Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Only a few days after ABC News celebrity George Stephanopoulos got himself stuck in the ubiquitous Clinton goo, apparently an occupational hazard for friends of Bill and Hillary, Sidney Blumenthal – not to be confused with U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, also a dear friend of the Clintons – found himself stretched on the journalistic rack. Mr. Blumenthal was first outed by a hacker known as “Guccifer,” who posted on-line four memos Mr. Blumenthal had written to Mrs. Clinton, the probable Democratic nominee for president. The e-mails were hacked from Mrs. Clintons’s private, unauthorized server. “Guccifer” apparently has done what all the Republican horses and all the Republican men thus far have been incapable of doing – prying from Mrs. Clinton’s clenched fist some e-mails touching on Benghazi she thought to keep private by operating from a private, and possibly illegal, server.

Those opposed to Obamacare, virtually all Republicans, probably should have realized that the Supreme Court does not convene to decide political issues. On Thursday, a little less than a week before Independence Day – And here one can hear disappointed Republicans grumbling, “A day that will live in infamy…” – the Supreme Court adroitly stepped over the political puddle, leaving Obamacare, apart from some few minor adjustments, virtually intact. Republicans had argued that the mandate provision, which assigned a penalty for people or businesses that declined to bow their necks to the Obamacare scimitar, was unconstitutional. Should the court find the provision constitutional, it would herald in a new and ruinous doctrine; namely, that the federal government can order citizens to purchase a service or product, a power never before exercised by congress. The court decision said, in effect, that Congress had no constitutional authority to claim such power through appeal to the c...

“Is that truth or gossip?” http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-reacts-publicly-osama-bin-laden-death/story?id=13592860

ABC news Chief Washington Correspondent and "This Week" Host George Stephanopoulos says that tax scofflaw Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may be contemplating increasing income taxes on the Middle Class: “To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a ‘This Week’ exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, ‘We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.’” Big surprise there.

Here’s hoping that the next time Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi goes to confession – the lady confesses to being a Catholic – the priest in the confessional box has the presence of mind to have an economist seated beside him. Pelosi believes that contraception and other family planning services, among which must abortion must be included, “help states meet their financial needs” and ultimately reduce costs. This sunburst came during a confab with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus? PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to...

Rham Emmanuel, the numero uno aide in the incoming Obama administration, has now been offered absolution of any wrong doing in any connection he or the Obama administration may have had with media tainted Governor of Chicago Rod Blagojevich by 1) the Obama administration (in a report the administration soon will released) and 2) host of ABC’s “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos, to whom the report was released early. It's who you know that counts in political reporting. That should satisfy the the complaisant Main Stream Media , as well as President-elect Barack Omaha’s other adoring fans. “I have been briefed on the review that Obama has done,” Stephanopoulos said. “The sources I talked to say that what it will show is there were actually far less contacts than we had heard – that Rahm Emanuel only had one phone call with Governor Blagojevich. It wasn’t even really about the Senate seat.” The New York Times is reporting that "lawyers who compiled the Obama review did not ha...

The announcement that appeared in the Hartford Courant was brief and modest, a little less than 150 words, five famished paragraphs: Michele Jacklin, former reporter, columnist and editorial board member had left the paper and joined the gubernatorial campaign of current Bridgeport Mayor John DeStefano as Director of Policy and Research. Other journalists have passed the bar dividing journalism and politics without damage to their careers. Pat Buchanan, initially connected with Richard Nixon, has passed over and under the bar several times; George Stephanopoulos moved effortlessly from Bill Clinton’s campaigns to become a television commentator; and closer to home, Charlie Morse, once the Courant’s chief political columnist, appropriately ended his career at the paper by joining the campaign of Lowell Weicker, an ideological soul mate. Some political watchers were mildly stunned by Jacklin’s move; not because she had passed through the revolving door that connects journalism and pol...