Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The American public, at least that portion of it not presently in the tank with Democrat nominee for President Sen. Barack Obama, will not accept as sufficient Obama’s explanation of his association with University of Illinois professor Bill Ayers . Obama has sought to dismiss his association with Ayers by saying he was eight years old when Ayers was a founder and member of the Weather Underground, a group of Anti-Vietnam War era domestic terrorists that bombed targets inside the United States, including the Capitol building in Washington DC. According to a 2001 story about Ayers that that Obama ought to have seen in Chicago Magazine , “Between 1970 and 1974, the Weatherman took credit for 12 bombings, including one at the United States Capitol and another involving several police cars.” In 1970, a bomb that was apparently being built in a Greenwich Village townhouse, occupied by at least five members of the Weatherman, accidentally exploded—killing three of the group, including Ayers...

A troubled taxpayer once put up on his lawn a sign that read: “Death, there’s a loophole. Taxes, never.” That man may have been one of a vanishing breed; he certainly was not a post Wall Street crash Democrat. Democrat presidential aspirant Sen. Barack Obama’s views on taxes have trickled down through the campaign grapevine to Connecticut from Washington DC, the spending machine that, in the words of one early libertarian , “[eats] out the substance of the people”; call it the trickle down theory of ruinous economic ideas. These ideas now have found a home in the breast and the campaign literature of Jim Himes, who is running this year against Rep. Chris Shays, the last Republican US Rep. standing in New England. When another Democrat, President John Kennedy, said that “a rising tide lifts all the boats,” he meant this: Economic prosperity puts dollars in everyone’s pockets. It helps workers, whose salaries increase in proportion to swelling profits made by their employers, because emp...

In the wake of the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, not to mention derivate failures such as Wall Street and Main Street, the conflict of interest prize of the decade must go to New York US Rep. Barney Frank. “It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?” The Fannie Mae executive was Frank’s domestic partner Herb Moses. Frank met Moses in 1987, the year Frank uncloseted himself as a gay, and the two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998. Moses was not without a sense of humor. In 1991 he wrote in the Washington Post, “I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus. On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.” Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that there was no funny business going on, conflict of interest wise, but skeptics were doub...

Loose lips sink ships, and not only during wars. Is it possible to imagine anything more stupidly destructive than this: Knowing that the economic ship is heading for the abyss, as Democrats never tired of reminding us during the late unpleasantness on Wall Street – the better to frighten you, my dears -- Harry Reid announces breathlessly that he has just come from a conspiracy session with other congreesional Wall Street beggars at which someone in the know assured him that a vary large insurer, a name that would be instantly recognized by anyone, is on the point of bankruptcy and will surely go broke if the bailout bill favored by Democrats is not passed instantly, or sooner than that. Democrats call this "the politics of fear." And what happens in Connecticut, once the insurance capital of the world? The stocks of some of the state’s most prestigious insurance companies plummet. Can Chris Dodd or John Larson or Rosa DeLauro or Joe Courtney or Chris Murphy be persuaded to...

The day after the great debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, everyone was prepared to pass judgment. I didn’t catch the debate. My wife Andrée had arranged for us to see at UConn the Bolt play, “A Man For All Seasons.” And so when the two bumped heads, we found ourselves in the sold out Nafe Katter Theatre's packed house watching Michael McKensie, playing St. Thomas More, scowling at Thomas Cromwell’s pragmatism: “ALICE: They say he's a very penetrating lawyer. “MORE: What, Cromwell? Pooh, he's a pragmatist-and that's the only resemblance he has to the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber.” McKensie spat the word “pragmatist” far out into the second row. It is an explosive line and ought to remind us, in this the age of pragmatism and cynicism, that once there was something more honorable than reasons of state. After viewing the debate, what strikes me most forcefully is how wrong everyone was about Palin, except of course the peo...

The gaffe meter is running, said one reporter for a state-wide newspaper. Gaffs there will be, sure as shooting, in the debate, so called, between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, the Republican and Democrat nominees for vice president. And writers for the late night comics will be watching eagerly, pen in hand, to record every misstep. The show must go on; material must be fed into the comic machine; attention must be paid. The experience vs inexperience topic still resonates among commentators and reporters. Of course, the most experienced political player in the political game right now is current all-time gaffer champ President George Bush, the Yogi Berra of presidential gaffers, and those people who have been accustomed to beating Palin over the head with their “lack of experience” comic blatters don’t like him at all. Apparently, there are two kinds of presidential experience: the good kind and the bad kind. No less an authority on things political than Woopie Goldberg has pointed ou...

Navigating among the founders is always a perilous business, most especially for commentators who quote them to give heft to their own views. Just when you are thinking that John Adams is a crusty old republican who does not translate well into a modern idiom, he tantalizes you with this tasty morsel on lawgivers: “One useless man is a tragedy. Two are a law firm. More are a congress.” We like to think of Thomas Jefferson, the American herald of liberty, as a friend of the press, until we remember that he was soundly beaten up by the papers of his day in one of the most vicious American campaigns in history and nursed a grievance poured out in letters that, he surely knew, would see the light of day and ring out through the ages: “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” And again: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” And again: “I read no newspaper now but R...