Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Lamont, Hartford Business. com This one has to be the quote of the decade. Addressing Connecticut reporters on the occasion of Matthew Brokman’s appointment to Chief of Staff for Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, the governor mentioned that Brokman would be intimately involved in budget negotiations with interested parties. As reported in the Hartford Courant , Lamont said, “’The era of free money is over,’ … adding that billions of federal COVID dollars will be coming to an end. The money has been allocated and is still being spent, even though life has returned to normal following the depths of the pandemic in 2020.” The “free money”, of course, had been awarded to Connecticut and other states by Democrat President Joe Biden. In the days of Tammany Hall, the dispensing of tax dollars to states and municipalities prior to elections would have been labeled “walking around money,” that is, money dispensed by political operatives – for whatever stated purposes – to secure the votes o...

Hillsdale College Hillsdale College My wife Andrée and I attended a week’s worth of classes related to the U.S. Constitution from June 23 to June 28 offered at Hillsdale College. The classes, a rare treat, were taught by four of Hillsdale’s accomplished professors: Paul Rahe, Will Morrisey, John Grant, and Joseph Postell, all of them sitting comfortably on the shoulders of the intellectual and philosophical giants to whom we owe the creation of the American Republic and its precocious child, the U.S. Constitution. Hillsdale  offers courses to the general public and distributes its newsletter  Imprimis  at no cost to the reader. I’ve long regarded Imprimis as an indispensable tool in managing mentally our bewildering postmodern age. The college was also offering a like course on Literature from Athens to Oak Park, Illinois, the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. The literature professor, Whalen Gillespie, conducted a pocket class during which anyone was able to question h...

Biden, Getty images, Alex Wong On June 27, Democrat President Joe Biden and former Republican President Donald Trump met in mortal combat during a “debate” led and moderated by two CNN reporters, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. Seen through the eyes of the Biden team, the debate was an opportunity for the president to show that he was sharp and on point in defending his nearly four years in office. His campaign had been bedeviled by charges supported by news clips that he was off his game. Throughout the Biden presidency, Republicans had strongly suggested that Biden’s inept policies had led to a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, a porous southern border, a tripling of the cumulative inflation rate, and many other associated economic, cultural and political disturbances, all of them laid at the door of an incompetent administration that was intent on advancing a new progressive era in American politics. The President Barack Obama administration had begun the effort, and the Biden ...

Merchan (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) Dispassionate political observers should agree on the following sensible proposition:  If the reason for a judicial gag order has expired, the gag order should also expire. Gag orders at trial generally are imposed by judges to preserve the integrity of a jury’s verdict. The commonly accepted notion that the accused, facing a deprivation of liberty, should be presumed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers evolved from judicious instructions to jurors to accept for deliberation only matters admitted at trial. The instruction makes no sense when applied to editorial writers, say, or wives suspicious of their husbands’ wandering eyes. Both may presume innocence or guilt to their heart’s content, and there is no need to wait on the deliberations of a jury before reaching a provisional conclusion based on compelling evidence at hand. Concerning Juan Merchan’s gag order -- slapped on “convicted felon” Donald Trump, a once and future pr...

Ganim, Fox 61 Industria Crecimus (by industry we thrive) – Bridgeport’s motto Like pornography, we all think we would know political fraud when we see it. Ballot fraud is only a small sometimes insignificant subset of political fraud. Following the arrests of four Democrat political operatives in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, we think we know what ballot fraud looks like, but election fraud is a different animal. It may plausibly be argued that election fraud occurs most often in one-party states and municipal offices in which rival parties have all but disappeared. Unhidden and open political fraud is possible in such unitary political structures because no one is looking critically at Connecticut’s dominant Democrat Party. Those attending to political affairs are members of the dominant party, along with a sometimes indifferent media reliant for its news on the dominant party. This is a picture perfect postcard of Democrat politics in Bridgeport and other Connecticut...

Tong Connecticut Attorney General William Tong sounded very much like an extremist libertarian when he commented, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that plaintiffs had no standing in a mifepristone case brought before the court, “Medication abortion is safe, legal and accessible in Connecticut. That was true before today, and following this decision, it will stay that way.” However, Tong advised, “Anti-choice radicals are combing this decision as we speak and have already started the process of coming back with new plaintiffs. We will fight back at every single step along the way to protect the rights of patients and providers to live their lives and do their jobs free from extremist political micromanagement . [Emphasis mine}.” The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, giddily approved by Tong, Governor Ned Lamont, Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz and other prominent state Democrats, was penned by associate Justice Brett Kavanagh, who wrote, echoing a court decision that shut...

The New York Post front page on Wednesday, June 12, 2024, following Hunter Biden’s conviction by a Delaware jury on charges that The First Son had falsely claimed he was not an addict when he purchased a gun, makes reference to the “First Felon,” and some grocery shoppers who caught sight of the headline could not restrain a snicker on their way to purchase overpriced eggs and other commodities. The price bumps are the result in large part of an inflation spiral caused, some think, by Biden’s reckless getting and spending policies. A friendly cynic who has what he likes to call his master’s degree in common sense believes the entire President Joe Biden administration must in the near future collapse into a soul-purifying, loud and sustained horse laugh. Accused of cynicism, my friend will remind the accuser that the Greek cynics were pre-Socratic philosophers. Even Socrates was tainted with a healthy dose of cynicism, and Antisthenes, the founder of the Greek Cynic School was a stu...