeftNutmeg – is exceedingly concerned with moral reprobation. For those who do not know, MyLeftNutmeg is a hard hitting leftist blog site in Connecticut. It’s good to be hard, bad to be soft. I do not mean to single out my honorable brothers on the left here for… well… moral reprobation; all this is merely by way of example. MyLeftNutmeg receives the bulk of its political ethic, such as it is, from other blog sites, MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post, for example; proving, once and for all, that the press – or the media, as some would prefer – is 10% thought and 90% repetition. It is important not to underestimate the power of repetition -- as a propaganda tool. Lenin said that if you label something effectively, you do not have to argue with it; this includes both people and propositions. People who have been labeled effectively within the past month include the not-so Reverend ...

USA Today has provided some chop quotes from various news outlets commenting upon the Spitzer mess. Most of the commentators have been so scrupulous in avoiding all talk of the sanctity of marriage that they have fallen headlong into a vat of secular verbiage. This avoidance is the obverse of sanctimony, but it really amounts to the same thing. Even atheists can be sanctimonious, and Spitzer fell from grace this time because he was not sanctimonious. The Daily News allowed that Spitzer’s fall from grace chipped away at his “moral authority.” Character and honesty are important, and “his blithe willingness to order up a hooker by telephone revealed an abysmal and disqualifying lack of judgment.” Ah, so that’s what it was, a lack of judgment. Only in the age of Madonna -- no, not that one -- can you have moral authority without having morals. Spitzer also lacked “perspective,” which “cast him into a freefall in the polls.” He showed his “dark side” to an ever recoiling New York. The pa...

The question is: Now that former attorney general of New York and former governor the Big Apple Elliot Spitzer has suffered public humiliation, lost his job and his reputation and seen an earthquake size crack begin to form in what previously had been supposed to be an ideal if somewhat Hollywood-like marriage, where do we go from here? Should Spitzer be prosecuted? In other words, now that the scourge of Wall Street has been flayed and executed, what do we do with the corpse? Some few rotten businessmen at the receiving end of Spitzer’s lash and some few newspaper owners determined to show the world that, even though they are by profession and inclination conservative Republican slayers, they too can cry with the best of them “I’m fer’sticken his head on a pike and show’n it on Brooklyn bridge,” are for further prosecution. My proletariat workmates watched the unmasking of Spitzer on television between lunch and coffee breaks. Working folk are not quite as severe in these matters as a...

“Am I proud? Yes, why should I not be, When even men who do not fear God Fear me? Those few lines were written by Alexander Pope, an English poet and critic active in the early 1700’s, who had some reason to be proud. He was a fine poet and an even better journalist who delighted in pricking the airy balloons of the high and mighty of his time, sometimes anonymously. Prisons yawned in the 18th century to swallow libelers, and men kept their dueling pistols near at hand. His biographer tells us that Pope’s physical defects – he was misshapen owing to a fall from a horse at an early age – “made him an easy target for heartless mockery.” He also had a religious problem: “Pope's father, the son of an Anglican vicar, had converted to Catholicism, which caused the family many problems. At the time Catholics suffered from repressive legislation and prejudices - they were not allowed to enter any universities or hold public employment. Thus Pope had an uneven education, which was often int...

Now that Governor of New York Elliot Spitzer has been hobbled by scandal , are there any lessons to be learned in the Spitzer mess for our own crusading Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is said to be seriously considering a run for governor? The template for the successful attorney general here in Connecticut was fashioned by once attorney general, now senator, Joe Lieberman, who took a sleepy office and transformed it into a major indignation outpost. In the colonial period, the attorney general was the King’s lawyer; but the modern office, first under the hand of Lieberman and now Blumenthal, has been transformed into a consumer protection agency with subpoena powers. When Spitzer, as attorney general, wanted to set right defective businesses, he would direct his sprawling office to examine all the records he had gathered through his subpoena powers and, having found a chick in the armor of the business, there he would thrust his lance. Pre-prosecution publicity, the death kn...

According to an extensive report in The New York Times , the state’s new governor, the redoubtable Elliot Spitzer, once attorney general of the Empire state, has slipped on blood. Evidentially, carrying into his new office some of the bad habits he so carefully cultivated as New York’s attorney general – some dare call him Caligula – Spitzer planted a story in an upstate newspaper that was designed to discredit his chief foe in the state’s legislature, State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. Problem was the information leaked to the paper was rancid, and not entirely true. Newspapers generally resent being manipulated in this way and, even as I write, it may be supposed that several managing editors of various newspapers are knotting the rope they will use to hang Spitzer. The poor fellow probably lapsed for a moment into his discarded skin as attorney general and thought he was dealing not with a powerful legislator but rather with some small time businessman who had run afoul of o...

Mark it on the calendar: On March 18, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ended the most prolonged petting session in Connecticut’s political history. Columnist Kevin Rennie has revealed that Blumenthal was – seriously folks – throwing his hat into the gubernatorial ring. The Democrat Party has for 20 long years been trying to entice the camera shy Blumenthal to run for something – anything – but attorney general, and he now has semi-definitively said that he will go all the way. Blumenthal’s announcement follows former attorney general Elliot Spitzer’s successful run for governor in New York. The attorneys general have been in the habit for many years of following each other around like a string of doggies, nose to tail, and it’s possible that Blumie, noting Spitzer’s successful venture in New York, figured to copy his template. Or perhaps Blumie simply tired of trotting out old excuses when political functionaries in Greenwich asked him for the hundredth time when he planned to run f...

Elliot Spitzer, the attorney General of New York, appears to have pulled it off. Most political prognosticators agree that he will be the next governor of the empire state. It may well be a step down for him. The attorneys general have managed to define their office as a safe haven outside of politics, and so they have little opposition; certainly they have little opposition in the media. Former attorney general Joe Lieberman reconfigured the office here in Connecticut from what used to be called in the colonial period “the king’s lawyer” to the more exalted position of “the people’s lawyer,” and the change in form necessarily involved changes in functions. There are no attorney general anti-bodies out there in the body politic. The power of the attorney general is hedged about only by sleepy-eyed judges who are busy engaged in their own bailiwicks. Since many legislators are either sympathetic lawyers themselves or bureaucrats whose livelihood depends on an entrenched legal establishm...

State Republicans in Connecticut must be a bit envious of their national party. Even ardent Democrats who believe that President George Bush is an imbecile – a dwindling number as more and more Republicans are added to the U.S. Congress – allow that the Republicans, led by uber-advisor Karl Rove, the putative brains behind the throne, did a magnificent job in showing Sen. John Kerry the door. While their national counterparts were expanding their political power, State Republicans were losing seats in the legislature. And only last week Lieutenant Governor Kevin Sullivan, formerly the President Pro Tem of the state senate, acting on behalf of Governor Jodi Rell, who was on a vacation not paid for by state contractors, unburdened himself of the following sentiment: "It is outrageous that our state would be seen nationally as the place to buy an illegal license. Worse still, it appears that state authorities failed to act for weeks after being informed by the media investigation tha...