Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Speaker of the state House or Representatives Chris Donovan is the Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut 5 th District. His former campaign finance director Robert Braddock has been arrested following a Grand Jury indictment on a series of charges involving campaign finance money laundering. During an arraignment proceeding on Thursday in federal court in New Haven, charges were brought against other people involved with Mr. Donovan’s U.S. Senate campaign, among them former Donovan campaign manager Joshua Nassi,   Paul Rogers, affiliated with two roll-your-own tobacco shops in Waterbury, and union officials associated with the Department of Corrections. Mr. Donovan appears to be weathering this brutal prosecutorial storm with a degree of calm indifference that has astonished some reporters and commentators familiar with other political corruption cases in Connecticut. Leaders in the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Bailey, beginning with Governor Da...

The Devil, it is sometimes said, lies in the details. The Devil did not show his hand in the Twardy investigation of Speaker of the House Chris Donovan’s tawdry campaign for the U.S. House in Connecticut’s 5 th District. Mr. Donovan’s former finance director was arrested by the FBI in a sting operation in which straw contributors, the FBI showed in an arrest affidavit, violated campaign finance regulations. FBI investigators almost certainly are squeezing some of the principals involved in Speakergate to obtain from them information their lawyers have denied to Mr. Twardy.   Virtually all Mr. Donovan’s Republican campaign opponents have said Mr. Donovan either did or did not know that his finance director, Robert Braddock, was, to put it kindly, delinquent in avoiding the near occasion of arrest. If Mr. Donovan knew about the financing irregularities that led to Mr. Braddock’s arrest, he was participating in corrupt activity; and if he did not know, he is not competent, m...

Decoding McEnroe Any piece of writing by Colin McEnroe, the Hartford Courant’s Voltaire, has to be decoded. This is because McEnroe writes in a sort of Joycian stream of conscious mode; his columns are usually studded with arcane references and barely suppressed prejudices not unusual to his station in the world. McEnroe is the sole host, now that his companion Bruce has departed, on his own radio talk program, the Colin McEnroe Show, a blogger, the author of an entertaining biography; and he also does house calls. McEnroe graduated from Yale, in the course of which – I am guessing here – he developed affection for coffee house banter and a disaffection for the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, not infrequently impaled in his remarks and columns. McEnroe used to be the religious writer for the Courant at a time when it was thought chic to employ religious writers, but he is not friendly to organized religion, preferring the quasi-religious vagaries of Buddhism, and the disorganized an...

Sen. Lou DeLuca has now been “done in” by most commentators and editorial boards. It’s difficult to see how he can survive the drubbing, and it is safe to predict that his days in the state senate soon will be drawing to a close. The Harford Courant has, somewhat tardily , called for DeLuca’s resignation from the senate. DeLuca has stepped down as Minority Leader for Republicans but continues to cling on to his seat by (pun intended) the seat of his pants. “And Mr. DeLuca,” the Courant intoned two days before two of its columnists, Kevine Rennie and Bill Currry opened fire in the Sunday edition of the paper, “ a Woodbury Republican, was wrong again last week in deciding not to resign his seat in the Senate. Resigning would be the honorable thing to do, but Mr. DeLuca is nothing if not consistent.” Rennie , whose jeweler’s eye was trained on prosecutorial inconsistencies, in addition to holding aloft DeLuca’s severed head, also lambasted prosecutors who arrogantly refused to settle wha...

From an address to Windsor Republicans at their annual Republican of the year awards dinner.The award this year was given to Steve Ellingwood. Reading his own obituary in a local paper, Mark Twain once said that the news of his demise had been “greatly exaggerated.” There has been much written lately concerning the death of political parties. But the reputed demise is, I think, premature – which may prove, as it did in Twain’s day, that newspaper writers, columnists and other professional worry-warts have, once again, gotten it wrong. The presence in this room of so many hard working, energetic and committed Republicans certainly gives the lie to that notion. The news that journalism is dead has also been tossed about lately. An exhaustive survey released by the much respected Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that national newspaper chains may be on their deathbeds. According to the report, the public “increasingly sees the press as slanted… Nearly three quarters of Ameri...

T’is the season to be secular – and litigious. In Kirkland, Washington, a high school principal this year refused to allow a production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” because Tiny Tim, the character in the tale who melts the stony heart of Scrooge, was incautious enough to pray, “God Bless everyone.” The “G” word rarely has been in favor among secularist censors, and this year was no different. On most occasions, one may expect an eruption of righteous anger when books are banned by school systems that object to ribald language or offensive messages. When Huckleberry Finn was dumped from libraries by timid administrators unnerved by the “N” word, a tortured cry went up from defenders of the First Amendment. But not this time. Florida and New Jersey school districts have banned Christmas carols altogether, perhaps fearing the litigious American Civil Liberty Union lawyer hiding under the school nurse’s bed. In Somerville Massachusetts, the mayor formally apologized to those o...