Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Very quietly and without any fanfare, Governor Dannel Malloy on May 11 began negotiations on the state budget with Democratic legislative leaders Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney and House Speaker Brendan Sharkey. The two leaders days earlier had given their approval to a finance committee approved budget that raised taxes considerably and was light on spending cuts. A budget produced by Republicans was its opposite number. Perhaps taking Mr. Malloy at his word, the Republican budget was balanced and contained no new taxes – just the sort of budget Mr. Malloy might have approved, if he took seriously his own campaign pledges. Several times during the gubernatorial campaign season, Mr. Malloy embraced a no new taxes budget plan. The budget Mr. Malloy presented to the General Assembly was out of balance and, said its critics, rather severe on groups of people who are forced by circumstances to throw themselves on the mercy of strangers.

"We cannot continue to put the Band-Aid on the problem and hope when we go to bed at night that next year will be any different. Next year is not different unless we make it different this year." So said House Minority Leader Themis Klarides as state Republicans launched their "Roadmap to Prosperity" alternative budget. Immediate reactions from leading Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly have not been obdurately dismissive. As a general rule, Democrats prefer long term spending measures and short term spending cuts, the shorter the better. Republicans prefer – or should prefer – exactly the opposite: long terms spending cuts and short term revenue increases, only when they are necessary. The Republican budget is a vast improvement over Governor Dannel Malloy’s defective budget, a step in the right (pun intended) direction.

The picture shows former State House Speaker Chris Donovan smiling broadly and sporting new hair on his face, a white trimmed beard and moustache. He is chatting with Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, who is smiling and appears to be sharing a humorous confidence with Mr. Donovan. Could she be remarking on his spiffy new look? Or perhaps she is congratulating the recipient of NARAL’s (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) attentions at having escaped the prosecutorial noose that hanged his campaign finance director and other staff members who worked on Mr. Donovan’s failed U.S. House bid in Connecticut’s 5th District.

Dan Roberti, a Democrat running for the U.S House in Connecticut’s 5th District has called upon Democratic Party nominee Chris Donovan to quit the race. "It is time for Chris Donovan to withdraw from the primary race for the good of the Connecticut Democratic Party and to protect the seat,” Mr. Roberti said following an indictment returned by a Grand Jury of Mr. Donovan’s former campaign director Robert Braddock. “He has hidden behind lawyers and never stepped up to explain how members of his campaign staff could have arranged conduit contributions without his knowledge." Following Mr. Roberti’s invitation to withdraw, Donovan campaign manager Tom Swan declared that Mr. Donovan remains, even after damning disclosures, the strongest Democrat in the race . Mr. Donovan was nominated at the Democratic convention for the 5 th District seat now occupied by U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, the Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate seat that will be vacated when pre...

Republican Senate Minority Leader John McKinney called upon Democratic Speaker of the House Chris Donovan to relinquish his position as Speaker following the arrest of his former finance chairman, Robert Braddock, for having concealed the identity of a donor, likely an FBI plant, who wanted to kill tax legislation on “roll your own” cigarette businesses in Connecticut. Pointing to an affidavit used to secure the arrest of Mr. Braddock, Mr. Kinney said, “The facts and allegations in the affidavit are a grave violation of the public trust and cast a pall on all of the legislative activities Speaker Donovan has participated in since announcing his run for the U.S. Congress in the 5 th District,” a fairly damning assessment. For his part, Mr. Donovan temporarily turned over the usufructs of his office to colleague Brendan Sharkey, who is expected to be appointed Speaker after Mr. Donovan’s term ends, and he has refused a call from one of his Democratic primary opponents, Dan R...

The Chris Donovan presser -- the first time the 5 th District nominee of the Democratic Party for the US Congress had appeared to answer media questions concerning the arrest of his former finance chairman – was preceded by a prelude in which Donovan spokesman Gabe Rosenberg, laid down the ground rules for the presser. Mr. Rosenberg read from the following statement: “I have to take a minute to set some ground rules. This is a very serious matter, and we have treated it that way. Chris has retained attorney Shelly Sadin of Bridgeport to represent him, his campaign, and his legislative office, and she’s here in front.” Ms. Sadin is a white-collar criminal defense lawyer associated with the Bridgeport firm of Zeldes Needle & Cooper. “Chris’ lawyer,” Mr. Rosenberg continued, “has made it clear that while she recognizes the importance of Chris speaking directly to the public, he needs to take great care not to do anything that might interfere with an ongoing federal inquiry....

It always helps if the person slated for destruction assists in the operation. In this regard, Speaker of the State House of Representatives Chris Donovan has been an obliging subject. Mr. Donovan missed his all-important curtain call – a non-negotiable demand from Connecticut’s left of center media that he present himself instantly to answer some nagging questions --     instead sending the director of the Connecticut Citizens Action Group (CCAG), Tom Swan, to catch the flack coming his way after the finance director for Mr. Donovan’s now faltering campaign for the U.S. House in the 5 th District was arrested in what appears to be a successful FBI sting operation. Mr. Donovan has hired two lawyers to help him weather the coming storm, the resourceful Stan Twardy, a political operative in the administration of then Governor Lowell Weicker, and a stand-by criminal lawyer. Mr. Donovan fired his corrupted finance director and replaced his campaign manager, Josh Nassi, w...

The Donovan sting, now referred to by Tom Dudchik of Capitol Report as “Speakergate,” continues to froth. CC-1 (Co-Conspirator 1), the FBI canary who helped to turn the tables on Robert Braddock, the former finance director of Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan’s U.S. House bid, has now been identified as Ray Soucy, a correctional industries supervisor at the Cheshire prison complex, according to a Hartford Courant story . Just before Mr. Donovan was about to be pummeled over the weekend by Connecticut’s media, the Speaker, who has rejected calls that he quit the state House and terminate his campaign for the U.S. House in Connecticut’s 5th District, fired Mr. Braddock and hired Tom Swan, the director of the left of center Connecticut Citizen Action Group, to replace his former campaign manager, who was also fired. Even as Mr. Swan stepped before the Media to say he had looked Mr. Donovan squarely in the eye and asked him point blank whether he was in any way connected w...

An endorsement by current U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in the race for the senate seat he will vacate when his term expires just might, unlike the usual light-as-air endorsements of has-been politicians, carry some weight. Mr. Lieberman is loathed by Democratic leftists in Connecticut. Hell hath no fury like that of a progressive scorned. Progressive radicals, feeling their oats, were prepared to rejoice heartily and even strew a few rose petals at the senator’s feet had he yielded to them following the Lieberman-Lamont primary, which was won by progressive heartthrob Ned Lamont. Mr. Lieberman, however, was not prepared to go quietly into that good night of whipped politicians; and so, having lost the primary, he challenged Mr. Lamont in a three way general election – and won. This was not the way to win friends and influence Connecticut progressives. If the progressive movement in Connecticut had an imam in it, a political fatwa would have been urged against Mr. Lieberman by progr...

On the question of a public option in the health care debate, liberal Democrats are now playing the God card, and it would appear that every liberal’s favorite whipping boy, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is in their view a moral apostate. Lieberman, already in Dutch with the far left of his party for having fraternized with the enemy, has vigorously opposed the “public option” – a euphemism for nationalized insurance – for non-theological reasons having to do with dollars and cents. But no sooner did Lieberman say he felt it was a “moral obligation” to oppose a ruinously expensive nationalized health insurance plan than there appeared out of the blue a union inspired “vigil” of rabbis and imams and priests and Unitarian ministers all inveighing against Lieberman as a religious reprobate. It certainly is odd how the seemingly inflexible doctrine of the separation of church and state — vigorously applied to crèches during the Christian season of joy – just comes and goes. Most news accoun...

The day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans in Connecticut appeared to have staged something of a come-back, evidence that the party is not cold-stone dead, Ned Lamont announced he was forming a committee to explore a run for governor. The following day, his announcement was wreathed in headlines. The Hartford Courant ran a top of the fold front page story: “ Ned Lamont May Run For Governor .” Is there any significance to the timing? If one is going to throw one’s hat “near the ring,” as one publication put it , a post election period is not a bad time to do it. The T.S. Elliot poem, “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes to mind: “There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;… Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.” The attention grabbing headlines suggest that Lamont’s entrée into the race will change...

Those who are used to seeing Tom Swan – current director of Connecticut’s Citizen Action Group and past director of Ned Lamont’s failed senatorial campaign against current U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman – in his appalled mode will not be surprised to learn that he was “appalled” at the suggestion, according to a piece in the New Haven Independent , “that he and other progressives present were being used to rescue a senator [U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd] who got too cozy with financial barons and predators.” Dodd has been traveling about the state visiting liberal watering holes, with an obliging train of progressives in tow, in an attempt some would consider desperate to shore up his tattered reputation. Lately, Dodd has suggested that those in the Bush administration who had facilitated the water boarding of Kalid Sheik Mohammed should be tried in court, as were Nazi war criminals prosecuted in Nuremburg by his father. A short video clip shown on MyLeftNutmeg , a left wing blog, shows Dodd holding f...

Tom Swan , the head of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group and the campaign manager for Ned Lamont in his unsuccessful run for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s seat, is kicking dust on John "Corky'' Mazurek’s shoes. Swan prefers Karen A. Houghtaling over Mazurek. Houghtaling is described in one story as “a 41-year-old grandmother who works more than 60 hours a week in two jobs as a receptionist and a waitress in Waterbury.” She is backed by CCAG and labor union groups such as the United Auto Workers, AFSCME Council 4, and the Working Families Party, the usual culprits who sit like gargoyles on the left wing of the Democrat Party. The Working Families Party is one of those odd party organs that developed as reformers attempted to bring political parties, increasingly viewed as unnecessary, into the 21st century. The “party” in Connecticut has, according to one account, fewer than a dozen registered members and a line on political ballots. It’s the line on the ballot, used by the WFP...

Jim Amann, the Speaker of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, has announced that he is surrendering his position, very likely to Majority Leader Chris Donovan, though others are vying for the position. Before he was elected to his leadership position, Donovan served as House Chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee. A key sponsor of health care reform, he has worked strenuously to create a system of universal health care in Connecticut. The insurance pool bill – which ought to be named after Bill Curry who as state Comptroller suggested the measure in 1991 – glided through the House on a party line vote shortly after Amann threw in the towel. Gathering votes for its passage was Donovan, who said “What's not to like about it? Its time has come.” According to his legislative biography, Donovan “is a labor representative with the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges and teaches part-time at the University of Hartford. Rep. Donovan formerly worked for the Connecticut...

Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Dodd is a liberal; or, as liberals like to style themselves these days, a progressive. So, naturally, conservatives in and out of the senate tend to rejoice at his absence from the chamber, increased these last few months by his quixotic pursuit of the presidency. Dodd’s ratio of missed votes compare favorably to other Democrat presidential wannabes. Hillary Clinton has missed 18% of senate votes because she is able to avail herself of private aircraft to speed her back and forth from the capital; Barack Obama missed 34%; Joe Biden missed 35% and Dodd 34%. According to Project Vote Smart, an organization that tracks votes important to Dodd’s clamorous progressive supporters on various blog sites, the senator missed 75% of “key votes” last month and 100% by the end of November. Now comes a page one story in the Hartford Courant written by Rinker Buck , the paper’s designated funeral director, to drive the last few nails into Dodd’s coffin. Buck points to a Quinn...

Ted Kennedy Jr., the son of the senator from Massachusetts, has lent his support to COW. COW is, of course, the anti-war group Connecticut Opposes the War, a national group opposed to the present war in Iraq. The last letter in the acronym changes according to the state in which the group operates. The Massachussets chapter would be MOW; Wisconsin would be WOW. Connecticut’s list of endorsers, here supplied by the Connecticut Citizens Action Group , suggest that some members of COW may be opposed to war in any case, while others may be oppose to the Iraq war in particular. Endorsers of COW, according to CCAG, include: “Sisters Of Notre Dame De Namur; Sisters of Mercy Leadership Team; Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery; CT State Legislators Chris Donovan, Andy Fleischmann, Toni Harp, Jonathan Harris, Jack Hennessy; Evelyn Mantilla, David McCluskey, Denise Merrill, Tim O’Brien, Melissa Olson, Elizabeth Ritter; Brendan Sharkey, Toni Walker; AFL-CIO CT; AFT CT; AFSCME Council 4; AFSC CT; CC...

Let’s play Connect The Dots. Dot 1: Sen. Hillary Clinton, wife and co-president of ex-President Bill Clinton plans to run for president on the Democrat Party ticket sometime in the near future, some think as early as 2008, when current President George Bush will retire to Crawford, Texas and Cindy Sheehan will move her “Bring The Troops Home Now!” show to, some think, Chappaqua, New York, the present residence of the Clintons. Dot 2: Hillary Clinton was visited recently by Ned Lamont, the Connecticut giant killer who, with a little help from his friends, recently bested Lieberman in a primary and has now become the nominee of his party for the U.S. Senate. Lamont’s friends include a pirate ship of bloggers -- among them Marcos Zuniga Moulitsas, captain of the good ship DailyKos – who hate, bloody hate, anyone associated with the Democrat Leadership Council, a bunch of candy-ass wimps and wimpettes who just don’t know what it means to be a Democrat. Dot 3: Bill Clinton, Hillary’s husban...

The Hartford Advocate reports that the Lamont campaign may be gay-averse at worse and at best simply rude. Kevin Brookman, vice president of Hartford’s Connecticut Pride Center, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people organization, was rudely rebuffed by staff people working for Democrat Party nominee for the U.S. senate Ned Lamont. When Brookman attempted to collect a promised contribution from Lamont for Hartford’s Connecticut Pride Festival, he was met with a torrent of verbal abuse from top Lamont campaign staffer John Murphy, once Tom Swan’s deputy at Connecticut Citizens Action Group. Swan is Lamont’s campaign manager. According to the Advocate: Brookman said when he recently tried to secure a promised donation from Lamont’s campaign, he was stunned by the cursing and disrespect he received from a campaign staffer. Brookman is organizing the Connecticut Pride Festival, which is expected to draw at least 10,000 people to downtown Hartford on Sept. 9. (He’s also a neighb...