Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In honor of Martin Luther King, may I offer the following CC pieces on him:   1) Republicans, Martin Luther King, And The Strangers In Our Midst https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/01/republicans-martin-luther-king-and.html   2) Obama, MLK and The Clintons https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2008/01/obama-mlk-and-clintons.html   3) The Black Family After MLK https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2014/02/addresses-never-delivered-to-blacks-in.html   4) Lincoln And King https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2013/08/lincoln-and-king.html   5) Lincoln, Martin Luther King, And The Not For Sale African American Vote https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2024/01/lincoln-martin-luther-king-and-not-for.html   6) Politics and Memory https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2021/11/politics-and-memory.html   7) John Brown: The 150th Anniversary Of The Raid On Harper’s Ferry And lastly, something on John Brown. Fredrick Douglas and Brown were on speaking terms.   https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2009/1...

Anyone who has been following Connecticut Commentary – and the stats suggest many people are – knows I  have written extensively on cities, territorial pools more or less owned by Democrats over the years. Here are some few columns , all of which have been printed in a handful of Connecticut newspapers. In one of them, I fell to my knees and beseeched Republicans not to cede this fertile ground to Democrats. That cry has not resonated with many Republicans, but it should. And by Republicans I mean the whole enchilada:  Republican leaders safely ensconced in the General Assembly; Republican worker bees of every kind; African American and Hispanic Republicans who have found, much to their surprise, that one of the chief difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties is that The Republican Party is NOT a closed shop; and minorities and whites who have survived the left leaning biases of academe and are familiar with the history of both parties from the post-C...

Lieutenant Governor Kevin Sullivan was celebrating Martin Luther King’s day late this year. A little more than a month out from MLK Day, he told Victim Advocate James F. Papillo, a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, to shaddup! It appeared that Papillo, who had given testimony in a public hearing against a bill designed to force Catholic hospitals to provide Plan B to rape victims, had impermissibly crossed a largely imaginary dividing line in his testimony and wandered into treacherous religious terrain. Sullivan said he thought Papillo had "crossed the line when he expressed his personal religious point of view" in testifying against the bill at a legislative hearing and called upon Governor Jodi Rell to fire him. Denise W. Merrill, the co-chairman of the Appropriations Committee said, "I think he did a disservice to all women who are victims of sexual assaults." And Rell remonstrated with Papillo, after which Papillo promised to stay in his religious cage. ...

The name Neda, here in the United States and in the world, has become pretty much a synonym for the Iranian resistance, now in a pause mode. Neda Agha-Soltan was the beautiful young Iranian, not yet wrapped in a burka, shot by a sharpshooter in Iran, whose gruesome death was caught in a brief video seen by millions, including the president of the United States, Barack Obama. It was that death and the iron fist of the leaders in Iran pummeling unarmed protestors that tore from Obama’s bosom this piece of prose: “The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.” And then Obama reached for his Martin Luther King: “Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now we are bearing witness to the Iranian pe...

One of the shrewdest commentators of the American scene is British transplant, now an American citizen, Christopher Hitchens , whose sole blind spot is religion. Hitchens is a militant atheist. Here is Hitch on the Republican field: “Only one of these men has any poetry about him. John McCain, the white-haired old lion in winter, embarking on his last hurrah, quixotically indifferent to money or polls, can still bring a lump to the throat. Stubbornly loyal to his comrades in uniform, adamant for victory in Iraq, he commands a certain respect of the kind that professional image-builders can only dream of. This may not turn out to be the year for old lions, but it’s nice to know, amid all the moisture and bogus emotion, that the country can still produce them.” And on the Clintons: “The first-time voters started to gravitate to Obama in ever-bigger droves, as did a surprising percentage of the women. This was simply not the time or the place for a politician to be appearing cynical or of...

I’m going to put some figures before you in the hope they will not put you to sleep. Americans – mindful of a dictum attributed to Disraeli by Mark Twain that there are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies, and statistics – tend to drift off as soon as you drag out the numbers. But, I assure you, these numbers are reliable and pertinent to this discussion. The figures immediately below are taken from Pew Research, because that organization is less prone to “lying” – or, if you prefer, statistical manipulation -- than most politicians on the make who fluff figure for their own sometimes nefarious purposes. For six decades, since the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, black unemployment, relative to white unemployment, has hardly budged.  You may recall the official title of MLK’s march on Washington: “The March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty .” Today, as then, black unemployment is double that of whites. There will always be discussions concern...

When Abraham Lincoln died after having been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, Secretary of war Edward Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages. There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen." Lincoln, who always had a modest appreciation of his own merits, probably would have disagreed that he was a perfect ruler; or, at least, he might have made some joke about it. Lincoln and humor were always on good terms with each other. A heckler in an audience once charged he was “two-faced.” Lincoln stopped in mid-sentence and shouted back at the heckler, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” On August 28 of this year, the nation will be celebrating in Washington DC, within sight of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, the 50 th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural -- delivered on March 4, 1865, about a month before the end of the Civil War on April 9 and a little more than a mont...

Winkler Mike Winkler, a progressive – very progressive -- state representative from Vernon, Connecticut, tumbled into a postmodern mare’s nest when he attempted, poorly, to discriminate between different kinds of discrimination. During a public hearing on bills before the Planning and Development Committee, Winkler said that Greenwich Housing Authority member Sam Romeo had counted Asian Americans among minorities presently suffering from invidious discrimination. Winkler had just suggested that Greenwich officials had deployed zoning regulations to deny access to African Americans, and here was a Housing authority member claiming that 37% of the population of Greenwich were minorities. Well yes, Winkler grudgingly conceded. However, “You count Asians and other minorities that have never been discriminated against,” Winkler said during the hearing, at which point the frigid waters of Critical Race Theory closed over Winkler’s head. Critical Race Theory holds that the law and legal ...

Growing up as a boy in Windsor Locks in the early fifties, you could not help brushing up against blacks at close quarters.  My very first boss at age thirteen was a Jamaican whose voice was, like a cello, deep and musical. It threw off chords that made you fall in love with your own native tongue. Mr. Black – his real name -- was a straw boss in the tobacco fields of Windsor Locks and Suffield. And when you wanted to catch his attention, you had best not omit the Mr. The man was cloaked in immense dignity. He stuttered when excited, a defect nearly all the toughs in the tobacco fields were careful NOT to notice.

The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now officially underway. It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel -- easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.

  Civil Rights leaders pose in the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963 --PhotoQuest / Getty Images Neo-Progressive leftists in the United States are bewildered. How is it possible that former President Donald Trump, the campaign footstool of Democrat opponents, is gaining in reliable polls after a bevy of prosecutors has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him? A few weeks ago, they hurled the kitchen sink at Trump. Several states pulled Trump’s name from their ballots, citing dubious Constitutional authority . Their reasoning was as follows: 1) The January 6, 2021 protest run wild at the state Capitol in Washington DC was an insurrection; 2) Trump participated in the insurrection, more or less by word of mouth, when he encouraged protestors to march “peacefully” on the Capitol in which electors were casting ballots for president; 3) therefore, Trump had engaged in a conspiracy that amounted to an insurrec...

  To honor the Reverend Martin Luther King on the day America has set aside for him, Connecticut Commentary is reprinting three blogs previously printed. The first is Lincoln And King , published on August 20, 2013. The second is Republicans, Martin Luther King, And the Strangers in Our Midst , published on January 14, 2014. And the third is The Black Family After MLK , published on February 26, 2014.

From time to time – though very infrequently -- Connecticut Commentary has published commentary written by others. The column below was written by Regina Roundtree and is reprinted here with her permission. “I want you to think with me this morning from the subject: rediscovering lost values. Rediscovering lost values. There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I don’t think we have to look too far to see that. I’m sure that most of you would agree with me in making that assertion.”  --  Martin Luther King Jr. The approach of King’s holiday has new meaning to me this year. In 2013, I came out of the closet -- as a Black Republican. Coming out was more than just saying I am a Republican; it required putting my words into action.  When I started coming out in 2013 many of my Democratic associates were very surprised.  Aware of the stereotype that Republicans are white and racist, I questioned them about why ...

Douglas The politics of postmodern progressivism (PMP) cuts bloodily across the grain of political memory. PMPs are not concerned with hiding their extreme programs or methods, both of which are of necessity unorthodox, boastfully so, and revolutionary. One of the reasons so called “cancel culture” does not alarm the PMPs is that, like revolutionaries everywhere, they purposely aim not to please but to repeal and then readjust culture and politics along revolutionary lines. Engraved on Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery, North London are the words “ The philosophers have only  interpreted  the world, in various ways [Marx was thinking chiefly of Hegel]. The point, however, is to  change  it.” In the progressive world view, change serves as a substitute for what Hegel regarded as the movement of spirit in history. In the Leninist-Stalinist period, Marxist-Communism succeeded in this project only too well. Through the use of force alone, against a backdrop of ma...

The real Sampson A friend, once a schoolteacher, thinks that in the future we may be speaking to each other in acronyms. There are so many of them in the air. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is widely known as AOC, and Critical Race Theory is referred to in news accounts as CRT. We have learned to think in abbreviations -- see Twitter -- and our ideas, usually rented from some partisan political platform thumper, are bumper sticker thoughts. Looking forward to our post-modern era, philosopher and social critic Julian Benda once lamented – “History will smile to think that this is the species [the intellectuals of his day] for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.” CRT is much in the news lately. It has inspired grassroots rebellions among insistent parents at Board of Education (BOE) meetings. The parents usually insist on three points: that education should not be political indoctrination; that parents, rather than a mob of educrats, should be able to affirm curricul...

Someone – Regina Roundtree, a Woman On Fire -- has conceived the idea of honoring Pat Longo, long one of the principal worker bees in Connecticut’s Republican Party. Of course, she’s much more than that. Mrs. Longo immediately comes to mind whenever I recall William Faulkner’s tribute to women: “If you have something very important to do, give it to a busy woman.” On March 1, Mrs. Longo will be honored at a special dinner arranged by Ms. Roundtree at Anthony's Ocean View in New Haven. All the particulars may be found at The Connecticut Black Republicans & Conservative site (CTbrac) here . Mrs. Longo, who is to receive the 2014 “Lillian Ford Feickert Award ,” will find herself in good company. The keynote speaker of the evening will be Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr.

We all know that criminal laws have a disparate impact on cities. The famous bank robber Willie Sutton, once asked why he robbed banks, replied with disarming honesty “because that’s where the money is.” Likewise, asked why drug prosecutions are more prevalent in Hartford than they are in, say, tony Greenwich, an honest prosecutor, if there is such an animal, might reply “because that’s where the drug dealers are." The answer to the question why are there more drug runners in Hartford than Greenwich is a little more complex.