Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

According to Public Policy Polling , Governor Dannel Malloy “continues to be one of the most unpopular Governors in the country in our polling.” Mr. Malloy’s approval-disapproval spread likely astonished most political actors in the state, with the possible exception of the phlegmatic Roy Occhiogrosso, the governor chief flack catcher, whose response to a reputable, non-partisan poll showing the governor with an approval rating of a slender 33 percent and a disapproval rating of 51 percent was a barely suppressed yawn. “We generally don’t comment on polls,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso, “because what’s there to say? Polls come and go, numbers go up and down. The governor always tries to do what he thinks is in the best interests of the people of Connecticut, irrespective of the political consequences.” Politicians also come and go, and their comings and goings are sometimes intimately connected with sliding approval ratings. On previous occasions, Mr. Malloy has said that he i...

Russians Mull Burying Soviet Leader Lenin The corpse if V.I. Lenin has been awaiting burial since the Soviet Union was thrown on the ash heap of history during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Comments by Russia’s new culture minister suggest, according to a report in the Washington Times , that Mr. Lenin is, finally, on his way out: “But recent comments by Russia ’s new culture minister have brought closer the possibility that the father of the Bolshevik Revolution could finally be laid to rest, signaling an end to the cult of Lenin . “’Many things in our life would symbolically change for the better after this [burial],’ Mr. Medinsky said, adding that he thinks Lenin should be buried with full state honors and his Red Square mausoleum turned into a museum of the Soviet era.” Nancy Pelosi Rakes In The Dough Borrowing a page from the 1912 election featuring socialist Eugene Debs on the far left, William Howard Taft in the center,   Woodrow Wil...

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Antonin Scalia is perhaps the nation’s foremost advocate and interpreter of orginalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation. The chief business of the Supreme Court, both originalists and non-originalists will agree, lies in Constitutional interpretation, a task that no Supreme Court justice may responsibly avoid. Mr. Scalia’s views on originalism have been widely disseminated; the justice has not in the past hidden his light under a bushel basket. An address on orginalism delivered twenty three years ago at the University of Cincinnati during the William Howard Taft Constitutional Law Lecture is available to every reporter in the state at the click of a mouse. In that widely available lecture, Mr. Scalia dilates on the defects of non-orginalist interpretation. Briefly, non-orginalism binds constitutional interpretation to what has been called “the living constitution,” which is to say the constitution as interpreted by justices o...