Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Pssst, come here, wanna buy a newspaper? Feeling patriotic? Both the Hartford Courant and the Register Citizen papers -- The Middletown Press, New Haven Register, Torrington Register Citizen -- are up for sale.

Let’s say you start off with a chair, then you remove the left forward leg, then you remove the seat, then you remove the backrest – do you any longer have a chair? Some people would answer “No.” The Hartford Courant, under the inspiration of current owner Sam Zell, a real estate poobah who has no intellectual or emotional connection to the people of Connecticut, now has dumped a major political reporter, Mark Pazniokas, the paper’s Washington Bureau chief, Jesse Hamilton, its Religion Reporter, Elizabeth Hamilton, a business reporter, Robin Stansbury, a handful of greenies -- environment reporter David Funkhouser, Steve Grant and Anna Marie Somma -- sportswriter Matt Eagan, itowns editor Loretta Waldman and itowns reporter Nancy Lastrina, two administrative assistants, a couple of feature copy editors and a library staffer and researcher. The Courant previously has shed staff through attrition and early retirement. The latest round of bodies were shot behind the curtain, so to speak, ...

The Courant editorial is called “ Have Another Drink ,” and it draws a parallel between the consumption of alcohol and gas. And what’s wrong with that? The suggestion is that those who drive cars are addicted to gas in the same sense that drunks are addicted to alcohol. There are some differences: Alcohol is not a necessity, except for those who have fallen into the bottle, and gasoline, a by product of oil, is a necessity, pending the invention and mass production and availability of cars that run on air, water or fairy dust. The premise of the editorial is that alternative transportation sources are not likely to be developed in the absence of some need. Gas at $14 a gallon, (the price in Ireland and much of Europe) to pick a random figure, is likely to produce such a need. Therefore, any attempt to lower gas prices to a level that decreases the pain of shelling out $14 for a gallon of it would be, as the progressives say, not in the public interest. Got a problem with that? Well, ye...

Political commentary here in Connecticut, the land of steady liberalism, is not dangerous or witty or even humorous; it is dull and repetitious, which is one of the reasons newspapers are foundering. The Harford Courant, which bills itself as the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, has fallen on hard times. In fact, it has now fallen into the unforgiving clutches of Sam Zell , a real estate mogul who seems to believe that newspapers should be more like blog sites and should operate on four rather than six cylinders. The Courant is in the process of being downsized or, in the lingo of its new owner, “right-sized.” Apparently right-sizing is a synonym for “made profitable.” We all know how real estate moguls make profits. As the press goes, so goes the state. Connecticut too is foundering, flopping around on the sand like a beached minnow, gasping for breath. The narrative in newspaper land could be more exciting, but the ideological mix on most editorial pages...

Sam Zell has just purchased a large chunk of the Times Mirror empire, the Tribune company, and is threatening to make The Hartford Courant profitable. Ordinarily, commentators at the liberal Courant, once a cog in the wheel of Times Mirror, are suspicious of profits, usually earned by grasping billionaires who relish grinding the faces of the poor. But hard times in the news business have convinced even the most aggressive amature Naom Chomskyites that as their profits go, so go their paychecks. So, the folk down there at the Courant – and other information outposts attached to the paper by media umbilical cords – are understandably anxious. Zell, dressed in his signature cowboy boots, addressed these nervous nellies at the Bushnell Memorial, and the day after his address, all present were attempting to decipher his oracular pronouncements. What, for example, can be read into those cowboy boots? Of late, especially in the European press whose fertile ground Arthur "Pinch" Su...

In the midst of a report on Ross Perot’s distaste for John McCain, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reports that “Perot isn't a Hillary hater, but he's not a fan either, relating the bumper sticker he received that reads: ‘Monica Lewinsky's Ex-Boyfriend's Wife for President.’” The New York Time’s anti war push Writing in National Review Online a few years ago, Stanly Kurtz opened a window on the mindset of New York Times owner Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.: “Pinch Sulzberger was a political activist in the Sixties, and was twice arrested in anti-Vietnam protests. One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, ‘the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life.’ If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country.’ Some Sixties activists have since thought better of their early enthusiasms. Pinch hasn...

It’s always a hazard to make predictions, because future events depend upon current events that change rapidly. The best sort of prediction is a vow: “I pledge in the New Year to be kinder to my friends and more hostile to my enemies.” This sort of prediction depends solely on will power and determination, which always lie in the hand of the vow taker. Predictions about historic events are always iffy. History, as a rule, snatches the better angels of our nature from us and consigns them to Hell. The careful reader will note that I have capitalized “Hell.” This, with apologies to honorable atheists among us, is because it is a place name for a real place, as yet undiscoverable by the spiritually vacuous tools of modern science. The following are safe predictions because, with the exception of #7, they are limited to what will not happen in the coming year. 1) Bloggers -- who are nasty, brutish and short (with just about everybody) – will continue on their private path to Hell (note the...