Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

S&P Global Ratings has lowered Connecticut’s rating one notch from A+ to A. Credit analyst David Hitchcock provided a list of reasons justifying the downgrade. Hitchcock noted, according to a CTMirror story , that Connecticut has one of the highest per capita debt ratios in the nation, having ended the last fiscal year with a taxpayer bonded debt approaching 24 billion. The state has been struggling with ways to provide support for its poorly funded municipal teachers’ pension program. Connecticut, according to Hitchcock, “has a history of deficit financing during recessions.” Connecticut has yet to recover fully from a recession that official ended several years ago. The state’s emergency budget reserve is dangerously low at $210 million, according to Hitchcock, an amount just larger than 1 percent of annual General Fund operating costs. CTMirror reports that “Comptroller Kevin P. Lembo recommends a reserve of 15 percent.”

The last few weeks of 24-7 news has been dripping with unintended irony. Just as the Democratic Party was setting up to attribute former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s loss to political stumble-bum Donald Trump as a result of President of Russia Vladimir Putin's interference in her campaign, President Trump bombed Bashir al Assad of Syria, Mr. Putin’s Kewpie Doll. The bombing served to mute some of the more outrageous claims. Everyone but Dick Blumenthal has been investigating the Trump-Putin connection; so far -- nada.

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has not told us in his wanderings within Connecticut whether he believes the general run of citizens in his state feel safer or less safe with the presence in Connecticut of sanctuary cities. There are, at last count, three sanctuary cities in Connecticut: Hartford, New Haven and Willimantic. However, some state politicians have grand aspirations. State Representative Edwin Vargas of Hartford  put forward last January proposed bill 6709 ,   which would “amend state statutes to prevent the state police from demanding information concerning citizenship from individuals with whom they interact," in effect making the whole of Connecticut a sanctuary state, according to a story in the Hartford Courant .  And indeed, why not? If sanctuary is good for the people of Hartford, New Haven and Willimantic, how can it possibly be bad for the people of New Canaan? The term “sanctuary city” has fallen into disuse lately. As is usual in politics, the t...

U.S. Representative Jim Himes, who just won re-election to office, has been pushed over the edge by Donald Trump, according to a story in the New York Post . “What finally pushed me over the edge, Himes said in an interview on CNN’s New Day, “was when the president-elect of the United States criticized the CIA and the intelligence community. Can you imagine what the leaders in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran are thinking as they watch the next president of the United States delegitimize and criticize his own intelligence community and stand up for the defense of Russia, one of our prime adversaries.” Mr. Himes must have been standing very close to the edge, because he believes that Mr. Trump’s remarks on the CIA report show that the President-Elect is unhinged: “We’re five weeks from Inauguration and the President Elect is completely unhinged.” In plain-speak, “completely unhinged” means he’s  nuts. Among Democratic politicians still suffering from painful election losses ...

Since the sixties sexual revolution, which overthrew the pre-silly sixties traditional morality of the Western World, everyone has become an expert on the subject of sex. The moral questions that tormented St. Augustine – who was not, by his own admission, a saint – are easily answered today by asking the question, what would I do in circumstances A or B? In the era of unorganized religion, we all have out private codes. If I were President of the United States, would I have seduced an aide in the White House when, on one occasion, I was chatting with a high Israeli official on the phone? Probably not. Would I have bitten Juanita Broaddrick’s lip in the process, so she says, of raping her? Not in the cards. If I were a self-infatuated real estate mogul in New York, would I have bragged about my conquests of married women to Billy Bush, then the host of Access Hollywood, little thinking that my every word would surface eleven years later in a Presidential campaign? Nope. If I wer...

    As the Middle East and President Barack Obama’s foreign policy of non-interference in the region dramatically disintegrate, President of Russia Vladimir Putin is gleefully pulling Uncle Sam by the beard. Most recently, Mr. Putin has supplied Iran, a traditional enemy of the United States, with defense missiles that grossly interfere with the non-nuclear weapons pact presently being negotiated between Mr. Obama and Iran. It should be understood that Iran is a theological oligarchy and not a democracy such as Israel. For all practical purposes, “Iran” is the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

The headline on the story was: “ Blumenthal, Murphy Issue Statements On Iraq .” But in fact, there is no more Iraq. The country, etched out by British colonialists in 1920 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, has been partitioned, somewhat like Ukraine, by principalities and powers that never were and never will be friendly to the United States. President Barack Obama some time ago, leaning into then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s air space, clasped him him robustly on the arm, and advised, unaware that his mike was hot, that following the election, he would have much more “flexibility” to decide, among other things, whether or not to place defensive  missiles in Eastern Europe .  It was a schmooze moment, and Mr. Medvedev promised to carry the message to Vladmir Putin, Czar of all the Russians.

The good news is that Secretary of State John Kerry is not Ayaan Hersi Ali , and therefore his address to Yale graduates on College Class Day was not cancelled by a tremulous administration responding to charges that the appointed speaker had needlessly denigrated Islam. Yale, one may be thankful, is not Brandeis University, which first announced plans that it would bestow an honorary degree on Hersi Ali and later cancelled her invitation to speak at the college when students and Muslim organizations became restive. Mr. Kerry, assuredly, is no Hersi Ali. His comments concerning the murderous assault on Christians by Muslim Salafists in the Middle East and Africa are so mild and inoffensive as to be barely noticed at all.     Nor is Mr. Kerry Condoleezza Rice, currently a professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and  the first African American in U.S. history to be appointed Secretary of State. Ms. Rice...