Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It’s all over but for the grinding of teeth – and the possibility down the road, if President Donald Trump is reelected to office, of yet another impeachment debacle. “Trump Acquitted” a Hartford paper blared on its front page – to no one’s surprise. The impeachment indictment in the U.S. House, controlled by Democrats, and an acquittal in the U.S. Senate, controlled by Republicans, were both foregone conclusions because, though the trappings of the proceedings in both chambers are quasi-judicial, the process is entirely a political affair.

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges ...” -- Anatole France. Of course, we all know that the rich do not sleep under bridges, and so the law, which in this case enforces the same rules of behavior for rich and poor, is not at all majestic, or merciful, or just. Justice, Aristotle says, treats equal things equally and unequal things unequally. Let’s begin with an obvious observation: a university talk by Ben Shapiro and Anita Hill are in no sense equal. And we know from bitter experience that opposition to such talks are radically (pun intended) unequal. President of UConn Susan Herbst would be hard pressed to cite a case in which a political sermonette by a noted liberal was cut short by audience thugs. But in the case of conservatives invited to speak at colleges, address-interruptus, sometimes violent, always ill mannered, is as common as applause. It would appear then that conservative speakers are in no sen...

It would be a grave error to interpose between speakers at UConn and their audiences an administrative apparat whose sole purpose is to decide which speakers are acceptable. It may still be possible to learn some lessons from an incident that occurred at UConn in which a speaker invited to address the university’s Republican Club, Lucian Wintrich, had been successfully shouted down and later arrested by UConn police. Wintrich, a White House reporter for The Gateway Pundit, may have been arrested to assure his safety from the fascists who shouted him down, stole his speech, and later sought to confront him as he left the campus. Charges leading to his arrest were quickly dropped by the prosecutor during a court appearance, and new charges were brought against the thief who had stolen Wintrich’s address, a just resolution since the thief, student adviser at Quinebaug Valley Community College Catherine Gregory, was the aggressor who had, along with her cheering section,...

Lucian Wintrich is the intolerable conservative nuisance – and victim – who was arrested by UConn police and charged with breach of peace for having made an unsuccessful attempt to exercise his First Amendment rights at Connecticut’s flagship university. Wintrich had been invited to speak by the University of Connecticut Young Republican Club on campus.   A raucous crowd – seeded,  one commentator noted, with fascists   – prevented Wintrich from delivering his thoughts on “It’s OK To Be White.”

“When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him” -- Napoleon That the compromise budget is predominantly a Democrat production should come as a surprise to no one. Weighing gains and losses in the scales, the left in Connecticut, best represented by Speaker of the State House Joe Aresimowicz, a union employee, has prevailed over its opponents. The state’s Capital City, Hartford, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, will receive a bailout from state taxpayers, at best a temporary solution to long- brewing, unresolved problems centering on the city’s hegemonic political structure, and a virtual guarantee that the city’s political shakers and movers will be bellying up to the bailout bar again in the not too distant future. UConn funding, cut in the Republican budget that had passed both Houses of the General Assembly, has been restored. Major changes in employee pensions, a prominent feature in the Republican budget, were dropped – but...

“The future ain’t what it used to be,” an often quoted remark by the irrepressible Yogi Berra, might very well be the new guiding principle of a recovering Democratic Party that, during the administration of lame-duck progressive Governor Dannel Malloy, leaned a bit too far left and fell into a dizzying abyss. Some Democrats – one thinks immediately of Senator Paul Doyle – have not yet fallen away from right reason and prudent moderation. Along with other moderate Democrats, Doyle voted against his party in favor of a Republican budget that was affirmed by the State Senate on September 15 and the State House on September 16. Neither the Governor nor his partisan generals in the field -- among whom David Collins of The Day newspaper numbers President of the University of Connecticut (UConn) Susan Herbst -- are comfortable with the only budget presented to the General Assembly that yet had passed on a bi-partisan vote.

Way late, lame duck Governor Dannel Malloy has discovered that the distribution of state funds to educational districts in Connecticut is " a hot mess . ”  In the Republican non- partisan budget that passed both Houses of the General Assembly recently, the method by which the state ferries education tax money to municipalities has not been changed. That method of tax redistribution is wholly a product of the Democratic Party, which has maintained control of the General Assembly – the law making body in the state – for nearly half a century.

Milton Friedman once said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” If you put socialists in charge of countries, you soon will create shortages of toilet paper, which is the case in Venezuela, reduced to rubble by Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolás Maduro. No one was surprised last week when Bloomberg announced that rich Venezuelans are fleeing the country – now an economic desert – for more profitable ventures elsewhere: “ Wealthy Venezuelans Are Seeking Haven in Madrid. " Something similar is happening in Connecticut. Tax money “invested” by Governor Dannel Malloy in Connecticut businesses is not working to create a welcoming business environment. “Once again, a Connecticut company making a major investment in its digital business has been lured by another state offering tax breaks and the chance to succeed in a big city,” the Hartford Courant tells us. This time it’s United Technologies (UTC)...

Demography, it is said, is destiny. If so, the most current report from the U.S. Census should serve as a splash of cold water in the face of Connecticut legislators. Marriage in Connecticut during the period surveyed, 2010-2014, has taken a massive hit. Experts say that young adults usually delay marriage because of the burdens of college debt, the high cost of rental housing and anemic salary growth. The high cost of rentals is a measure, in part, of the scarcity of rental housing; through budget mismanagement and a disinclination on the part of the dominant Democrats in the General Assembly to attack spending, Connecticut is still resting somnolently in the lap of a recession that disappeared years ago in the rest of the country; and UConn has just announced plans to boost tuition by thirty one percent.

The romance between Fred Carstensen of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis (CCEA) at UConn and the administration of Governor Dannel Malloy suffered a setback when Mr. Carstensen discovered that new data supplied by the federal government indicates a slowdown in business activity. For reasons that are not clear, the dip in job growth in Connecticut surprised Mr. Carstensen, the Candide of economic analysts in the northeast.

This campaign year Governor Dannel Malloy had hoped to present voters with a tax rebate drawn from a budget surplus. The rebate, a slender $55 per person, disappeared because the budget surplus disappeared. On Tuesday, the bad news filtered down from the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis; state income tax receipts for the current budget ending June 30 will fall $357 million short of what had been budgeted. The crystal ball gazers in the Malloy administration affected surprise; the governor was disappointed. He wanted everyone to know, however, that in the event Connecticut produces a future surplus, some of the over-taxation would be remitted to taxpayers by Mr. Malloy, assuming the governor is returned to office in the next election cycle. A number of economists, the usual culprits, were trotted out to explain who killed Cock Robin.

One news publication apparently has an ear for a political pitch : “In the first-term Democratic governor’s recent speeches, echoes can be heard of the broad themes that President Obama successfully used in 2012 to make a case for his second term, despite stubbornly high unemployment and a tepid economic recovery, the same conditions confronting Malloy. “Like Obama, Malloy is asking for more time to overcome fiscal challenges left by a Republican predecessor, rattling off statistics that point to progress and ignoring those that do not. And like the president, the governor acknowledges the electorate’s fears and frustrations about the pace of recovery.” The publication notes that Governor Dannel Malloy has not yet formally announced his candidacy. His on the stump remarks are styled by the publication as a “soft opening of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s unannounced re-election campaign.” Pause for a moment over the oxymoronic expression “soft opening of an unannounced campaign.”...

Now that Republicans have been cut out of the budget loop by Governor Dannel Malloy and progressive leaders in the General Assembly, future budgets will be assembled by Mr. Malloy, tax hungry progressives in the state legislature, SEBAC, a coalition of union leaders authorized to negotiate contracts with the state, and economists at the tax gobbling University of Connecticut (UConn). According to a story that ran in CTNewsJunkie , “Economists at the University of Connecticut recommended Thursday looking at instituting a statewide property tax to close more than $1 billion funding gap in the state’s education cost sharing formula.” In the UConn report, contributing economist Stan McMillen notes that Connecticut has underfunded its statutorily required share of educational funding to municipalities for the last 5 years by about $1.09 billion. The UConn report weighs a few gap filling options, including a sales tax increase to 8.3 percent and a boost in the income tax of 13.8 perc...

After it had been pointed out that his drawings were hypercritical and highly unflattering representations of his subjects, a famous caricaturist responded, “What’s the point of having absolute power, if you are not prepared to abuse it?” Roy Occhiogrosso, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Senior Advisor and a fierce Malloyalist, should have internalized the quote so that he would be able to flourish it   when asked by reporters why the governor thought it necessary to recruit dozens of state officials as propaganda agents.

UConn The Money Sponge To Hike Tuition Again The Malloy administration – and other culprits – have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into UConn. And UConn had shown its gratitude by hiking tuitions – again, according to a report inthe Stamford Advocate . “Under the plan adopted by the trustees in December, tuition would jump to $10,368 for tuition and $25,303 with other costs by the 2015-16 academic year if the state allocation increased by at least a half percent each year. “With no state increase, the cost will go to $10,536 for in-state students and $25,590 when room and board are added in by 2015. “The tuition increases are being used to hire 275 new faculty, starting with 65 for this fall.” Washington Looks Like North Korea Connecticut sympathizes, having experienced a similar problem just before the onset of Winter. “Power officials said the outages wouldn't be repaired for severaldays to a week , likening the damage to a serious hurricane.” T...

State Treasurer Denise Nappier points out in a letter to the Journal Inquirer some important differences between her view on expanded bonding authority and that of Governor Dannel Malloy. In the course of her letter, Ms. Nappier shoves a boney finger in the governor’s chest and warns,   “… when legislation is enacted that will result in unnecessary additional costs of issuing state bonds, and may jeopardize investor confidence in our bonds, it is my duty as state treasurer to speak out against the measure and urge corrective action." Mr. Malloy wants expanded bonding authority for the Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority.   Ms. Nappier wrote that she had always supported the consolidation of two quasi-public authorities, the CHEFA and the Connecticut Higher Education Supplemental Loan Authority, and she heartily agreed with the governor that the consolidation would enhance efficiency. “However,” she writes, “CHEFA’s new authority to issue bonds for UC...

The Whistleblower Trap Priscilla Dickman, all 5 foot 2 of her, has been wiggling on former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s torture rack for six agonizing years. The end in sight keeps disappearing over the horizon whenever her case comes to a decision point. Ms. Dickman, a union steward when she was in the employ of the UConn Heath Center (UCHC), all 110 pounds of her, is still fighting for what most of us would consider decent justice, but it eludes her whenever she stretches out her hand to grasp it. Not that she is dispirited, not at all. She has been conducting the civil side of her case pro se (by her self) and in the intervening six years has cast serious doubt on the proposition that a fool has himself for a lawyer. The criminal and civil side of her case is being handled by John Geida of Embry Neuser, while Norm Pattis is handling Ms. Dickman’s habeas charge of innocence. Early on in Ms. Dickman’s ordeal, she was represented for a number of years by union lawyers who ...

A new UConn poll from the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut shows that 50 percent of voters support a constitutional convention to amend the state constitution, while 39 percent oppose the measure. Even more dramatically, the poll shows that sixty-five percent of voters support citizen ballot initiative, always an admission that state legislators, the prisoners of special interests, no longer represent the will of the people. According to the poll’s director, Christine Kraus, "The constitutional convention question appears to be a referendum on the performance of the General Assembly." A ballot initiative would, in essence, transform the entire population into a citizens’ action group. It is for that reason opposed by – guess who? – Tom Swan, the executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group, among others. Swan, Ned Lamont’s campaign guru, fears that a convention might propose a direct initiative ballot that will tamper with...

The most conspicuous follower of President George Bush’s war policy in Iraq is, as any MyLeftNutmegger will be happy to tell you, Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman; yet Lieberman is gaining support, according to recent polls. U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, also a proponent of the war, has lost points and now is even with his challenger, Dianne Farrell. Responding to the Hartford Courant-UConn poll, Farrell’s campaign manager Adam Wood said, “The momentum for change is growing, particularly in the 4th Congressional District, and the poll reflects that. ... People are aware of Chris Shays' support for the president's policy on Iraq and are becoming more frustrated day by day." If support for the war in Iraq has depressed Shays’ numbers, why have Lieberman’s numbers gone up? My best guess is that one Democrat is more attractive than the other.