Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

On dictator Nicolás Maduro’s abrupt leave-taking from Venezuela, Daniel Johnson observes in The Telegraph , “The same raddled radicals who half a century ago cut their teeth worshipping at the shrines of Castro and Mao, who spent their youth marching for Chile and Nicaragua, who rallied behind Saddam’s Iraq and still champion Hamas in Gaza, are now recycling their anti-American agitprop on behalf of a tin pot tyrant who even by Latin American standards is entirely unlamented.”   One of the American rattled radicals who spent his youth worshiping at the shrine of the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua was present Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders, who spent his honeymoon, such as it was, in the Soviet Union, a collection of formerly free and independent states hauled by force into the Soviet Union by Stalin – no democrat he. Stalin was, even as Nikita Khrushchev knew, a true believer in the politics of the terror, the bullet and the gulag. The same may be said – and has been said of M...

  Mamdani and The Warmth of Collectivism   Zohran Mamdani’s ambition, he tells us, is to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” But collectivism is only warm for socialist politicians minding the boiling pots.   The Telegraph of London tells us, following Mamdani’s ascension to the mayoralty of New York City, “From this week, however, [New York City and London] will be aligned in a much more unfortunate manner: with the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani taking power in New York, both will be governed by the far-Left. New York may well be about to match London’s decline.   “Mamdani comes to power with a far more radical agenda than Sadiq Khan,” a British politician serving as the third and current mayor of London. He [Mamdani] is demanding higher taxes on the rich, although that has to be agreed by the state’s governor, tougher rent controls, transport subsidies, and even state-run grocery st...

Connecticut is experiencing, the “experts” tell us, an “affordable” housing shortage. This is simply another way of saying too few housing opportunities are being offered in Connecticut to middle income people. The problem is not a lack of properties. There are in Connecticut post-industrial properties that may be converted into affordable rents for – to choose but one group, young Connecticut residents who graduate from Connecticut colleges with degrees that may earn them a spot in a vibrant Connecticut company.   The supply-side answer to a lack of housing is to increase the supply of housing. Easier said than done, say progressive politicians who favor replacing supply-side measures with the centralization of governmental force. The state should, progressive minded experts tell us, seize unproductive properties, rehabilitate them, and market them to productive landlords.   The problem, in many cases, is that the owners of such properties cannot sell them to prospect...

Connecticut Commentary will not here forecast the race of governor in Connecticut and contingent races. It may be more instructive to lay out for voters the correlation of political forces in Connecticut most of which favor Democrats.   The last Republican governor of Connecticut was Jodi Rell, who got along famously with Democrats, as did her predecessor, Governor John Rowland, untimely booted from office during his historic making third term. Governor Ned Lamont hopes to replicate Rowlands’s record.   Since Rell, Republican influence in the state’s General Assembly has diminished significantly. Democrats now enjoy a nearly veto-proof majority in the state legislature, not that there is any pressing need to veto measures supported by Lamont. All so called “moderate” Republican members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been replaced by far less moderates Democrats who favor, unsurprisingly, leftist solutions to pressing budget deficits. Connecticut’s co...

Putin We know that most politicians pursue hyperbole as an avocation, and some are better at this than others. It is generally agreed that President Donald Trump is a master of the art of persuasion by exaggeration. But he is not a lone practitioner. In a serious democracy, practitioners would receive a death sentence for misleading the public.   In every hyperbole, a staple of all comedy, a lie lies asleep in bed with a truth. To lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not. The only lie consistently reproved by our free – and increasingly thin and costly newspaper media – is hypocrisy. But there is a saving grace to hypocrisy which, we are told, is “the compliment vice pays to virtue.” To mislead is a vice, but the politician who gives himself over to hypocrisy hangs onto the truth with one hand while bidding it good-bye – hopefully, temporarily – with the other. The hypocrite is not morally deracinated. He knows that the exception he relies upon really does prove, rather t...

Tong Fresh off a disaster in which one of his Assistant Attorneys  General, Seth Hollander, was referred by a judge to Connecticut’s Statewide Grievance Committee for having knowingly misled a court, Attorney General William Tong, all by his lonesome, is trying in a separate court filing to extend congressional immunity to Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission.   Mark Pazniokis of CTMirror puts it this way: “The office of Attorney General William Tong is asking a Connecticut court to rule for the first time in the 50-year history of the state Freedom of Information Act that all records relating to the “legitimate legislative activities” of the General Assembly are exempt from public disclosure.   “At issue is the meaning of the 55-word “speech or debate clause’ of the Connecticut Constitution. Like a similar provision in the U.S. Constitution, the clause creates a legislative privilege intended to protect legislators from arrest or other interference by ...