Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The big three, Looney, Lamont, Ritter “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session,” said Mark Twain. The life, liberty and property of Connecticut residents will be safe after May 8, 2024 when the General Assembly packs it in for the fiscal year. Of course, the General Assembly will reconvene in February, at which time the life, liberty and property of Connecticut citizens once again will be put in jeopardy. Some prospective bills never make it from the drawing board. Such was a bill, championed by environmentalists and politicians seeking to make hay from California’s attempt to outlaw the sale of internal combustion engines after 2035. A measure to replicate in Connecticut California’s stringent laws and regulations concerning environmental tidiness has now been put off until the current 2024 elections have concluded. “In a surprising move,” the Hartford Courant tells us, “House Speaker Matt Ritter said that the legislature will not vote...

Blumenthal and Murphy U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has been roughly cuffed by some news outlets, but not by Vox, which published on April 16 a worshipful article on Connecticut’s Junior Senator, “ The Senator of State : How Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, a rising Democratic star, would run the world.” On April 15, The Federalist mentioned Murphy in an article entitled “ Sen. Chris Murphy: China And The World Health Organization Did Nothing Wrong . The lede was a blow to Murphy’s solar plexus: “Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy exonerated China of any wrongdoing over the global pandemic stemming from the novel Wuhan coronavirus on Tuesday. “’The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, is not because of anything the WHO [World Health Organization] did,’ said Murphy during a prime-time interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.”

Pelosi “When in doubt  tell the truth . It will confound your enemies and astound your friends” ―  Mark Twain It looks like Majority Whip James Clyburn has let the political cat out of the bag. National Democrats have larded with ideological pork a massive $1.8 trillion dollar rescue plan brought forth to mitigate Coronavirus, stopping in its tracks a bill designed to stop the pandemic in its tracks. “The Senate bill that Democrats stopped,” the New York Post notes, “would have given nearly every American $1,200, with $500 for every child. It would have allocated $250 billion for unemployment insurance, $350 for a small business loan program, more than $100 billion to hospitals, $11 billion towards vaccines, $4.5 more to the CDC, $20 billion to veterans’ healthcare, $12 billion for public education, another $10 billion to airports, and $5 billion to FEMA.”

Ned Lamont There are both advantages and disadvantages to chief executives elected to office from outside the political box. One of the greatest disadvantages relates to political navigation. Asked about Governor Ned Lamont’s first year in office, Republican leader in the State Senate Len Fasano said, “It’s a lack of understanding in that building that has been an impediment to the governor closing the deal” on transportation. “I think the business principles and brains are of value, but they are nullified if you can’t navigate the building.” On the matter of transportation, Lamont’s two pilot fishes in the General Assembly are President of the State Senate Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz. The Democrat majority in the General Assembly is headed by Looney, a fixture in the General Assembly for 26 years, and Aresimowicz, a union employee fearful of fouling his own nest.

The matter of trust in government always lies like a dagger in the clenched fists of the disenchanted. It was American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician Gideon John Tucker (1826-1899) who said “no man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.” The CTMirror report is titled, Lamont: Trust me. GOP lawmakers: Why should we? The title may leave behind the impression that only quarrelsome Republican legislators mistrust the usual Democrat hegemony in the General Assembly. What else is new? That clearly is not true. It has been mistrust – not to speak of mistreatment – that has caused in Connecticut a lingering ten year recession that elsewhere in the country ended in the second quarter of 2009. Businesses have moved out of state; so have people. “Connecticut ranks third from last nationally on United Van Lines’ annual study of outbound moves, with New Jersey dead bottom,” The Hour tells us.

Now that the party primaries have concluded, the substance of the play will change – because the audience will have changed. Democrat Party nominee Ned Lamont unsurprisingly dished Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim with 81 percent of the primary vote. On the Republican side , Bob Stefanowski hauled in 30 percent of the vote, 9 points more than Mayor Mark Boughton of Danbury, not a strong showing for a party nominee. In the hotly contested 5 th  District, abandoned by Elizabeth Esty after charges she had not moved quickly enough on reported incidents of  harassment by her Chief of Staff  against one of her female aides. Jahana Hayes upset party nominee Mary Glassman with a convincing 62 percent of the vote. State Senator Joe Markley won a resounding victory over his two primary opponents, and Susan Bysiewicz, hand-picked by Lamont for the Lieutenant Governor slot, prevailed over her primary opponent with 62 percent of the vote. During primaries, politicians tend...

There are two stories in the Hartford Courant of general interest. The first is a front page, top of the fold story, “ Getting To Know Joe Ganim ” the present Democrat Mayor of Bridgeport now running for governor. The story is what we call in the trade “a puff piece.” Perhaps all we need to know about Ganim is that he’s not John Rowland, though the recent past of both are eerily similar. Would a major newspaper in Connecticut publish a top of the fold, front page puff piece on Rowland if, after his release from prison, he had run for, say, mayor of Hartford, won, and then announced his candidacy for governor, as Ganim did in Bridgeport? Unfortunately for the hapless Rowland, he went into the radio talk show business on his first release from the hoosegow.

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Oliva was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics. Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia, the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls, Governor Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed out the door by his Lieutenant Governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Attorney General George Jepsen, and other Democ...

The hunger for an independent governor – that is, one who is independent of party allegiance -- begins to approach the intensity of the search for the Holy Grail. Independence is regarded as a boon for several reasons, one of them best stated by Mark Twain: “Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.”

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” – a remark attributed by Mark Twain to Disraeli Len Suzio lost his seat to incumbent State Senator Dante Bartolomeo in a hard fought contest in 2014 by 1% of the vote and won the seat back in 2016 by 2.8 % of the vote.  His is a particularly difficult seat for Republicans; registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the 13th District roughly by a two to one margin. Think of Sisyphus rolling his stone up a perilously steep incline.

Q: It may or may not have been the most significant presidential debate in living memory, but it certainly was the most touted presidential debate in “Click Nation USA.” What are your general impressions? Cynic: In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” one character says to another, “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time; that would be hypocrisy.” Neither of the presidential candidates this year needs worry about that. Hillary Clinton’s presentation, more than Trump’s, was unbearable pretentious. She needed to confess but boasted instead of her essential goodness. She is not a good person – never has been, never will be. But she is a Democrat and, in our time, political affiliation is a substitute for moral rectitude. Q: Is she evil? Cynic: No, she lacks the energy to be evil. The root is old and dry. Vladimir Putin is evil. That little runt in North Korea is evil. Donald Trump bubbles wi...

The reader should note the quotations marks around the word “plagiarism.” The quote marks are intended to bracket the word in doubt because plagiarism often lies in the mind of the accuser. Note to the reader: I borrowed this thought from someone else, changing it slightly from “beauty lies in the mind of the beholder,” a sentiment some have traced to Plato. Was Shakespeare plagiarizing when he borrowed heavily from Montaigne and Boccaccio? Or, as seems more likely, was he merely capturing their bright flags? We are not the inventors of the words we use to encapsulate our thoughts. In fact thoughts themselves have a parentage. C. S. Lewis put it this way: You cannot invent a new primary color. The attribution game is, in some cases, a tangle that has ensnared many an “expert.”

                                                                                    Q: Who are the Trump supporters? A: Right now, they are, for the most part, people who are unattached, emotionally or ideologically, to either of the two major parties. The Obama administration has abandoned altogether what used to be called moderate, Reagan Democrats. Some of these people, left in the lurch by progressives, have crossed over to vote for Trump. He is running very strong among Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated white males. Within the narrower category of alienated moderate Republicans and Democrats, there are numerous sub-groups: resentment Republicans and Democrats, people who have, in one way or another, been slighted by what they refer to, disdainfully, as the party ...

“Abortion rights” – which is to say unrestricted abortion – figures prominently in U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s utopia. A bill introduced by Mr. Blumenthal, The  Women’s Health Protection Act of 2013, would affirm unrestricted abortion by making it impossible for states to regulate abortion providers, chiefly Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. To Blumenthal watchers, a bill preventing various actors in the abortion drama, including states and the federal government, from propounding any rules governing abortion at any stage of the birth process for any reason would seem to be out of character for Mr. Blumenthal, who spent much of his two decades as Attorney General in Connecticut suing businesses for having violated regulations while proposing bills to Connecticut’s General Assembly that would further hobble a Connecticut economy already gagging on needless regulations.

It appears that Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, will be addressing Congress after all on March 3 rd . The US Congress has been called the greatest deliberative democratic body on earth, and so here is a match that appears to have been made in Heaven. What then is the problem? Dick Blumenthal, as of this writing, is pretending not to know. Connecticut’s first consumer protection U.S. Senator has dropped into his Hamlet mode and has not yet made up his mind whether he’ll attend Mr. Netanyahu’s address. Said Mr. Blumenthal , “Well, I’m here as the senator from Connecticut, and I have to make a decision about what serves the national interest. And obviously I am Jewish, so I will be inclined to go but I, you know, have to make a decision on what I think is the right thing to do,” and “I certainly have respect for the head of the state of Israel and out of that respect I could go. But the invitation and the acceptance were very u...

The opening day of Connecticut’s new tax and spend season had been postponed because of a snow storm. But the storm was neither long enough nor the snow deep enough to prevent legislators from making their appointed rounds. Governor Dannel Malloy, the author of the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history, was characteristically optimistic – utopians usually are  – and his opening day speech, a spare 43- minutes, was interrupted by the General Assembly members assembled more than 50 times. Mr. Malloy’s speech was larded with applause lines such as these:

In Germany, anti-Vietnam War protestor, longtime Senator from Massachusetts, wind sail surfer, husband of ketchup multi-millionairess Teresa Heinz Kerry and Secretary of State John Kerry “recalled for young Germans Tuesday when he snuck out of the American embassy in divided postwar Berlin at age 12 for a clandestine bicycle ride into the Soviet-controlled eastern part of the city.

Henry Mencken, every good journalist’s journalist, was a prolific writer. Asked if he ever got tired cranking out newspaper stories and commentary, he said -- never. During his whole journalistic output, Mr. Mencken said, he felt like a little boy with two stomachs in a candy store. Many of his writings were devoted to Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, which he hugely enjoyed as a buffoonish spectacle. Of Mencken and conventions, Murray Rothbard wrote:

It would be difficult for anyone other than politicians on the right, often the butt of his jokes, to disdain Colin McEnroe. We in the land of Mark Twain do love and forgive our humorists their hyperbole, and Mr. McEnroe is the closest thing Connecticut has to, say, Aristophanes, the famous Greek comic playwright of the 4 th century BC. Time, as we know, is the enemy of sound scholarship. The ruin of Greece has left huge gaps in our understanding of, among other things, Greek comic playwrights. Only eleven of Aristophanes’ 40 plays survive virtually complete. Modern scholarship, which relies on multiple disciplines –archeology, for instance -- to fill in the gaps, shows us an Aristophanes who was an arch political critic, though he wore many masks. In his plays, Aristophanes mercilessly and subversively routed by means of humor the larger and more offensive pretentions of his day. Plato’s beef against Aristophanes was that his play “The Clouds” slandered Socrates and so led to th...