Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Colin McEnroe is outraged--yet again. The precipitating cause this time is the arrest and detention of one Ken Krayeske , communications director for Green Party candidate for governor, photographer, mountain bike rider, blogger and disturber of the peace. Krayeske was detained and arrested by Hartford police--acting in concert with a shadowy group called the Connecticut Intelligence Center attached to the office of Homeland Security. According to a police report, some of the representations of which have been questioned by Norm Pattis, Krayeske’s pony-tailed lawyer, this is what happened: While Rell was parading in Hartford, Krayeske was seen by the police on a mountain bike proceeding at a fast clip to the head of the parade. Krayeske ditched his bike and rapidly approached Rell, intending to take a picture with a camera he had in a nylon bag. Krayeske took a picture before being apprehended by one of Hartford’s finest. The apprehending officer could not have mistaken Krayeske for ...

Chris Shays, the Ishmael of New England congressional Republicans – “And I alone am left to tell the tale” – is not entirely unhappy in his new role as the last moderate Republican still standing. According to a report in the Hartford Courant: "Speaker Nancy D. Pelosi, D-Calif., has clashed with Shays for years. She came to his Fairfield County district in 2004 and declared Shays a 'rubber stamp for the radical right wing, check-your-brain-at-the-door congressperson.' And worse, 'an enabler for Tom DeLay,' the former Republican majority leader who gave Shays fits. "Shays had shot back. 'Nancy Pelosi is a fraud,' he said flatly, referring to some minor trouble she'd had with the Federal Elections Commission after taking contributions that exceeded federal limits. "Thursday, though, Shays could revel in the knowledge that Pelosi is leading the fight for his plans for ethics reform: to ban gifts from lobbyists, to place tough restrictions on priv...

According to a recently published column written by Gerald and Natalie Sirkin, there may be the equivalent of a European Union in our future. By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin C2007 The strangest of all the failures of the news media may be their silence on the madness of what could be the biggest story of our time. We have heard mutterings of a United States-Mexico-Canada union, but it took digging on Internet to find out about it. The information is not secret. It just hasn’t been in the news. On March 23, 2005, President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin, met at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, to discuss integrating their countries. They then drove to Baylor University in Waco, where they announced the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) for the integration. Soon after, the Council on Foreign Relations on May 17, 2005, issued “ Creating a North American Community ,” a 59-page document proposing a five-year plan for a Nort...

ISI Books, an imprint of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, has just released an authoritative reprint of Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic , which is, in addition to De’Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the much thumbed Federalist Papers , the most important post Civil War primer of American political thought. Brownson, whose father lived in the Waterbury area before he moved his family to New Hampshire, was the principal autodidact in an age of autodidacts. Standing at the bridge of the modern age and more familiar than other men of his time with the European godfathers of the modern era--Transcendentalism can be traced directly to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the German romantics--Brownson went through the defining movements of his day like a hot knife through butter. American Transcendentalism was an eclectic stew of oddments: Its moralism may be traced to the Puritans; it’s concept of intuition and the notion that the individual enjoys direct access to divine...

Americans do tend to let their sympathies and myths run away with them. Appearing on the Colin McEnroe show, Nixon gunner and Watergate star Lowell Weicker admitted he was wrong. At the time of then President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the senator said, he was outraged. But he was wrong, Weicker generously admitted: Ford was right to pardon Nixon. Weicker was his usual expansive self: "Now, let's get to the big issue, which is the pardon of Nixon. I mean, I was pissed when that happened. Obviously, I had passionately involved myself in Watergate. It sort of had taken two years of my life to get out of that difficult time. It turned out alright, but nobody knew that at the beginning. And here comes the president to be pardoned. Well, I made my feelings known in no uncertain terms. But I'm going to tell you... I'm going to do something you rarely hear Lowell Weicker do:I was wrong, he was right. I mean, we had gone through Vietnam; we had gone through Watergate. I me...

Speaker of the state House of Representatives James Amann has introduced a cautionary note into the discussion of universal health care. "If you think we're going to conquer the world next year and get everybody covered,” Amann said, “it would be a miracle. I'm sure the governor would love to sign that bill. I think if we concentrate on the kids with a program we have called HUSKY, which is one of the best in the nation, improving that and creating more access and more prevention, we can at least conquer that [this] year." State financed “universal health care” always presents problems involving unintended consequences. A federal universal health care program would drive insurance companies from the field; unable to compete with a compelled tax supported system, they would simply go out of business. This would present problems also, possibly for Connecticut since the insurance industry is still fairly strong here. For instance, how would we recover the taxes lost by t...

Gov. Jodi Rell said she planned to pick her battles carefully with the Democrat leadership this year. "I have great plans, but I also understand the people of Connecticut have elected me to be the voice of reason.” The governor indicated she is willing to bargain with Democrats concerning her plan to eliminate the local property tax on motor vehicles. "I very much have every intention of doing it. But if they're going to stand there and give me one of these folded arms and just say, 'Go ahead, we're not even going to entertain it,'" Rell said. "I need to pick my fights and I need to pick the ones that are going to make the biggest difference for the taxpayers." Re-elected by a huge margin, the governor said she would use her political clout in negotiations with the Democrat dominated legislature. "If it's something I believe is detrimental to the people of Connecticut, I won't have any hesitation of standing up and telling the publi...