Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

CTMirror notes in a recent story that minority leader in the state House of Representations Themis Klarides has voiced her concern often enough that “when Democrats expanded their lead in the House and regained control of the Senate — that the majority is gearing up to spend recklessly…   ‘All we have heard from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle has been more, bigger, and let’s expand,’ Klarides said.” Effective Republican resistance to spending increases, always a matter of numbers in the General Assembly, will be severely reduced in the new session.

“Character is much easier kept than recovered” – Thomas Paine According to a story appearing in the Waterbury Republican American , “Former state Comptroller Bill Curry, the 1994 and 2002 Democratic nominee for Governor, was even more direct. ‘No one under any cloud of investigation is on any serious list for any appointment in any White House. It simply isn’t worth the enormous political and moral hazard,’ he said. Mr. Curry was a White House adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s husband," former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Curry believes that Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy has no chance – zip – of acquiring a position in the administration of future President Hillary Clinton. 

" These are the times that try men's soul's. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and women " – Thomas Paine In calling for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s head, many of his eager executioners have lost their own. One blogger headlines his usual spit and piddle with the title “Lieberman Must Be Destroyed,” while a statewide columnist refers to him contemptuously as Uriah Heap. Now that we can speak with bowed heads and chastened hearts of President Barack Obama, an early anti-Iraq war enthusiast, it is supposed by ardent Democrat Party activists -- many of whom, the modern equivalent of Paine’s sunshine patriots, spend their days in bathrobes writings blogs -- that present leader of the Democrat Party in the US Senate Harry Reid should deprive Lieberman of his perks, take from him a quick confession, lead the repentant sinner to the executioners b...

A little bit like Moxie – which makes you foxy – Christopher Hitchens is an acquired taste. At his best, he is a smooth blend of H. L. Mencken and Bill Buckley at his most mirthful. Personally, I’m put off by his aggressive atheism; but he does claim to be a child of the Enlightenment, and one cannot complain too much if the child, grown to a man’s stature, seems to be a chip off his daddy’s block. “Hitch,” as he is called, is an American transplant from England, as are so many writers, such as Tom Paine, who fit comfortably into an American skin. Hitchens has written intelligently about Paine and also Jefferson. Of all the writers pouring their hearts out -- usually onto their sleeve -- about the war on terror, it seems to me that he, along with Arnaud DeBorsgrave, is the sanest -- and the hottest. Hitchens was invited recently to contribute to a discussion, “What to Do in Iraq: a Roundtable," sponsored by Foreign Affairs. His brief contribution , eminently sane, follows: "I...