Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Bloomberg News is reporting that President Barack Obama now has the distinction of “presiding over his own bear market.” Bear markets shred investments. “The Dow Jones,” the news service said, “fell 20 percent since Inauguration Day, the fastest drop under a newly elected president in at least 90 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gauge has lost 53 percent from its October 2007 record of 14,164.53, slipping 4.1 percent to 6,594.44 yesterday.” Congratulations are in order. There are some as yet infirm plans to name the present market “The Obama Market,” in honor of the president’s economic programs.

At least one Briton thinks President Barack Obama is rude and arrogant . How quickly is the bloom off the rose. The James Carville/Stanley Greenberg/Barack Obama attack machine has found a sumptuous target in Rush Limbaugh, according to Politico . President George Bush having retired, Beltway Democrats, not entirely shunning the politics of fear, are in desperate need of a new face to grind beneath their boots. Carville is the author of “And The Horse You Came In On,” an attack on the rude attackers of former president Bill Clinton. Greenberg is a Clinton era pollster who now provides info to President Barack Obama’s administration. Both Greenberg and his wife, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, have been generous in the past to Rham Emanual, chief sniper of the Obama administration, having provided Emmanuel with a free Washington DC rental for many years. A Miami abortion clinic doctor is in trouble, according to a report in the Sun Sentinal , for having killed a baby. And Secretary of...

Gov. Rell , when asked if she thinks Rush Limbaugh is the voice of the Republican Party, said “Some may think so. I don’t.” Limbaugh, said Rell, "speaks for himself and a few selected people.” Dumb questions elicit dumb answers. Limbaugh, whose name former Gov. John Rowland used studiously to miss-pronounce (I know not the man), would be the first to deny that he was the voice of the Republican Party. Certainly his is not the voice of Northeast Republicans, a vanishing species. Where have all those flowers gone? Chris Shays was (please note the past tense) the last moderate Republican standing in New England. Limbaugh’s latest speaking engagement was before the Conservative Political Action Conference, a group not known for their affection for the kind of Republicans who here-about are regularly praised by the liberal press as being “pragmatic” and “moderate.” Here in the Northeast, listening to Limbaugh is a guilty pleasure, a little bit like wandering into a bordello and tasting...

Bloomberg reports: “As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem. “Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.”

The requirement that the state balance its budget yearly is one of the few effective checks on spending left to us. State Rep. Andy Fleischmann of West Hartford, having drunk deeply from the well of current political rhetoric, proposes removing it. “If you believe it makes sense for government to stimulate the economy to help reduce the severity of the current downturn,” he writes in a Hartford paper , “then — whether you’re a groundskeeper, gas station owner or governor — you should join me in pushing Connecticut to alter its constitutional requirement to balance the state budget each fiscal year. “That’s why I introduced legislation requiring state government to balance its budget over the course of the 10-year business cycle — not in a single fiscal year. This simple change will allow our state to pursue policies that reinforce — rather than undermine — the recently enacted federal stimulus plan.” After cutting unnecessary services, Mr. Fleischmann would have state government issue ...

The state House’s so called “deficit mitigation” bill passed unanimously but ran into a problem in the Senate, where Republicans opposed the measure on a party line vote. The bill draws $373.3 million from President Obama's federal stimulus package and $281.7 million from the state’s "rainy day fund'' for fiscal emergencies. It incorporates $280.6 million in dubious temporary cuts and revenue increases, $50 million in contract cancellations by the governor, $49.2 million in labor savings yet to be negotiated with state-employee unions and $40 million in federal Medicaid funds. It is important to pause here and notice that deficit mitigation relates only to the current hole in the bottom of the state’s treasury; the Damoclean sword hanging over the heads of both legislators and the governor is a hefty $8 billion projected “shortfall” in revenues. The word “mitigation” is a euphemistic fig leaf that hopefully will not signal to taxpayers that the state has a gaping hole ...

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, ...