Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The state Democratic Party, much wealthier than the state Republican Party, is now spending some of its dollars on imported gunslingers such as James Hallinan, a political hessian hired by party central to throw mud at Republican candidates for governor, a certain sign that the election season is upon us.  Democrats in Connecticut hold all the state’s constitutional offices, have veto proof majorities in the General Assembly, and presently have in their campaign coffers 14 times more cash than Republicans. Some of the mudslinging has backfired. Even a few liberal commentators have winced at the slops that regularly cross their news desks  but, as Cardinal John Henry Newman once said, “Throw enough mud and some will stick – stick but not stain.” Governor Dannel Malloy’s low rating in the polls, some commentators have noted, may give Republicans an opportunity to win back the governorship, last held by Jodi Rell, Mr. Malloy’s polar opposite. Mr. Malloy is a pro-union,...

Hugo Chavez, the Fidel Castro of Venezula, is moving his country towards a communist form of government. The constitutional changes made recently by the Venezuelan legislature dominated by Chavistas would, according to an AP report, “allow the government to expropriate private property prior to a court ruling and take total control over the Central Bank, create new types of property managed by cooperatives, and extend presidential terms from six to seven years while allowing Chavez to run again in 2012.” People in Connecticut, if they blinked, will have missed the report in the Hartford Courant. The paper reported the story in its Nation/World News section, a clip bin of world news stories. Though U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd from Connecticut, now running for president, is considered an authority on Latin America, apparently no one from the paper has contacted him to gage his response to the Cubanization of Venezuela. Dodd also has been cited in the Courant as a supporter of constitutional go...

President George Bush’s efforts to support democratic movements everywhere in the world – but most especially in former soviet block nations like Ukraine – may come back to bite him in Latin America. Under the increasingly anti-democratic regime of Vladimir Putin, Russia appears to be sinking back into the ice age of Breshnev styled communism. Putin seems to be especially perturbed that Bush backed pro-Western Victor Yushchenko as president in the former soviet colony. Chavez was warmly received by Putin in Moscow just before Ukraine asserted its independence of its former overlord and gave the boot to Moscow’s preferred candidate. When the Bush administration recently lodged a formal protest with Russia for having supplied the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez with some 100,000 AK-47 rifles, the protest likely fell on deaf ears. The rifles – to be used, reliable analysts suppose, to support left wing movements in Latin America, and also to arm communist street gangs charged with el...