Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Those on the right like to joke that New England is slipping into a socialist nirvana, but recently US. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Leon Trotsky of the movement to make New England Venezuela, has added serious notes to the charge. Kevin Williamson has exploded the Warren menace in a thoughtful piece in National Review titled “ Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything .” “Warren’s proposal,” Williamson writes, is dishonestly called the ‘Accountable Capitalism Act.’ … Under Senator Warren’s proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more. Naturally, their political activities would be restricted, too. Senator Warren’s proposal entails the wholesale expropriation of...

Most commentators in Connecticut seem to trust the Quinnipiac Poll. The latest Q poll shows Republican gubernatorial challenger Tom Foley leading Governor Dannel Malloy by about six percentage points. The same poll shows Independent gubernatorial challenger Joe Visconti capturing about seven percent of the vote, and that seven percent represents the ants in the pants of Foley supporters who point out that, during the last gubernatorial go-around, Mr. Foley lost to Mr. Malloy by a very thin margin. The Q poll also points out that Mr. Visconti appears to be drawing equally from Republicans and Democrats, so that his effect on the general election would appear to be a wash.

Some bills offered by politicians in campaign modes are difficult to pass but worth supporting as campaign puffers. They look good, in other words, on a campaign resume: “Democratic contender for the U.S. Senate Leon Trotsky, a proletarian himself whose grandmother worked her fingers to the bone in a soul grinding mill – for slave wages, we may add -- has always favored periotic increases in the minimum wage, while Republicans, mostly grasping yacht owners, have always fancied keeping the poor on the edge of poverty.” A bill that favors one or another preferred special interest and yet fails to pass in the legislature is not a failure -- provided it may afterwards be molded into campaign bullets and shot at political opponents.   And failed bills that entail disastrous consequences are problem free when they fail, because failure decouples crippling consequences from legislation. There are sound reasons for believing that minimum wage bills hurt the poor and affect large ...

Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s non-obituary is beginning to appear in newspapers, now that he has officially surrendered his position as president of Cuba. Castro held the position, bayonet in hand, ever since he seized power in Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959. The communist dynasty now falls to his brother Raul, 76 years young. Despite keystone cop like attempts to remove the now ailing dictator and relieve Cuba of its incubus, the most serious of which was President John Kennedy’s Bay of Pig’s fiasco, Castro’s Cuba has been relatively free of the usual plots and mayhem associated with communist regimes. Other communist leaders were not so lucky. Trotsky died at the hands of an assassin sent to Mexico by Stalin, who dispatched the war hero and party theoretician with a hatchet. Stalin , “the Breaker of Nations,” authorized the Great Purge of 1937-39, which eliminated opposition from the Old Bolsheviks, and anyone else he thought might oppose his steely will. Stalin himself was poisone...

Hilliare Belloc’s advice to the rich – “Learn something about the internal combustion engine, and remember: Soon, you will die.” Caligula So, I have become a ghost, the nearest I shall ever be to a God again; for, in life, I was a God. Divinity, you know, is the highest form of politics. What is higher or nobler than a God? … But wait: Nobility has nothing to do with it, as if nobility and Godliness could ever share the same frame; a God is above that sort of thing … As a former Emperor – now, God and ghost – everything to me was permissible, and understandable. I comprehend by grasping my subject from the inside; nothing was alien to me. I am solid as earth now, though I know it does not seem so to you, because I know everything; I am in everything, and everything is in me. That is how I know; through a process of identity and self revelation. I become the thing I want to know – say, a tree, or a young boy, or a virgin – and then, at will, I revert to Godliness. You, on the other ha...