Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

What’s Next?

2026-10-21T14:04:51.661-04:00

Fazio and Lamont

The off-year presidential elections will soon be over. Few expect breathtaking surprises. It is traditional in national off-year presidential elections for the party out of power, in this case Democrats, to gain seats in the U.S. Congress. In Connecticut, Democrats are expected to hold back an anticipated Republican eddy. Republicans have been telling us recent polling is defective. Nationally, Republicans are expected to lose some seats in the U S Congress. Statewide, Democrats are expected to maintain their margins. The obvious question at this point is: What comes next?

The tradition mentioned above concerning off-year presidential elections may be the only tradition that, for the time being, the rebels without a cause among American Democratic Socialist (ADS) are willing to tolerate. Their revolutionary movement calls for a unitary national legislature – no more U.S. Senate -- additional seats as socialist ballast to be added to the U.S. Supreme Court, a vast increase in the power of the executive branch, and a new convention on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution first proposed by progressive Democrat President Woodrow Wilson according to which constitutional provisions should be regarded as having no more authority than statutory regulations, among other reforms that, taken together, would radically reshape the future of American politics.

When the ADS is finished tinkering with long settled American constitutional governance, the end result will be a monarchical government in which the legislative branch has been reduced to a powerless shadow of itself; the judicial branch, the membership of which will be subject to a popular vote, has been emasculated as a check upon the magisterial executive office; and the No-Kings movement can be shelved as hopelessly irrelevant to the newly reformed socialist political order. What the ADS really wants is a government not unlike that of any respectable serfdom tyranny in which the electorate is expected to surrender its assets unquestioningly to a rapacious government and shut up.

Vermont socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders appears to be basking in his glory. He has predicted a socialist tsunami sweeping all before it in the upcoming elections. A future presidency is twinkling in Democrat state Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left eye. Her political pockets have been deep enough to allow her to transfer $1 million last Friday to a political account that will help elect fellow socialist/progressive Abdul El-Sayed to the U.S. Senate.

I’d rather be right than president, Henry Clay once said. Sanders has trumped that one. He has rarely been successful in most of his far-flung leftist ambitions. He has always wanted to plunder the assets of billionaires – be it noted, not millionaires. Sanders, since his first election to office, has now become a millionaire. He plans to spend the seized assets on increasing the power of governance to seize assets. And what will he purchase with the seized assets? Answer: more power to seize more assets in the future, almost certainly from non-millionaires. The 1861 Civil War income tax, historians may recall, was a tax levied on equivalent “millionaires” of the day that was supposed to be temporary. Alas, owing to improvident inflation producing spending, the post-Civil War “millionaire’s tax” has now trickled down to non-millionaires, where it rests today, eating out the substance of middle class workers. Taxes, once they go up, are not subject to the laws of gravity whenever spending increases proportionally. They rarely come down.

In Connecticut, as well as much of New England and California, the feverish dreams of leftists have come true. We are, and have been for the last three decades, a leftist “conspiracy.” The word “conspiracy” is here used in its Shavian sense. George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” Democrats in Connecticut are without question pedantic professionals. They outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin. There are slightly more Independents or Unaffiliateds than registered Democrats in “the land of steady habits.” In the state’s General Assembly, Democrats boast a veto proof majority. All the members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrat. Jodi Rell, the last Connecticut Republican governor who died two years ago, left office in 2009 and retired to Florida. All current justices of Connecticut’s Supreme Court were appointed to office by Democrat governors. The media in Connecticut has been soft on Democrats for decades, some say because the media always knows who butters its bread. This is a high hill to climb.

We have only to wait a few days to find out who won and who lost. The larger and more important question is: What will the winners do with their victory? A Democrat victory will represent the continuation of a left leaning status quo in Connecticut. Almost certainly this will mean a hardening of what some political analysts are calling Connecticut’s Democrat hegemony. Hegemonic governments are nearly always tyrannical, because hegemons such as we see in Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and Shia Islam’s terrorist conspiracy with Iran need fear only an awakened and effective resistance to tyrannical rule.

We shall see in coming days if fellow cynic H.L. Mencken’s definition of democracy -- “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” – is on point.

What, Me Worry?

2026-10-20T18:13:55.964-04:00

Connecticut Dems

Connecticut Democrats have little to worry about for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is: political problems become worrisome only when the opposition party or an independent media has the political resources and the inclination to exploit the problem.

We know that Connecticut’s Democrat Party has been for 30 years and more the unquestioned dominant party in our state. This dominance is longer-lived in the state’s cities, now dependent on majority Democrats for funding. Hartford’s last Republican mayor was Ann Uccello who presided as mayor from 1967-1971.

Political dominance, once attained, is relatively easy to maintain – particularly in a state like Connecticut in which the media, far less independent than it had been during the golden age of bipartisan government in Connecticut, partly for business reasons favors the hegemonic party in power.

One of the reasons “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is that opposition to absolute power is at a minimum when a single party has swept the boards of active opposition and corrective active resistance has been routed by aggressive hegemonic governance. Under such conditions, the dominant political power needn’t worry that the angels of our better nature will veto improvident legislation. The political orientation also changes: The dominant party becomes more aggressive and less attuned to political solutions to problems that do not support its increasingly ideological preferences. Once one has captured the castle, politic al energy is directed mostly to its defense, not its maintenance or its relationship with the larger political unit.

This disposition of forces leads to ineffective opposition and produces nests of political corruption in which dominant politicians may rest undisturbed upon public nettles transformed in their imagination into beds of sweet-smelling roses. To bring off this delusion in which arrogant politicians hope by sweet speech to “fool most of the people most of the time,” Abe Lincoln’s formulation, politicians must violate the spirit of our Constitution, which answers a no less important correlative question – Who shall decide what shall be done?

Both Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson sought to answer this second question by reverting to the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

The Declaration affirms the primacy of a “natural law” that cannot be expunged by politicians, however convincing, because the natural law has been imprinted within the very nature of mankind by the God of creation who will brook no interference by men who wish to rob mankind of the preternatural rights enshrined in both documents.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said that both the North and the South “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?”

These words, approved by Frederick Douglass and heard by John Wilkes Booth, who was present at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, are carved on the North Wall of the Lincoln Memorial – by a woman sculptress as it happens. They erupt even today in the minds of patriots like a cleansing Godly wind storming from the Declaration of Independence.

Connecticut has adopted as its political template the destructive correlation of forces that obtain in California and New York City under socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the third person of the new socialist trinity being Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. These are forces of dissolution the United States has valiantly resisted for much of the 20^th century long before the advent of the profoundly socialistic and anti-American Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) enthusiasm, now menacing much of Europe, the cradle of republican virtue. The present left leaning Democrat Party in the northeast has forgotten everything and learned nothing. Any fool can learn from his own mistakes, but it takes genius to be able to learn from the mistakes of others.

The Trouble With Bad Manners

2026-10-18T09:35:39.394-04:00

Elci

The trouble with bad manners, Bill Buckley once said, is that they sometimes lead to murder.

Buckley was perhaps the most well-mannered contrarian journalist in the business, and he had a genius for friendship.

Considering the disposition of political forces in Connecticut – Democrats own the state, lock, stock and barrel -- most contrarian journalists would necessarily fall on the Republican side of the political barricades. They would also be conservative or libertarian. Buckley s last significant collection of his writings -- Happy Days Were Here Again -- was subtitled, provocatively, “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.” Those who knew him well will testify that Buckley could handle disagreement without flyting off the handle.

Buckley’s irrepressible good humor always stood him in good stead. Asked by a New York Times reporter during his run for mayor of New York City against John Lindsey what he would do if – miracle of miracles – he actually won the race, Buckley responded he would hang a net outside the window of the New York Times’ editorial floor, to catch the bodies as they fell.

The front page, top of the fold Hartford Courant headline reads “GOP leader calls for apology after video.” The video featured Lee Elci, 22 year radio talk show host, “a conservative who is running as a Republican” against Democrat state Senator Martha Marx of New London, and a gaggle of pearl clutching Democratic poohbahs such as state Attorney General William Tong, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

“Elci,” the Courant tells us, “was temporarily taken off his radio show until after the Nov. 3 election after Marx raised complaints that he would have an unfair advantage of promoting his own campaign without equal time for her. The latest dust-up came at a Democratic event with top state officials, and video of the event is now playing on Elci’s Facebook page as a 30-second advertisement. The video shows Marx pointing to the camera and saying, ‘I have an A--hole running against me, and I hope that gets on Facebook’”

Governor Ned Lamont joined in the merriment, according to the Courant report: “’Martha will tell you that her opponent is an absolute idiot ---hole.’ Lamont’s fellow Democrats are seen laughing and smiling in the video. Marx then says, ‘He can take his big mouth that I have silenced and go back on the radio.’ Republican Party Chairman Ben Proto seemed more surprised than abashed. He told the Courant, “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the governor call anyone an A--hole.” Proto added he thought Lamont owed Elci an apology.

No apology was forthcoming from Lamont’s flack catcher Lauren Gray, a spokeswoman for the Lamont campaign, who said that the governor was attempting to make a joke in comments that were taken out of context.

Elci put it all down to the expected Sturm und Drang of political campaigns: “My feelings aren’t hurt,” Elci told The Courant in an interview. “I’m a big boy with a thick skin,” hardened after more than two decades of political buffering.

Proto, while avoiding vulgarity, was less placid in his response: “’I’d say she’s as dumb as a stone, but that would be insulting to stones,’ Proto told The Courant. ‘Everybody in that room knows that Martha Marx is not the brightest bulb on the tree, so they’re trying to figure out how to protect her because they’d rather have a stupid Democrat than a smart Republican in the Senate. And they have one in Martha.’”

Good to get these things out of your system; such flushing helps drive off insomnia.

The differences between the right and left in America are serious. That has been the case for decades, even before Buckley raised aloft the flag of American conservatism. Elci, always opening himself to critics on the left, has passed the Buckley test for 22 years in broadcast journalism; Marx has fallen short. And the Democrat Party titterers mentioned above, often the targets of Elci who even under awkward circumstances has managed to maintain his manners, need never fear that they will incur the wrath of free speech for me but not for thee left of center bootlickers in New England’s media. They are fast making Barry Goldwater a prophet unloved in his own country. If you cut out New England and California, Goldwater once said, you’ve got a pretty darn good country. Goldwater didn’t say “darn.” He brashly used the more vulgar D-word, demonstrating to all that there is a place in competitive politics for jocular vulgarity.

The chief problem with Democrats in Connecticut is not that they are vulgar. Both Blumenthal and Lamont are millionaires with millionaire manners who live in toney Greenwich Connecticut, the headquarters of millionaire self-sufficiency. Lamont in particular has spent millions financing his own campaigns, which relieves him of the necessity of grubbing for dollars among the plebs. The Democrat Party in Connecticut is now a hegemonic force that rivals the monarchy of the Sun King. If the No Kings folk were serious in their assaults on monarchs, they would be picketing under Lamont’s windows. Elci says these kinds of things aloud, always minding his manners. That’s why Marx called him an A-hole, to gain favor among Connecticut’s modern updated kings.

Capturing the Flag

2026-10-15T23:06:49.858-04:00

Sanders

When we talk about political campaigns, we often resort to military terminology. In the United States, the campaign wars seem never ending. The chief problem with campaigns is that they are distortion mechanisms constructed to capture votes, which is why German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” The quotable Bismarck could be disarmingly honest, as in, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”

For truth in politics, we look to disarmed retired politicians rather than active vote-hungry politicians.

In war, capturing the flag is an indication of a battle won, and so too in political campaigns. We think of accurate accusations of genocide, for instance, as a battle for the moral soul of a constituency. For this reason, it seems to Jews in the United States a false flag to accuse the state of Israel of genocide. The children of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, some of whom walk among us still, know better. A list of 23 main Nazi concentration camps may be found here: List of Nazi concentration camps. The genocidal intent and purpose of the camps have been well documented. The curious historical investigator may find references to Nazi genocide even on WalkMeLearning Arc, one among many AI tech teachers preferred by the young and uninstructed among us.

The left, if we are to believe them, has now captured the “genocide” flag by labeling as genocidal the historical victims of genocide.

Here is Vermont socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders boasting joyously as he captures the “disarm Israel” flag: “When Bernie Sanders moved last April to block a U.S. arms sale to Israel, only 14 Democratic senators joined the Vermont independent. What a difference a year makes: When Sanders objected to another Israeli arms sale this month, 39 other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus joined him — a sea change that has raised eyebrows from Washington to Jerusalem. In a recent interview, Sanders reflected on the sudden and massive shift, one that has some observers saying he — not Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has voted to support the arms sales — is leading Senate Democrats on Israel policy. ‘That’s true,’ Sanders said of the claim. ‘I mean we got 40 votes, and Schumer got seven. We have more support for our position than Chuck has for his.’”

Who is “we?”

Sanders’ “we,” Politico tells us, does not include “One Democrat who continues to support the sales. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, said the Netanyahu government should be reined in but said Sanders was pursuing ‘the wrong vehicle to try to achieve those changes.’” In future comments when referring to the false prophets in his own party, Blumenthal might try to become less mystical. However, Politico notes, “… most of those who recently came to oppose the arms sales cited the Iran War and the risk of further escalation in the region — not Sanders.” During his entire political life, Sanders has been the political victim of his initial choices. His beef with millionaires ended when he himself became a millionaire. He has now moved on to castigating billionaires.

If you throw enough dirt, Cardinal John Henry Newman once said, “some will stick – stick but not stain.” Once you have accepted the view, historically a campaign “lie” in Bismarck’s sense, that the nation of Israel is inherently genocidal, you are on your way to swallowing a host of historical toads. And the same is true of the continuing socialist denigration of capitalism and religion. Karl Marx, a theology student once told me, was the best God-hater of his generation. He wanted to eliminate the competition. Joseph Stalin, an expelled seminarian student and the best Marxist of his generation, expanded the Czarist Gulag to accommodate clergy, capitalist and the Old Bolshevik followers of Lenin.

Here in Connecticut, the Democrat Party has for three decades and more captured and held hostage the state’s operative political and cultural flag. This capture is most obvious once the thinking mind turns to taxing, budgets and spending, as in It’s the Spending Stupid, a decades old piece in Connecticut Commentary.

Some tax relief in Connecticut would be welcomed – and would instantly attack the state’s “affordability” crisis by leaving tax receipts in the pockets and bank accounts of taxpayers -- if the Democrat political hegemony in the state were serious about mounting taxation and spending.

Income-tax relief would be welcomed in Connecticut’s tax-and-spend Democrat dominated General Assembly, Meagan Portfolio tells us in her latest piece published in the truth addicted Connecticut Centinal -- Connecticut Taxpayers Deserve More Than ‘Hope Not’.

But there is no relief for weary Connecticut taxpayers: “Connecticut still collected nearly $13 billion in personal income taxes before refunds in fiscal 2025. Employers withheld $9.15 billion from workers’ paychecks and sent it to the state. Another $3.81 billion came from estimated payments—generally made during the year on income without sufficient withholding—and final payments of tax still owed when people filed their returns. Getting to work alone gives the state several chances to collect. Connecticut took in $362.9 million in gasoline taxes, $47.8 million in driver’s license fees and $18.6 million in vehicle title fees in FY25. Before drivers earn a dollar at work, they have already encountered several ways to pay Hartford. Businesses get their own bills. Connecticut collected $1.4 billion through its corporation tax, which generally taxes corporate profits. Another $2.37 billion came from estimated and final payments of the pass-through entity tax. That tax applies to income earned by businesses such as partnerships and S corporations, whose profits generally pass through to their owners for income-tax purposes. Those three entries alone brought in nearly $3.8 billion… Transferring wealth gives Hartford another opportunity to collect. Gift and estate taxes brought in $146.1 million in fiscal 2025. The estate tax applies to wealth transferred at death, while the gift tax covers certain transfers during a person’s lifetime. Connecticut is the only state with a stand-alone gift tax.”

It’s the spending – STUPID – that drives tax increases, spending and what Bismarck might call inflationary lying during hunts, political wars and political campaigns. What to do about all this? Hint: In Connecticut’s Democrat political hegemonic General Assembly, committed to ever increasing taxes and lavish spending, there never will be political salvation outside the state’s opposing Republican Party.

Fazio, Is There A There There?

2026-10-12T23:51:40.525-04:00

Fazio

The story in the Hartford Courant -- Where has CT GOP’s Fazio worked? What to know as governor’s race comes to vote – may be much ado about nothing, to quote Shakespeare.

The governor’s race will “come to a vote” in less than a month and so, from the point of view of loyal opposition, it is well timed. The opposition research folks who are paid for turning over political rocks – always selectively -- probably should be given a raise on this one.

The Courant tells us Ryan Fazio’s professional background includes roles in commodities trading, growth equity, and energy/agriculture sectors, but he has not publicly named the companies he worked for — a fact highlighted by the Hartford Courant as a point of political scrutiny.

All political politicians come from somewhere and, at the end of their political confinement, much too long in many cases, they go somewhere to cash in on their political service. Republicans generally come and go from the business community, and leftist Democrats, borrowing a page from socialist economist Karl Marx, have more than adequately portrayed multi-millionaire business owners and executives as greedy, predatory capitalists.

Democrats, once their term in office have ended, usually are deposited in revenue bearing public sector jobs. Former Democrat Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, the first openly gay mayor of a major city, was amply rewarded upon leaving office by appointment to a variety of judicial offices. Segarra’s non-service in Connecticut‘s judicial department has recently been examined by the Hartford Courant. See: “Former mayor leaves bench. Segarra, often absent from work as judge, allowed to take disability retirement, pension.”

Fazio has not yet been accused by Connecticut Democrats of using his political office for personal enrichment. According to the Courant, “Fazio’s campaign website, state Senate page, and LinkedIn résumé do not list any company names. His LinkedIn states he began work at a ‘growth equity firm’ nearly seven years ago without naming it, and before that he was a commodity trader for ‘trading houses’ from June 2012 to January 2020. His résumé describes trading and transporting physical commodities — especially dry bulk shipping, grains, and renewable fuel products — but again omits firm names. Democrats have questioned the omission, citing alleged ties to companies with connections to China (emphasis mine) one of which collapsed after its stock price fell 99%, and another co‑founded by Fazio’s father that led a $20 million investment in an international money transfer start‑up.”

The “connections to China” likely were Hong Kong connections. Hong Kong was for many years a protectorate of the late, lamented British Empire, a Crown colony of the United Kingdom from 1841 to 1982, and a dependent territory from 1 January 1983 to 30 June 1997. Then too, everyone – including Connecticut’s state government -- is connected to China.

In the same story, Fazio responded to charges that, not at all oddly, seem as if they had been fed to the media by a Democrat Party opposition research team. Fazio told the Courant “he rarely talks about his business background on the campaign trail because he is not a ‘bio candidate’ who emphasizes the details of his personal history. Instead, he is a ‘policy candidate’ who emphasizes how he will cut electricity rates and taxes, among other high-profile issues. He says he has one of the most detailed policy platforms on multiple issues of any candidate running for office.”

Fazio is quoted in the Courant story: “I have generally not run on biographicals. Some candidates are very biographical, and some candidates are very issue-focused. I have always been a policy and issue-focused candidate for office. I’ve always been someone who is running to change policy and never one who said, ‘Look at my resume. I think I should be in office.’ Not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. I have friends who are more that way, and I have friends who are more like me who are ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here are the issues to be solved.’ I have mostly always run my campaigns oriented to the policy.”

Former Office of Policy and Management (OPM) Deputy Secretary Kosta Diamantis, currently facing federal corruption charges, claims he has been targeted with “thuggish and inconsistent” legal tactics by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to divert attention away from Gov. Ned Lamont’s involvement in COVID testing contracts awarded to Sema 4, a company that was funded by Annie Lamont’s venture capital firm.

“Attention was diverted to Mr. Diamantis, one of the state’s top officials in monitoring state spending, at or about the time serious questions emerged regarding the governor’s wife, who is a partner of a powerful hedge fund,” Diamantis’s attorney Norm Pattis wrote to United States Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, III in a February 14 letter. “That hedge fund invested in a company called Sema 4 on at least two occasions during the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020. Under the guise of a public health emergency declared by the governor, Sema 4 entered into two contracts with the state, one of which was a no-bid contract for COVID-19 testing products.”

“Mr. Diamantis raised concerns about the propriety of the contracts, after being alerted to them by members of his staff,” the letter continues. “Gov. Lamont hired a man who had previously been a beneficiary of Mrs. Lamont’s hedge fund investments to serve as chief operating officer; this man had oversight over the Sema 4 contracts.”

At the time, Josh Geballe served as Chief Operating Officer for Lamont. Annie Lamont’s venture capital firm, Oak HC/FT, had previously invested in Geballe’s company, Core Informatics.

These are the outer boundaries of a tangled web. “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” Walter Scott tells us. The easiest way out of any political tangle is to distract pursuers by dangling before them a tempting, complex diversion.

It is doubtful that Governor Lamont, the principal economic beneficiary of his wife Annie Lamont’s energetic exercises in perfectly legal enterprises, could benefit politically by party opposition research that merely hints at the supposed irregularities of his Republican gubernatorial opponent, whose out of office employment resembles closely that of Democrat U.S. Representative Jim Himes, referred to in his political biography as “an American businessman and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Connecticut's 4th congressional district since 2009. Born in Peru and raised in Peru, Colombia, and New Jersey, he is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar with a background in banking at Goldman Sachs and nonprofit affordable housing. He is Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, serves on the Financial Services Committee, and previously chaired the New Democrat Coalition.”

Lamont, so far, has steered clear of the moral tar pit. He may be more familiar than his opposition researchers with forbidding Biblical injunctions: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” -- Matthew 7:3–5

Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy And DeLauro On Abortion

2026-10-07T01:14:59.689-04:00

DeLauro

The invitation reads, all in caps: “REP ROSA DELAURO TO SPEAK AT SACRED HEART UNIVERSITY ABOUT BEING CATHOLIC IN CONGRESS.”

An enticing preview of DeLauro’s upcoming remarks was provided by Kimberly Schwartz, the Director of Communications at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield Connecticut:

“U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro will address the Sacred Heart University community in a talk titled ‘Being a Catholic Member of Congress in a Changing World.’”

On the matter of abortion, DeLauro’s views are heterodox rather than orthodox. That is to say, DeLauro’s views on abortion are not those professed unchangingly by the Catholic Church roughly from the 1st to the 21^st century. The orthodox view of the Catholic Church on abortion is available to anyone -- Catholic politician or not – who has a finger and access to a computer.

However much the world has changed in the intervening centuries, the orthodox position of the Catholic Church on abortion has remained ever the same.

According to Wikipedia, “the Catholic Church opposes all forms of abortion procedures whose direct purpose ( emphasis mine) is to destroy a zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus, since it holds that "human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which are the inviolable right of every innocent being to life".^[1] However, the Church does recognize as morally legitimate certain acts which indirectly result in the death of the fetus, as when the direct purpose is removal of a cancerous womb. Canon 1397 §2 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law imposes automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication on Latin Catholics who actually procure an abortion,^[2] if they fulfill the conditions for being subject to such a sanction.^[3] Eastern Catholics are not subject to automatic excommunication, but by canon 1450 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches they are to be excommunicated by decree if found guilty of the same action,^[4] and they may be absolved of the sin only by the eparchial bishop ( emphasis mine).^[5] In addition to teaching that abortion is immoral, the Catholic Church also generally makes public statements and takes actions in opposition to its legality… According to Respect For Unborn Human Life: The Church's Constant Teaching, a document released by United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities, the Catholic Church has condemned procured abortion as immoral since the 1st century.”

DeLauro may not be subject to “automatic excommunication” because she has not herself procured an abortion; even so, her church frowns upon those who assist others in procuring abortions. The frown is taken seriously by orthodox Catholics and brushed aside as politically irrelevant by heterodox Catholics, those out of communion with their church on decisive doctrinal matters.

At the very least, the political position taken by DeLauro on the matter of abortion – she has promoted abortion at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason – runs afoul of the position of her church. Her position may be accurately described as follows: my political position trumps Catholic orthodoxy.

DeLauro’s bona fides as an upright Catholic of long-standing are detailed in the invitation to her address at the Dr. Michelle C. Loris ’70 Forum in the Martire Center for the Liberal Arts, 5401 Park Avenue, Fairfield on Wednesday, October 14, at 2 p.m. at Sacred Heart University.

“Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro represents Connecticut’s Third Congressional District and serves as ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. In these roles, she helps oversee the nation’s investments in education, health and human services, and employment. DeLauro’s Catholic faith has guided her entire life and political career. Over the years, she has led Catholic Democrats in issuing statements of principles to discuss how their faith and the teachings of the Catholic Church influence their work in Congress. She recently launched a Catholic Democrats Working Group. DeLauro received 16 years of Catholic education, beginning at St. Louis School, where she was taught by the Daughters of the Holy Ghost. She later attended the Academy of Our Lady of Mercy, Lauralton Hall, operated by the Sisters of Mercy, and Marymount College, founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary.”

On the key issue of abortion in 2025, DeLauro was given a 100 percent approval rating by Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America:

Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, H.R. 21. Final Passage. A bill to interfere with the medical practice of abortion care under the threat of severe penalties. A vote for reproductive freedom was against passage – nay

One Big Beautiful Bill Act, H.R.1. On motion to agree to the Senate passed version of H.R. 1. (Some anti-abortion lawmakers cast what appear to be pro-repro votes; most observers recognize that those votes were cast for reasons unrelated to reproductive health.) A vote for reproductive freedom was against the motion – nay

One Big Beautiful Bill Act, H.R.1. Final Passage. A bill to drastically cut Medicaid funding and disqualify Planned Parenthood from participating in the program for one year. A vote for reproductive freedom was against passage – nay.

Abortion Coverage Ban. H.R. 6703. Final Passage. Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act, H.R. 6703. Final Passage. A bill to ban abortion coverage in certain health plans and to raise health care costs. A vote for reproductive freedom was against passage – nay.

In its media release, the university that will serve as a platform for DeLauro describes itself in these terms: “Sacred Heart, a Laudato Si’ campus, stands out from other Catholic universities as it was established to be led by the laity. This contemporary Catholic university is rooted in the rich Catholic intellectual tradition and the liberal arts and, at the same time, cultivates students to be forward thinkers who enact change in their own lives, professions, and communities. Sacred Heart University has earned national recognition for academic excellence, student success, career outcomes, and campus experience.”

Orthodox Catholics may want to attend DeLauro’s heterodox secular political service at Sacred Heart University and bring along with them the apostle Paul’s instruction to Christians in Romans 12:2 – “And be not conformed to this world: but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and the acceptable and the perfect will of God." According to early Christian tradition, so non-conforming to the world were the apostles that all of them but one – Judas, who committed suicide – were martyred by the secular authorities of their day.

Connecticut’s New Civil War

2026-09-30T09:44:10.223-04:00

Connecticut's General Assembly, Ritter presiding

The matter has not yet been decided in court, but there assuredly will be winners and losers.

The U.S. Federal government, its back put against the wall by a Connecticut law that questions the authority of the federal government to operate in certain Connecticut jurisdictions, has sued Connecticut. The federal government will be arguing that the Connecticut law abridges the rights and duties of the federal government under what has been known as the U.S. Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause.”

The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the U.S. constitution, federal laws, and treaties override all state laws that conflict with them. It ensures that all state laws, state courts, and state constitutions must be subordinate to the U.S. Constitution and federal laws and treaties made by the U.S. government.

Article VI, Clause 2 is not at all ambiguous. It reads: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Actually, the supremacy clause predates the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. The Articles of Confederation provided that "Every State shall abide by the determination of the [Congress], on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them."

Thus far, contending parties have been civil to each other. No leading states’ rights Democrats in Connecticut have yet pledged to secede from the union should the case be decided against them. Both sides insist they are upholding important historical principles, but the discussion presented in the state’s media so far has elicited a sigh of discontent among those in Connecticut who sense a needless repetition of events that precipitated the Civil War.

President Pro Tempore of the State Senate Martin Looney offered a full throated defense of Connecticut’s updated Trust Act that has sparked the legal contretemps between the Federal Government and pro-sanctuary Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Looney’s seat in the state legislature will soon be vacated. Looney announced last May he would not run for reelection. Occupying a safe seat, he has served in the Connecticut legislature for a record-breaking 46 years, starting in the House in 1980 and the Senate in 1992. Gerrymandering has been a boon for state Democrats. Looney is generally cited approvingly in clashes between the increasingly powerful left wing of Connecticut’s hegemonic Democrat Party and any politician, Republican or Democrat to his right.

This is what Looney said in a recent Hartford Courant story – “State girds for battle over ICE agents”:

“First of all, I think that any law that is passed by the state of Connecticut is presumptively constitutional until a court rules otherwise. The law we passed is constitutional. It is not something that should be struck down under the Supremacy Clause. … This is a matter of public safety, where the state has a significant, historically validated claim to be able to protect its own people. … The ICE officials are ignoring a presumptively valid state law. They’re taking the position that the state doesn’t have any authority to regulate the way they conduct their activities. But we were very careful in passing the law to make sure that we were not subjecting federal law enforcement to anything that we do not require of state law enforcement – masks, physical badges, and ID and all those things. The agency operating ICE inherently understands that some of what they’re doing is shameful, and that’s why they don’t want to be identified. It’s an extraordinary thing for people engaged in law enforcement to think they have to remain anonymous. It means that they don’t have confidence in the morality of their own mission. FBI agents do not wear masks. ATF agents — they don’t wear masks, either. Federal marshals who protect courthouses — they don’t wear masks.”

The operative word in Looney’s statement is “presumptively”, repeated multiple times in his statement. It is by no means certain that Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution allows any state government to abridge the constitutional rights of the federal government. It takes a great deal of hutzpah to declare that the wearing of masks by ICE law enforcement officials means that “they don’t have confidence in the morality of their own mission” or that their mission – to enforce federal immigration laws -- is in some sense “shameful.” Occam’s razor applied to such a farfetched theory might easily dispel Looney’s politically opportune misunderstandings

Occum’s Razor -- pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity”– allows room for reality to overcome, in this case, political moral posturing. Of two competing theories, the principle holds, we should give precedence to simplicity; the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. Federal ICE agents in the field have often been “docked” by persons less morally astute than Looney.

House Speaker Matt Ritter appears to be on the same page as Looney, though his assessment is less accusatory and more suave than Looney’s.

This is what Ritter said: “If you look at the law that we passed [the updated Trust Act] , adherence to that law is going to avoid the type of situations that we’ve seen that put not only officers in harm’s way but also people they’re trying to apprehend. Storming courthouses or hospitals or schools is not going to make people safer, and I don’t think it’s a good outcome for law enforcement, either,” he said. “It puts our law enforcement in a tough spot. I think it puts the federal officers in a tough spot. We should not have people going into those types of places. They are very sensitive and have long been considered sensitive sites.”

Justice, Aristotle says, lies in treating things that are the same in a similar manner and things that are different in a different manner. Both Looney and Ritter, presumably men of the law, anchor their analysis in a categorical error. Illegal aliens and U.S. citizens are categorically, from the point of view of the law, different from each other. Justice requires that they be treated differently. For instance, citizens of any country other than the United States should not be permitted to vote in U.S. elections. Why should a citizen of Venezuela impermissibly residing in the United States be permitted to vote in U.S. elections?

Anti-ICE crowds are the enforcement mechanisms of the left in national and state politics. Sometimes violent, the crowds present a threat to the lives and wellbeing of ICE agents – hence the masks that prevent doxing. Ritter appears to be arguing that if ICE would foreswear enforcing the nation’s laws, there would be no disruptions such as occurred recently in Danbury, Connecticut. True enough, but this is an argument for the repeal of all reasonable law enforcement and an invitation to social anarchy. Deployed by a legislator whose principal activity is the creation of laws, this is an unintentionally amusing line of thought.

Lamont’s Aborted Scandals

2026-09-27T09:28:24.765-04:00

Every newspaper and news outlet in Connecticut should be screaming from the rooftops in favor of multiple -- far more than two – debates between Governor Ned Lamont and his Republican challenger Ryan Fazio. Multiple debates between the two would reveal, however imperfectly, the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates.

Debates -- the more, the merrier -- cut across the grain of modern political perceptions. Should Lamont be re-throned for a third term as governor in the absence of serious campaign debates, he may rightly credit an indifferent “business as usual” state media for his uncontested victory. Lamont’s handlers, we know, will be advising him to maintain a low profile and use his dazzling record in office as a blind hiding his imperfections in plain sight. Lamont has so far relied on his millions to purchase anonymity from a variety of sources that over the years have produced an artificially, highly attenuated public persona, the result of choreographed public appearances.

Lamont is perfectly content to let TV ads, campaign spokespersons -- cheaper by the dozen – and Connecticut’s obliging left of center Democrat controlled General Assembly do his debating for him, provided his carefully crafted political persona remains pristine and unchallenged by Connecticut’s left of center media. Lamont might make a serious error in an unmanaged debate, but prearranged media appearances usually go off without a damaging hitch. These appearances are political melodramas whose scripts are usually determined by Lamont and others whose business it is to shape his public persona. Debates are much different presentations -- to be avoided at all costs. Running out the campaign clock is a perfect way to escape unscripted public scrutiny. Lamont may already have won this battle. So far he has agreed to only two debates with Fazio.

In recent days, Lamont has been running away from unscripted debates – and costly administrative scandals.

Democrat functionaries have recently decided that a cursory investigation into the resignation of Connecticut Central State University (CCSU) President Zulma Toro by Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) should be safely shelved. An earlier possible impeachment of Marissa Gillett, PURA’s Czar, was also shelved following her resignation. (See here for more on PURA.)

The shelf space in the Lamont administration is getting mighty crowded.

Sam Norton, spokesperson for CSCU tells us, “In light of President Toro’s resignation and retirement, continuing the investigation to a final report is no longer necessary. The information shared during the investigative process will continue to inform how we establish and maintain a culture of respect. That is where the resources need to go… A prolonged employment dispute would have created continued uncertainty and a distraction for the university at a time when our students, faculty and staff need clarity and stability.”

“Toro’s resignation,” Hartford Courant reporter Livi Stanford reminds us, “follows the scandal-plagued departures of two Connecticut State Colleges and Universities chancellors. Last week, an independent review examining Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system’s response to sexual harassment allegations against former interim Chancellor O. John Maduko found ‘serious failures in how CSCU responded to concerns about sexual harassment and gaps in the Board’s process for selecting the former interim chancellor, according to an announcement Board of Regents Interim Chair Ari Santiago sent to the CSCU community.”

Two “eyes wide open” Republican leaders -- Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding and Senator Henri Martin, the Republican ranking member of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, found the decision to bury the accumulating scandals “absolutely unacceptable… So this all magically ‘goes away’ because President Toro resigned? That isn’t going to fly. What about the abuse allegations? The meat cutting? The dog watching? The verbal assaults on staff? What about the whistleblowers and the victims? What about the people whose lives have been derailed? Where’s their justice?”

West Hartford Democrat and co-chair of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee Senator Derek Slap rose to a defense of those shelving necessary public information that might easily be brought forward through a serious legislative investigation -- were it not for Derek Slap. The Grand River Solutions independent review, Slap told reporters, “provides a pretty good roadmap for some of the changes that need to take place… I don’t think it’s fair to say there hasn’t been accountability. We’ve had two chancellors and one president who have all left. I hope that nobody’s trying to use this as an opportunity to score political points six weeks before an election.”

Stanford tells us in her report: “Grand River Solutions, the national consulting firm conducting the review of the CSCU system’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against Maduko, recommended CSCU should “cease the actual or perceived general practice of not conducting an investigation whenever a respondent is no longer affiliated with the system ( emphasis mine)” according to its independent review.”

Slap crowned his statement with the following diadem, both hypocritical and misleading: According to Stanford “He said if Republicans have a list of tangible things that are not known yet and warrant an independent investigation, he is open to it, but in ‘all fairness I have not seen that.’”

Sure, sure – in all fairness, it would not be possible for Republicans, or anyone else, to offer Slap “a list of tangible things that are not known yet” in the absence of investigations snuffed by Slap, Lamont, Democrat gate keepers in the General Assembly and incurious members of Connecticut media, given to chastising loudly pro-open-government Republicans. The arrogant Lamont administration appears to have an “invincibility” problem.

Connecticut’s Systemic Problems Rescripted

2026-09-25T23:56:42.368-04:00

Lamont

Hartford Courant reporter Livi Stanford writes in a front page story -- CCSU president steps down – “Toro’s resignation follows the scandal-plagued departures of two Connecticut State Colleges and Universities chancellors. Last week, an independent review examining Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system’s response to sexual harassment allegations against former interim Chancellor O. John Maduko found ‘serious failures in how CSCU responded to concerns about sexual harassment and gaps in the Board’s process for selecting the former interim chancellor,’ according to an announcement Board of Regents Interim Chair Ari Santiago sent to the CSCU community.”

Toro is “Central Connecticut State University President Zulma Toro [who] resigned Wednesday following an investigation into a complaint alleging the workplace culture under her leadership was oppressive, bullying and intimidating.”

The reaction to Toro’s resignation is not at all unusual.

CCSU’s director of institutional advancement Lisa Bigelow, who filed the complaint against Toro that led to her resignation, characterized the resignation as a first step that “was badly needed.”

Governor Ned Lamont faintly praised Toro. Stanford tells us, “Gov. Ned Lamont told reporters Wednesday in Hartford that he did not encourage Toro to step down. ‘I did not,’ Lamont said following an unrelated event on Arbor Street. ‘I haven’t talked to her in some months. Lamont added, ‘I do know that there have been some accusations out there that I think were disturbing on both sides. I do know that she’s been thinking about retirement for a while.’”

Reporters covering Lamont’s bid for an unprecedented third term in office will recognize the response as a “spectator’s” observation, rather as if the governor had played no part in the organizational catastrophe that has overtaken the consolidation into one CSCU “community” of what had been six higher educational institutions and sixteen campuses across the state.

Participating educational institutions are:

Central Connecticut State University, Eastern Connecticut State University, Southern Connecticut State University, Western Connecticut State University, Charter Oak State College, Online College, CT State Asnuntuck, CT State Gateway, CT State Housatonic, CT State Manchester, Great Path Manchester, CT State Middlesex, CT State Naugatuck Valley, CT State Northwestern CT, CT State Norwalk, CT State Quinebaug Valley, CT State Three Rivers, CT State Tunxis.

Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) operates out of Hartford, the state’s Capital city, and CCSU, Central Connecticut State University, is a chip off a relatively new block.

Connecticut’s four major colleges initially were overseen by the Connecticut State Department of Education. In 1965, the General Assembly transferred control of the-colleges to an independent board of trustees. In 1983, the four institutions were converted into universities, constituting the Connecticut State University System. Connecticut universities presently are governed by the Connecticut Board of Regents for Higher Education, established in 2011 to license and accredit the institutions and their programs, approve budgets, support planning, and coordinate technology operations. The interim Chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities was O. John Maduko – before the chaotic earthquake detailed by Stanford in her report.

The administrative body count has now crossed several red lines. But few legislators have yet seriously examined the fault lines and systemic failures of the CSCU conglomerate itself. The overriding political question, rarely put under the political microscope, is ever the same: Who decides what is to be done when serious problems occur? The line of political responsibility in Connecticut has been gerrymandered in such a way that the administrative and legislative arms of state government seem raised in a perpetual gesture of resignation.

Asked by the Courant whether he thinks Republican candidate for Governor Ryan Fazio will criticize him in the coming weeks over the CSCU situation, Lamont replied languidly, “I would think so.”

He was right. The Courant reports, “Fazio said in a statement, ‘I’m deeply concerned by the fact that complaints about Toro’s behavior reportedly date back to 2019. This is bigger than one president or one chancellor. It reflects a broader failure of accountability and oversight within Connecticut’s public higher education system. Governor Lamont has had years to address these problems, yet we continue to see leadership upheaval and scandal in a system entrusted with educating our next generation.”

Appearances are still important in Connecticut politics, and Lamont appears overly scripted, disinterested and unconcerned with systemic problems confronting his administration. He has so far agreed to only two debates with his Republican opponent. All the stars are arrayed in his favor: The General Assembly has been controlled by a hegemonic Democrat Party for decades. All the members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats. Some large cities in Connecticut have been controlled by Democrats for nearly half a century. The business relations between Connecticut’s legacy media and Democrats are in very good repair, so much so that many people in the state are beginning to suspect that the media has lost its contrarian edge. The disposition of political forces in the state clearly favors Lamont, who appears to be resting, half asleep, on plush and comfortable laurels.

Scripted success is the bright side of politics, but there is a dark side as well. When a dominant party appears to be tailoring its political prescriptions to campaigns rather than small “d” democratic policies that benefit the whole population, voters may resent elected representatives engaged in fooling most of the people some of the time in their politically slovenly campaigns. There is something in small “r” republican virtue that does not like arrogant dominance.

Mamdani vs Columbus Day

2026-09-23T08:50:23.884-04:00

Mamdani

George Bernard Shaw, the wily old Fabian Socialist, once said about patriotism, with a wily old Fabian Socialist sneer, “Patriotism if you must, but please – no parades.” Of course, Shaw knew very well that patriotism is a parade, among other things.

The history of the word “patriot” itself shows some antagonistic stretchmarks. It was used as an insult by British patriots of uppity American anti-British revolutionists during the prospectively successful American Revolution. But, as Americans often do, they assigned a new positive meaning to the word -- and held parades during which, as John Adams tells us in post-revolutionary days, flags were flown, martial arms were displayed, the sky burst into patriotic flames, and everyone went home with smiles on their faces.

The war on the American flag – just a piece of cloth – and patriotism, and Christopher Columbus statues, is a relatively recent phenomenon celebrated by anti-American patriots, though not, Shaw would be pleased, in unseemly parades. Modern day Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) celebrate their deviations from tradition and history in exuberant socialist/communist manifestoes.

The Democrat Socialists of America manifesto abolishes the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate, but it bursts – like John Adams’ night sky -- with what might be called anti-historical fireworks. The manifesto reduces the perceived platitudes of the U.S. Constitution – just a piece of paper -- to sentiments no more binding than easily changeable statutory laws. An early progressive, the incurable academic President Woodrow Wilson, thought the same of the U.S. Constitution, but he liked parades. The DSA needs an activist political arm, an overpowering central state, to usher in its impractical, anti-democratic utopia, but to do so Constitutional impediments first must be swept away, along with the Constitutional architecture of a republican government.

Socialist Mayor of New York City (Wall Street?) Zohran Mamdani does not like Columbus; he does not like an ordered liberty that has not been ordered by progressive socialists like himself, but apparently he likes public gatherings and parades.

A few day ago Mamdani was disinvited to a 9/11 memorial gathering in which victim families assembled to remember fondly the 2,977 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks across the United States, among them heroic firefighters, who were incinerated when two civilian airplanes were designedly steered by aggrieved foreign members of the Muslim Brotherhood into two World Trade Center towers. Cutting across the nerves and memories of the wounded participants in the memorial event, Mamdani perversely attended the event. Mamdani’s political brother-in-arms, Hasan Piker, earlier had said, “America deserved 9/11.”

Some attendees, family members and friends of the 9/11 victims, could not help but notice Mamdani’s appearance on the campaign trail with leftist commentator Piker, a self-proclaimed socialist whose view on Islamic terrorists cannot be considered frigid. Piker’s 2019 comment had been widely reported. Mamdani belatedly disavowed Picker’s comment, though he has taken great care not to tread too heavily on its author. Few of the leftist Democrats who acknowledge Piker’s remarks as objectionable have stepped forward to denounce or disassociate themselves from Piker himself. Mamdani is a member in good standing of the DSA, a group that has discounted entirely the sensible admonition of their mothers – “You are judged by the company you keep.”

There is a profound difference between patriots, however one defines the word, and anti-patriots who are card carrying members of the DSA. It should be relatively easy for the mayor of Wall Street to denounce convincingly the ideological destructors-elect of Wall Street or others whose past public representations are too easily dismissed by their fervent supporters in a once contrarian legacy media. How hard can it be to defend a besieged U. S. Constitution from ideological marauders with socialist knives in their teeth?

It would take Mamdani minimal searching to discover that the city has the largest population of Italian Americans in the United States. Many Italians, a Google search tells us, “live in enclaves in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. New York is home to the third largest Italian population outside of Italy, behind Buenos Aires, Argentina (first) and São Paulo, Brazil (second). Over 2.6 million Italians and Italian-Americans live in the greater New York metro area, with about 800,000 living within one of the five New York City boroughs. This makes Italian Americans the largest ethnic group in the New York metro area.”

New York City Italians, according to recent news reports – Fury erupts over Mamdani parade invite as old Columbus insult resurfaces: ‘Are you kidding me’ – have now registered their collective well founded disapproval of Mamdani.

Mamdani’s cultural and political orientation causes painful friction among Jews, Italians and Black Americans with memories longer than the life of fireflies. New York Jews are especially tender on the matter of anti-Zionism, attempts to destroy the state of Israel, and anti-Semitism, attempts to destroy Jews as Jews. It is no secret that Shia Iran along with its political mafia – Iranian inspired terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen – hope to be able to “push Israel into the sea,” a verbal construction that amounts to the kind of genocide practiced by Hitler’s Nazis. We know this because of the signs featured in every “Palestinian” protest march charging Israel, determined to frustrate every attempt at genocide, with genocide.

But what about the Italians in New York City? Is the alienation of Italians in New York City a problem for Mamdani?

In recent days, Mayor Mamdani was disinvited to a memorial for 9/11 victims and their family members. He attended the event. He was reportedly booed at a New York City police event he attended.

Now this: “The Columbus Citizens Foundation, which is responsible for holding the [New York City Columbus Day] parade, invited Mamdani in the hopes of fostering a better relationship between City Hall and the Italian-American community, the New York Post reported. Mamdani’s past criticism of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, however, has sparked backlash among Italians who feel inviting the mayor is in poor taste… ‘Are you kidding me? This is a WEAK and FECKLESS move by the organizers,’ Italian American Civil Rights League president Mike Crispi wrote on X. "Zohran has showed contempt for our people and kissing a** won’t change his true feelings. Italian Americans need to wake up and get tough. It’s the only way to preserve our culture.’ … Crispi’s criticism was a reference to a 2020 social media post where Mamdani posted a photo of himself brandishing his middle finger at a statue of Columbus with the caption ‘take it down.’"

And, heaping insult upon injury, “Little Italy in Manhattan was omitted from New York City's immigrant enclave map, prompting backlash before Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the neighborhood would be added.”

It was indigent Italian immigrant workers who dug the tunnels in New York City that later became the city’s elaborate subway system. These were lower class workers clawing their way into the middle class, certainly not lords of Wall Street. In New Orleans about the same time, a mob of enraged citizens broke into a holding pen. The mob dragged off and hanged eleven men presumed to be Italian anarchists, although a court had, previous to the hangings, found them innocent of anarchy as charged. The hangings represented the largest batch of men hanged in a single incident in U .S. history.

Following the lynchings in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration, responsible stewards of history tell us, “to placate Italian Americans in New York and other cities and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. During the anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets, and politicians used rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These rituals took themes such as citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and the celebration of social progress; included among them was the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy.”

Patriotism was erupting everywhere. The quote above was taken from Wikipedia, available to the most slumberous politicians. Mamdani was giving the finger to more than mute statues.

This writer has lived his whole life with Italians, and he knows this: Italians everywhere can, yielding to Christian precepts, generously choose to forgive an insult. But they do not forget.

Kosta takes a vacation

2026-09-19T13:33:25.220-04:00

Kosta, Yahoo

One can only hope that Konstantinos “Kosta” Diamantis will be writing a memoir while vacationing in Greece.

The former Connecticut deputy budget director and head of the state’s Office of School Construction Grants and Review, we are told in numerous news stories, fled to Greece on September 17, 2026, just before his scheduled federal sentencing for a major corruption case.

Convicted in October 2025 on 21 federal counts -- including bribery, extortion, conspiracy, and making false statements to federal investigators – prosecutors tell us that Kosta abused his authority over state school construction contracts (worth about $8.5 million) to pressure contractors for bribes between 2018 and 2021.

According to a recent story in CTMirror, Diamantis sent a “rambling ten page email to his attorney in which he cast “the prosecution as ‘politically motivated.’ He also said that the Department of Justice was ‘weaponized’ against him, copying language frequently used by Trump… Diamantis blames Lamont for the federal charges leveled against him. And he claims the criminal case against him was meant to distract the public from the governor and his wife’s business dealings, particularly a previously vetted investment in a company that provided COVID-19 testing in the early weeks of the pandemic. “

Diamantis wrote. “The entire investigation was a politically insulated script written by Lamont, Connecticut DOJ and Connecticut’s tight knit legal aristocracy hired by Lamont to protect himself and his family from scrutiny and ensure I would be discredited.”

Kosta’s defense attorney, Norm Pattis, was not surprised by Kosta’s flight to Greece, which has an extradition arrangement with the United States, suspended in cases in which the person to be extracted is a Greek citizen. Kosta has duel citizenship in Greece and the United States.

Long in the habit of avoiding arcane legalese, Pattis tells us "As a lawyer, you know, I cannot support his decision to take the law into his own hands [and flee the country], but as a fellow human being, I understand why he did what he did. He's got two choices: spend the next five years of your senior citizenship, or your golden years, asking Bubba for permission to stand in line, or go to Greece. Who wouldn't go to Greece?"

Governor Ned Lamont very quickly washed his hands of all responsibility. He was shocked – SHOCKED! – “that this guy, with that big a judgment, is able to get away like that," Lamont said.” Thankfully, "It's a federal matter, and I hope they hold him accountable and get him." The federal government, Lamont told reporters, is “responsible for tracking him."

Lamont has not yet accused Trump, regarded in Democrat precincts as being the cause of every political ill in the country, of conspiring to spirit Kosta to Greece. It is pretty well known that Connecticut Democrats are glad to be rid of an albatross who knows a great deal about legal political peculation -- as do Democrats. The current mayor of Bridgeport, the affable Joe Ganim, was elected mayor of the city six times, serving from 1991 to 2003, when he resigned after being convicted on federal felony corruption charges. Ganim spent nine years in prison – a very “big judgment” to quote Lamont. Shortly after his release, Ganim in 2015 regained his old office in a successful political comeback and once again was elected Bridgeport mayor.

The federal government was responsible for trying Diamantis, and he was certainly found wanting at trial. But Diamantes’ political rap sheet shows a long and fervent attachment to Lamont’s Democrat Party. One news account tells us, “Diamantis was initially appointed by Gov. Dannel Malloy to oversee school construction funding for the state government and was given the additional title of deputy budget director under Lamont, who also kept him in the school construction role. He was previously a Democratic state representative for a Bristol district for 14 years.”

“The conspiracy charged by federal prosecutors,” we are told, “did not implicate anyone else in state government. Following Diamantis’ flight, “Republican gubernatorial nominee Ryan Fazio asserted that the episode reflected on the governor…” Fazio noted, “When Gov. Lamont promoted Kosta Diamantis and put him in a position of enormous authority over taxpayer dollars, he was putting his trust in him to safeguard the public’s money. That decision ended with Diamantis convicted on federal corruption charges, and now he has fled the country rather than face sentencing. The taxpayers deserve accountability for the judgment and failures that allowed this to happen.”

Diamantis is said to be considering a return to Connecticut to serve time for what appears in the grand scheme of things to be relatively minor peculations. Most of the grand political crimes in Connecticut are committed against taxpayers, largely the result of a 30 year old one-party state in which the majesty of the law regularly winks at the real robber barons who commit legalized theft. Carrying an accumulative debt of billions of dollars while boasting of fake “surpluses” ought to be worth a few days in the clinker. At the very least, those who engage in legal theft should be “sent to Coventry” or publicaly vilified at stocks set up fronting Connecticut’s Old State House. But legal peculation that occurs under laws written by the peculators is generally written off as “politics as usual” by both dominant Democrats and the remnant of the state’s once independent media.

Politics, Straight Up

2026-09-16T23:00:18.357-04:00

We are a couple of months in front of an off-presidential year election. Before we go to the polls, we should brush away the political cobwebs that prevent us from seeing clearly what is right under our noses, and so …

What is debt inflation?

Inflation is a contributory cause in high prices, but inflation is not the same as high prices. Inflation is a government caused market distortion, a reduction in the purchasing power of money. Combined with currency devaluation, it can significantly erode the real value of a currency both domestically and internationally.

There are, we know, numerous ways to discharge debt. Ordinary people discharge debt by increasing their income and paying off the debt. There are different ways to increase your assets to pay off a debt. You might increase your working hours, get a raise from your boss, or turn to a life of crime and rob a bank. In any society in which criminal activity is punished, this last option is not, in the long run, profitable.

One need hardly say that a government is an assembly of ordinary people. Just as a church is the body of the faithful, so a government is, in any republic worthy of the name, the body of people governed. The Declaration of Independence, Americans cannot help but notice on the eve of the 250^thyear of its signing, begins with the words “We the people…” Our ego-inflated politicians wish us to know they are above the common cut. They can flout economic laws without fear of arrest.

The federal government may discharge debt – deficits – by increasing taxes or borrowing money to pay off the debt, or by printing money, a solution to the debt problem at the federal level; states don’t print currency.

If you are a government, federal or state, you may choose to neglect debt or acquire more debt by passing along the debt payment to the children of taxpayers. There is in the United States no debtor’s prison for politicians who resort to this option. Perhaps there should be. Connecticut just now is hoisting a half century of accumulative debt.

Connecticut's comparable state-government debt is $26 billion. The state’s Audited total liabilities (ACFR), a measure that includes all state‑government obligations plus long‑term unfunded benefits such as pensions and other post‑employment benefits, is about $94.43 billion, according to a 2023 report.

So then, why don’t politicians – like every householder in the state of Connecticut – pay off their debts by raising taxes, thus increasing the state’s net worth?

Good question.

Post and pre-revolutionary Americans have been through much of their history tax-averse for two reasons: 1) they regard much of government as an economic imposition. The whole of the French Revolution and a good part of the American Revolution pivoted on the perception that the government, when it overreaches, and the governed are inversely related to each other. The stronger the government, the weaker the people; the richer the government, the poorer the people. And 2) private and governmental income is an indispensable means of acquiring power and agency. Americans have never been willing to surrender their independence and agency to an immodest secular, political church of anointed politicians.

Ordinary Americans are reservoirs of natural rights because they live in a country -- secured by blood, sweat and tears -- in which important rights are not dispensed by godlike secular deities. So says…

John Adams (1765): “Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

James Wilson (1790): “Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.”

James Madison (1792): “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example… of charters of power granted by liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson (1791): “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States… are reserved to the states or to the people.’”

Connecticut’s political deities fear raising taxes for the same reason King George III feared – and was said to have praised -- a resolute George Washington. When the news was brought to the king that Washington would give up office and return to private life after having served as the President of the United States for only two terms, he was reported to have said, “If Washington does that, he will be the greatest man alive.”

Modern scholars now tell us that the quote does not appear in any credible archival records, royal correspondence, or contemporary accounts of George III’s reign. No matter, here was a case of a larger truth overcoming the absence of facts. Washington did what kings fear most, and he was the greatest man of his time.

IMPURA

2026-09-12T09:05:33.481-04:00

Lamont and Gillett

In proving foresight may be vain/The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley – Robert Burns

At a minimum, the Connecticut Freedom of Information (FOI) law and its Commission, responsible for enforcing the FOI law, have been entrusted by the state legislature to assure an open political process and to guard against insufferable political effronteries to the law.

In brief, the law stipulates that politicians and administrators of the public’s business cannot do anything they like all the time; there are limits to the nearly limitless arrogance of Connecticut’s one-party state, always verging, as is common in one-party states the world over, on the razor’s edge of imperious arrogance.

In an age in which politicians wish to conduct the public’s business privately and off the record, the internet and legal propinquity threaten to spoil the best laid plans of mice and men.

That is exactly what happened when one of Connecticut’s two energy distributors, Eversource, brought the state’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority (PURA) to court. The case was decided in favor of Eversource and United Illuminating, largely because PURA’s chairwoman, Marissa Gillett, admitted under oath that she had repeatedly violated state law by making unilateral decisions without the legally required number of commissioners participating. Instead, Gillett had, according to numerous reports, designated herself as the presiding officer in nearly all the decisions made by a truncated PURA – very likely with Governor Ned Lamont’s approval or direction. Did she skirt an administrative process to attain a result approved by Lamont? Only last week, Lamont told Connecticut’s business community, “I appoint PURA [the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority], and those are the folks who are holding Eversource and U.I. [the state’s energy distributors] accountable. The last commissioner [Marrisa Gillett] — the utilities thought she was holding them too accountable.”

Connecticut’s crusading Attorney General, William Tong, may want to bring Lamont up to speed on the progress of the PURA case. “It ain’t over,” as Yogi Berra once said, “until it’s over.”

“The long-awaited decision and accompanying order to produce thousands of documents,” Courant reporter Edmund Mahony tells us, “settles a request dating from May 2025 by Eversource for all records generated that month by the Public Utility Regulatory Authority concerning proposed energy and utility legislation, including correspondence with the legislature (emphasis mine)… At the time of the records request, Eversource was in a protracted dispute with former PURA Chair Marissa Gillett, who the state’s biggest utilities had accused of improperly or illegally manipulating the outcomes of regulatory proceedings in ways that unfairly impacted utility bottom lines… In its decision Wednesday, the Freedom of Information Commission ordered PURA to produce thousands of records about proposed legislation that the commission said the authority had improperly redacted or refused to release.”

In its long awaited decision on Wednesday, the Courant tells us, “the Freedom of Information Commission ordered PURA to produce thousands of records about proposed legislation that the commission said the authority had improperly redacted or refused to release. PURA, under new leadership appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont, agreed to produce all the records. The commission also voted on Wednesday to admonish Scott Muska, the former PURA legal director who Gillett appointed and put in charge of the agency’s responses to Eversource public record requests.”

The court proceedings are laced with potential potent dynamite: “Eversource was looking for records that suggested Gillett was trying to persuade legislative allies to amend laws in ways that would help her push her regulatory agenda. The records request became moot a year ago when Gillett resigned, having lost support in the legislature.”

Moot, schmoot – if there are emails showing that Lamont or state legislators participated in an effort to short-sheet utility providers, likely evidence will be present in possible conspiratorial emails and other “private” communications. The deletion of emails, especially those relating to court cases or sworn congressional testimony, is generally frowned upon by non-partisan news outlets.

It looks like the Lamont administration has done a hasty job mopping up the Gillett inspired PURA mess, but carefully mopped messes – especially in an era in which purged data frequently rises, vampire-like from the grave at midnight -- have a way of returning with renewed vigor during political campaigns. There is little danger that the Democrat dominated General Assembly will stumble politically and open a public investigation into legally questionable administrative proceedings in which the governor and some legislators may have played a part, but still red flags have been posted everywhere, and buried emails occasionally are resurrected in hard fought campaigns.

Lamont Fazio Debate, It Ain’t a Lincoln Douglas Debate

2026-09-10T16:50:08.841-04:00

News on debates – indeed, news about any subject – is always after-event reporting. Every observant reporter and columnist knows that a modern debate, federal or state, and a report on a debate are two different events.

Most scholars agree that widespread coverage of the Lincoln/Douglas debates – note the plural – was broadly “fair” precisely because newspapers at the time were partisan. Carrying on a tradition since the first raucous presidential debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the two principal combatants in the Lincoln Douglas debates could rely on a party committed media. To put it in rude terms, Lincoln had his media and Douglas his.

There were seven Lincoln Douglas debates impartially disbursed throughout Illinois. The media at the time was stenographic. Debates were reported nearly in full, but the Republican media touched up Lincoln’s remarks while leaving Douglas’ remarks as they were. The Democrat media did the same. When modern scholars and historians wanted an accurate rendition of what had been said during the debates, they turned to the unvarnished debate record of candidates, the Republican media reporting on Douglas and the Democrat media reporting on Lincoln.

The modern debate experience is essentially different because modern political debates are not debates between two candidates overseen by an outwardly partisan, stenographic media. They are elaborate and sometimes confusing press conferences between two or more candidates for office. The narrative line of the debates is not set by the candidates themselves but by press reporters whose impartiality is presumed by the audience.

During one of Lincoln’s speeches a heckler, probably planted, called out that Lincoln was “two-faced.” Lincoln’s response: “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” Nearly everyone during his day – including Lincoln himself – agreed that he was no Clark Gable. Such an audience response and Lincoln’s laughable rejoinder are nearly impossible in modern day politics; it would be verboten in a debate led by news reporters whose political prejudices, unlike those partisan reporters of Lincoln’s day, are carefully hidden in the reportorial shrubbery.

In Connecticut’s gubernatorial race, much of the media’s reporting is favorable to incumbent Governor Ned Lamont precisely because he has been governor for two terms, now heading towards a third term. It is from incumbents that the media gets its news. Incumbents generally are political chefs, meal makers, news outlets serving as their wait staff, and modern incumbent politicians are masters at making the servings delectable. Rare is the news outlet willing to antagonize its well-developed news sources. Political propaganda can be very convincing coming from friendly politicians. Then too, the whole of New England has been for decades a political property of the Democrat Party, which is why there is only one Republican congressperson in the whole of New England. A few decades ago, a reporter was asked why every several years he blew off his sources. Because, he said, he did not wish to be cuckolded by professional politicians. The reporter was a heroic exception to the rule.

I asked Ryan Fazio how many debates with Lamont have been scheduled. His response was sad but not surprising: “I have accepted nearly 10 different debate invitations while Gov. Lamont has accepted only 2, hosted by WFSB and WTNH, in the last 10 days of the campaign after early voting will have already begun and likely over 100,000 people have already cast their votes.” The rule regarding incumbents is: Leave your campaign to subordinates if possible, and avoid or reduce direct unscripted encounters with your opponent. Debates, even a tightly scripted debate, may be a mare’s nest of possible avoidable errors. Less said is best done. Such is the advantage of incumbency and profitable, longstanding warm relations with a friendly media.

In an unscripted encounter, it would be very difficult for Democrats to pin a donkey’s tail on a Republican elephant. But they never stop trying to do so.

In a recent pre-debate encounter between Lamont and Fazio, Lamont’s Republican opponent valiantly attempted to reclaim from Lamont the issue of middle class unaffordability. Much of the unaffordability crisis in Connecticut, has occurred because dominant Democrats in the General Assembly have for decades steadfastly refused to cut taxes, a workable solution to government debt President John Kennedy asserted in an address he gave before the New York Economics Club about a year before he was assassinated. Connecticut Commentary covered Kennedy’s astonishing address last April 2024 – “A Word to the Wise in Connecticut: Cut Spending, Reduce Taxes.”

Lamont boasted concerning his “influence over electric rates” during a pre-debate encounter with Fazio at a State Bond Commission meeting, “I appoint PURA [the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority], and those are the folks who are holding Eversource and U.I. [the state’s energy distributors] accountable. The last commissioner — the utilities thought she was holding them too accountable.”

The last Commissioner of PURA was Marissa Gillett, forced to leave her position following a successful suit brought against her by hard pressed energy distributors. The PURA Grand Guignol was covered by Connecticut Commentary in the link provided above.

Fazio responded to Lamont’s boast, “I heard the governor take credit — ‘I’ve eliminated the public benefits charge’ — even though he just signed a bill into law that will increase the public benefits charge for the next 20 years. We all know that the public benefits charge is very volatile. Sometimes, it is zero. Sometimes, it is as high as 30%. But it averages 15 to 20%, and will continue to do so in the future.”

Fazio knows whereof he speaks. The public benefits charge has been Fazio’s bete noir for most of his term in Connecticut’s state senate. The public benefits charge is a mandatory fee added to electric bills to fund state‑approved programs such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, low‑income assistance, and other public initiatives, with recent increases also covering new projects like home electric vehicle chargers. To put it in terms voters might better understand, the fee is an off-budget tax collected by energy distributors rather than legislators from their customers. In Lincoln’s day, the media might have called the devise a honeypot or an off the record budget reservoir deployed by clever politicians to fool some of the people all of the time.

Tax charges belong in state budgets, not in electric bills.

Patriotic Cynicism, Corruption and Connecticut’s One Party State

2026-09-08T09:24:27.021-04:00

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past – George Orwell

The quote most often deployed in defense of the sentiment – “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” -- has been misattributed, Reuter’s fact checkers tell us, to Edmond Burke. A cynic might say, “Well, if Burke didn’t say it, he should have.”

Scouring Burke’s texts, the fact checkers have concluded Burke may have said something similar, but no cigar. This is what Burke said: “No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

For anyone who has spent much time wandering through the dim corridors of politics, The Burke quote cited above may be more useful in attaining a faithful understanding of modern politics than the misattribution. Party politics in the Western world encourages party participation, without which political power is tightly managed by political overseers and corrective opposition to political tyranny, the capture of active politics by a single party, is both futile and fatal to liberty. Burke’s “contemptible struggle” suggests that even he sometimes yielded to a cautionary cynicism.

Was Burke cynical? Were the founders of the American republic cynical? If they were not skeptical of power, why did they arrange a constitutional system in which power is divided between three branches of government? Is a good monarch or political association of good men a sufficient answer to the evil designs of ambitious politicians? If what the moderns call “agency” is wanting, how are the evil designs of contemptible men and women to be turned aside? Agency is political power. In a one party state, resistance to political combinations is futile; that is the message of every active Caesar who has ever trod his opponents underfoot in a contemptible struggle to center political power in one person or one party. Connecticut Democrat Party agents regularly promote the command economy and a one party state that we know from even a cursory review of history is the active element in all loathsome tyrannies.

Russia, but for a brief and shining moment following the collapse of the country’s socialist/communist tyranny, appeared to be open to Western notions of liberty. Putin, who might have continued the reforms of Gorbachev, turned his eyes eastward to China, a fatal error. The political leaders of socialist states in Latin America -- Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – have lingered in the dark halls of tyranny for decades. The American Democrat Socialist (ADA) combine is little more than a worm in the apple of American democracy.

George Orwell, we know, was a lifelong socialist and a journalist dedicated, both as a fiction writer and a serious critic of spurious politics – Fascism and Communism both – to the mission of a rigorous journalist. Orwell shouts at us in all of his writings: Every political corruption begins as a corruption of the language. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was in reality a collection of captive states answerable only to the Supreme Soviet and Communism’s ruthless Czar, the murderous Joseph Stalin. Orwell saw through all the masks. The mission of journalism is to say the truth without fear or favor. Modern journalism falls very far short of Orwell’s mark.

It should trouble lovers of liberty in Connecticut that “the Constitution State” has been for decades little more than a one party state, and it should surprise no lover of liberty in Connecticut that the one party state is an indispensable precondition for what the Connecticut Democrat Party robustly condemns as a perversion of democracy.

John Adams often said that “America is the friend of democracy everywhere, but the custodian only of its own,” a not-so-subtle warning that the republic the founders had established should not engage in colonialism of a kind practiced by strongman executives everywhere: kings, Russian czars, a title that derives from the pre-historic Old Slavic tsesari, from the Greek kaisar, and from the Latin caesar. It is important to unmask corruptions in the language, almost always a prelude to political corruption. Political corruption is an eruption within the state of anti-republican elements and a rupture of the vital connection between the people and their government.

When Orwell sent his novel Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, to various publishers, he was told by one publishing house – sorry, we don’t publish children’s stories. Modern political critics have found a route around Orwell; He is an old writer, unread and unheeded by modern left of center political commentators. Ignorance covers a multitude of political sins, and fashionable political writers inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm do not often blush at the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious socialists.

When the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), threw off every mask in their manifesto and declared forthrightly it was their purpose -- to reopen to unprocessed entrants all borders closed by President Donald Trump, to definance American aid to a “genocidal” Israel, to eliminate a filibuster that in the past has prevented a congressional majority from asserting questionable legislative claims without a fulsome debate in the U.S. Congress, to repeal the U.S. Senate, and other anarchic, anti-Constitutional measures, to treat the U.S. Constitution as if its provisions were no more authoritative than statutory laws, to elect by popular vote Supreme Court Justices, and other destabilizing measures that would disable a 250-year-old constitutional republic – the silence from Connecticut Democrats was ear-splitting.

Try to imagine the scene in an updated Orwell novel: Pigs – always more equal than other barnyard animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm -- propose to eliminate the U.S. Senate, and the two U.S. Senators in Connecticut’s political barnyard swallow their tongues at the prospect of their own political annihilation. And all this is received by Connecticut’s brave, non-partisan media without a cynical snicker.

An unpublishable fairytale do you think?

Think again.

Connecticut’s Energy Shortage: Reading Between the Lines

2026-09-02T09:10:26.344-04:00

Part of the reason Connecticut’s overtaxed residents are suffering from an affordability crisis is that they are also suffering from an energy shortage. If the supply of energy were sufficient to meet the demand for energy, the price of energy would be lower. All Connecticut legislators who have even a nodding understanding of the law of supply and demand – called a “law” because economic laws are and should be both predictable and inescapable – should have known before they went gaga over a promising new and untested energy source, turbine windmills, that energy affordability is directly related to all Connecticut businesses.

If you don’t have sufficient energy production, all goods and services become more expensive, and if the assets of those who purchase the byproducts of energy -- all goods and services produced in the United States – do not increase commensurately, their affordability quotient will be reduced. To put it in the simplest terms possible: If, because of high energy prices, the purchaser of goods and services cannot increase his own assets to meet an assault on his budget by rising energy costs, he will suffer the “affordability crisis” now upon us, according to all the campaign readouts issued by politicians who are directly responsible for the affordability crisis.

The news from the Hartford Courant on the energy front – “Study: Green shift clashes with gas reliance” -- is not reassuring.

Here is the lede to the story:

A white paper by a Boston-based research group -- “New England’s Energy Transition: Colliding With Reality” – warns that New England consumers face higher electric costs and shrinking supply because of policy shifts toward renewables and away from natural gas, which remains the mainstay of the regional energy portfolio. The study “shows that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent in New England over the past 25 years on zero carbon energy programs, the region’s reliance on fossil fuels — notably natural gas — for electric generation within the six states has increased, to the current 55.4 percent from 54.6 percent in 2000.”

Translation: Several years ago, spurred on by environmental purists, the whole of New England, including Connecticut, made a conscious choice to wean itself from fossil fuel based energy products – including natural gas, considered at the time a cleaner form of energy than oil and coal. The weaning has not occurred, possibly because such a withdrawal would instantly bankrupt everyone dependent on relatively clean natural gas – that is to say, all residents of New England. Half the energy needs in Connecticut are met by severely neglected nuclear plants. Technological improvements in the nuclear production of energy are very promising indeed.

The research report tells us, “After 25 years, New England has nearly eliminated coal, sidelined oil, lost two nuclear plants and built thousands of megawatts of wind and solar. Yet the region remains about as dependent on fossil generation as it was in 2000… The region is now driving up operating costs for its existing gas fleet while simultaneously discouraging investment in new natural gas capacity. Yet it is pursuing this policy shift without first proving that a dependable alternative system can be built at sufficient scale and at a price consumers can afford.”

And the Courant supplied the following gloss on the report: “What changed is the fossil mix. While coal and oil nearly vanished, by last year a decades-long shift to natural gas had accelerated to the point where gas output surpassed what had been the output of all fossil fuels combined in 2000. Pushing the gas expansion was the Great Recession in 2008, which slowed electric demand growth, and the boom in shale-gas. [Natural] Gas was also considered environmentally acceptable compared to coal and oil, the report says.”

Some formerly dunderheaded politicians are beginning to realize that New England’s war on fossil fuel related energy suppliers has created a gap in energy supply that cannot be filled by the wishful thinking of environmental purists. Left leaning politicians in Connecticut especially have yielded to the Siren’s Song that will plunge Connecticut below water -- because wishful thinking of any kind never trumps reality. If Connecticut’s energy supply does not increase to meet future demand, the unforgiving law of supply and demand tells us, the demand, no longer affordable, will disappear. Profitable tax producing people and companies with wheels on their feet will move to more promising states.

To close Connecticut’s energy gap, the report sensibly recommends, “permitting new high-efficiency natural gas generation and expansion of the pipelines to deliver relatively low cost gas from Pennsylvania, something that has so far been blocked by environmental challenges in New York. It also recommends maintaining dependable energy resources until replacements are proven reliable, determining whether [its current amelioration programs] are phasing out energy sources before they can be replaced, studying whether programs like behind-the-meter residential solar unfairly allocate grid maintenance costs; and evaluating competing energy portfolios on the cost, emissions and reliability of the complete system required to support them, including transmission, storage, firming, fuel infrastructure and other supporting resources.”

In the matter of energy production, critics of Connecticut’s single party state government have sometimes suggested that nuclear energy ought to have a prominent place at the legislative table. The Democrat top-heavy government’s “investment” in wind power appears to be working as many prominent left of center Democrat legislators thought it would – to drive competing sources of energy from the field, a resolution that only worsens Connecticut’s expanding energy gap and does not align with campaign promises often made by Democrats to attack the state’s “affordability crisis,” caused in part by progressive politicians who are insensible to the economic distortions their programs have created.

Stop misallocating tax money, reduce unnecessary and destructive regulations, move surplus money, whenever possible, from government coffers back to people’s wallets and purses through appropriate tax cuts – and get out of the way of capitalist creativity: That’s the road to prosperity for both government budgets and a vibrant enriching economy. President John Kennedy’s “incoming tide that lifts all the boats” will restore a broken economy if is permitted by progressives and socialists Luddites to rise. There will be no rising tide in Connecticut without a fierce focus by the legislature on energy diversification, because abundant energy lies at the root of rising cost of every product and service in the state.

The Imitation of Trump

2026-08-30T09:22:59.875-04:00

Imitation, the wits tell us, is the sincerest form of flattery – when the imitation is sincere. When Democrats repeat in reverse the policies and political rhetoric of President Donald Trump, they come not to flatter Trump, but to bury him.

Perhaps the most important question for Democrats right now is: Why has their unabating anti-Trump rhetoric failed so miserably to dethrone Trump in the public’s estimation? We know all the anti-Trump chatter – and the many impeachments, and the many suits, three attempted assassinations and the usual anti-Trump sour-pudding one finds in many of the Associated Press reports -- has not in the least dented Trump’s own estimation of himself. Most people put this down to his self-celebratory egomania, an offshoot of what they suppose is his tendency towards authoritarianism or Caesarism.

Given the 250-year-old republican constitutional order that American Democratic Socialists (ADS) hope to repeal, Caesarism, as it is currently practiced in most socialist/communist countries, does not appear to be a realistic possibility in the United States. Trump will no longer be president after his term ends at high noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2029, and continuity in office is an essential element in tyrannical governance. The Castro brothers have ruled Cuba since 1959, more than six decades of dictatorial rule. Venezuela has been overmastered by a mix of military strongmen, democratic leaders, and Bolivarian socialist presidents from José Antonio Páez in 1830 to Nicolás Maduro, now biding his time in federal pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, thanks to Trump.

At present, no U.S. Gulag has yet been established in New York City to house Trump’s political opponents, and socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has showed no interest in springing fellow socialist Maduro.

According to generally reliable Nielsen data, the legacy media – major networks and cable both – has taken a deep dive. As of March 2025, legacy broadcasters accounted for just over 10% of total TV viewership. Gallup data shows trust in national news outlets dropping to 40% among Republicans, down from 70% in 2016. According to the New York Times, Trump’s approval rating is hovering around 38% nationally. Alas, the public’s trust in legacy media reporting is hovering around 34%. Trump, whatever his failings, is still more popular than the “Grey Lady” New York Times, the ADS, or brussel sprouts.

Trump has been misbehaving for years. Political naughtiness appears to be a permanent part of his public persona. Some commentators have compared him to Huey Long, the infamous and vastly underestimated Louisiana rabble-rouser. The political rabble in New Orleans, considerably less pristine than the political rabble elsewhere in the nation, took to politics the way it took to jazz, warmly embracing a politics that, like jazz, played between the notes. Long was assassinated in the beautiful art deco building he had constructed to keep incumbent Democrat politicians caged in a single Baton Rouge building away from the usual temptations in New Orleans.

Trump, full of intimations, has occasionally suggested that comparisons with former president Teddy Roosevelt (TR) might be appropriate.

Mark Twain, who could zing with the best of them, was not a Roosevelt fan, or a fan of the U.S. Congress, or a fan of political parties, or fan of a crippling post-Civil War Jim Crow mindset. Consider the following dictation note taken from the Autobiography of 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.”

Twain, everyman’s robust social commentator, heartily disliked TR and skewered him at every opportunity. When TR, following his failed independent run for the presidency on the Bull Moose Progressive ticket, traveled to Africa to shoot water buffalo and other mountable wild animals, Twain announced that TR had gone to Africa “to shoot cows.” TR said if he found himself alone with Twain, he would hang him.

Americans generally tolerate the rough and tumble of politics. In present day America, the voting public has, so to speak, “come of age.” They have left behind their innocent pre-teens years ages ago. The first real American political campaign, the 1800 campaign featuring Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, was not a Sunday stroll through the rose garden. Abe Lincoln was routinely ridiculed by the media that supported his opponent, picturing him occasionally in political cartoons as a black ape.

In Trump’s case, reactionary Democrats may have helped in Trump’s presidential election against all three of Trump’s Democrat presidential opponents: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the hapless Kamala Harris.

If a resurrected Twain were writing about politics today, he likely would denounce Democrat Party flimflammery and cowardice. A gilded member of the Gilded Age – named after Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today -- Twain knew how America’s free market system worked in practice. Corporations have never been taxpayers; they were always tax collectors. Every progressive tax levied on every business is collected by the business in the form of higher prices on provided goods and services and passed on to federal and state governments – thereby increasing the cost of goods and services. In what way, a resurrected Twain might ask, does this convoluted process reduce a now burdensome affordability crisis centered on the high prices of necessary goods and services?

Absent a Gulag for capitalists in Mamdani’s New York City – perhaps on Wall Street? – we will be stuck with energized anarchic American Democratic Socialists and high prices.

The Meta Settlement

2026-08-28T08:17:28.600-04:00

AG Willim Tong

The problem with the META settlement is that, unlike a trial, it settles none of the crucial questions surrounding the settlement. In fact, a settlement might properly be defined as a clever strategic device designed to prevent a clear discussion of the issues that prompted the settlement. Henry Kissinger is reported to have said the United States rarely settles its most pressing problems; instead, it “amicably bids them goodbye.”

This goodbye bid will cost the redundantly rich META CEO Mark Zuckerberg about $17 billion, pocket change for him. At least he will not have to suffer the nuisance of a trial or lean overmuch on the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In his recent non-testimony before the U.S. Congress, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci repeatedly hobbled on that crutch, boring to tears neatly everyone but his lawyers.

Half of Connecticut’s portion of the settlement, we are told in a Hartford Courant story – State gets $265.4M in Meta settlement – “will be used to remediate youth harms from social media, including ‘support for mental health and crisis intervention, after school and summer school programming, and implementation of phone-free school zones,’ according to the state attorney general’s office.”

As usual, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong’s assessment of the settlement was rhetorically overloaded, and it left important questions unanswered: “Meta strip-mined the souls of America’s children for maximum profit with abusive and addictive features that unleashed a youth mental health catastrophe. That ends now… This settlement charts a new course for online safety, enforcing sweeping reforms to fundamentally alter the experience for kids on Instagram and Facebook.”

If Connecticut is to use half of its awarded settlement to remediate the harms caused by social media to the state’s youth, how does the state propose to use the remaining half of the $265.4M settlement? Is there an accountant in the house who will chart the state’s receipts and expenditures?

We are told that META was motivated chiefly by an unquenchable thirst for profits. Governor Lamont has repeatedly lamented, according to the Courant, “that social media makes people anti-social and has been harming children.”

Profits, we know according to recent Manifesto pronouncements from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), are unspeakably evil. Lamont charged, “Tech companies have increasingly been taking advantage of kids, creating apps and algorithms that decrease their attention spans, drive them to become addicted, cause them to tune out real life, and harmfully impact their mental health and wellbeing. This multistate settlement is long overdue and requires strong protections for children’s online safety.” Profits and children, intentionally or not, have now become the last refuge of scoundrels.

“A coalition of 29 states sued the tech giant in 2023,” we are advised by the Courant, “but the deal cuts short the trial, which was expected to see CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stand before a jury in federal court in California… The federal lawsuit was the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont. It followed newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in 2021, that found that the company knew about the harm Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.”

It does seem odd that Connecticut, conspicuous by its absence, is not mentioned among the bipartisan coalition of states that initially sued META in federal court, rather as if Tong was riding in the caboose of the train of states speeding towards a trial cut short by a settlement.

Trials, we all know, settle issues. Settlements often amicably bid useful solutions good-bye.

Not everyone, we are told in the Courant story, is satisfied with the closed-door settlement: “Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, said during his testimony last week that Meta consistently prioritized profits over safety in designing its products, focusing on how often and for how long people used them, even if it was detrimental to their mental well-being.

“’If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money,’ he said.”

The unresolved questions are these: If META has caused teenagers — especially teen girls — untold harm when it comes to mental health and body image issues, why not go to trial? Why settle for what amounts to state “profits”? Why are profits inherently evil while state and federal surplus profits – that is to say, the amount of over-taxation a state levies on its citizenry – are unquestionably good? If affordability has now become a widespread problem, why has it not yet occurred to greedy politicians that the most uncomplicated and direct way to enrich the citizenry is to reduce taxes. There is, after all, a surfeit of data to show that when marginal taxation is reduced, state tax receipts increase, the chief point made by President John Kennedy in a major address he made about a year before he was assassinated in a speech to the New York Economics Club? His program was adopted posthumously and -- guess what? – federal tax receipts increased dramatically, a true gift to the nation by a beloved president.

Even so, there is cause for political celebration. The settlement trumpeted by Tong and Lamont will enrich both politicians. Political Chanticleers are condemned to convince voters that their cockadoodles make the sun rise each morning.

Lincoln vs Marx

2026-08-23T22:43:07.132-04:00

Marxism as an economic theory failed most as soon as the mewling babe was out of the crib. In a piece reprinted in the Epoch Times by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation – “The Coup in Search of a Philosophy” -- Surse Pierpoint tells us: “In 1925, John Maynard Keynes dismissed Marx’s ‘Capital’ as an obsolete economic textbook that no serious economist would still assign. He was not being contrarian. By the time he wrote that, the marginal revolution of the 1870s had already done the intellectual work: Jevons, Menger, Walras, and later Wicksteed, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled the labor theory of value that Marx’s entire economic system rested on. Among economists, the argument was over, and Marx had lost it.”

Henry Ford is reported to have said about history, “History is bunk.” Shortly after Das Capital had been loosed on the world, economic “experts” pronounced Marx’s theory of value -- bunk. In years following, history would prove Marx’s critics right. Under Marx’s theory of value, anything produced independently of state orders withers and becomes valueless on empty shelves.

Most Americans are not familiar with the historical interaction between Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Marx wrote columns that were picked up by New York newspapers. Marx and Engels wrote a book on the American Civil War, heavy with economic discursions, and sent it to Lincoln, who referred it to one of his cabinet members, possibly as a form of intellectual punishment. In one of his speeches, Lincoln later presented his own non-Marxian theory of labor.

The indirect interaction between Marx and Lincoln is mentioned in Connecticut Commentary here in: “Lincoln Alive: His Relevance To Modern Politics.”

Here is Lincoln on the real relation of labor to capital: “Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families--wives, sons, and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class… Again, as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost (emphasis mine).”

In his brief essay, Pierpoint asks precisely the right question: “Before 1917, Marx was known among rival socialist faction economists who had already rejected him. After 1917, the Russian state needed a founding philosophy for what was, in plain terms, a seizure of power. It got one, retroactively, by making Marx a household name... What the data supports is narrower and more interesting: a discontinuous jump in mainstream legitimacy, arriving exactly when a regime needed intellectual cover, not when a new argument appeared to justify one. Here is the part economists tend to miss and sociologists tend to bury. If the economic argument was already lost by 1917, and the Soviet revolution supplied prestige rather than proof, what explains the durability of Marxist categories in Western universities, long after the calculation debate was settled and the planned economies it inspired had produced the most devastating body counts of the 20th century (emphasis mine)?”

A similar question perplexed Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist imprisoned by the fascists in the 1920 s: Why did the communist revolution “emerge in backward, agrarian Russia rather than in the advanced industrial economies [as] Marx had predicted? His answer was that Western societies are governed as much by cultural consent—manufactured through schools, churches, and media—as by direct economic control. A frontal seizure of the state, as in the Bolshevik model, would not work in the West. What would work was a slower ‘war of position’: a patient occupation of the institutions that manufacture consent.”

Connecticut Commentary mentioned Gramsci here five years ago in Connecting The Dots: Critical Race Theory And Gramsci Marxism:

Communism could succeed in highly developed states, Gramsci theorized, if it were first to infiltrate and overcome cultural institutions: the family, the school, the artistic community, the church, political parties, media outlets, independent court systems, and most especially, a Western prophylactic that would prevent the rise to power of new Caesars such as Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia – constitutional government and the division of political power into three co-equal and separate branches of government. These stubborn, organic modalities of Western civilization are what G.K. Chesterton and others used to call “the little platoons of democracy.” Once undermined, the resistance to the communist state among developed nations would collapse. The phrase most often associated with this process was later called “the long march through the institutions.” Critical Race Theory has replaced class with race in its slow march through our post-modern pedagogical wilderness, but its end point is Gramscian Marxism. The Critical Race Theorist sees race everywhere. It lies at the root of all social disorders. It is the noose with which the theorist may hang the whole of western history; for the principal mission of Critical Race Theory is to change history by a quiet revolution in which the march of boots into the future is heard only as pleasant applause.

Despite its longstanding economic buffoonery – socialism always runs out of other people’s money because it is a frontal attack on free market creativity. But communism never-the-less can succeed in a war on culture by patiently sapping and undermining what Chesterton called “the little platoons of democracy.” To put it bluntly, modern, reinvented Marxism of a kind actively supported by the American Democratic Socialists (ADS) is profoundly anti-democratic, anti-religious and anti-cultural. It relies upon anarchism to sow the ground for a future cloud-coo-coo-land utopia.

Pierpont notes: “The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) did not arrive at their current position by accident. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a long-standing constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry, ratifying what internal factions had already been calling a ‘big tent’ strategy: build numbers first, sort out doctrine later (emphasis mine). The numbers came. By the summer of 2026, DSA-aligned candidates had unseated sitting Democratic incumbents in New York and Colorado, captured a Senate nomination in Maine over a sitting governor, and pushed a mayoral runoff in Los Angeles—a run of primary victories serious enough that Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, hardly outside agitators, warned in The Washington Post on July 1 that the party needed to confront the movement rather than continue appeasing it.”

____________________________

ADDENDA

The piece above incorrectly states “Marx and Engels wrote a book on the American Civil War, heavy with economic discursions, and sent it to Lincoln…”

Lincoln could not have seen the “book” written by Marx and Engels on the Civil War since the book -- The Civil War in the United States, a compilation of articles that addresses the conflict written between 1861-1862, was not published in Lincoln’s lifetime. The articles appeared for publications in the New-York Tribune and Die Presse in Vienna. Lincoln, we know, frequently read the Tribune. Lincoln did receive a letter written by Marx on behalf of International Working Men's Association. The letter (see below) was referred to members of Lincoln’s cabinet. Charles Francis Adams answered the letter on behalf of Lincoln.

The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams

January 28, 1865 [A]

Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864, and included in the Minutes of the General Council on 29th November 1864;

First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, January 7, 1865, and in German translation in Der Social Demokrat, 30 Dezember 1864;

Source: The General Council of the First International 1864-1866, Progress Publishers;

Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;

Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."

Ambassador Adams replied as follows:

Legation of the United States

London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

Charles Francis Adams

Both Charles Francis Adams and his son, Charles Francis Adam’s Jr. were fairly prolific writers.

The pieces I wrote focus on the differences between Marx and Lincoln’s appreciation of the role played by labor and capital in the economy.

Incidentally, as a sidebar, I may mention that Marx did not like Lincoln or, one supposes, his economic views. There is also evidence that Marx disliked Lincoln and the Union's cause because they met Marx's objective of fomenting a communist revolution.

“The way in which the North is waging the war,” Marx wrote, “is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long. The South, an oligarchy, is better suited to the purpose, especially an oligarchy where all productive labour devolves on the niggers and where the 4 million 'white trash' are flibustiers by calling. For all that, I'm prepared to bet my life on it that these fellows will come off worst, 'Stonewall Jackson' notwithstanding. It is, of course, possible that some sort of revolution will occur beforehand in the North itself.”

Lamont, the Last of Connecticut’s “Moderate” Democrats

2026-08-18T21:30:13.653-04:00

Lamont

Governor Ned Lamont’s Democrat Party has been listing left for, some say, 30+ years. Connecticut’s still massive accumulative deficit — the total of all past budget shortfalls as reflected in Connecticut’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, now topping $49 billion -- began in the 1930s when the General Assembly, now dominated for decades by Democrats, collectively decided the state could live with deficits.

In a brief story on pension debt published in 2023, CTMirror noted, “Connecticut amassed debt between the 1930s and 2010 by failing to save adequately for retirement benefits and by liberal use of its bonding credit card for capital projects… Overall debt across all areas tops $88 billion. Connecticut remains one of the most indebted states, per capita, in the nation, and required annual payments are expected to put extra pressure on state finances well into the 2030s or later.”

The state’s overall debt was reduced during the Lamont administration, largely owing to a state Republican inspired bipartisan bill that capped some spending and bonding, the so called “spending guardrails” that have in recent days been adjusted, much to the delight of importunate public employee unions.

John Maynard Keynes’ politically convenient dismissal of debt -- that a country‘s national debt should not be worrisome because a national debt is one “we owe to ourselves” -- has been discredited by responsible economists and unforgiving experience. Nevertheless, politics as usual, we all know, trumps economics. Progressive politicians are unwilling to surrender political prerogatives to economic realities. And so, politicians in Connecticut and elsewhere are willing to suffer the inconveniences of debt if our accumulative debt allows them to continue lavish spending without raising taxes to liquidate the debt.

Increasing taxes in a sluggish economy generally is avoided by politicians hungry for public approval during election seasons.

State taxpayers appear willing to indulge such economic perversities so long as their own budgets remain manageable, government programs are not crippled by program cuts, and public employee union heads are not unduly disturbed by budget realities such as that expressed by Mr. Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” Misery occurs when spending exceeds income. A state accumulative deficit of $49 billion will result in misery, some modern day Micawbers think, if left unattended; hence the “spending guardrails” that somewhat reduced the poor ratings issued by major investment houses.

When accumulative spending is greater than the state’s ability to finance spending, accumulative debt must increase this writer noted last year in a blog titled Spending, Connecticut’s Real Problem, and the State’s ‘Surplus’

The blog, larded with uncontested data, pointed out: “The reader may have read often in Connecticut’s media of the state’s burgeoning surplus. There are three things that may be done with a surplus of tax funds: 1) The surplus, a tax over-charge, may be returned to taxpayers, much in the way an overpayment may be returned to business customers by non-greedy, non-felonious capitalists; 2) the surplus may be applied to the liquidation of current debt; or 3) the surplus may be used to finance new spending. The Democrat progressive community in Connecticut, operating on the principle that taxes must always increase and never decrease, generally prefers option 3).”

The so-called state “surpluses”, produced in part by Republican inspired “guardrails” now being partly dismantled by state progressive Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly, are not surpluses at all. The guardrails are not permanent fixtures. And the chief problem with the load of programs and program extensions produced abundantly by Connecticut’s progressive legislators is that all progressive programs have been oversold and underfinanced. That includes such valued programs as social security, Medicaid and Medicare, and others. Continued expansion and underfinancing produces continuing debt that progressives are unwilling to finance through election crippling tax increases.

And the sole thin reed that stands between improvident spending and economically deceitful post-Keynes progressivism in Connecticut is – Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, a so-called fiscal conservative and social progressive.

On the Republican side of the political barricades, Ryan Fazio, who could use battalions of support, has dedicated his campaign for governor on repeated attempts to reduce spending, the core issue in CT. It rarely has been foremost in the minds of establishment Connecticut politicians, mostly Democrats, that affordability can be addressed through spending cuts, leaving assets in the hands and wallets of the state's principal financers, hard-pressed middle-class taxpayers. We have a government that first causes unaffordability through artificially high employee union salaries and program bloat and then, once elections roll around, weeps crocodile tears over problems they have caused.

Assuming Lamont is reelected governor in the state’s upcoming campaign, he will be conducting a losing battle with committed progressives in his own party for four additional years. Progressives in Connecticut are awaiting a progressive/socialist deluge. The anarchist/progressive wing of the Democrat Party, having been invited by party regulars into their Big Tent, have only to agitate and wait patiently for the inevitable King Tide.

What Makes Blumenthal Run?

2026-08-16T13:13:56.015-04:00

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror notes in a recent story -- Larson lost to a younger challenger. Could Blumenthal face a similar test? – that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is getting on in years. The seventh oldest U.S. Senator, Blumenthal is now 80 and, Pazniokas reminds us, other Democrat political anchorites have recently lost elections in primaries to a new generation of politicians weary of patiently waiting their turn in the political queue.

“Blumenthal is up for reelection in 2028 when he will be 82,” Pazniokas tells us. “He hasn’t confirmed what he’ll do in two years, but he said he’s taking the steps to prepare for another campaign — in the event he runs again.”

“Taking the steps” involves taking in political contributions for an, as yet, unannounced senatorial campaign. This may be politically expedient, and it is perfectly legal, but some political pecksniffs tell us that the practice is immoral, little more than a clever deception. Democrats in politically safe — read: gerrymandered – seats have a way of shuttling excess campaign contributions to friends and political allies. Entrenched incumbents such as Rosa DeLauro often use bloated campaign coffers as a foil to frighten off competitors both in primaries and general elections.

Blumenthal, we all know – because the news has been shouted by Blumenthal from the rooftops in Connecticut throughout his entire political life – is very good at self-advertising, martialing public opinion and raising money.

Even so, Pazniokas writes, “…after a high-stakes primary in which his colleague U.S. Rep. John Larson, was soundly defeated by a younger challenger, it could be hard for Blumenthal — and other aging members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation — to dodge questions about age and the calls for generational change that are sure to play a role in future campaigns. So far, the 80-year-old senator seems undeterred” -- and even a bit undecided.

Seeking to pacify Pazniokas without quite addressing his misgivings, Blumenthal noted, barely suppressing a yawn, “I’m focused on this November, electing Democrats to the United States Senate so we take back a Democratic majority and that’s my focus. I have a campaign committee. I haven’t announced anything. I’m raising money, but my focus is on November… There’s no magic about age. It’s about energy, new ideas, a commitment to fighting, and outreach and connection with people. It’s what we need to do as Democrats in this election. We need to convince people we’re on their side.”

Its doubtful Pazniokas bought the evasion. Blumenthal does not strike the average news reporter as a man afflicted with tunnel vision. He strategizes, he plots long-term. A cradle to grave politician, Blumenthal threw his hat into the political ring shortly after having graduated from law school. His son Mathew, a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives from the 147th district in Fairfield County, is now following in his dad’s well-worn path.

“Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights,” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says, “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” Cassius -- a cunning, manipulative, and envious Roman senator – orchestrated the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. In the United States circa 2026, we only “assassinate” politicians in our ever-changing media. There are, of course, exceptions. Various people have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to dispatch President Trump and other political menaces, mostly on the right side of the political spectrum.

Generally, we prefer bloodless political turnovers, which have become more frequent ever since members of the Democrat Socialists of America discovered the best way to insert themselves into the Democrat Party Big Tent – by using party primaries to rid the tent of ageing multi-term incumbents who lack the requisite revolutionary oomph.

The primary system itself, it turns out, is the chink in the armor of once invincible, multi-term, gerrymandered protected politicians such as Larson. “The 14-term congressman lost to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin,” Pazniokas tells us, “who mainly campaigned on the need for new voices and new energy in Congress, without needing to lean much on age at all. Bronin called his victory a ‘political earthquake in Connecticut.’”

Blumenthal, like his neighbor and political comrade U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, has not called out the members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for their blaring anti-Semitism or their habit of knocking off in primaries long serving politicians such as Blumenthal and Schumer. Both Blumenthal and Schumer are Jewish and “of an age. Both are presumptive moderates and highly vulnerable to lean and hungry socialists plotting against them. Without ballast, the political ship is likely to turn in any direction at any time.

The question before the house is: What made Blumenthal run in the past, and what would Connecticut’s political landscape look like if he chose to hang up his spurs? Would son Matt slide into his Dad’s position in the U.S. Senate, providing the DSA is unsuccessful in abolishing the U.S. Senate? Would present Attorney General William Tong cheerily surrender a carefully hidden ambition to replace Blumenthal senior? The route from the Attorney General’s office into the U.S. Congress has been well traveled by both former Senator Joe Lieberman and Blumenthal senior. And what of the other immobile Democrat members in the U.S. House delegation patiently awaiting their opportunity? A decision by Blumenthal to bow out would quick-start the most volatile game of political musical chairs in state history.

Roger Sherman vs the Democratic Socialists of America

2026-08-14T14:06:25.958-04:00

Roger Sherman

Roger Sherman, students of American History will know, was a Connecticut patriot, the only Founding Father of the United States to have signed all four major U.S. founding documents.

Sherman served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. He was a justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and a treasurer of Yale College. An early supporter of American independence, he represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence and helped draft the Articles of Confederation.

Sherman is best known, even among journalists who have not cracked a book on the American founding since their college years, as the author of “The Connecticut Compromise.” The Constitutional Convention was hopelessly deadlocked on a question that had bedeviled patriots since the Roman Republic had been crushed first by Caesar and later by barbarian hoards from the north: In a true Republic, who should decide what should be done? It is this question that the U.S. Constitution answers.

In a federated system of government, the founders well knew, the Republican vision cannot be met by allowing large states to dominate smaller states. The principle of representation must be widely distributed without favor or fear throughout the body politic.

Sherman’s compromise divided the national legislature, the present U.S. Congress, into two bodies, a House and a Senate; the House membership would be chosen proportionally by popular vote, and the Senate membership – two Senators for each state -- would be chosen by state legislators, later by popular vote. The compromise balanced representation in such a way that large population centers could not deny representation to smaller population centers, either states or municipalizes within the states. And it was only after the Convention had adopted Sherman’s compromise that the members of the Convention could proceed to build a truly representative republic, so important was the settlement of the issue facing the delegates to the national Constitutional Convention.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s mission statement has for some time been shouted from every rooftop in the nation. The newly elected Mayor of New York City (and Wall Street), Zohran Mamdani, is a card carrying member of the DSA. The group is not hiding in the bushes. It is boastfully socialist.

Here are a few notable propositions drawn from its 2026-2027 manifesto:

“DSA’S MISSION IS TO UNITE WORKERS INTO A POWERFUL POLITICAL MOVEMENT TO WIN THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY AND CHANGE THE WORLD (capitalization original). Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics, with a government by for and of the working class and with powerful labor unions and social movements. Organizing in every city and town, we hope to build a socialist society where people come before profit, basic needs are guaranteed, the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control, peace around the world is secured, and workers around the world join together in common struggle to construct socialism worldwide. This year defeating the far right, protecting the rights of the working class from the U.S. to Palestine, and fighting for democracy are our top priorities. Through our grassroots struggles, we will build a. movement with the power to take on the capitalist class and build an equal democratic and liberated world.”

Virtually the whole DSA manifesto has been cobbled together from unattributed socialist/communist sources here presented as a series of orthodox propositions; heterodoxy, or indeed the slightest deviation from Saints Marx and Stalin, will not be permitted. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto rooted firmly in a central perception – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” — breathes lustily from every paragraph. The DSA, this writer has pointed out elsewhere, is an organization whose members are loosely bound by a pre-Marxian anarchist imperative. Before utopia enters, armed to the teeth, through the front door, any rational political or cultural order must be shown the back door. A barren desert is the perfect picture of anarchic ambition.

Politicians in Connecticut should warmly embrace Sherman’s Compromise for four reasons: 1) Sherman is a state constitutional hero, and states should embrace such men; 2) his Compromise extended the political franchise broadly throughout the nation and within states; 3) he should be regarded justly as the “father” of the US. Congress; 4) it is therefore inconceivable that in Connecticut any member of the state’s U.S. congressional Delegation – all of them are Democrats who have professed an abiding affection for democracy – should accede to a DSA mandate that would require the abolition of the U.S. Senate and all State Senators.

Whyhaven’t some curious in-state journalists asked the state’s two Democrat U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, which side of this political barricade are they willing to die on: 1) the continuance of senatorial representation or 2) its abolition at the demand of DSA “reformers”?

For U.S. Senators Blumenthal and Murphy, the answer to the above question, would represent a political “life or death” decision.

Criminalizing Police Presence

2026-08-08T21:25:53.795-04:00

Not everyone in Connecticut is content with a new bill -- HB 5001, signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last May -- that prohibits, according to Livi Stanford of the Hartford Courant, “law enforcement from being within 250 feet of an election site without permission from state election officials, except in specific narrow exceptions.”

The new law, we are told, “is causing frustration among some police chiefs and lawmakers. Non-compliance with the law is now classified as a Class C felony.” The bill was approved, according to Stanford, “in a straight party line vote with no Republicans voting for the bill.”

Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican who opposed the bill said, “This is a direct shot at law enforcement officers. It’s a direct effect on the municipality because it creates a real problem for police officers to do their job in these locations. Departments across Connecticut can’t fill their ranks, and some police officials strenuously objected to the bill because non-compliance with its perceived ambiguous restrictions triggers a felony charge.”

Farmington Police Chief Paul Melanson said, according to Sanford, “that law enforcement being threatened with a felony charge is concerning, saying it has a ‘chilling effect. There is no intention to disrupt the election process,’ he said. ‘I know in the municipalities I have worked in they actually like the police close by these election sites.’”

A previous bill, the “Police Accountability Act,” withdrew partial immunity from police officers making arrests. Partial impunity protected police officers and municipalities from sometimes frivolous and expensive suits. The withdrawal of partial immunity allows anyone alleging arrests that may contravene provisions in the bill to sue errant police officers. Some police chiefs at the time pointed out that the bill – unnecessary and unnecessarily confusing, many police chiefs noted -- would adversely affect police recruitment where police were most needed, in Connecticut urban areas. Some political analysis pointed to a perceived direct connection between the bill’s provisions and a serious dip in recruitment in urban areas. What recruit considering joining a city police force would not rather join a force in some sleepy rural environment where the possibility of a legal attack on the personal assets of police officers was more remote and less tempting?

Under the terms of the then new “Police Accountability Act,” qualified immunity was changed to provide a civil cause of action – meaning to legally justify someone to file a civil lawsuit – for individuals who claim that their constitutional rights were violated by the police.

An attempt made in 2025 to restore partial immunity to police officers was rebuffed by majority Democrats. A relatively new legislator, State Rep. Mark DeCaprio of Lebanon, said at the time that he had offered the remediating legislation because “There is a concern with law enforcement. I’ve run into several officers over the last two years and it’s always in the back of their minds …. I’d like to have a discussion on this.”

DeCaprio was reminded by Judiciary Committee Co-Chair State Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, “there have been no lawsuits since the Police Accountability Act; this is nothing more than fear mongering.”

Perhaps the absence of lawsuits should have been taken by proponents of the new law as an indication that the Police Accountability Act was unnecessary, little more than a campaign showpiece for Democrats.

State Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington -- a member of the Judiciary Committee and a detective with the Stonington Police Department, where he worked for 23 years – characterized the 2020 Act as a way for Hartford Democrats “to systematically defund the police without actually saying that’s what they were doing.” Howard said he had spoken with seven police chiefs in the state who told him that “we are in crisis mode for recruitment and retention” and that part of the issue is the Police Accountability Act qualified immunity provision. “I have two [teenage] sons and I would do everything in my power to prohibit them from following in my footsteps because of what Connecticut has done to the profession the last five years.”

The new law restricting police presence at polling stations is a revisitation of arguments for and against the earlier Police Accountability Act, and the two groups pitted against each other are strikingly similar.

Matt Blumenthal, a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives from the 147th district in Fairfield County and the son of the ubiquitous U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, presents an argument in favor of the new police restriction bill by pointing to the bill’s intent. Lamont, who signed the new bill into law, the Democrat dominated General Assembly and Matt Blumenthal all agree that the new law is well intended. Police chiefs and the Republican Minority in the General Assembly, intensely practical, are focused on the likely consequences of the new legislation.

The Courant tells us Matt Blumenthal, “a Stamford Democrat and co-author of the bill, said the intent of the law is to prevent any attempt at election interference by any agency or department that has not earned the trust of state and local elections officials.”

Blumenthal told the paper, “’We have no reason to believe that state and local law enforcement would engage in any misconduct like that [i.e. prohibited by the bill]. However, the current (federal) administration has stated and its allies have threatened to engage in activities around elections that could threaten their integrity or intimidate voters. We want to send a message here in Connecticut that this sort of conduct will not be tolerated. Blumenthal said there is no intent to keep state or local police from engaging in their normal law enforcement activities. ‘The catch-all exception to the law is if they get permission from the moderator they can engage in whatever normal otherwise lawful activities they wish,’ Blumenthal said.”

Unintentionally perhaps, Matt Blumenthal has let a snarling cat out of the bag. In Connecticut’s sanctuary state, the federal agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) are prohibited by state law from operating freely in restricted areas – courthouses, for instance – but the targets of the new legislation are Connecticut police, far less culpable, Blumenthal may agree, than ICE agents. The new law does indeed, according to police officials, prevent Connecticut police from operating in polling places as usual. The new law intends “to keep state or local police from engaging in their normal law enforcement activities.” That is the expressed intent of the legislation.

And the snarling cat has, Blumenthal tells us, an intended purpose: “We want to send a message here in Connecticut that this sort of conduct” – the Nazi-like conduct imputed to ICE agents -- will not be tolerated.”

Blumenthal’s mission-creep has in the present law made its way into Connecticut’s law enforcement sanctum sanctorum. Connecticut cops should not mind a little political spittle.

Vote Democrat.

Socializing Democrats: We Want Anarchy

2026-08-04T08:09:20.651-04:00

L'État, c'est moi (English:"I am the state") – attributed to King Louis XIV

Some Democrats are beginning to pin the Socialist tail on the donkey. Democrat Party fixture James Carville has threatened to leave the party if it does not soon begin to organize an effective resistance to a rampant socialism. “Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party,” Carville fumed recently. “One of us is going to leave. It might even be me. If he becomes a voice in the Democratic Party, I’m out. I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.”

Democrat U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who appears increasingly to be a party of one, has publicaly protested the American Democratic Socialists (ADA) as a threat to democracy. The party’s official manifesto warmly embraces such eventualities as open borders, the abolition of the US Senate, the popular election of US Supreme Court Justices. One hopes, perhaps in vain, that current Democrat U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy might unite to resist a call to abolish the U.S. Senate.

Back recently from Croatia, once a part of the now liberated ganglia of the Soviet Bloc, the Croats told Fetterman that implanting socialism in the United States would be “the worst thing ever.” The Croats, who have a still robust memory of being swallowed alive by Joseph Stalin’s ruthless Soviet Union, were “mystified why America is having that conversation.” Nearly everyone in the counties liberated from Stalin’s fatal embrace, including Poland and Ukraine, routinely calls this ahistorical flirting with socialism “civilizational suicide.” A recent Gallup poll disappointingly shows that 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably.

Fetterman called this death-wish longing for socialism, historically a precursor to communism, “an orgy of socialism” in his party. And, of course, “alarmists” in the Republican Party have been warning for some time that the party of Harry Truman, among the first Americans of note to recognize the state of Israel, has become an “anti-Israeli” party, in Fetterman’s view.

Opposite Fetterman on the ideological barricades stands Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist spouting millionaire who apparently believes that all millionaires – including himself? – are members of Oligarchy Inc.

Most recently, Sanders championed the socialist candidacy of Graham Platner, whose successful attempt to deny a party primary endorsement to Democrat Janet Mills, the governor of Maine since 2019, secured flashy headlines for Platner. In short order, a woman alleging sexual improprieties stepped forward, sinking his much heralded campaign. Platner, The Guardian noted on the eve of Platner’s primary victory, “won 72% of the [Democrat primary] vote, defeating state governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and third-placed David Costello, based on early results reported by Reuters. His victory on Tuesday caps a remarkable rise for a candidate who has never held elected office and whose campaign was shadowed by negative headlines that might have ended a more conventional political career,” an indelicate reference to the tattoo Platner wore over his heart, a symbol worn by Jew killers in Nazi prisoner of war camps.

The national Democrat Party’s cautious, tremulous support of Sanders, Platner and other prominent left-leaning, headline-grabbing socialists such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a leading proponent of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) insurrection, very well may lead to defeats in the general election. We do not know at this point whether the so called “energy” the DSA has generated in primaries will carry over into the general elections. The electoral base in a general election is much broader than the narrow base in primaries. And the socialist insurrection so far, with some exceptions, has purged the Democrat Party of moderates who cannot support the DSA Manifesto.

This is what we know: The DSA manifesto envisions the abolition of the U.S. Senate and with its disappearance a redrafting of the Constitutional Convention’s “Connecticut Compromise,” an ingenious measure that permanently solved one of the most pressing problems confronting participants in the convention: how to arrange a legislative body in such a way that larger states could not execute a permanent veto over smaller states such as Rhode Island.

The Connecticut Compromise or the Sherman Compromise, named after Roger Sherman of Connecticut, defined the legislative structure and representation each state would claim under the United States Constitution. Sherman proposed a bicameral legislature: a U.S House of Representatives to assure proportional representation in the House chamber; and equal representation in the Senate chamber in which each state, regardless of its population, would be represented by two senators.

The visionaries over at the DSA also look forward to the popular election of Supreme Court Justices, which undoubtedly would compromise the independence of the nation’s highest court, a common feature of socialist tyrannies. Does anyone in the U.S. Congress believe courts in communist Russia or communist China operate independently of communist or fascist heads of state? How should U.S. Senators react to a measure that would abolish U.S. Senators? Why are Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Blumenthal and Murphy, silent at the prospect of the dissolution of the U.S. Senate?

There is a point at which constitutions so reformed are constitutions denied.

The inner cynic of this political writer is shouting in my ear – “Idiot! Why do you suppose that the aggrieved members of the DSA – and leftist politicians who support them – are concerned seriously with constitutionalism or good government? What they really want is anarchism, because it is from social disorder and the evisceration of democratic norms that fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini arises. Mussolini’s definition goes like this: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state.” And by “state” Mussolini meant Mussolini. This is a far left and not a conservative credo.

Some historians contest whether the sentence quoted above, “which does not appear in the registers of the parliament, was really said by Louis XIV, especially since on his deathbed, Louis XIV pronounced an attested sentence, seemingly contradictory: "I die, but the state will always remain."

But of course! Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, supplies a relevant attested quote: “Nothing concentrates one’s mind so much as the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning!” That realization rarely occurs to immodest politicians or socialist revolutionaries.

In the not too distant future, senators who support socialism or who are loftily indifferent to the real world consequences of socialism should have a quiet conversation with their democratic consciences and ask themselves: Does the United States need a revolutionary overthrow of constitutional principles? Shouldn’t we rather be insisting on a restoration of those principles – what Abraham Lincoln called a “new birth of freedom” to insure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth?”

Fauci and Blumenthal, Defending the Indefensible

2026-07-30T19:02:20.738-04:00

Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has blackened U.S. Senator Rand Paul with an imputed charge of McCarthyism.

Katherine Pugh, a reporter for Just the News, writes:

“A Democratic senator accused the GOP committee chair of employing similar tactics to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, known for leading aggressive anti-communist investigations, at a contentious hearing with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Tuesday … Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., cited two X posts by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from December of 2024 and 2025 that were mentioned in a statement by Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, after being thrown out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing for trying to make a statement as his client repeatedly invoked the 5th Amendment to avoid answering questions … Paul's posts read: ‘the power of some of us must be used for good, like putting Fauci in jail,’ and ‘I want to give him a subpoena and a jail cell.’

“Blumenthal said both statements foster a ‘well-founded fear’ that the hearing is an effort to ‘trap Dr. Fauci in some kind of criminal wrongdoing,’ which is not a congressional hearing's purpose to him.

"’During some of the dark days in this body, under Senator Joe McCarthy, it became standard operating procedure to seek that kind of prosecutorial objective,’ Blumenthal continued.

“McCarthy was known for his aggressive and unproven accusations against government officials, specifically during 1954's Army-McCarthy hearings. He ultimately faced a Senate censure - a formal, public statement of disapproval that reprimands unacceptable behavior - and died in 1957.

"’We should not be part of a rerun of that kind of effort,’ Blumenthal said.

“The Democratic senator then read aloud a statement issued by Schertler, clarifying that it was in reference to Paul, and asked it to be included in the record: ‘This year's-long public crusade against Dr. Fauci makes one thing clear: this is not a serious effort to seek information from Dr. Fauci in a transcribed interview for a valid legislative purpose. You are single-mindedly fixated on seeing Dr. Fauci prosecuted for imaginary crimes, and you are so invested in that outcome that you have created a personal brand around it.’

While his client, Fauci, was refusing to submit testimony to Congress through a questionable 5th Amendment plea, Schertler attempted to respond for his client and was properly ejected from the hearing room. No matter: Blumenthal read Schertler statement into the legislative record anyway.

“Fauci has ‘saved lives,’ Blumenthal continued. He noted that Republicans are eagerly rebranding the former NIAID director, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right during the hearing to decline answering questions, as a villain to distract from ‘their own failure to protect Americans from soaring healthcare costs.’”

Both U.S. Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley had some good-natured fun commenting on Fauci’s repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment, even on those occasions when an honest answer to a question honestly put could not criminally ensnare Fauci.

SEN. PAUL: In the red folder on your table is a copy of Section 192 of Title 2 of the U.S. Code. Your counsel has been provided a copy as well. That section makes it a crime for a witness appearing under subpoena to refuse to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry. Do you have that in front of you?

FAUCI: On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Let the record reflect that the witness has refused to answer whether there is a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.

Fauci, responsible commentators should note, was given blanket immunity by the Biden administration; that means nothing done or said by Fauci prior to the grant of blanket immunity is prosecutable. Immunity of this kind renders redundant 5^th Amendment pleas by those hoping to escape public scrutiny. Blumenthal, for 20 years Connecticut’s Attorney General, has himself used immunity to loosen the tongues of witnesses to possible prosecutable crimes, a common practice of any prosecution agency. Prosecutors, as a matter of course, often seek to produce in witnesses “a well-founded fear” that their testimony may lead to prosecution because they want to elicit true testimony from hostile witnesses. Everyone discussing these matters should recall that those posing questions in legitimate legislative hearings have themselves no prosecutorial powers. Questions are not thumbscrews: That has been and should be the operative principle of all attorneys general, state and federal, including Blumenthal.

At the conclusion of Fauci’s non-testimony, Paul noted that Fauci had no proper right to invoke the 5^th amendment precisely because he had been graced with a blanket immunity from prosecution by Biden: "Because you refuse to answer, citing a privilege that is unsupported because of your pardon, and after being denied to do so, this committee has scheduled a vote next week on a resolution certifying your contempt."

People testifying before legislative committees have an obligation to say the truth, the chief purposes of the oath to which those testifying swear: “Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony that you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” As prescribed by Federal Rule of Evidence 603 and customary congressional practice, the oath to tell the truth in congressional testimony is a formal, legally binding promise—either by oath or affirmation—that your testimony will be truthful.

Blumenthal knows all this. And he should be possessed of “well-founded fear” that his constituents, who will be voting for or against his continuance in office during the upcoming election, know that he knows it.