Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Hester, I have a modest proposal. I was talking to a friend of mine, a politically connected tradesman and a marine retired from service. Everyone should be advised that there is no such thing as an ex-marine. I doubt this is true in all cases, but marines, when they grow old, tend to lose some conventional inhibitions. I suppose that’s true of most of us. Conventions can be a smothering blanket, but in the winter one wants warmth. Inhibitions gone, friends are the next to ditch us. Anyway, my marine friend is full of salty expressions. Comradeship arouses in men, especially when engaged in battle or sports, the scatological imperative. People, he says, think politicians are helpful – compassion and do-goodism is after all in their job specs -- and so people turn to them when in distress, even when the distress is caused by the self-same politicians. But, my friend says, politicians the world over are concerned chiefly with acquiring power and utilizing it to their be...

  I can’t imagine how you can think philosophy and wine are similar—except in this one respect, that philosophers sell their learning as shopkeepers their wares; and most of them dilute it, too, and defraud customers  — Lucian, “The Sale Of Philosophers” Governor Ned Lamont has two serious problems. The first is his inexperience in Connecticut politics, which makes him the plaything of lean and hungry Democrat leaders who have a wealth of experience in Connecticut politics. And the second is  Red Jahncke . “First, it was diversion. Now it’s ‘interception,’” Jahncke writes in the  Connecticut Post . His article should have been titled “What a wicked web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

I can’t imagine how you can think philosophy and wine are similar—except in this one respect, that philosophers sell their learning as shopkeepers their wares; and most of them dilute it, too, and defraud customers — Lucian, “The Sale Of Philosophers” The Democrats' problem in Connecticut is simple: you can’t sell a failure to someone who has experienced the failure. Working class citizens in Connecticut are poorer now than they were before Dannel Malloy became governor in 2011  and after more pending tax increases, they will be poorer still.  The assets sunk in their property have been devalued; workers in the private marketplace haven’t had raises in years; college tuition for their children has increased, along with their inability to pay metastasizing tax increases; despite the insistence of reigning politicians that the future will be rosy under an enlightened, progressive administration, their recent, remembered past has been a nightmare. The clunker doesn’t mo...

Governor Dannel Malloy has not been able to discover from cross-talk between his office and CEO of Aetna Insurance Company Mark Bertolini whether Aetna, following the company’s merger with Humana, will move its headquarters out of state. The resolution of this mystery is important because a removal of Aetna’s headquarters from Connecticut will reduce the state’s revenue stream. Should Aetna pull a GE on Mr. Malloy, Connecticut's notoriously out-of-balance budget will suffer yet another inconvenient battering – this on the eve of state elections. For this reason, efforts have been made to decipher the cryptic comments Mr. Bertolini earlier made to Aetna stockholders. Like the oracles of the “False Prophet Alexander” lampooned by the Roman satirist Lucian, which oracles were richly detailed but opaque, obscure and non-responsive, Mr. Bertolini’s statements  to his stockholders admit of several meanings. Their sense has befuddled both Mr. Malloy and Luke Bronin, the ...

Lucian, the second century satirist, once wrote a dialogue called “The Sale of Creeds” in which he held up to ridicule such famous philosophers as Socrates, Diogenes and Pythagoras. In Lucian’s drama, some of the philosophers were a bit of a hard sell. Only a few weeks ago, to judge from commentary in Connecticut’s press, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman might have been sold at bargain prices. But now comes a piece in Politico that raises his price considerably. Some leading Democrats and Republicans -- not among them Chris Healy, still the state’s Republican Party chieftain, though Mr. Healy himself recently sought to auction himself off as a National Republican Party Chairman – would be happy to purchase Mr. Lieberman, mostly for tactical reasons. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Politico reports, “is quietly urging the Connecticut lawmaker to run for a fifth Senate term in 2012 — and to stick with the Democratic side of the aisle.” Now that the House has fallen to Republicans and th...