Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Let There Be Audits -- The Difference Between Hartford And New Britain

2026-06-10T09:05:07.831-04:00

As a general rule, incumbent politicians do not like audits. An audit is a scrupulous examination, political and economic, of a politician’s record in office. If the audited politician’s career in office is at an end, an audit, usually performed by the opposition party, may seem redundant. What is the point of beating a dead political horse?

These strictures would seem to apply to former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart’s career-ending audit about which much reportorial and commentary ink has been spilled. At this point, it seems safe to say that Stewart’s political reputation has suffered irremediable damage. Stewart’s withdrawal from her race for Governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket was occasioned by the publication of an audit’s findings. The audit was commissioned by the incoming Democrat Mayor of New Britain, Robert (Bobby) Sanchez, and conducted by a putative “non-partisan” law firm, Crumbie Law Group.

In recent days, we find another audit has tickled the interest of some Connecticut reporters, this one involving a substantial cast of political characters: Hartford City Treasurer Carmen Sierra, Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, City Council President T.J. Clarke, discharged Hartford Audit Commission Chairman Bruce Rubenstein, recently deposed from the panel, and City Council President T.J. Clarke, among others.

As a general rule, party whistleblowers occupy the same bottom rung on a state’s political latter as peeling paint. The sooner they are scraped off, the better for every active politician. The problem purging must be done efficiently with as little party ruckus as possible. In the Hartford case, eerily similar to the New Britain case, it was not possible discretely to hide the bodies under the political bed.

The most recent update on the story was written by Managing Editor of the Hartford Courant Helen Bennett whose lede suggests further scrutiny might disclose the hidden bodies.

Former Connecticut state treasurer and Hartford City Council president Shawn Wooden resigned from the Hartford Pension Commission citing “significant fiduciary and ethical concerns” under the city’s current treasurer. A week later, City Treasurer Carmen Sierra … “has pushed back, citing what she said is the ‘enormous success’ of the pension fund under her watch. Hartford City Treasurer Carmen Sierra took this stand in a letter to Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and City Council President T.J. Clarke, in which she addressed the fund and claims by former Hartford Audit Commission Chairman Bruce Rubenstein, who was publicly critical of Sierra after he was not reappointed to that panel.”

These events, purposely confusing, have more turns in their course than a scurrying serpent’s spine. And it should not be possible that wrongdoing by Hartford politicians can so easily be smothered by the citation of political successes? The administration of political business in New Britain was no less successful, as witness the many reelections of Erin Stewart, the former Mayor of New Britain and the former Republican gubernatorial contender.

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Rubenstein’s successor, Attorney Kate Torres, we are advised in the Courant story, “was confirmed on April 13, 2026 before Mr. Rubenstein convened any meeting to discuss a potential audit. Under the City Charter, Ms. Torres was seated immediately upon confirmation. Therefore, the April 15 Internal Audit Commission meeting held after her confirmation could be challenged as improper [emphasis mine], as Mr. Rubenstein had already been replaced. Any suggestion of ‘retribution’ [on the part of those who terminated Rubenstein] originates solely from Mr. Rubenstein, not from this office, Sierra’s letter states. Rubenstein had been on the commission since 2013; the audit has since been reapproved.”

Responding to Torres’ circulated letter, Rubenstein quietly noted, according to the Courant, “Treasurer Sierra mentioned a replacement to me about a month before Attorney Torres was nominated and confirmed, and well after the wheels were in motion to audit the MERF [Municipal Employees Retirement Fund] and after people within her orbit told me of problems with her and the MERF and the Treasury Department.”

Wooden’s comments, it should be noted, echo a similar resignation from former commission chairman Joshua Gottfried, who was also removed in April 2026.

There are, the reader may notice, numberless forward and backward steps in this awkward dance, and the dance itself, as some investigative journalists persist in telling us, raises far more interesting questions that have not been answered – because they never were asked - by ducking and bobbing politicians, such as:

1) Have we not learned in the New Britain case that unmonitored state credit cards should never be issued to municipal chief executives who may safely abuse them with impunity? Employees whose continuance in their jobs depends upon the good will of their bosses are unlikely to blow whistles. Why wait for the second shoe to fall before outlawing such practices? Just tote up the additional charges usually incurred by chief executives and add them to their ever increasing – occasionally unearned – salaries.

2) Shouldn’t the newly established “Sanchez Rule” deployed so effectively against a Republican threat apply as well to every incoming municipal chief executive, Republican or Democrat? If audits are good for the goose, why are they not also good for the gander?

By all means, let there be audits – the more audits the better. That is the real lesson of Stewart’s humiliation. If former Republican Mayor Stewart should find her way to jail, room should be made for her Democrat compatriots in crime. Surely a “clean politics” bill in the Democrat dominated legislature can be devised on behalf of pilfered taxpayers in Connecticut who have not yet moved to southern states where solicitous politicians treat their taxpayers more like prized citizens and less like milch cows with swollen utters.

MacCormack, Hanged, Drawn, Quartered, and Fricasseed

2026-06-04T22:00:11.620-04:00

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” – misattributed to Mark Twain

The statements made by Jadon MacCormack on a Facebook posting were not unattributed.

MacCormack wrote, “This ideology” – the transgender and LGBT movement, according to the Hartford Courant – “promotes confusion over clarity, prioritizes feelings over biological reality, and seeks to redefine the natural order of marriage, family, and human identity in ways that directly contradict God-given rights and common sense.”

MacCormack was not called upon to clarify his propositions because those condemning him needed no clarification. He was, unsurprisingly, roundly denounced and asked by all and sundry to resign from his position as the Republican Party nominee for House District 50, currently held by “Patrick S. Boyd of Pomfret, a well-known conservative Democrat who has served in the legislature since 2017 and currently co-chairs the House Democratic Moderate Caucus,” according to the Courant.

Democrat Governor Ned Lamont said, “The hateful comments made repeatedly by this Republican candidate for public office are unacceptable and completely out of step with Connecticut values. Connecticut is a state that welcomes people, respects differences, and believes everyone deserves to be treated with dignity. Hate and discrimination have no home here, and I will continue to stand with the LGBTQ+ community to ensure our state remains a place where everyone feels safe, welcome, and respected.”

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora said, “Mr. MacCormack’s recent comments about Pride Month are his own. They don’t speak for the Republican Party here, and they don’t reflect the priorities our caucus members are running on. They were immature and reckless, and they show a candidate who isn’t ready for the responsibility he’s asking voters to give him. Residents in the 50th District, like voters across the state, want a state representative focused on their paychecks, their property taxes, and their kids’ futures. Mr. MacCormack has shown he isn’t that candidate, and the best thing he can do for the 50th District now is step aside… I will not support a candidate who suggests that people should be jailed or hung based on their sexuality. And for the record, this candidate’s comments have gone far beyond simply calling out Pride Month. Unhinged, violent rhetoric has no place in society, let alone politics.”

State Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding said, “He must step aside. The Senate Republicans and I condemn these comments in the strongest of terms.”

State Republican chairman Ben Proto said, “By invoking historical punishments for individuals based on their sexual conduct and coupling those references with language portraying entire groups of people as threats to society, Mr. MacCormack crossed a line that should never be crossed by anyone seeking public office. Whether intended or not, such rhetoric can be interpreted as validating hostility toward members of the LGBTQ community and contributes to an atmosphere of division and fear.”

Democrat House Speaker Matt Ritter of Hartford and House Majority Leader Jason Rojas issued a joint statement: “The Connecticut House of Representatives includes members and staff who are members of the LGBTQ+ community, and it is sickening to think that this candidate wants to spew this kind of poison in the people’s chamber. I’m sure Jadon will keep howling at the moon. Northeastern Connecticut is smart enough not to listen.”

Kevin Rennie, a former Republican state senator, now a Hartford Courant columnist, wrote, “Republican Jadon MacCormack, who highlights on his campaign website his warbling gospel music as one of his chief accomplishments, has let loose with a full blown moral panic fusillade in his campaign for the 50th House District. The nominee of the party of Lincoln has diagnosed the ills of the eight-town district and found them in four letters: LGBT.”

Republican State Senator Heather Somers, widely celebrated as a moderate Senior Deputy Leader said, “No one should feel unwelcome or uncomfortable because of who they are. These types of divisive politics are tearing communities apart at the seams. My focus is on bringing people together to address Connecticut’s affordability crisis, property tax burden, and build a more prosperous future for everyone.”

Prominent members of the state Democrat Party were delighted to be able to use MacCormack as a campaign foil with which they lustily attacked state and national Republicans.

“The state Democratic Party," the Courant noted, “strongly criticized state Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Greenwich Republican who will be running in the November election [against Lamont]. They noted that MacCormack had his picture taken with Fazio in posts that have been seen on social media, and they noted that Fazio had not reacted as quickly as other Republicans.”

Democrat Party spokesman Ian Clarke said, “This is an endorsed GOP candidate wishing death and AIDS upon millions of LGBTQ+ Americans. Where exactly is Ryan Fazio on this? This is pure hatred, and condemning this kind of inhumanity shouldn’t be hard. MacCormack has campaigned with him, promoted him, and bragged about working with him. If Fazio wants to lead this state, he can start by doing the bare minimum and condemning the bigotry coming from his own political ally.”

“Without mentioning MacCormack by name,” the Courant tells us, “ Fazio said at about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday that the candidate ‘has made several posts that have come to light which seriously violate the values of freedom, safety, and individual rights that Republicans, Americans, and Connecticut residents hold dear… While Democrats continue to run candidates who have been repeatedly charged with serious crimes or are under federal criminal investigation, Republicans hold their candidates to a higher standard. The candidate’s posts and comments are entirely unacceptable, and he should withdraw from the race immediately.”

Democrat contender for the U.S. Senate in Maine Graham Platner has given no indication he plans to bow out of the race following a devastating story –“Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior” -- in the New York Times, a paper that has rarely supported President Donald Trump. Leaning far left, Platner has fallen off the Democrat’s moral bandwagon, and his fall has not caused fellow Democrat Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to reconsider his support of a man that for years has proudly displayed a tattoo replicating the insignia worn by Nazi prison guards in Jewish extermination camps. Platner has so far escaped whipping from moral esthetes such as Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, like Sanders, a Jew.

MacCormack has now been hanged, drawn, quartered, and fricasseed.

It was Voltaire who said if God did not exist, theists would have to invent him, presumably to justify their theism. Turning Voltaire in his head, Dostoyevsky had one of his characters say that if there were no God, atheists would be forced to invent Him to justify their belief that – “without God, all things are possible.”

If there were no MacCormack, majority Democrat politicians in Connecticut would be forced to invent him so they might with impunity denounce all Republicans.

How to Defend the Indefensible, Murphy on Platner

2026-06-02T21:54:22.422-04:00

A CliffNotes version of the case against Graham Platner, Maine’s Democrat Senate frontrunner, may be found in the Connecticut Centinal under the byline Reese On the Radio.

Revelation followed revelation, most of them debilitating: “The most recent revelation: Platner exchanged sexually explicit text messages with multiple women early in his 2023 marriage. His wife discovered them, reported the matter to campaign leadership last year, and the issue was handled privately—reportedly with counseling. When the New York Times and Wall Street Journal published the story days before the primary, Platner dismissed it as ‘gossip’ and ‘journalistic malpractice.’ His wife called the coverage ‘shameful’ and urged focus on ‘the issues.’ Some Democrats muttered about ‘questions to answer,’ but the campaign and base largely treated it as a distraction.”

Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Chris Murphy recently was given the opportunity by Margret Brennan of CBS News to defend the indefensible, and he rose limply to the occasion.

MARGARET BRENNAN: … the campaign for Graham Platner confirmed to CBS on Saturday that the Maine Senate candidate had sent sexually explicit texts to women other than his wife. This is in addition to other past controversies. Does he pass the character test?

SEN. MURPHY: Yeah, I mean, I have not followed this story as closely as others have, but Graham Platner is somebody that served our country, he served his community, he's also made mistakes.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.

SEN. MURPHY: And he has admitted that. Character also involves standing up to people who are bankrupting and corrupting this country, and this race is going to be a contrast between somebody that has put his life on the line for this country against somebody that is literally empowering the moral hollowing out of our nation from the White House. So he certainly admitted that he has made mistakes, but I think this is going to be a pretty clear contrast in Maine between somebody who has spent his life protecting us, versus somebody who seems to be protecting Donald Trump's corruption.

The “somebody that is literally [emphasis mine] empowering the moral hollowing out of our nation from the White House” is Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins. Collins, in Murphy’s view “seems to be protecting Donald Trump’s corruptions.”

Someone friendly to Murphy should point out to him the difference between literally and figuratively hollowing out the United States before he moves onto his next media availability. With what tool did Collins literally hollow out the United States? Somewhere during his political journey to the far-left Murphy should have noticed that Collins is not a Trump lickspittler – not even figuratively. She was the only Republican U.S. congressman in New England voted to impeach Trump.

Reese On the Radio struck exactly the right note when he wrote, “The deeper issue is not Platner’s fitness—voters in Maine will judge that. It is the left’s demonstrated willingness to abandon every standard it spent years imposing on the opposition the moment one of its own becomes useful. This is not evolution or forgiveness. It is the substitution of partisan utility for consistent principle. When sexual conduct, victim-blaming language, racial generalizations, Nazi iconography, and calls to armed struggle are disqualifying only for Republicans, the claims lose all credibility. #MeToo becomes selective enforcement. Racism becomes a club rather than a category. ‘Character matters’ becomes a slogan deployed against enemies and ignored for allies.”

And, of course, the slogan need have no relation to reality. Democrat campaigns in New England, content in accusing Republicans of all manner of associational offenses, need not mention their departure from sound state and federal policy.

We’ve been around this block several times. Murphy’s compatriot in the U.S. Senate Dick Blumenthal self-assuredly accepted a characterization of Supreme Court prospect Judge Brett Kavanaugh that he had, thirty years earlier while in high school, molested Christine Blasey Ford. Ford named a witness to the event who claimed under oath that it had not occurred. If true, the unsupported claim might have cost Kavanaugh a seat on the high court. It is literally true to say Judge Kavanaugh had been unjustly defamed by both Ford and a credulous Blumenthal.

In an account of the now forgotten smear campaign that bears revisiting -- “Blumenthal Revisited, Down The Memory Hole” – Connecticut Commentary noted, “Looking back on these events with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the committee was dubious. She – and anyone listening to Blumenthal’s hearty assurance that she was telling the truth when she said that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had molested her when he and she were students at different high schools thirty (30) years earlier – had assured the committee that a witness to the molestation would testify on her behalf. That witness later testified that she had not witnessed the event as Ford had claimed. Three direct witnesses Blasey Ford identified as having been present when the molestation had occurred testified under oath that they could not support her charge.”

Blumenthal, up for re-election in the next non-presidential campaign, wittingly or not was never held to account by Connecticut’s media for promoting what appeared to be a fraudulent assessment of Kavanagh’s publicaly brutalized character. In a section of the country dominated by Democrats, the media, national and state, should have been, as a matter of course, more contrarian and more vigilant.

Loose Ends: PURA Loses, Looney Leaves, Lamont Reforms Homeschooling

2026-05-30T18:17:50.921-04:00

PURA loses

The title of the Hartford Courant story was worth a thousand words: PURA agrees to settle suit. And the subtitle -- “Authority [PURA] admits improper decision making by ex-chair [Mellissa Gillett]” – could not have gone down the gullet of Governor Lamont, an early Gillett enthusiast, easily. Crow is nearly always indigestible.

Lamont robustly defended his choice of Gillett as chairwoman of PURA almost to its inglorious conclusion.

Gillett was appointed to her position with great fanfare. Finally, PURA was to have at its chair a woman who did not flinch in a fight with Connecticut’s energy distributors. Following an interview with David Roberts in 2024, Connecticut Commentary noted that in the interview Gillett had forcefully summarized her regulatory philosophy:

“What is the point in constructing a regulatory regime that never or rarely says ‘no’ to Big Business monopolies that can by their very weight and political influence suppress any attempt to lower increases in their price structure? What Connecticut needs, according to Gillett, is a compensating institution, PURA, that can say no to such monopolistic practices. PURA, when operating successfully, should ‘serve in place of the free market’ [emphasis mine] that has been displaced by monopolies using the governing authority to advance monopolistic interests.”

That philosophy soon collided with a rocky reality. According to the Hartford Courant, “Gillett resigned under pressure nine months later, after it was revealed that she had withheld evidence from a court in another case, and Gov. Ned Lamont since has arranged what amounts to a fresh start in utility regulation. He replaced her with former consumer advocate Thomas Wiehl and appointed new commissioners to an authority that expanded from three to five members… The utilities complained in the suit that by concealing the fact that she was delegating important decisions herself, alone, Gillett was violating law establishing PURA’s regulatory processes. Among other things, the utilities were being denied appeal rights to which they would have been entitled had they known decisions were being made by a single commissioner.”

The utilities were more than generous: “… by offering to settle in return for an acknowledgment of Gillett’s [improper unilateral] decision-making, [the utilities agreed] to the dismissal – without costs to any party [emphasis mine] – of what was shaping up as protracted, costly and ultimately losing litigation for the state.”

Looney Leaves

The Democrat dominated General Assembly recently bade a fond farewell to Martin Looney, a political fixture of 33 years at the Capitol who served his party loyally as a gatekeeper that prevented Republican rude attempts to introduce legislation to various committees, all controlled by Democrats. Looney served as President Pro Tempore of the Connecticut Senate since 2015. Previously, he served 12 years as House Majority Leader and is well known for having championed progressive legislation on gun control, tax credits for low-income workers, drug cost caps, marijuana legalization, and death penalty repeal.

Looney was polite to Republicans and permitted them to talk without obstruction. But then, Republicans would likely agree, talk is cheap and political action in a legislature dominated by Democrats dear. Bills in the General Assembly are usually fashioned by the Democrat caucus in proceedings closed to both Republicans and the general public, and the committees, also controlled by Democrats, are attached to those caucus rooms by inviolable umbilical cords.

Distribution wise, legislative action in Connecticut is far from democratic. The distribution of political forces in Connecticut has not changed much over the years: There are in the state, according to the Independent Voter Project (May 30, 2026), 35.05% registered Democrats, 21.06% registered Republicans, and 43.89% Independents or Unaffiliateds. None of the Independents are represented as such in the General Assembly.

Looney is now “out of the story,” as the Icelandic Sagas claim when a central character has made his last appearance.

He likely will be replaced by yet another neo-progressive – such is the prevailing tendency within New England northeast states, as witness the seizure of New York City’s mayoral office by Zohran Mamdani , a full-throated Marxist.

It seems only yesterday that former Mayor Ed Koch, advised that a judge who had been mugged had never-the-less given a too lenient sentence to a serial mugger, exploded, “Well, mug him again!” During his presidential attempt, Barry Goldwater advised, “If you knock off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.”

Connecticut has in the past few decades adopted California and neo-progressive New England as its political template. One may be sure that Looney’s replacement will not stray far from what has become the neo-progressive norm faithfully represented by the departing Looney.

Homeschooling Reform

Lamont, we are told, has signed into law a new homeschooling reform law. The bill, we are told, has been somewhat “watered down” from a Democrat caucus approved version. But anti-democratic caucus government in Connecticut remains virulent, and bills watered down will in the future be watered up – you can bet the farm on that.

Murphy As Political Prophet

2026-05-28T08:19:52.993-04:00

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has written a book, a neo-progressive manifesto that dismisses conservative realities – the free market, for instance -- as “cults” or heretical departures from the political cult of neo-progressivism. His book is titled Crisis of the Common Good and is certain to be received with worshipful hosannas by the legacy media’s leftist chorus.

The title of the book is itself a knockoff of Robert Reich’s earlier work entitled The Common Good. Most of what is praiseworthy about Murphy is derivative. Murphy’s book is subtitled, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.

In a confessional sense, Murphy does not address in his book in what sense the neo-progressive movement has “broken” America. But then, the book is not a confessional. It is a tangle of wormwood eaten, boastful, and dry as dust campaign solicitations.

The expression “the common good” has a long and honorable literary lineage. “I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support.”

The expression “common good” is useful when it describes voluntary efforts on the part of good people to support those in need, and the need need not be exclusively monetary. To move what is called by Christians caritas from the personal religious realm to the public political realm diminishes to some extent the virtue of godly love. St. Thomas Aquinas understood caritas to mean “the friendship of man for God.” It was, he wrote, the most excellent of virtues, in accord with 1 Cor 13:13 ('but the greatest of these is love').

Once doing good is no longer a voluntary affair exercised by individual good people towards those in need the goodness is diminished; it becomes an undifferentiated good performed by political operatives for, to put it bluntly, self-inflating reasons. Politicians, we ought always to remember, are not “gods” of the polis.

“Let the good you do be done in secret, so that your giving may be in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” is an admonition unpracticed by politicians operating in the political realm, where virtue is not its own reward. Politicians generally ask others to contribute money to their reelection efforts so that, parceling out the money, they may be bathed in a derivative virtue. Murphy does this often and well in his new book.

Some reviews of the book have been justly critical, others unintentionally amusing.

The book touches on a lamentable decline of civic virtue and shared purpose in the United States over the past fifty years. Murphy attributes the decline to six “false cults”: profit, globalism, technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption, forces that have resulted in communal fragmentation, the “undermining of democracy”, the newest Democrat Party campaign catchphrase, spiritual rootlessness, and a “winner takes all” political process that has empowered the wealthy and well-connected, according to Amazon’s Political Wire.

Murphy here is biting off considerably more than he has chewed in his book, though all of these talking points have been mentioned by him countless times on his campaign trails.

Publishers Weekly kindly characterizes the book a “sharp but uneven analysis.” Murphy is praised for his insights into alienation and economic disparity, unoriginal talking points. However, the publication notes, some historical examples and policy proposals are “unevenly developed.” The review “highlights Murphy’s personal anecdotes, such as his son’s youth hockey experience and a meeting with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as effective illustrations of broader societal trends, though some historical references are considered shaky.”

The review does not touch upon Murphy’s fairly recent separation from his wife and children as an instance of spiritual rootlessness or the “quiet desperation” that, Henry David Thoreau tells us, is the lot of most men. People who frequent their mail boxes often, Thoreau tells us, “have not heard from themselves in a long while.”

St. Augustine, still bathed in paganism despite the efforts of his Christian mother to bring him to the faith, prays to the Christian God to lead him from erotic temptation – “but not yet.”

Augustine and Thoreau are mentioned here only to demonstrate that the concerns tormenting Murphy are not new. They are as ancient as sin and redemption.

A personal narrative such as The Confessions of St. Augustine written by a re-Christianized politician would be most welcomed in our age of rootlessness and spiritually murderous quiet desperation, but Murphy’s book, much too self-celebratory, is not it.

How to Avoid Solving a Problem, and Signs of the Times

2026-05-26T21:10:09.523-04:00

The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC) for donations to scholarship granting organizations is simple and readily understandable. According to the IRS, “Beginning January 1, 2027, individual taxpayers may be able to claim a Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC) for certain cash contributions up to $1700 to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). A state or the District of Columbia (state) must choose to participate in the FSTC and provide a list of SGOs in that state to the IRS before an individual taxpayer can donate to an SGO within that state and claim the FSTC.”

As of April 26, 2026, the following states have signed onto the program: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Connecticut, not known in the past for allowing federal dollars to slip through its clutches, is not at the moment a participating state.

The Republican Nominating Convention’s choice for governor, Ryan Fazio, finds the opposition to the FSTC program somewhat odd. Why would the governing power in Connecticut – Governor Ned Lamont and the state’s left leaning General Assembly turn up its nose at what he has called, somewhat sardonically, “Literally free money?” Fazio, a Republican whose conservative bona fides few question, fully understands “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” Milton Friedman’s memorable locution.

Governor Lamont at first embraced the idea, but later had second thoughts. Political commentators afflicted by gnawing curiosity are now wondering what or who changed Lamont’s mind. During election periods, we all know, even the soundest of economic principles embraced by presumptive moderates tend to realign with the preferences of powerful political interests.

“States still have to opt in [to the program], CTMirror tells us, “… and those that have are mostly Republican-led. Colorado was an early exception, and New York signaled in early May that it also plans to join. Connecticut has not, and Gov. Ned Lamont has indicated he’d rather wait for the federal government to release more guidance on how the program works. He expects that to be available by January.”

And by January 2027, the off-year presidential elections in Connecticut will have concluded. Democrat opponents of FSTC by that time will have ushered into office both Lamont and a left-leaning Democrat Party dominated General Assembly.

“The program,” we are told by CTMirror, “has received support from advocates for private school choice and religious education, as it eases the cost of tuition.” As suggested by the number of states that have pledged to adopt the program, there is abroad in the United States a vast number of parents who are unhappy with the quality of education their children, rich and poor alike, are receiving. They view the FSTC program as a small window carved into a pedagogical holding cell they hope to escape. Private and religious schools are relatively few in number. It would be absurd to suppose they alone are responsible for the positive reception to the FSTC program in 27 states.

Connecticut Education Association President Kate Dias gave the game away when she said tax credits and state voucher systems were part of the same effort. CTMirror pointed out to Dias that Connecticut “does not have a voucher system, nor have legislators from either party articulated much interest in creating one. And vouchers don’t have a direct bearing on the federal scholarship tax credit, which comes out of the federal budget, not any state’s.”

Sure, sure, Dias responded, but they are alike in the most important respect: “The intention and the motivation of the federal government are to set up a nationwide infrastructure for school vouchers. That, Dias said, forces public schools to compete for attendance — and by extension, funding. States typically base public school funding around enrollment.”

Dias is saddened by the very concept of the proposed federal scholarship tax credit. “It makes me sad,” she confessed, “that we’ve created a competitive environment [emphasis mine] as opposed to one where we are able to equitably look and say, ‘OK, this is where the opportunities are.’”

Behind Dias’ fear of competition lie several supportive battalions, all politically armed to the teeth and determined to eradicate competitive pedagogical disturbances such as Catholic schools, private schools, and charter schools.

As a portent of things to come, public hearings in which parents – the first line of defense against inadequate education – are permitted to protest publically against attempts to politicize homeschooling must at all costs be frustrated by Democrat politicians in hock to powerful state education union heads that support state rather than municipal control of education programs.

Historically, Connecticut’s municipalities determined for decades both the nature of curricula throughout the state and the financing of local education. And need it be pointed out that Abraham Lincoln, among other notable political leaders in the U.S. and Europe, was home schooled. The highly poetic Gettysburg Address that used to be recited every Memorial Day in most major cemeteries in Connecticut is a testament to Lincoln’s poetic prowess. Most postmodern politicians could not hold a candle to Lincoln, whose Second Inaugural Address still rates among the most powerful political utterances of the last two centuries.

Lincoln’s memorable words, inscribed by a woman sculptress on the North interior wall of the Lincoln Memorial, still smolder in the hearts of free men and women everywhere:

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses 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 offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

What Connecticut politician aflame with the latest indignity can soar to such rhetorical heights? Who among us remembers the last utterance of any Connecticut politician blessed with an Ivy League education?

Lincoln was forever competing against his last best effort at a time when it was thought that competition raised up men and women, but that time perhaps has passed.

Elliot And The Lamonts Among Us

2026-05-21T22:58:15.545-04:00

The Lamonts, Governor Ned Lamont and his lovely wife Annie Lamont, an accomplished money-making investor, have been with us a long while. Ned Lamont first entered politics under the sheltering wings of former Governor and U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican millionaire bumped by Connecticut Republicans way back in 1988 when they realized that Senator Weicker, who as governor graced the state with an income tax, was a Teddy Kennedy Democrat in disguise. Weicker served in the U.S. Senate for three terms from 1971 to 1989.

Weicker’s Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating during his last year in the Senate was ten points higher than that of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, not a “moderate Republican.” Moderate Connecticut Republicans espied Weicker’s Democrat Party leanings when rarely subtle Weicker boasted of himself that he was “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.”

Neo-progressive revolutionists with knives in their brains, socialists teetering on the edge of communism such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, have left the Lamonts relatively untouched. The Lamonts are multi-millionaires who live in Greenwich, Connecticut, part of the state’s so called “Gold Coast,” a place where millionaires live and die in relative obscurity, safe from the torments that neo-progressives are fond of inflicting on redundant millionaires.

The evil-rich in Greenwich, now trending Democrat, want to live out their days in the state’s Gold Coast sanctuary in comfort, unruffled by Oscar Wilde’s remark that Americans are people who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Neo-progressives are, of course, full of Nietzschean “ressentiment,” a term in philosophy indicating a form of hostility directed toward an object perceived as the cause of one’s frustration or loss of power. More potent than envy, ressentiment is a hateful desire for revenge that arises from a sense of weakness, inferiority, or thwarted agency. The victims of ressentiment are often incapable of true wit or humor.

Most Democrats view Lamont’s reelection as a done deal, but before reelection he must run the neo-progressive knout. The anticipated primary between Lamont and Josh Elliott, a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives representing the 88th district since 2017, promises to be a humorless and witless affair. Elliott, as serious as a pile of rocks, has not been convincingly accused of committing humor.

Connecticut’s media has anointed Elliot with its prized neo-progressive affirmations. Elliot, we are told, is the founder and chairman of the Tax Equity Caucus, which works to ensure “fair taxation” in Connecticut. As elsewhere in the nation, the super-rich in Connecticut pay a disproportionate share of taxes. Millionaires pay a much higher share of federal taxes as a percentage of income than the general public, even if the dollar amount varies widely. Elliott has supported legislation to raise the minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick days for all workers; sponsored bills to reform the electoral system, including restoring voting rights for formerly incarcerated individuals and implementing ranked-choice voting; and championed the elimination of the religious exemption for MMR vaccinations for K-12 students. His gubernatorial campaign is laser focused on the advancement of neo-progressive policies to address problems that, some conservatives suspect, have been caused by neo-progressive politicians like Elliott and Mamdani.

With all the zeal of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, Bill Buckley, the most respected conservative polemicist of his day, valiantly set out to exclude from the American conservative movement anyone lingering in anti-Semitic political hallways. He did so by publically rebuking leading conservatives, while providing a standard to gage Anti-Semitism in his short book In Search of Anti-Semitism.

Moderate Democrats in Connecticut – Lamont is reputed to be one – have not been as anxious to swab their decks of immoderate elements. Lamont lacks the necessary passion to attack with energy disabling extreme neo-progressive saboteurs in his party, a courtesy that may not be returned in equal measure by Elliot in what may turn out to be a bruising primary campaign.

Mamdani has shown neo-progressives that they might ascend to power positions within a once moderate Democrat Party provided they possess the requisite courage of their convictions. Marx, Lenin and Stalin, the Trinity of Soviet era socialism, were convinced, not without reason, that capitalists would finance their purchase of the rope necessary to hang the capitalists, invariably portrayed as the enemies of the working classes.

There appears to be no elbow room on Elliott’s left for pretentious Democrat moderates like the Lamonts. Ned affects neo-progressivism during political campaigns but, having secured office, it is anticipated he will revert to type. Both Annie and Ned are successful venture capitalist millionaires. Annie, in particular, appears to have done very well in financial money markets. We are told in a piece appearing in The Connecticut Centinal, that “independent journalists Tony DeAngelo and Professor Bob Swick have relentlessly documented a deeper, more troubling pattern: no-bid state contracts funneled to OAK-backed companies, official business conducted on a private family office server, suspicious Cayman Islands offshore vehicles tied to university foundation money, and a network of FOI-exempt nonprofits that shielded decision-making from public view.

Annie Lamont, we are told in her HT/FT bio, “co-founded Oak HC/FT in 2014. Prior to founding Oak HC/FT, Annie spent 28 years at Oak Investment Partners, where she served as a Managing Partner and led the healthcare and fintech practices. Over the course of her career, she has invested in category-defining companies across the healthcare and financial services industries, including Aspire Health, athenahealth, CareBridge, Devoted Health, iHealthTechnologies (which became Cotiviti), NetSpend, OneMedical, and VillageMD.”

No neo-progressive is she.

Connecticut Democrats, On the March Or On The Run

2026-05-18T19:45:40.599-04:00

Governor Ned Lamont spoke over the heads of moderate Democrat delegates to a different neo-progressive constituency in his acceptance speech as the Democrat Nominating Convention concluded. He was addressing the 25% of delegates who voted for Josh Elliott, a neo-progressive heartthrob some quasi-socialist Democrats in Connecticut regard as the Zohran Mamdani of Connecticut.

Elliot, who garnered a sufficient number of delegate votes to primary Lamont, has vowed to engage the governor, considered by some a moderate Democrat, in a primary.

The delegate count, Elliott has said, did not adequately portray his delegate support. He believes he would have won the endorsement had the delegate vote been anonymous.

“People were afraid to cast their votes against the governor,” he said. “I’ve been hearing threat after threat from people if they voted against the governor today. I’ve been telling people to channel that frustration into energy over the next three months. We have a 169-town strategy. We will have field organizers at every corner of the state. Our team will talk with every single Democrat, and we will be at every town committee in the state. We are going to win in August, and we are going to win in November.”

In his own post-nomination convention comments, Lamont vigorously struck the usual Democrat piñata.

“We’re challenging one of the most dangerous, extreme, and corrupt presidents in my lifetime,” said the usual mild-mannered moderate. “And I’ve been around for a while. This is why it’s important Democrats stand tall, stay united, and show what we’re made of. We will beat him back and win back Congress this fall and take control of our destiny. It’s just ironic that this guy is in the White House at the same time when we are celebrating our 250th anniversary. A country created by the best sentence ever written ‘all men are created equal.’ But when Donald Trump reads that, he thinks it means all white men are created equal, and it doesn’t mean women. And by the way it doesn’t mean you, you and you. That’s what this election is all about. Regardless of race, color, creed, what you believe or who you love, you belong here in Connecticut.”

Anyone who has been around in politics for a while knows that political targets are mobile. Trump moves through political events like a speeding bullet, and the state’s congressional and gubernatorial elections will not be decided until the political clock reaches V-Day, November 2026. Midterm congressional elections take place halfway between presidential elections. Trump will not be on the ballot in November and, despite Democrat caterwauling to the contrary, it is absolutely certain he will not be on the ballot when the presidential election rolls around two years later.

Americans are used to gaudy campaign rhetoric, but time marches on. The Democrat’s target – a president who will establish a fascist-like, Stalinist-like, end-of-democracy era of autocratic rule – is a disappearing target, a campaign scarecrow. Trump, for instance, has not proposed eliminating the Electoral College, a political devise adopted during the founding to prevent large population centers from determining elections. He had not proposed packing the Supreme Court, a political measure solidly rejected during the presidential administration of Franklin Roosevelt, a strongman president who served four terms in office before he and succeeding presidents were rebuked by the Twenty‑Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on February 27, 1951, limiting the presidential office to two terms.

Democrats in Connecticut have so far made numerous political and programmatic errors, some short term, others long term.

The most serious long term error lies in the buried assumption that neo-progressivism in the United States, swiftly on its route to full scale socialism -- as in Zohran Mamdani’s benighted New York City -- is the preferred ideology of Connecticut voters. Socialism preeminently is a doctrine that relies heavily on envy – the bad kind -- and a revolutionary expropriation of wealth on behalf of the poor and lower middle class. Even Connecticut’s poor, languishing in long term politically produced poverty, know that all this is a false promise made by a seemingly omnipotent state that has, for more than thirty years in the state’s large cities, created the problems it long has purported to cure.

The second long term error lies in a misreading of the state’s disenfranchised Independents, more properly called unaffiliateds. Some unaffiliateds are born that way, other have defected from one of the two preeminent political parties. Henry David Thoreau considered himself a party of one.” When he resigned from the Friars’ Club, Groucho Marx wrote in his resignation letter, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

The mistake is to regard such people as easily persuaded by political rhetoric. Those who decline to participate in the life of established political parties cannot for various reasons be moved as a bloc towards political parties. But it is likely that the unaffiliated breakdown patterns the breakdown of political parties across the state: There are in Connecticut 22% registered Republicans, 36% registered Democrats and 44% Independents/Others. We do not know how many Independents are disgruntled dropouts from the state’s two major political parties, but we can hazard a reasonable guess that within the dropout independent/Other group there are more independents disgruntled with Connecticut’s hegemonic Democrat Party.

The Republican Party in Connecticut must forge a new vocabulary to give it an edge over majority Democrats. And that vocabulary will of necessity at first seem unsettling to status quo ears.

Blumenthal Revisited, Down the Memory Hole

2026-05-16T14:11:03.519-04:00

Blumenthal

The blog below was Published Six Years Ago. Looking back on these events with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the committee was dubious. She – and anyone listening to Blumenthal’s hearty assurance that she was telling the truth when she said that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had molested her when he and she were students at different high schools thirty (30) years earlier – had assured the committee that a witness to the molestation would testify on her behalf. That witness later testified that she had not witnessed the event as Ford had claimed. Three direct witnesses Blasey Ford identified as having been present when the molestation had occurred testified under oath that they could not support her charge.

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s term expires in January 2029

___________________________

Kavanaugh v. Blumenthal

Before Judge Amy Barrett is called to answer possible objections to her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, it may be useful to revisit U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s questioning of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, US Senator Dick Blumenthal warmly welcomed Christine Blasey Ford as follows, according to a transcript of the hearing testimony:

BLUMENTHAL: Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

I want to join in thanking you for being here today. And just tell you I have found your testimony powerful, incredible [Blumenthal perhaps meant to say “credible”] and I believe you. You’re a teacher, correct?

FORD: Correct.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, you have given America an amazing teaching moment, and you may have other moments in the classroom, but you have inspired and you have enlightened America. You have inspired and given courage to women to come forward, as they have done to every one of our offices and many other public places. You have inspired and you have enlightened men in America to listen respectfully to women survivors, and men who have survived sexual attack, and that is a profound public service, regardless of what happens with this nomination. And so the teachers of America, the people of America should be really proud of what you have done.

Let me tell you why I believe you: not only because of the prior consistent statements and the polygraph tests and your request for an FBI investigation and your urging that this committee hear from other witnesses who could corroborate or dispute your story, but also, you have been very honest about what you cannot remember. And someone composing a story can make it all come together in a seamless way, but someone who is honest — I speak from my experience as a prosecutor, as well — is also candid about what she or he cannot remember.

Q: It is interesting, perhaps telling, that Blumenthal uses the word “credible” rather than truthful. Blumenthal, as Attorney General for two decades in Connecticut, is familiar with court jargon. He has himself argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Testimony can be credible – that is, believable -- without being true, or in conformity with the architecture of facts. In a period of intense partisanship – welcome to the 21^st century – there are two kinds of credible or believable world views, Democrat and Republican. We should all bear in mind Otto von Bismarck’s observation: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” Supreme Court nominations since Democrats first borked Judge Robert Bork have been a combination of all three – hunt, war and election. Lies can be credible and believable; indeed, they fail most conspicuously when they are neither.

When Blumenthal says “I believe you” to Ford, he is asserting only his own certitude, not her’s. There is a problem. Certitude is a quality of propositions. Blumenthal is here imputing certainty to persons. He believes Ford because she is a woman accusing of improper behavior a man he does not wish to join the Court.

In his role as a U.S. Senator in the hearing proceeding, Blumenthal, as well as other partisan senators, is a juror. There can be no adequate defense against a charge viewed as true when a trier of fact, a jury, is willing to believe a charge because a testifier is a woman, whereas the accused is a man whose public reputation he wishes to despoil. Properly speaking, Kavanaugh, at the time the incident was alleged to have occurred more than thirty years earlier, was a boy in high school, and Ford was a girl in high school. Judges and jurors in trials know that evidence three decades old is perishable.

Here are some facts that were elicited during the hearing. 1) Blasey Ford did not report the incident to police at the time it had occurred, three decades before her senate testimony. Indeed, she initially spoke of the incident to no one; 2) at first reluctant to testify, she was pressed into service after having been identified publicly by Democrat politicians familiar with her account, many of whom opposed the Kavanaugh nomination for political rather than jurisprudential reasons. Kavanaugh was awarded the U.S. Bar Association's highest rating. We do not know whether Blumenthal was one of those who outed Blasey Ford; 3) three direct witnesses Blasey Ford identified as having been present when the molestation had occurred testified under oath that they could not support her charge. Senator Ted Cruz rang this point like a Liberty Bell when he said:

A fair-minded assessor of facts would then look to, “What else do we know when you have conflicting testimony?” Well we know that Dr. Ford identified three fact witnesses who she said observed what occurred. All three of those fact witnesses have stated on the record under penalty of perjury that they do not recall what she had alleging had happened.

They have not only not corroborated her charges, they have explicitly refuted her charges.

A contemporary calendar in which Kavanaugh disclosed his associations and whereabouts showed that Blasey Ford’s timeline and accounts of Kavanaugh’s molestation could not have been factual. By the time Blumenthal questioned Kavanaugh, the case against him was already collapsing under the weight of elicited evidence, as the transcript indicates.

GRASSLEY: (OFF-MIKE) Senator Blumenthal.

BLUMENTHAL: Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

Good afternoon, Judge Kavanaugh. As a federal judge, you’re aware of the jury instruction falsus in unibus (sic), falsus in omnibus, [false in one, fa,se in all] are you not? You’re aware of that jury instruction?

KAVANAUGH: Yes, I’m — I am.

BLUMENTHAL: You know what it means?

KAVANAUGH: You can translate it for me, senator. You can do it better than I can.

BLUMENTHAL: False in one thing, false in everything. Meaning in jury instructions that we — some of us as prosecutors have heard many times, is — told the jury that they can disbelieve a witness if they find them to be false in one thing.

So the core of why we’re here today really is credibility. Let me talk…

The jury instruction cited by Blumenthal apparently did not apply to Blasey Ford.

KAVANAUGH: But (ph) the core of why we’re here is an allegation for which the four witnesses present have all said it didn’t happen.

This was nervy of the judge under scrutiny, and Blumenthal quickly changed gears, so he thought.

BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you about Renate Dolphin who lives in Connecticut. She thought these yearbook statements were, quote, “Horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.” end quote, because Renate Alumnus clearly implied some boast of sexual conquest. And that’s the reason that you apologized to her, correct?

KAVANAUGH: That’s false, speaking about the yearbook and she — she said she and I never had any sexual interaction. So your question…

BLUMENTHAL: But…

There can be no “but.” The woman cited by Blumenthal denied the planted imputation that Kavanaugh had had questionable sex with her. Kavanaugh rose to her defense, genuinely angrily.

KAVANAUGH: … your question is false and I’ve addressed that in the opening statement. And so, your question is based on a false premise and really does great harm to her. I don’t know why you’re bringing this up, frankly, doing great harm to her. By even bringing her name up here is really unfortunate.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, calling someone an alumnus in that way, was actually interpreted…

KAVANAUGH: Well, implying what you’re implying what you’re implying about…

BLUMENTHAL: … by a number of your football friends at the time of boasting of sexual conquest. That’s the reason that I’m bringing it up. And it conflicts…

KAVANAUGH: Yes. No, it’s false.

BLUMENTHAL: … with…

KAVANAUGH: You’re implying that. Look what you’re bringing up right now about her. Look what you’re doing.

BLUMENTHAL: … Mr. Chairman, I ask that…

KAVANAUGH: Don’t bring her name up.

Blumenthal raised a point of order. Kavanaugh’s objections were answers, or an unsuccessful attempt at gallantry, not interruptions.

BLUMENTHAL: … these interruptions not be subtracted from my time.

GRASSLEY: Very well (ph). Ask your question and then let…

KAVANAUGH: She’s a great person. She’s always been a great person. We never had any sexual interaction. By bringing this up, you’re just — just dragging her through the mud. It’s just unnecessary.

GRASSLEY: Proceed, Senator Blumenthal (ph).

BLUMENTHAL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You’ve made reference, judge, to a sworn statement I believe by Mark Judge to the committee. Is that correct?

KAVANAUGH: I made reference to what Mark Judge’s lawyer sent to the committee.

BLUMENTHAL: You know (ph), it’s not a sworn statement, is it?

KAVANAUGH: It would — under penalty of felony.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, it’s a statement signed by his lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder. It is six cursory and conclusory sentences. Are you saying that that is a substitute for an investigation by the FBI or some interview by the FBI under oath?

KAVANAUGH: Under penalty of felony, he said that this kind of event didn’t happen and that I never did or would have done something like that. And…

BLUMENTHAL: As a federal judge, you always want the best evidence don’t you?

Here the interrogatory descends into self-destructive irony. The “best evidence” had all along supported Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony.

KAVANAUGH: … Senator, he has said and all the witnesses present — look at Ms. Keyser’s statement, she’s

BLUMENTHAL: Let me…

KAVANAUGH: Dr. Ford’s longtime friend… who denied Ford’s testimony that she was present when the alleged molestation had occurred. Better run away.

BLUMENTHAL: … let me move on to another topic. You’ve testified to this committee this morning — this afternoon, quote, “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Is it your testimony that the motivation of the courageous woman who sat where you did just a short time ago was revenge on behalf of a left-wing conspiracy or the Clintons?

KAVANAUGH: Senator, I said in my opening statement that she preferred confidentially. And her confidentially was — was destroyed by the actions of this committee.

Run away.

BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you this, in a speech that you gave at Yale you — you described, quote, “Falling out of the bus onto the front steps of the Yale Law School at 4:45 a.m.” and…

KAVANAUGH: I wasn’t…

BLUMENTHAL: … then…

KAVANAUGH: … I wasn’t describing me. I organized…

BLUMENTHAL: … trying to…

KAVANAUGH: … Senator. Senator, let me finish, please. I organized a third-year end of school party for 30 of my classmates to rent a bus to go to Fenway Park in Boston, which was about a three-hour trip.

I bought all the tickets. You and I have discussed that before. I bought all the baseball tickets. I rented the bus. I organized the whole trip.

We went to Fenway Park. Roger Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox. We had a great time. George Brett was playing third base for the Royals — actually, he was playing left field that night. And he — and we went to the game, and got back, and then we went out. It was a great night of friendship.

BLUMENTHAL: I — I apologize for interrupting, judge, but I need to finish the quote before I ask you the question…

KAVANAUGH: I wasn’t talking about…

BLUMENTHAL: … The quote ends…

GRASSLEY: OK, we’ll let (ph)…

BLUMENTHAL: … the quote ends that you tried to, quote, “piece things back together,” end quote, to recall what happened that night. Meaning…

KAVANAUGH: I know what happened.

BLUMENTHAL: … Well, you…

GRASSLEY: Judge, let — will you quickly answer your question? And then I’m going to let him answer you…

KAVANAUGH: I know what — I know what happened that night.

BLUMENTHAL: I’ll finish asking my question…

GRASSLEY: Please, go ahead…

BLUMENTHAL: … your honor (ph).

GRASSLEY: … but do it quickly.

BLUMENTHAL: Doesn’t that imply to you that you had to piece things back together, you had to ask others what happened that night?

KAVANAUGH: No, it…

GRASSLEY: OK. You — you take your time now and answer the question.

KAVANAUGH: … Yes.

GRASSLEY: And then, Senator Crapo.

KAVANAUGH: Definitely not. I know exactly what happened that night. It was a great night of fun. I was so happy that — it was great camaraderie. Everyone looks back fondly on the trip to Fenway Park. And then we went out together, a group of classmates. And I know exactly what happened the whole night. And I’m happy.

And here comes the kitchen sink.

BLUMENTHAL: Judge, do you — do you believe Anita Hill?

GRASSLEY: Senator — Senator Crapo.

GRAHAM?: (OFF-MIKE) Time is up (ph). Your time is up (ph)…

God bless the clock. Barrett is due to be interrogated -- likely mauled by mostly male Democrats -- by Kavanaugh's interrogators this Tuesday and Wednesday, after having on Monday recorded and carved out their posturings for use in the upcoming elections.

Barrett v. Blumenthal, Day One

It has been said of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal that there is no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between him and a television camera. On the day after Judge Amy Barrett’s first appearance before the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal’s picture appeared twice in a Hartford paper. He was prominently featured in both an AP story, “Barrett makes case as next justice on the Supreme Court,” and a separate Connecticut story, “Blumenthal says fate of Obamacare is on the line.”

Blumenthal is used to receiving gushingly favorable press in his home state. So, no surprise there.

The first day of Barrett’s testimony was not devoted to the questioning of the nominee by senators. Barrett briefly addressed the assembled senators, after which the senators addressed Barrett, sitting mutely before them, looking somewhat like a pillar of salt wearing a medical mask. The interrogatories occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday. What is the real purpose, some may wonder, of this awkward preamble to the hearing?

Barrett, perhaps anticipating hostile questioning from Democrats, was permitted to make an initial statement, in the course of which she said, according to the AP story, that Americans “deserve an independent Supreme Court that interprets our Constitution and laws as they are written.” And the senators were permitted to make statements – political pitches, really, to their separate constituencies that later may be carved out and presented to voters in campaign clips before their upcoming elections, which have already commenced.

As quoted by the reporter in the Hartford paper, Blumenthal’s message was: “Your nomination” – the senator, full of an unbending resolve, was speaking directly to the pillar of salt – “is about the Republican goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare they seem to detest so much.”

Blumenthal has not yet told us how a single likely Supreme Court Justice would be able to “repeal” -- be it noted, a legislative term -- an act passed by Congress. Supreme Court Justices should not be in the business of re-writing congressional bills, the exclusive province of the legislature. This was a point made by all sitting Associate Justices during their separate appearances before the senators on the Judiciary Committee, not only originalist members of the court. The point Barrett stressed in her opening statement, emphasized by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her own testimony, was that justices of the high court should say whether laws are or are not constitutional and leave the legislative repair work to such as Blumenthal, whose detestation of originalism and originalist justices was barely concealed .

Perhaps Blumenthal did not hear her statement because he was anxious to present a political point before the November elections in his own state.

The point he did manage to make was apparently lost on reporters in Connecticut, which was this: Democrats, who believe the U.S. Constitution is a document that should be altered – some would say deformed -- by high court decisions, want justices to act as the spear points in a progressive remaking of the very nature of constitutional governance.

Indeed, that is why Barrett, whose ambition is far more humble, has been singled out by Blumenthal and other progressive saboteurs as a menace. She was treated as such by Blumenthal, who refused to meet with her prior to her hearing, a discourtesy unusual even for Blumenthal. The snub heard round Connecticut is mentioned in Connecticut Commentary.

In the meantime, Democrats such as Connecticut’s sainted Senator From Planned Parenthood, Dick Blumenthal, who denied Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett the courtesy of a private meeting before her anticipated auto de fa, are busy strewing faggots at her feet and will not be satisfied with anything less than a public humiliation, followed by a public burning. The nation’s shameless mainstream media will help light the Democrat’s Senate Judiciary Hearing pyre. Barrett, don’t you know, is a member of a Christian “cult”, a Catholic charismatic movement warmly embraced by papists such as Pope Francis and all the bishops in Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s Catholic Church.

The message to Catholics could not be plainer: It’s OK for Pentecostals to acknowledge the workings of the Holy Spirit in human history, but not Catholics. It’s OK for Catholics to honor saints such as Francis and Aquinas, but to aspire to be like either is cultism.

At the last moment, Democrats apparently decided not to claw Barrett’s Catholicism during their hearing. The pawing, Democrat senators decided, should be sufficiently subtle, not embarrassingly overt. It is not good manners, but rather political considerations that had persuaded Democrats to paw rather than claw.

Blumenthal v. Barrett, Day Two

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, before interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett on day two of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings, laid before Barrett, according to a story in The Hill, a non-negotiable demand.

“Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), The Hill reported, “on Monday urged Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from any case involving the election that comes before the Supreme Court, as Democrats prepare to push her for such a commitment as part of her confirmation hearings.”

In a prepared remark, Blumenthal intoned, “Your participation, let me be very blunt, in any case involving Donald Trump's election would immediately do explosive, enduring harm to the court's legitimacy and to your own credibility. You must recuse yourself. The American people are afraid and they're angry, and for good reason. It's a break the glass moment."

The quotable Blumenthal was at one time an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and his brief stint as a reporter armed with explosive adjectives shows. Euphemistic detonations of this kind, wholly inappropriate for a U.S. Senator attempting to gage the suitability of a possible associate justice to the high court, had been frequently deployed by Blumenthal during his twenty years stint as Connecticut’s Attorney General, and they had always played well in his state’s left of center media.

Blumenthal has not said precisely how he took the measure of the American people’s fear at the prospect of Barrett’s elevation to the court. Could the fear he feared not be a projection on the American people – all of them? – of his own somewhat frantic and fantastic misgivings? Barrett’s past record of decisions on a circuit court has not resulted in explosions or enduring harm to judicial probity, and none of Barrett’s decisions have discredited her high American Bar association rating.

Blumenthal did not demand the recusal of the other two justices seated on the Supreme Court who were also nominated by President Donald Trump should the legitimacy of the coming election be referred to the high court.

If the Blumenthal principle were to apply equitably to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, any decision made by the court likely would favor Democrat presidential contestant Joe Biden, a bosom pal of both Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton, still wincing from her presidential defeat in 2016; we see here the hidden scorpion’s stinger in Blumenthal’s demand.

The Senator From Planned Parenthood has not said, nor has he been asked, what sanctions he will apply to Barrett should she, maintaining her political independence, as befits a Supreme Court Associate Justice, refuse to bow under the lash to Blumenthal’s will. Will Blumenthal-Schumer-Feinstein-Pelosi move for impeachment, a sanction, most would agree, that has lost its puissance as a threat, having been much overused by Democrats seeking to impeach Trump before his four year term as President is affirmed or repudiated by voters at the polls?

All Blumenthal’s threats were blunt arrows. Barrett is not made of inimitable stuff, and she is a brilliant jurist. When a Republican interrogator asked her on the second day of her testimony to show senators and the public the reference documentation she had before her as an aid to answering complex legal questions, she laughingly held up an empty note pad.

Democrat senators, always with a compassionate critical edge in their voices, were making political points. To a person, they painted a gruesome picture of what would happen after Republicans and their court jesters had been successful in killing Obamacare and its various iterations, hoping perhaps the resulting conversation would tailspin into a political discussion concerning the benefits of what really amounts to universal healthcare, a government run operation that would drive up medical prices in the long run, ration health care and put out of business insurance companies clustered in Blumenthal’s Connecticut, once the insurance capital of the world.

Barrett deftly avoided the trap by reminding legislators that Supreme Court Justices were not in the business of settling partisan political disputes among legislators, though she put the point in polite judicialese. As her predecessors had done in previous judicial appointment hearings, Barrett told the trap-baiters that she could not both render just decisions from the bench and prejudice such decisions by answering questions on hot button issues – abortion and gun control have long been two of Blumenthal’s staple campaign subjects – that she would be called upon in the future to consider.

At the end of a long day, Barrett appeared unflustered; nearly every commentator, on the left or the right, seemed certain that Barrett would be confirmed; and although there is one day yet for Democrats to pull a rabbit out of their hats, Barrett seemed serene and refreshed. Her life has prepared her well against the ravages of quick witted students, rambunctious children and senators in campaign heat . At the end of his own dispiriting interrogation, Blumenthal’s hands were visibly shaking, not, one hopes, with suppressed indignation or some affliction as yet unnoticed by his hometown media.

Blumenthal v. Barrett, Day Three, “I won’t do that!”

A lede in a story covering Senator Dick Blumenthal’s second day questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Barrett correctly reports that the senator “spent most of his allotted half hour Tuesday questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett about her support for an organization that says life begins at fertilization and on her controversial dissent in a gun case.”

At the beginning of his questioning, Blumenthal assured Barrett that her Catholic faith was not on the senate’s chopping block. But it was. Blumenthal is a master of insinuation, and pro-abortion-at-any-stage-of-pregnancy-Democrats such as Blumenthal, a regulator-in-chief Attorney General in Connecticut who unaccountably has opposed all and every attempt to regulate the abortion industry, is clearly combative in the presence of Catholics. The anti-Barrett forces, who are legion, have feverishly questioned Barrett’s association with a Catholic group regarded as a cult by many progressive ascendant elements in the Democrat Party.

Blumenthal has not been questioned closely concerning his own associations with extreme groups on the left. And, of course, there are in the country some fervent anti-Catholics who believe – half a century after historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the author of more than 20 books and President John Kennedy’s biographer, told us that anti-Catholicism is the oldest prejudice in the United States – that Catholics are programmatically incapable of permitting their First Amendment constitutional religious rights to be discarded by revolutionary progressives.

Blumenthal, not always reckless, who can speak with the tongue of an angelic lawyer, knows that he must tread softly in a state heavily populated by Catholics of all races – second wave Irish, heavily persecuted in post-potato-famine days, second wave Italians from the poorer sections of Italy, Hispanics seeking shelter from atheist, pro-socialist communists in Latin America, and Greek Orthodox Catholics fleeing the sword of Islam, most of whom still cling faithfully to their bibles and, not surprisingly, to their guns.

Not everyone in Connecticut is a Harvard graduate who has overcome the Catholic dogma that sings loudly within them. And not everyone in Blumenthal’s home state, Connecticut, trusts that the police, whom progressive Democrats want to defund, will arrive in a timely manner on their doorsteps after they have been called for assistance. In Connecticut, every attempt to cage Second Amendment rights after a horrific and murderous assault – the fatal attack by two parolees on the wife and two children of Dr. William Pettit, now a state senator, comes to mind – causes gun sales in the state to spike sharply.

On the very last day of her public testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Blumenthal prepared a cunning trap for Barrett. He asked her to affirm or “grade precedents” in three prior Supreme Court cases, 1) Brown v. Board of Education, 2) Loving v. Virginia, and 3) Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1) the court ruled that that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, in 2) that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and in 3) that the purchase and use by married couples of contraceptives without government restriction was protected by the constitution.

Barrett responded that Brown and Loving had been correctly decided. She was willing to say so on this occasion because what she had said “in print, either my scholarly work or in judicial opinions is fair game,” and she had in the past said that Brown had been correctly decided. However, she declined in the case of Griswold to “grade precedents,” that is to give a “thumbs up or down” to rulings she had not commented on-- for the best of reasons: the canon of judicial ethics forbade her from doing so. Blumenthal, for 20 years the Attorney General of Connecticut, knew that he was asking Barrett to violate a judicial Canon; never-the-less, he pressed on, pulling out all the emotional stops.

“Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a question was correctly decided,” Barrett responded, “I cannot answer that question because I cannot suggest agreement or disagreement with precedents of the Supreme Court. All of those precedents bind me now as a Seventh Circuit judge and were I to be confirmed I would be responsible for applying the law of stare decisis to all of them.”

Blumenthal asked the judge “to think of how she would feel as a gay or lesbian American ‘to hear that you can’t answer whether the government can make it a crime for them to have that relationship, whether the government can enable people who are happily married to continue that relationship,” at which point “Barrett pushed back, saying the senator was implying she would cast a vote to overrule Obergefell [ v. Hodges],” a case in which the high court found that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.

Her personal feelings, she had said dozens of times during her testimony, cannot and would not be permitted to color her prospective decisions on the court. Defendants and plaintiffs in every court in the land expect judges to apply the law and the Constitution to their decisions – not their personal feelings.

“I’m not even expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,” Barrett told Blumenthal, stepping nimbly and properly around a snare that would have impaired her objective decisions in future cases. “You’re pushing me to try to violate the judicial Canons of ethics and to offer advisory opinions and I won’t do that.”

Canons of judicial ethics, of course, mean nothing to former state attorneys general on the hunt for votes during elections. “People never lie so much,” said a refreshingly honest Otto von Bismarck, “as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

Early in his interrogation, Blumenthal promised his victim that the front door would be closed to anti-Catholic prejudice. In the end, the back door was flung wide open, and all the snot-nosed devils in Hell rushed through it.

Blumenthal’s Last Stand

The title of the news report was, “Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes last-ditch effort to delay Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but Republicans prevail on party-line vote.”

Blumenthal’s last stand occurred following the termination of the Senate public hearing convened to pass on Amy Coney Barrett’s fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s elevation to the high court is a virtual certainty, since Democrats in the Senate do not have the votes to block her admission to the court.

Unlike Custer’s last stand, Blumenthal’s occurred on an empty battlefield. And Barrett, who already had been through Blumenthal’s drill, certainly will not respond publicly in the pages of Connecticut papers to issues Blumenthal had previously raised in the public Senate hearing, exhaustively covered by the anti-Barrett media.

During her public hearing, Barrett was peppered with questions from Blumenthal and others that she wisely chose not to answer.

At one point during her public hearing, a polite and mild mannered Barrett, sensing the snare tightening around her ankle, told Blumenthal, “Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a question was correctly decided, I cannot answer that question, because I cannot suggest agreement or disagreement with precedents of the Supreme Court. All of those precedents bind me now as a Seventh Circuit judge and, were I to be confirmed, I would be responsible for applying the law of stare decisis to all of them.”

Blumenthal tightened the snare. He asked Barrett how she would feel as a gay or lesbian American “to hear that you can’t answer whether the government can make it a crime for them to have that relationship, whether the government can enable people who are happily married to continue that relationship,” at which point Barrett pushed back, saying the senator was implying she would cast a vote to overrule Obergefell [ v. Hodges],” a case in which the high court found that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.

“I’m not even expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,” Barrett said, stepping nimbly and properly around a cheap trap that would have impaired her objective decisions in future cases. “You’re pushing me to try to violate the judicial Canons of ethics and to offer advisory opinions and I won’t do that.”

Blumenthal, having stoked the fires of resentment among gays, folded his tent and marched off the battlefield. But he would live to fight another day -- when Barrett was not present to challenge his discreditable political tactics.

Prior to the appearance of Neil Gorsuch before his committee, Blumenthal wrote on his own site: “We know that conservative organizations have spent millions on the prospect that he will move American law dramatically to the right. And we know that he will not answer questions that his predecessors answered about core tenets of American jurisprudence. In short, he has left us with substantial doubt. That doubt leaves women wondering how long they will have autonomy over their health care decisions, same-sex couples questioning whether they might be denied the right to marry the person they love, workers and consumers doubting their rights, and Americans fearing the court will abandon protections of privacy, equality and the rule of law. That doubt is why I cannot support this nomination, and why I will work to block it using every tool at my disposal.”

Much later, following his elevation to the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, an originalist constitutional interpreter, would write a majority decision in which the Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Gorsuch pointed out in his decision that employers discriminating against gay or transgender employees accept a certain characteristic (e.g., attraction to women) in employees of one sex but not in employees of the other sex. The ruling has been hailed by legal scholars as one of the most important Supreme Court decisions regarding LGBTQ rights in the United States, along with Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

No recent nominee to the Supreme Court, originalist or not, has agreed to answer the kinds of questions put by Blumenthal to Barrett -- because in answering such speculative and hypothetical questions on abortion or gay rights as Barrett correctly refused to field, the prospective justice would not thereafter be free to decide such questions should he or she be elevated to the Supreme Court – very likely in Barrett’s case, much to Blumenthal’s chagrin.

There are highly relevant questions Connecticut’s deferential media has not and will not put to Blumenthal, a progressive white-hatter.

Blumenthal had said that Barrett, should she become an Associate Justice, must recuse herself from making decisions on the high court involving election laws because President Donald Trump, who had nominated her to the court, might become involved in suits concerning ballot impropriety. Put aside for the moment that recusal and presidential court nominations are wholly unrelated, an obvious question raises its horned head: Why didn't Blumenthal at the same time call for the recusal of two other Associate Justices nominated to the court by Trump, Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch, both male Associate Justices? Do we have here an example of senatorial white privilege – Blumenthal is a millionaire by marriage several times over – once again exercising patrimonial rights over a woman?

The objections raised by Blumenthal against Barrett, all swirl around originalism -- a mode of Constitutional interpretation different in kind from conservatism, a political worldview and another of Blumenthal’s bugbears.

Blumenthal made use of the Barrett snares in his 2017 Gorsuch interrogatories.

Here is a 2017 report from CTMirror on Blumenthal’s interrogation of Gorsuch:

On Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that overturned the state’s ban on contraceptives for married couples and bolstered Americans’ right to privacy, Gorsuch said, “It has been repeatedly reaffirmed.”

Pressed by Blumenthal to give an opinion on the case, Gorsuch demurred.

“My personal views have nothing to do with my job as a judge,” he said.

On Eisenstadt v Baird, which established the right of unmarried people to possess contraceptives, Gorsuch said, “To say I agree or disagree with the United States Supreme Court as a judge is an act of hubris.”

“Precedent is more important than what I think, and my agreement or disagreement doesn’t add weight towards it,” Gorsuch said.

Gorsuch called Loving v Virginia, which ruled that banning interracial marriage is unconstitutional, “a seminal, important vindication of the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But he said little else.

“I’m drawing the same line that Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsberg, (David) Souter and (Antonin) Scalia… Many, many people who have sat at this confirmation table and declined to offer their personal views on this or that precedent,” he said.

Of Lawrence v. Texas, which held the government can’t criminalize gay and lesbian relationships, Gorsuch said, “I’m going to give you the same answer every time.”

Blumenthal also failed to secure Gorsuch’s personal opinion on a couple of key abortion rights cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

A frustrated Blumenthal told Gorsuch, “Your declining to be more direct leaves doubt in the minds of millions of Americans.”

But Gorsuch said it was important to hide his views.

“If I start suggesting that I prefer or not or like this or that precedent, I’m sending a signal, a ‘promise of preview,’ as Justice Ginsberg called it, about how I would rule in the future,” he said.

He said Blumenthal, and other senators, are grilling him on issues that are “very live with controversy, which is why you are asking about them.”

When Blumenthal questioned Barrett, he was simply retracing well-worn old ground.

It has rarely, if at all, been mentioned in stories on Blumenthal that Gorsuch, an originalist Associate Justice elevated to the high court by Trump, wrote one of the most important Supreme Court decisions regarding LGBTQ rights in the United States, along with Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Why isn’t this telling but inconvenient datum mentioned in every story that displays Blumenthal’s always cleverly buried axiom that originalists appointed to the high court are bound by their originalism to issue decrees shoving gays back into the closet?

Why, to put the question in other terms, is Blumenthal consistently treated by Connecticut’s media with the solicitude one reserves for holy icons when, in fact, he has shown himself, time and again, to be a work-a-day neo-progressive Democrat hack afflicted with an unquenchable lust for favorable publicity?

6,310

Larson, Bronin and Political Change

2026-05-14T16:00:07.208-04:00

Bronin

“The more things change, the more they remain the same” (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose) --French aphorism attributed to Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

U.S. Congressman John Larson lost to former Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin in a Democrat nominating convention by a sliver. Bronin captured 214 deletes, Larson 204 in what one newspaper called “a stunning upset.”

Because the constituencies in party nominating conventions, primaries and general elections are different, politicians jockeying for elections often appear to be speaking, so to speak, out of both sides of their mouths. Having achieved office, the elected politician is free to throw off all three masks and do as he or she likes. Former President Joe Biden, for example, campaigned as the usual, moderate Democrat but, once in office, governed as a neo-progressive. His second run for the presidency was derailed by members of his own party, among others, who thought he was not up to the job. They thought they had nothing to lose once Biden had been thrown into the ashbin of history because they had in reserve Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris, who was a female —likely the first female president – and Biden’s soulmate.

History, it turned out, was not obliging.

The Democrat Party in Connecticut has been swinging left for decades. A non-incumbent Democrat in a primary election has more mobility than an incumbent Democrat of long standing, who will in most political contests be forced to defend his or her “record in office.” There are people, both in the media and in politics, who continue to track glaring inconsistencies in campaigns. Political consistency remains a virtue among us and inconsistency a vice. Among journalists, the political vice most often condemned is hypocrisy, a mismatch between one or more of the faces a politician presents as he wends his way through varying constituencies.

A cynical friend insists that hypocrisy is the only truly “sinful” – that is to say, indefensible and instantly punishable – vice in American politics. “Better to divorce your wife or eat your children than to be accused of hypocrisy,” says he. Cynics and comedians sometimes engage in exaggeration to make a point or raise a laugh, considered a virtue among politicians who usually bore us to death with stale platitudes.

Bronin thankfully addressed the delegates following their vote with some gaudy platitudinous remarks: “We just saw a political earthquake in this convention hall. Every Democrat in this room believes that we need to stop the damage that Donald Trump is doing to our country every single day, that we need to rebuild the guardrails to stop the brazen corruption and self-enrichment that he has taken to unimaginable heights. This is one stage in the process, but it’s an important one.”

Addressing reporters following his eupeptic acceptance speech, a hymn to change Bronin remarked that the upset “sends a powerful signal to Democrats out there that they have a real choice. What we usually see at these conventions is a coronation of the incumbent. What we saw tonight was a sea change. What we saw tonight was (sic) the most active Democrats in the district sending a message that we want change. I think what that means for the voters is that, for the first time in 28 years, they realize that they have a choice.”

At the next stage in his march to the governor’s mansion, someone in Connecticut’s media may mention that the whole of Connecticut’s government – the governor’s office, the membership of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, all the state’s constitutional offices, the state’s largest cities, and the General Assembly -- have been Democrat Party strongholds for the last few decades.

The last Republican mayor of Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, was Ann Uccello, who held office from 1967 to 1971. The 46 year old Bronin was 9 years short of being a twinkle in his daddy’s eye in 1971. Change would seem to imply a wresting of some political power from hegemonic Democrats. In what sense will a change from Larson to Bronin represent a cleansing different political change? The Democrat Party in Connecticut is the party of stasis, not the party of change. More Democrats in office can only mean more of the same.

Connecticut Democrats running for office on a platform of “change” will eventually be forced to confront honestly the question put to Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential bid: Assuming you are elected, in what important respects will your presidency differ from that of the rudely dethroned Joe Biden? Harris was understandable flummoxed by the question and in time learned how to deflect it with some grace. But the unanswered question hung over her campaign like the sword of Damocles.

If Bronin replaces Larson as a member of Connecticut’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional delegation, how will his approach to legislation, domestic policy or foreign policy differ from that of Larson – or indeed, any other Democrat in the delegation, all of whom appear to march rigidly in lockstep with each other on important issues of the day?

Change implies directional difference. Will Bronin’s approach to the war on terror in the Middle East, to choose but one sundering instance among many, be more like that of Democratic Sen. John Fetterman or Democrat Senator Chris Murphy?

In Connecticut, restorative change can only occur through a principled and sustained assault on the status quo, resulting in more power to the people and less to double-tongued self-serving politicians.

The Republicans are coming, Betsy McCaughey On Fire

2026-05-12T17:56:00.000-04:00

Betsy McCaughey

Former Republican Mayor of New Britain Erin Stewart has been much in the news lately -- days before the Republican Nominating Convention will convene to choose a candidate to run against incumbent Governor Ned Lamont -- largely owing to the efforts of newly elected Democrat Mayor of New Britain Bobby Sanchez.

Upon leaving office after 12 years of helpful and politically uneventful service, Sanchez began a formal examination of the former mayor. An accurate non-politicized examination of her service as mayor, Stewart has said, would reveal that she had entered office facing a daunting municipal debt of $30 million and left the treasury a surplus of $34 million.

But you can’t take politics out of politics.

Was Sanchez’s close examination of the Democrat perceived dirt under Stewart’s bed a political hit job designed to rid the gubernatorial field of a dangerous Republican opponent? That is a question that will not be resolved within the parameters of the upcoming gubernatorial election. Democrats know that the wheels of justice thankfully grind slowly. And while they are grinding, Stewart will remain steadfastly silent on the advice of lawyers – assuming civil or criminal charges are brought against her. Until a presumed trial occurs, she will be left “swinging slowly in the wind,” hanged by a rope of charges assumed to be true.

A Hartford Courant report tells us, “The state police opened a criminal investigation last month into financial irregularities in the tax collector’s office in New Britain city hall. But state law enforcement authorities declined to say Monday whether the investigation could expand to include questions about Stewart’s use of her city-issued credit card.”

Democrats have not told us whether their examination of possible malfeasance in office will extend to other Democrat mayors of safe Democrat cities. There is no danger that the mayor of Bridgeport, a reelected felon, will any time soon be replaced by a more blameless Republican mayor. Does Mayor (Joe) Ganim, for instance, have a (P-Card), the state issued credit card Stewart is thought to have abused? If so, has he abused it? We will never know – because Democrats are in charge of most large cities in Connecticut, and knowing such things cannot profit the ruling Democrat Party.

Who has such cards? We know that P-cards are not issued to Republican contenders for office who do not win elections. We also know that Connecticut is, and may continue to be well into the future, a Democrat Party hegemon, a one-party state.

Will the possibility of abuse restrict the use of the card, legitimate or not, by all Connecticut mayors? Why do any Democrat mayors in Connecticut need such a card, given the undisputed fact that the Democrat majority in the General Assembly would gladly assume any debt incurred by Democrat mayors of all large Connecticut cities? The Democrat dominated General Assembly, in the face of Republican objections, has routinely paid down debts incurred by Democrat big-city mayors.

Questions such as these are rarely asked or answered by Connecticut’s investigative reporters, likely because fewer reporters result in fewer reportorial investigations, a boon to irreplaceable urban incumbent Democrat mayors.

When Republican contender for governor of Connecticut Betsy McCaughey (pronounced McCoy), always aflame, was asked by a reporter recently to comment on the “accusations” regarding Stewart, she erupted: ”I’m focused on a much bigger scandal – the fact that the U.S. produced 178,000 jobs last month, and our state got only 100 of them. Everyone keeps asking me if we should ax Erin. I am staying focused on axing the state income tax, to bring companies and jobs back to Connecticut.”

In a rare Republican pre-primary debate in which Ryan Fazio participated, McCaughey was asked whether she thought the possibility of eliminating Connecticut fairly recent income tax was doable.

She erupted.

The project has to be sold not to politicians whose lives are made easier by increasing taxation, but rather to voters whose lives have been made miserable by ever-increasing taxation. Every tax is an imposition on the creativity and expansion of the free market. Those who flee to false socialistic/communistic solutions can offer no political salvation to plundered middleclass taxpayers. And it is the creativity of a politically unencumbered market – not fanciful profits stuffed under the pillows of billionaires – that increases the wellbeing of voters presumably represented by big spending Democrats. If you want to get rid of billionaires by expropriating their earned profits – Are you listening AOC? -- by all means do so, and spare us the neo-progressive sermonizing. But the expropriation can occur only once, after which comes the deluge. Neo-progressives ae not committed to the survival of the middle class. They are committed to the survival of neo-progressive snake handlers and sellers of magic elixirs such as the newly elected mayor of Wall Street in New York City, Zohran Mamdani.

McCaughey knows a thing or two about the spectacular failures of quack neo-progressive New York politicians. She was Lieutenant Governor of New York from 1995 to 1998 under Governor George Pataki and holds a Ph.D. in U.S. constitutional history from Columbia University. Not at all a political lightweight, she is the author of over three hundred scholarly and popular articles and has produced prize-winning studies while at two think tanks, the Manhattan Institute and later the Hudson Institute. She is currently a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

Her conservative credentials are unimpeachable.

The Republicans Are Coming, Ryan Fazio

2026-05-11T18:20:00.000-04:00

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time" -- attributed to Abe Lincoln

The slam on Ryan Fazio, running for governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket, is that he is a political nerd. Some, managing to cough up a chuckle, have compared him to Clark Kent, without bothering to ask whether he is a political superman as well. His superficial critics may have underestimated him.

It is true that Fazio is a master of detail, as may be seen in virtually all his comments on budget and spending matters. As a general rule, the voting public on both sides of the aisle tend to drowse when budget figures are produced, largely because budget makers have introduced into their calculations a welter of confusing detail that allows quite a few rhetorical escape hatches. A politician not interested in “fooling most of the people most of the time,” Abe Lincoln’s formation, will deploy a cut-to-the-quick analysis of complex issues, and Fazio appears to be accomplished in the art of not so gentle persuasion.

There is no question from friend and foe alike concerning Fazio’s political orientation. He is a literate American conservative, quite different from a British conservative or a Shia Iranian conservative terrorist. The terms “liberal,” “progressive” and “conservative” have been misapplied so often for tendentious reasons that their once clear meanings have been bleached out of them. Fazio is a man of the right. Most of his Democrat political opponents are men and women of the left.

The term “moderate” is usually deployed to designate politicians occupying a position midway between left and right. The late U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker presented himself to Republicans and majority Democrats in Connecticut as a “moderate” Republican before he saddled Connecticut with an income tax and, his cleverly disguised imposture exploded, and he ran for governor on an independent ticket, “A Connecticut Party.”

Fazio has made no attempt to hide his conservative light under a bushel basket.

Here is Fazio on energy costs: “The cost of electricity in our state is too damn high. Today, Connecticut pays the second-highest utility rates in the continental United States. Democrats’ policies in Hartford have contributed to these sky-high electric rates, by imposing $1 billion in “public benefits” taxes on our residents. In the Senate, Ryan Fazio has led the charge to lower electricity costs. As Governor, he will pass his comprehensive energy reform plan and finish the job he set out to do by eliminating the ‘public benefits’ charge crushing Connecticut families.”

Here is Fazio on taxes: “After two terms of the Lamont administration, Connecticut is the third-highest taxed state in the nation, with families and jobs fleeing Connecticut for greener pastures. This is just not acceptable. In the State Senate, [Fazio tells us that he has been in the state Senate] a leading voice for tax cuts and responsible spending. Ryan has a plan to lower income taxes for every family in Connecticut by $1,500 and cap property taxes. He has a 100% rating from the CBIA for his pro-economic growth voting record. He will bring sanity to the state budget by restoring the fiscal guardrails that were broken by Ned Lamont and Hartford Democrats in their last tax-increase budget.”

Here is Fazio on immigration: “Independent analysis tells us that Connecticut is now spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on illegal immigration. On top of that, Governor Lamont and Hartford Democrats have created sanctuary state policies that are protecting criminals at the expense of our citizens’ safety. Real leadership means prioritizing services and public safety for Connecticut taxpayers, not asking them to foot the bill for those who came here illegally. Ryan will reduce taxpayer spending on illegal immigration and reverse the sanctuary state policies passed in 2019 that protect illegal immigrants convicted of felonies from immigrations enforcement in Connecticut. It’s time for common sense and public safety in our state.”

Here is Fazio on housing: “Connecticut needs sustainable solutions for housing that protects the ability of towns and cities to make their own decisions while improving affordability. Ned Lamont and Hartford Democrats have increased the power of the state government over our towns without making anything more affordable. Ryan will find solutions as governor that protect the ability of towns and cities to make their own decisions while reducing the costs of housing construction and making it easier to build middle-income housing like accessory dwelling units and residential units in mixed-use areas that blend in to current neighborhoods. He will reduce licensing taxes on workers in the trades and make it easier for apprentices to enter the workforce to support our whole economy.”

Here is Fazio on veterans: “Connecticut is home to over 130,000 veterans who deserve more than bureaucratic delays and broken promises. Progress on veteran homelessness, healthcare access, and job training has stalled. Ryan will ensure those who served receive the support they’ve earned. As Governor, he’ll streamline services, reduce costs, and make it easier for veterans and their spouses to work and make a life for themselves in Connecticut by cutting fees, recognizing licenses from other states and more. Ryan will always honor those who risked everything for our freedom.”

Here is Fazio on crime: “Homicides, car thefts, and other serious crimes rose to unacceptable levels under the Lamont administration. For our families to prosper, first they must feel safe – especially in our cities. The culture under one-party Democrat rule in Hartford has become one that fails to support law enforcement, while creating a revolving-door for violent and repeat offenders. As Governor, Ryan will support our law enforcement by changing the 2020 anti-police law, close the revolving door of parole for violent criminals, and reinstate proactive policing policies like consent searches. In his Senate campaigns, Ryan has repeatedly received endorsements of law enforcement organizations because he supports our local police.”

Here is Fazio on Education: “Ryan Fazio believes that every family and child deserves a great education in Connecticut, but not every student is getting that now. In the last decade, student outcomes have fallen in Connecticut more than the national average—and for low-income students most of all. That is not acceptable to Ryan, who saw firsthand how great schools in inner cities can create hope. Ryan volunteered as a tutor for seven years in inner city charter schools and continued to fight for school choice and high standards for families as Senator. Ryan believes that our investment in education should be focused on supporting students, parents, and teachers – not on a bloated educational bureaucracy. Connecticut can and should have the best public education in the world available to every student and Ryan will make that his goal as Governor.”

Now then, all the positions listed by Fazio on his site and quoted here are necessary for good government in Connecticut. They likely were written, in consultation with others of course, by the man professing them. In his public appearances, Fazio reels them off without benefit of notes. National actors and well fed consultants are not whispering to him through ear buds, an indication that he is the author of these sentiments sincerely, even passionately, held. Moreover, each item of interest is vital to Connecticut voters that have in the past been led down rose strewn paths by politicians who, having won office, soon forget their promises and false campaign postures.

At some point, people who have been fooled some or all of the time will set their sights on a modest, truth telling politician who will, once in office, do the truths they have unreeled on the campaign trail, rather than commit while in office to actions that satisfy the usual professional political pretenders. The public goods Fazio wishes to bestow on hard pressed Connecticut citizens are very good indeed: Taxes are too high; veterans have been neglected; honest citizens should have a low tolerance threshold for violent crime; the most profitable way to increase housing is to make the building of housing profitable to free market builders.

Historically, on those occasions when the relationship between governors and the governed are inverted – so that the richer the governors become, the poorer the governed become; the more powerful the governors become, the weaker the people become – the imbalance is readjusted through a revolutionary struggle for God given rights and independence and a restoration of ancient individual freedoms and rights of property. Such was the struggle for independence heralded in the Declaration of Independence, a revolutionary spark that lit the world 250 years ago. It was Lincoln who often said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

Connecticut’s Persistent Problems, the Cynic’s View

2026-05-10T00:03:00.001-04:00

Antisthenes

I: You’ve said there is no political problem that does not lend itself to a political solution, and yet problems associated with improvident spending that are everywhere politically caused – such as inflation, excessive spending and state debt, and seemingly endless political campaigning – are rarely addressed. Why?

C: It does not benefit an incumbent party in power committed to ever-increasing spending to settle such problems. In Connecticut especially, but throughout the nation as well, automatic spending increases, so called “fixed costs”, strip legislatures of their constitutional obligations. Constitutionally, legislatures are tasked with getting and spending. That means that every dollar drawn into the treasury through taxation and every dollar disbursed by the legislature should be voted up or down by small “r” republican legislators. Fixed costs loosen such constitutional obligations. If fixed costs are not unconstitutional, they most certainly are imprudent.

I: So, what do we do about fixed costs?

C: You put that very question to Chris Powell, for many years the Managing Editor and the Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer. What was his answer?

I: “Unfix them.”

C: There you go – a political solution to a political problem.

I: That solution, some would say is … ah … difficult.

C: In a one party state, anything that reduces the undemocratic power of the ruling single party will be difficult. Referring to the unbearable fast changing New England weather, Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” The joke hangs on the certitude that human intervention cannot change weather patterns. But that is not true of problems caused by political intervention. Fixed costs are problems that involve imprudent spending by states and the federal government, the solution to the problem -- cut spending -- while difficult, is not impossible. And since excessive spending and inflation are causally related, a marriage made in Hell, reductions in spending will also beneficially reduce inflation, a hidden tax that reduces the purchasing power of the dollar.

It is disgraceful that big spending neo-progressives have remained unaccountable for their deficit spending and dollar depreciations.

About seven months ago, Marc Fitch wrote in Inside Investigator, “Between this fiscal year [January 2026] and 2030, Connecticut’s fixed costs – which include pensions, retiree healthcare, Medicaid, and debt payments – will grow by $2.1 billion, with most of the increase coming from a $1.2 billion increase in the cost of Medicaid, driving fixed costs to consume nearly 54 percent of the budget [emphasis mine].” The 54 percent of Connecticut expenditures that has been placed beyond the reach of budget makers ain’t peanuts.

I: Give my readers one more example, before I let you go, of a serious problem that the majority Democrat Party in Connecticut does not wish to solve.

C: Sure – government by caucus. Since the advent of President Barack Obama’s administration, Democrats have managed to seize very nearly every position of political power in Connecticut: the governorship, both houses of the General Assembly, the whole membership of the U.S. Congressional Delegation, all the constitutional offices in the state, and the state’s judicial system. To be sure, Democrats in Connecticut hold a voting majority.

According to 2026 voter registration data, Democrats make up about 35.05% of Connecticut’s registered voters, Republicans account for 21.06%, while Independents make up 43.89%.

But in the General Assembly, managed by neo-progressives, the political power structure is 100 percent Democrat. This totalitarian power system moves representative government from a two-party power sharing operation to what cynics like myself call single-party caucus government. Two gatekeeping Democrats – Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff – manage by caucus the whole political business of the State Senate. Independents that make up the majority of Connecticut voters have no representation in the General Assembly. Bills proffered by Republicans die aborning, neither heard by committees, also controlled by Democrats, or voted upon by the whole legislature. Legislation that shapes the future of the state is caucus-endorsed and passed through the General Assembly by political chicanery. Whatever else this is, it is not representative small “d” democratic government.

I: How do you solve that one?

C: If you don’t like your representative government, change your representatives. If the status quo is undemocratic, change it.

I: Easier said than done.

C: Where have I heard that one before?

General Assembly Members Have Vacated the Premises. It’s Over … For Now

2026-05-07T08:51:00.005-04:00

Sen. Dick Blumenthal

General Assembly Members Have Vacated the Premises. It’s Over … For Now BLOG

The Blumenthals, father Dick and son Matt, were there in the picture featured on the front page, top of the fold, in the Hartford Courant story, “With tone of defiance and new laws, Connecticut leaders push back hard against Trump and ICE.”

Both were smiling broadly as Governor Ned Lamont signed Bill 349 which, the Courant reminds us, “allows citizens to sue federal immigration agents if they believe that their civil rights have been violated. In addition, the bill prevents all law enforcement officers, including from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE [Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement], from wearing masks, except in limited situations.”

Laws restraining police are old hat in Connecticut. Police “reform laws” affecting the personal partial immunity of individual police officers reduce the inclination of recruits to join police forces.

Some Connecticut politicians excluded from the photo-op were not smiling.

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora characterized the bill as “an election-year stunt.”

“Today’s rally,” Candelora said, “made clear where the governor and General Assembly Democrats’ priorities lie — political theater in an election year. They rushed in front of cameras to promote a flawed bill that invites litigation, exposes federal and even local law enforcement to legal liability, and even bars veterans from applying military training toward a law enforcement career. Meanwhile, Connecticut residents are still waiting for direct relief from the affordability crisis these same Democrats created. Their priorities are badly out of whack.”

Senator Dick Blumenthal, for 20 years Connecticut’s white-hatted crusading attorney general, thought while in office that one of his principal duties, nowhere mentioned in the statute creating the office, was to swell the state treasury with fines levied against his targets. He was faithful in performing this self-perceived duty. State treasurers, governors and members of Connecticut’s media were pleased with his performance. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? When Blumenthal left the AG’s office and ascended to the US Senate, his successor, George Jepsen, under pressure from Republican candidate for attorney General Martha Dean and others, dismissed more than 200 of Blumenthal’s pending cases.

Blumenthal has carried with him into the Senate his bullying prosecutorial methods. Here is an embarrassing instance of Blumenthal’s ideological rigidity: Blumenthal questioned a number of prospective federal judges -- “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”

The correct answer to Blumenthal’s question is: ”Whoever won the electoral vote in the US Congress and was thereafter certified by Congress won the election.”

The congressman is a US Senator and one expects him to be familiar with the constitutional provision governing the election of presidents. But no -- Blumenthal characterized a literal repetition of the constitutional provision as judicially inappropriate. “You were instructed to give this answer, right?,” he berated one of the judicial prospects. “I am amazed, just amazed, by the insult to this committee of witness after witness seeking to be a federal judge subverting our constitution and showing how you have no independence, which is essential to a federal judge…” The judges questioned seemed more astonished than Blumenthal that the senator had characterized a literal citation of a constitutional provision as a “subversion of our constitution.”

The shameless peddling of false presumptions, a towering arrogance, an irresistible inclination to present to the voting public an unctuous moralistic face in danger zones – it has been said that there is no more dangerous spot in Connecticut than that between Blumenthal and a television camera – are all unfortunate characteristics that stem from a lack of modesty and due proportion. Governance requires both modesty and prudence, without which it is simply a destructive force before which honesty must withdraw in fear and trembling.

Moving from the AG’s office to the US Congress, Blumenthal took with him his most self-damaging characteristics and left the best behind. He cannot stop prosecuting and primping before the cameras.

Striding in his father’s footsteps, Matt Blumenthal characterized Connecticut’s newest attempt to drive ICE devils from Connecticut’s political temples this way: “We’re not going to allow federal agents or ICE to be intimidating people close to polling places. Given what has happened in Minnesota and the violence and chaos we’ve seen them conduct in Minneapolis, people in Connecticut have a very well-founded fear of these activities, and so we don’t want them anywhere near the polls.”

It would take a Connecticut George Orwell to do satirical justice to the state’s politically convenient non-compliance with federal officials. Orwell started his political life serving with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a part of Britain’s vast colonial empire. The future author of 1984, often referred to as Nineteen Eighty-Four, hated the assignment. He hated colonialism and throughout his life protested against the use of political force that – and this should not astonish a sometimes virtuous Dick Blumenthal -- is the very opposite of small “d” democracy.

The Cynic’s Musings, May, 2026

2026-05-05T15:03:00.002-04:00

Antisthenes

Connecticut’s spending problem

Spending cuts are rare in “the land of steady [bad] habits.” A blushingly honest Democrat will tell you, “You can’t cut spending in Connecticut without cutting your own political throat – in particular, state union employee votes and the invaluable boots-on-the ground campaign assistance provided by unionized state workers, who unfailingly know which side their bread is buttered on.

An AI replacement

Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly has passed a bill regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Every morning of their waking lives, socialists arise weeping tears of blood and vowing vengeance on the rich. AI is fertile ground both for the rich and hopeful aspiring entrepreneurs. At this point, very early in the game, all AI regulations and all costs associated with them rest on shaky predictions -- because there is no such thing as a “perfect” undeveloped technology. In a sane Connecticut economy, perhaps after neo-progressives are sent packing, every regulation would be accompanied by a cost estimate. Like tariffs, the bete noir of anti-capitalist socialists, regulations are taxes on products and services, usually passed on for payment to inattentive tax payers.

When Martin Looney, one of two crucially important legislative gatekeepers in Connecticut’s hegemonic General Assembly, announced early in May 2026 that he would not be running for office again, Attorney General William Tong did not announce that his position might easily be filled by an “AI Companion,” thus saving the state some money in reduced expenditures. Looney has strongly suggested that Majority Leader of the State Senate Bob Duff, who some have called Looney 2.0, might be a propitious replacement.

Connecticut’s War on Wealth

The nation’s neo-progressive war on wealth has been in process for years. The political barbs, initially directed at millionaires have been repurposed, likely because outspoken anti-Trump Democrats such as Vermont’s U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a pre-Mamdani socialist fixture, reached the million-mark several years ago. Democrat contumely is now directed at Republican billionaires. Both Governor Ned Lamont and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, multi-millionaires, have so far fallen short. Sanders is not there yet, and time is running out on the 84-year-old socialist warrior, who honeymooned in Russia before former President Ronald Reagan -- with assists from imprisoned Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II -- turned the Soviet paradise into a realist rubble.

In February 2025, People magazine provided a list of the nation’s oldest U.S. Senators:

Chuck Grassley (R-IA) - age 91

Bernie Sanders (I-VT) - age 83

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) - age 83

Jim Risch (R-ID) - age 81

Angus King (I-ME) - age 80

Dick Durbin (D-IL) - age 80

Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) - age 79

Ed Markey (D-MA) - age 78

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) - age 78

Peter Welch (D-VT) - age 77

Connecticut’s youthful voters may or may not be distressed to discover Blumenthal among those listed. Sanders, a millionaire like Blumenthal, gave some indication awhile back that he might retire after reading – one can only hope – Hilaire Belloc ‘s poem “Advice to the rich.”

Get to know something about the internal combustion engine

And remember: soon you will die

Final justice is the Lord’s.

The Pretense of Representation

There are throughout the United States three forms of governance: federal, state and municipal, each very different from the other because the constituencies are different. Municipal politicians, state officials and federal officials represent different jurisdictions. The three governments sometimes clash. During the Civil War state and federal jurisdictions clashed bloodily. There were upwards of 500,000 northern and southern casualties at Gettysburg alone, a handful more than the American casualties in Iran. When President Abe Lincoln said at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here,” he was half right. We will not forget his words or their deeds. Remembrance for Americans is a revolutionary act, a declaration of immutable truth.

During the whole of his abbreviated administration, Lincoln thought of himself as the constitutionally rightful representative of the whole nation. The confederate states that had seceded from the union obviously disagreed.

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, famous for courting Connecticut’s tepid media, is also famous for draping himself in a flag of universal representation. In fact, he is a slick anti-Trump, anti-Republican, neo-progressive partisan. The shooty-shoot to the U.S. Senate in Connecticut drives ambitious Democrat politicians from the brashly partisan Attorney General’s office to the U.S. Congress. Both Attorney General Joe Lieberman and Blumenthal slid effortlessly from the AG’s office to the U.S. Congress. If possible, Blumenthal the elder would deed his present position as congressional senator and sub-president to his son Matt, as yet a somewhat lowly state House of Representatives member. But, of course, the ambitious Attorney General William Tong may have his mind set on the same track.

The clash, if ambition causes the two to bump heads, should prove entertaining.

The 80 year-old redundantly wealthy Dick Blumenthal, draped for purposes of re-election in neo-progressive beggar’s rags, is approaching Belloc’s terminus. An occasional neo-progressive, Dick still knows little about the internal combustion engine, but he may recall Belloc’s final advice – “Remember, soon you will die,” one hopes after one has made a conscience clearing confession of faults.

Blumenthal, The Cynic’s View

2026-05-02T13:07:00.004-04:00

Antisthenes

Interviewer: We haven’t talked to you in quite some time.

Cynic: You’ve been denying yourself a great pleasure.

I: Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal questioned Department of War chief Pete Hegseth recently. Blumenthal’s opening interrogatory gambit was as follows: “I know you have characterized this war as an astonishing military success. But the American people aren’t buying it. One point is irrefutable: which is, Americans never succeed in war unless the American people are behind it. And if what you are seeing as success now is winning, I would hate to see what losing looks like, because none of the shifting and contradictory objectives of the war have been achieved so far…”

Cynic: Yes. Responding in a like manner, Hegseth might have said, “If, as you suggest, the U.S. military engagement with Iran, a notorious financier of anti-American terrorism throughout the Middle East for roughly 40 years, must be called losing, I would hate to hear what you would call winning.” The U.S has destroyed Iran’s navy and ground forces. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping coming and going from Iran, thereby imposing on Iran a crippling loss of daily revenue. Iran will be losing an estimated $150 million a day in oil revenue as long as the U.S. blockage continues. Blumenthal equates “winning” with 40 years of pointless non-productive “peace negotiations.” Everyone recalls how former President Barack Obama said pointedly that Iran must never be given the opportunity to develop nuclear weapons and followed up by sending the self-declared enemies of the United States and Israel planeloads of cash later used to finance terrorist groups at the very gates of Israel. Blumenthal, a Jew, has not rushed to point out the obvious failings of Obama’s Iran policy. The twitter-like clips Blumenthal cherishes are intended only to be used as a campaign voting inducement. In almost every such partisan Congressional “discussion”, the person being interrogated is not permitted to answer in full the points made by the interrogator. Attempts at debating questionable propositions usually are cut short by interrogators screaming “I am reclaiming my time…” which is simply a not so polite way of saying, “Shut up!”

Some students of history at the Pentagon could easily demonstrate that the most productive peace negotiations between belligerents occur after one side has defeated the other on the battlefield. The Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta lasted through 27 years of fruitless negotiations. Sparta finally defeated Athens and imposed peace terms, but in the end Athens won the peace, and a very productive one it was. Sparta was a magnificent military barracks but far inferior culturally to Athens, which gave us a Socrates, an Aristotle and ideas concerning democracy and a republic that lit the imaginations of the founders of the American Republic.

World War II ended in a military victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The U.S. and its allies, having won the war, imposed peace terms on Germany. These things are usually mentioned in historical accounts with which Blumenthal, a student of military affairs, should be familiar. The notion that wars never blossom into long periods of peace is an anti-historical fable easily dismissed. Despite the Democrat Party’s occasional successful attempts at resurrecting old animosities, the Civil War and later Constitutional amendments dealt a death blow to both slavery and Jim Crow attempts to reintroduce de facto political slavery through a back door.

I: Some people regard Blumenthal as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.

C: There is no such thing as a partisan pragmatist. That is what is wrong with most news reports these days. They present themselves as pragmatic and indifferent to partisan designs, but their product tells against them. The Democrat Party has for decades been retreating from the foreign and domestic policy of President John Kennedy, a genuine liberal, and campaign enthusiasts such as Blumenthal and his fellow neo-progressive U.S Senator Chris Murphy are leading the retreat. Pragmatism is an American locution. The philosopher most closely associated with it is William James, who defined pragmatism as a method of resolving philosophical disputes by attending to the practical consequences of ideas rather than abstract or purely logical distinctions. We see before us the practical consequence of a violent attack by an Islamic regime on Israel. One may always hope that partisan Democrats who falsely regard Trump as Hitler would understand and embrace a policy of unremitting distain for true enemies of the United States – particularly when the Democrats are Jewish.

Budget Roulette

2026-04-30T08:22:00.008-04:00

CT General Assembly

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session” -- Gideon John Tucker (1826–1899), American lawyer, newspaper editor, and New York politician

The tax rebate check we were told for (weeks) was “in the mail” is no longer in the mail. Instead, the Hartford Courant tells us, “hundreds of millions of dollars will be funneled to cities and towns in order to avoid local property tax increases, as mayors and first selectmen will be urged to hold the line on spending in the next fiscal year.”

Rebates, rather than tax cuts, are instantly revocable at the pleasure of Democrat leaders in the state General Assembly. Rebates should be regarded by state taxpayers and reporters as temporary political coupons designed to bring into the Democrat Party fold hard pressed voters who surely know the difference between a permanent or semi-permanent price reduction and a temporary coupon offered at the pleasure of a provider of goods and services.

A tax cut leaves prospective tax payments in the hands of taxpayers. A tax rebate is first collected by the state and then partly returned – or not – to tax payers. In the case under examination, the tax rebate promised to taxpayers months before the upcoming elections will instead be distributed to municipalities as a tax relief program that will offer no real net-tax relief to taxpayers. While the flow of taxation will be changed, the amount of taxes will remain the same. Taxes will not be cut. More importantly to dominant Democrats in the General Assembly, leading legislators (read: Democrat legislative gatekeepers in the General Assembly) will not be forced to cut net-spending to pay either for the temporary tax rebate or the repurposed tax rebate.

This is a win, win proposition for hegemonic Democrats in Connecticut. In “the state of steady (bad) habits,” it is considered politically inconvenient for tax stakeholders to even mention the words “reduce spending.” And the possibility of permanent spending reductions is nearly always considered a political calamity among spendthrift Democrats and the state’s reportorial chorus.

Governor Ned Lamont’s response to the repurposed tax rebate is strained to the point of absurdity.

Lamont said, “I have heard directly from mayors, first selectmen, superintendents, students, and taxpayers across Connecticut who are feeling the squeeze of rising costs. This $270 million is a direct response to the strains being placed on town, school district, and family budgets. By closing funding gaps for our schools and municipalities, we can help communities avoid raising property taxes while keeping classrooms running and local services strong. Affordability is a top priority for this administration, and this investment delivers real relief where people feel it most.”

Just to begin with, the “squeeze of rising costs” felt by Connecticut taxpayers is due to federal government caused inflation, non-payment of costs incurred by state government – Connecticut’s net tax-supported debt (NTSD) debt is nearly the highest in the nation – and improvident spending. All spending in the face of mounting debt is improvident. The classic definition of inflation is: “Too many dollars chasing too few goods. Inflation, a reduction in the purchasing power of the dollar, is government caused; state debt is government caused. The Inflation problem is answered when the federal government pays its debt through tax increases or spending reductions or both, rather than flooding what is left of the free market with devalued currency and excessive borrowing.

Connecticut's total state government debt is approximately $26 billion as of 2026.

A requested Office of Legislative Research report sent to the General Assembly in September 2024 notes, ominously, “Connecticut had the highest NTSD as a percent of own-source revenue at 103.8%, greater than the median of 24.5% for all states.”

The “squeeze” referenced by Lamont, in other words, may properly be laid at the feet of spendthrift politicians for whom debt, however high, is not viewed as an impediment to spending. Both inflation and budget deficits are caused by improvident politicians who seek, just in time for reelection, to offer false solutions to problems they themselves have caused.

Lamont was not alone in patting himself on the back. “For the Hartfords, the Bridgeports, the East Hartfords, the Meridens, the Waterburys, there’s a lot of money in there,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, a lifelong Hartford resident. “We’re hoping they’ll use it to reduce property taxes or stabilize their budget for a couple of years. Don’t blow it all at once. But it’s a gift — I shouldn’t say gift. That’s the wrong word. It’s a grant that they did not see coming.”

The distinction between Ritter’s gift and a grant is paper thin. Ritter is gifting or granting other people’s money to the cities Democrats depend on for reelection, and the problem with granting other people’s money to politically favored groups is, as Prime Minister of Great Britain Maggie Thatcher once said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” There is another problem as well: Why should any of us suppose that an allocation of other people’s money by Ritter will be money well spent – or better and more profitably spent than the same funds distributed by a fair and equitable free market system?

Auditors Booted from Hartford’s Internal Audit Commission

2026-04-27T00:41:00.001-04:00

The headline in the Hartford Courant likely will not be reassuring to Hartford residents: “Longtime CT city commissioner ousted. Another leaves too; backlash immediate and sharply worded.”

Dismissed, according to the Courant, was “Bruce Rubenstein, an attorney and member of the Internal Audit Commission since 2013… not reappointed when city Treasurer Carmen Sierra” thought it proper to appoint attorney Catherine Torres to the Internal Audit Commission in Rubenstein’s place.

Asked why he thought he was not reappointed to the audit commission, Rubenstein said, “I believe that she (Sierra) knew we were talking about an audit and investigation of the pension fund; she would have known we were interested in an audit… The pension is billions of dollars … if a treasurer opposes an audit, something is wrong. I don’t look the other way with allegations.”

Sierra complimented Rubenstein as she showed him the door. She said, according to the Courant, “she had an opportunity to work with Rubenstein ‘for many years’ and he is ‘a wonderful person, very smart.’… However, she said, Rubenstein has served and was reappointed by a previous treasurer and she has made it clear it was time to ‘open doors for young professionals and that we need to diversify these commissions.’”

“Rubenstein told the Courant, “… he voted recently in favor of an investigation and audit of the city’s pension fund and expenses, inclusive of the period from January 2024 to the present. He said the decision to audit the pension fund came after information was submitted to the audit commission that ‘alleged possible problems with the income and expenses for that time period and advised us to take a look.’”

Those who know Rubenstein well regard him as a blushingly honest appraiser of things political in Connecticut.

The Courant notes: “The change in the Internal Audit Commission also comes as Sierra also appointed a new member to the Hartford Pension Commission, ending the membership and chairmanship of Joshua Gottfried, who then penned a critical letter to Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and the City Council, citing concerns that he alleges impact the commission “effectively carrying out its fiduciary duties.”

Gottfried has not gone gentle into that good night, according to the Courant. Gottfried has penned a letter detailing his concerns in “three primary areas: investments, personnel, and governance.” He is sharing the letter because, according to the paper, a “1% additional rate of return would save the city $109,190,000 over the next 15 years.”

Gottfried writes in his letter that “many of the issues” he details “stem from a lack of adequate policies and procedures as well as how de facto authority and communication have been structured by the Treasurer who also serves as Secretary of the [Pension] Commission.”

Sierra has vowed to respond “legally” to Gottfried’s letter. As a practical matter, this barely concealed threat means, “We cannot comment on a pending legal matter” that will take God knows how long to resolve as it bounces through the courts.

Tossing into overburdened courts complex political matters, some have observed, may be the last refuge of political scoundrels.

A denial of public information concerning audits necessary for good governance may be accomplished in various ways: the results of the audit itself may be sequestered in some dark corner; the auditors may be politically replaced with others more obliging; or those pointing out governmental deficiencies may be first dismissed and later discredited by shark-toothed lawyers. These are the impediments that prevent state employed whistleblowers from blowing their whistles.

The danger in audits is that honest auditors may lay before the public evidence of political malfeasance – always on the occasionally debatable assumption that sunlight disinfects corruption -- a danger resolved most effectively by the stratagems mentioned above.

The real problem in most large urban areas of Connecticut such as Hartford is that in a one-party municipal system one hand may never know what the other hand is doing because -- there is only one hand. The last Republican mayor of Hartford was Ann Uccello, the first female Mayor of Hartford and the first female Mayor of any city in Connecticut. “In a 1970 poll,” according to her obit, “81 percent of the greater Hartford public approved of her job performance.” In 2008 the city of Hartford covered itself in glory by renaming Ann Street Ann Uccello Street. Ann was elected mayor in 1967 and left office in 1971.

Indeed, Connecticut suffers from the same one-handed political structure as many of its major cities, and largely because of this the majority incumbent party can well afford to wink at political corruption.

Regione caecorum rex est luscus, Desiderius Erasmus tells us: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"

Homeschooling in Connecticut. What Would Webster Say?

2026-04-25T17:53:00.001-04:00

Republican State House leader Vince Candelora has a gift for summarizing in a few pithy sentences legislative attempts to solve problems majority Democrats in Connecticut‘s General Assembly have made.

Objecting to the “final” version of a bill many homeschooling parents in Connecticut find unnecessarily intrusive and needlessly complex, Candelora said the bill “really misses the mark, if we are concerned about children falling through the cracks who are being abused,” the precipitant cause of the now revised homeschooling bill favored by Democrats. “That’s what our focus should be. [The bill drafted by Democrats is] an attempt to regulate homeschooling, and that’s not our issue. Our issue is when children are in DFC [Connecticut Department of Children and Families] custody or a report of DFC abuse or neglect [has been made], how are those children monitored? The focus [of the present adjusted homeschooling bill], is registering homeschooled children. [The bill] is the first step to regulate homeschooling. The next is curriculum review, and that is where families start to object.”

To anyone who supposes that the revised homeschooling bill has set the feet of Connecticut’s Democrat controlled General Assembly on a “slippery slope” that could lead to further intrusive home schooling restrictions, state House majority leader Matt Ritter announced, intemperately: “The term ‘slippery slope’ is the laziest intellectual argument that has ever existed in mankind, because it can be used for anything. I hate it. I hate it, so I don’t want to hear about slippery slopes.”

Ritter did not share with reporters his detestation of the expression “the camel’s nose in the tent,” as in “the present watered down homeschooling bill is the camel’s nose in the tent.” We all know that once the camel’s nose is in the tent, the rest of the beast will follow, displacing the tent dwellers. That would seem to be the import of the following passage in a Hartford paper: “Both Ritter and House Majority leader Jason Rojas of East Hartford said it is possible that there could be changes [to the proposed bill] in the future.

“’There will have to be a new hearing, a new bill, elections,” said Ritter.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again – but only after the upcoming election have been concluded. It is extremely important to Democrat leaders in Connecticut that incumbent majority Democrats should not lose office by slipping on slippery slopes.

Noah Webster, born in West Hartford and known as the "Father of American Scholarship and Education" – the man was immensely prolific; a modern bibliography of his works spans 655 pages -- reminds us that power politics may trump Constitutional restraints. We should be doubly wary of ambitious politicians who appear to be actuated by noble intentions: "It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

Webster was largely homeschooled by his mother before enrolling at Yale at 16 years of age. Recruited by Alexander Hamilton as editor of The Federalist, he moved to New York but quickly moved back to Connecticut upon graduation. Apart from Yale, he was educated by tutors, later writing that a liberal arts education "disqualifies a man for business.” A public school teacher in Glastonbury, he was a lifelong critic of public education. His own elementary school teachers, he thought, were the "dregs of humanity." Their instruction, he later complained, mainly concerned religion.

And Webster was unabashedly patriotic: “America sees the absurdities—she observes the kingdoms of Europe, disturbed by wrangling sectaries, or their commerce, population, and improvements of every kind cramped and retarded, because the human mind like the body is fettered 'and bound fast by the chords of policy and superstition': She laughs at their folly and shuns their errors: She founds her empire upon the idea of universal toleration: She admits all religions into her bosom; She secures the sacred rights of every individual; and (astonishing absurdity to Europeans!) she sees a thousand discordant opinions live in the strictest harmony ... it will finally raise her to a pitch of greatness and luster, before which the glory of ancient Greece and Rome shall dwindle to a point, and the splendor of modern Empires fade into obscurity.”

As we approach the country’s founding celebration on July 4, 2026, it may be instructive to turn on its head the wrong question – What do we think of the founders? -- and ask the right question – What would the founders think of us?

Is Europe still absurd? May we say with assurance that we in the United States observe scrupulously the rights of every individual? Are gerrymandered Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly who outnumber Republicans willing to allow an open government that includes the opposition party in the general decision making process? Is democracy by political caucus democratic? When we celebrate the semiquincentennial of the United States’ founding on July 4, 2026, will we remember the opening words of the Declaration of Independence we are celebrating: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Murphy Mamdani’s Apology Tour

2026-04-22T09:49:00.001-04:00

“Every time I see or hear Murphy, I feel my brain cells dying” -- a Facebook commentator

The Hill reports – “Murphy tells US, world progressives to take 'lessons' from Hungary elections” – “Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Saturday urged progressives in the U.S. and around the world to ‘learn from each other’, saying the defeat of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary can offer a roadmap for rebuilding democracy… Murphy told the crowd at the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization conference in Barcelona that the U.S. faced “the most significant threat” to democratic institutions since the Civil War, and Americans were “watching the courage of the defenders of democracy” in Hungary and other parts of Europe… The Connecticut Democrat, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, painted the picture of an America ‘in crisis,’ likening President Trump’s actions to a ‘totalitarian takeover.’”

Possibly some Democrats in Connecticut regard Murphy’s remarks as foaming at the mouth rhetorical campaign rhetoric. The Hill report continues: Trump, Murphy said, “’is trying to seize control of our courts, of our law enforcement, of our media, of our elections. His goal is oligarchic capture,’ Murphy said, describing the current White House as ‘the most corrupt’ in the nation’s history... “He called on progressives to unite to counter right-wing populism across the globe, pointing to [the] AfD party in Germany, [the] far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Orbán and Trump” – quite a mouthful, but not at all surprising coming from Connecticut’s version of New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Both socialism and neo-progressivism are on the march, and historically, both have marched to the same ideological drummer. The Soviet Union before its breakup was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Hungary, both before and after the first suppressed Hungarian Revolution, was a part of the forced socialist collective. It may help Connecticut voters to recall that Nutmeggers used to wrinkle their noses at the mention of socialist communism.

Murphy, The Hill reported, “also pushed for corporate power to be broken up and to ‘confront the cult of corruption’ worldwide, which he argued is harming working-class people. ‘This cult of corruption exists [not only] in America, but in every other corner of this world,’ he said. ‘This is the lesson from Hungary. The Hungarians refused to bend to the cult of corruption. They demanded a higher standard from their public sector leaders,’ he added.”

The Baltic States and Poland have in the past heroically sought to break free of the Soviet Socialist “Republic”. Some Hungarians in the audience attentive to Murphy’s remarks no doubt will recall the forced servitude of Hungary under the Soviet hegemon.

What lessons should Nutmeggers draw from Murphy’s remarks at the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization conference in Barcelona, Spain?

Speaking before three thousand hopeful neo-progressives in Spain, Murphy donned his frequently inflamed anti-President Trump face. It was an event of searing declamations among left wing fellow travelers.

In its coverage of the conference, the Associated Press (AP) noted, “Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, an outspoken critic of U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, hosted two overlapping events about democracy and progressive politics in Spain’s second-largest city.”

Prime Minister of Spain since 2018, Sanchez, also served as Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) since 2017, previously having held that office from 2014 to 2016. He is the ninth president of the Socialist International since 2022.

On March 30, the AP reported, “Spain closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war, officials said Monday, in another step by Europe’s loudest critic of U.S. and Israeli military actions in the month-long conflict. The country earlier said that the U.S. couldn’t use jointly operated military bases in the war, which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described as illegal, reckless and unjust. Defense Minister Margarita Robles said that the same logic applied to the use of Spanish airspace.”

Murphy no doubt ingratiated himself with his fellow socialists by his fervent remarks concerning Spain’s government. He was joined in his denunciations by the fraud-soaked Democrat governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, a speaker at the conference who recently ran for Vice President of the United States on a ticket featuring Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate substitute for President Joe Biden. Former President Biden was knocked out of the presidential ring by an assortment of prestigious Democrat leaders, including, some suspect, former President Barrack Obama and former Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi. Not physically present in Spain during the conference, socialist Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani was content offering Zoomed remarks.

The associated Press reported: “Sen. Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, spoke at the progressive rally and he didn’t shy away from blasting Trump while celebrating the loss of power of Trump’s ally Viktor Orbán in elections in Hungary last week.

“Donald Trump is out to end our democracy,” Murphy said. “We are not on the verge of a totalitarian takeover, we are in the middle of it.”

Many observers of the American scene heartily doubt that the time remaining in the Trump presidency will allow Trump-the-totalitarian to snuff out Democracy in America, a book written by Alexis de Tocqueville too little read among neo-progressive socialists on both sides of the Euro-American pond.

Republican government in the United States, Tocqueville reminds us, will survive until Congress discovers a way to bribe the public with the public's money. The allure of power and influence, he warns, can corrupt the democratic process. Nor was Tocqueville a stranger to socialism. Both democracy and socialism are grounded in equality, but the two differ from each other none-the-less he maintained. Democracy seeks equality in liberty, while socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Might it not be a good idea to require, before voting for men and women in the US Congress, some firm assurance that they understand the difference between servitude and liberty?

Connecticut, a Sanctuary State

2026-04-16T20:21:00.001-04:00

The title of the story in the Hartford Courant read: “Connecticut Senate Democrats pass tighter restrictions on ICE agents, right to sue agents.” And the lede said everything worth saying: “HARTFORD, Conn. — Prompted by shootings and heavy-handed tactics [by ICE], the [neo-progressive Democrat controlled] state Senate voted on party lines Tuesday night for a new state civil rights law that would allow Connecticut citizens to sue federal immigration agents…The controversial measure would permit civil lawsuits against federal officials if citizens believed that their civil rights had been violated.”

That is to say: Neo-progressive Democrats in Connecticut, leading by the nose a disappearing remnant of liberal state Democrats, intend, through constitutionally questionable legislation, to remove partial immunity from federal law enforcement agents – so that non-citizens of the United States may sue in court federal agents who wish to detain them. Connecticut’s new “civil rights law” might be constitutional, were it not for the Supremacy Clause, a provision in Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution that establishes the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties as the supreme law of the land, overriding conflicting state laws binding upon state judges.

The Supremacy Clause 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, any Thing (sic) in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding”

Most historians and legal scholars agree that the Supremacy Clause was included in the U.S. Constitution to remedy weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation. The Articles lacked a mechanism to enforce federal law over state law. By establishing federal supremacy, the U.S. Constitution provided a legal framework for resolving conflicts between state and federal legislation and ensured a uniform application of federal law across all states.

According to Constitution Annotated: “The Supremacy Clause was a response to problems with the Articles of Confederation, which governed the United States from 1781 to 1789. The Articles conspicuously lacked any similar provision declaring federal law to be superior to state law. As a result, during the Confederation era, federal statutes did not bind state courts in the absence of state legislation implementing them. To address this issue and related political difficulties, the Confederation Congress called for a convention in 1787 to revise the Articles. While the Supremacy Clause was not a source of major disagreement at the Constitutional Convention that followed, it generated intense controversy during debates over the Constitution’s ratification. But advocates of federal supremacy prevailed. The Constitution was ratified in 1788 with the Supremacy Clause.”

Under the Supremacy Clause, state courts are legally bound to follow federal law. The clause enforces the principle of judicial review by permitting courts to invalidate state or federal statutes that violate the US Constitution. Federal statutes and treaties must conform to the constitution; they may not exceed the powers granted to the federal government.

At the insistence of leftist Democrat State Senator Gary Winfield, who represented Connecticut’s 10th District, the Democrat dominated General Assembly earlier enacted the Trust Act. The Act, according to a memo produced by Attorney General William Tong’ office, barred police from detaining someone solely for immigration issues. The bill allows local governments to detain an individual at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only if the person has a serious or violent felony conviction.

“A section of the bill [supported by Winfield] that abolishes partial immunity for all police officers in the state,” Connecticut Commentary noted at the time, “has been roundly criticized by Connecticut Republicans, police chiefs and some few Democrat legislators who believe that holding municipalities and individual police officers legally responsible for suits filed against officers, frivolous or merited, will severely reduce police recruitment, especially in large Connecticut cities such as New Haven.” That prediction proved true for obvious reasons: What candidate seeking employment as a police officer would choose to ally himself with a police organization that would permit a suit attaching his private assets?

The Supremacy Clause is the broad-shouldered constitutional provision upon which judicial review rests. Without the Supremacy Clause, there would be no constitutional authority vested in superior courts that allows justices to strike down legislative provisions the courts deem unconstitutional.

Senate Bill 397, which passed muster in the state senate, has been energetically promoted by Governor Ned Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong.

“Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a liberal Democrat from New Haven,” the Hartford Courant noted on April 14, “said that Connecticut residents have been ‘appalled’ by the ‘abuses committed by ICE.’ As a result, the [Democrat legislative] caucus crafted the 40-page Senate Bill 397 with the assistance of Gov. Ned Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong.”

Looney has not yet told us whether his constituents would be similarly appalled by his thus far successful attempt to subvert the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause without first making the slightest gesture to repeal the offending provision in the time-honored fashion.

“Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding of Brookfield, the Courant reported, “
said that there are ‘barrels of case law in favor of overturning [Senate Bill 397].’ After the smoke clears and the debate ends, Harding said, ‘All we’re left with is another anti-cop bill from Hartford.’”

Republicans generally trust that appellate courts will not permit Connecticut’s neo-progressive legislators to remove by statute a constitutional authority under the Supremacy Clause that allows justices to overrule laws they regard as constitutionally subversive.

As usual, state senator Rob Samson, one of the state's legislative jewels in Connecticut’s crown of neo-progressive thorns, got it exactly right.

Samson blasted Senate Bill 397 as “extremely offensive” in its treatment of law enforcement, according to the Courant.

“I would call it a Trojan horse, anti-police bill,” Sampson said on the Senate floor. “It cannot be overstated just how important they [ICE law officials] are to maintaining law and order. … Most of this bill is patently unconstitutional. … Immigration policy falls under the federal government. It’s the United States, not the state of Connecticut, that makes immigration policy.”

Earmark Reform, Connecticut’s Corrupt-Cup Overflows

2026-04-14T17:56:00.002-04:00

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft -- George Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

Corruption, we know, is a staple of kingly arrogance. In a unitary one party state, corruption corrupts absolutely, for obvious reasons. When power remains undivided in a state, the only guard against political corruption, so we have been told, is a vigilant media.

A nudge from the Feds and a six month old attempt by Connecticut Republicans to reform the state’s earmarks structure has awakened the virtuous juices of a handful of Connecticut’s reporters.

About six months ago, Republican leaders in the General Assembly – state representative in the House Vince Candelora and state senators Rob Sampson and Steve Harding -- issued a mini-manifesto on earmarks and ended by “proposing the following legislative reforms which would apply to all grant recipients receiving a grant-in-aid earmarked from a state appropriation or bond allocation from the state. They include:

Transparency of Purpose

As a condition of receiving funds, grant recipients must submit a written request to the Appropriations Committee which shall include the following information:

The amount of funds requested

The necessity for and intended use of such funds;

A clear description of the public purpose furthered by the granting of such funds; and

The legislator/requestor who made the initial request for funds, including a certification that they, their family members, or any business with which they are associated, have no financial interest in and will receive no financial benefit from the grant of funds.

Such information shall be publicly posted online.

Grant recipients must participate in a public hearing conducted by the Appropriations Committee, which shall also include the agency of cognizance (DECD, DSS, etc), to give the committee an opportunity to gather additional information and solicit public input.

Grant recipients must disclose any convictions of its officers or board members of any financial related crimes and any cases where an officer or board member was the defendant in a lawsuit related the handling of funds or the discharge of fiduciary duty.

Grant recipients must submit to random state audits and financial reconciliations to verify that the funds are being used as intended.

Transparency in Reporting

Prior to receiving an initial grant and annually thereafter, no later than 60 days before the end of the fiscal year in which the funds were received, the grant recipient must submit to the Appropriations committee a certified, detailed accounting of the recipient's budget for the previous fiscal year that includes:

Each amount spent on administrative costs; each amount spent on lobbying, political and advocacy activities, including but not limited to, funds paid to any tax-exempt organization recognized under IRS Code 501(c)(4); a detailed reporting of all sources of income, in addition to the state funds; a detailed accounting of all disbursements; if applicable, a detailed accounting of how third-party and subsequent grant recipients expended the funds they received; a list of all current Board Members.

The Republican leaders also included in their manifesto a few pertinent remarks that might have caught the eyes of federal investigators/prosecutors:

The budget bill which passed this year included $13.3 million in Fiscal Year 26 and $5.6 million in Fiscal Year 27 for legislatively directed appropriations under the Youth Services Prevention and Youth Violence Initiative lines.

There are 289 separate lines which list only the organizations' names and amount appropriated to each.

There are multiple organizations listed twice. Some organizations are either misspelled or have incorrect names. Some of the organizations have little to no information available online.

Examples of the grantees include:

“Sports Academy” is receiving $250,000. It is unclear what “Sports Academy” is, or does. The only organization with an exact match of this name that registered with the state was dissolved in 2021.

Blue Hills Civic Association, Inc. is receiving $20,000. This organization has been under FBI investigation since December of 2024. The organization has received $14.42 million from the state since 2016 with a vast majority coming in the past four years.

The lawmakers also highlighted a Special Act which passed this year that directs state funds to a long list of nonprofit groups (attached).

We hope these common sense reforms receive bipartisan support, and if we are called into Special Session this month, we urge Democrats to add these good government solutions to the list of action items to vote on. We urge Democrats to work with us in bipartisan fashion on these ideas. We should be spending taxpayer money as prudently and as transparently as possible. The candy store Connecticut government giveaways must end."

The earmarks presently under scrutiny by the Feds may be the tip of a very large and menacing iceberg. Bob Swick, who has been ringing Connecticut’s fraud alarm bell for two decades, notes in Connecticut Centinal: “Looking at the Governor and his dealings, he represents all that is bad in our political system. One can safely state this as the corruption does get answered about “Thermo Fisher Scientific’, ‘Sema 4’, ‘Core Infomatics’, ‘Centrellis’, ‘Ocrulus’, ‘Urjanet’, ‘1life Healthcare’, ‘Galileo Health’, ‘Castlight Health’, "‘Paladina Health’, and "‘VillageMD‘, the Lamont-related Cayman Island partnerships, large Cayman Islands deals such as the ‘Horsebarn Hill Investment Fund’ hiding in the UCONN Foundation, and other deals working through ‘quasi-public’ organizations such as Lamont-connected (and covert) ‘Connecticut Innovations’”.

In a recent Hartford Courant story, reporter Chris Keating noted: “Prompted by an FBI investigation and complaints by legislators [for the most part, aggressive, morally awake Republican Party leaders in the state’s General Assembly] about state spending, the state House of Representatives voted unanimously for a reform bill that calls for greater oversight for nonprofits that collectively receive millions of dollars annually in state funding.

Keating noted in his story, “Some lawmakers [chiefly Republicans] said the measure, known as House Bill 5039, was not as strong as it could have been. First, the judicial and executive branches, which are separate branches of government, are not included in the bill, despite millions of dollars that often flow to nonprofits. Second, Lamont’s proposal to include the name of the legislator who proposed the specific earmark was dropped from the bill.”

In his remarks on Tammany Hall, boss George Plunkitt makes a careful distinction between honest and dishonest graft:

EVERYBODY is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics. There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took “em.”…

Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend -- why shouldn’t I do the same in public life?

Another kind of honest graft. Tammany has raised a good many salaries. There was an awful howl by the reformers, but don’t you know that Tammany gains ten votes for every one it lost by salary raisin’?

Now, in conclusion, I want to say that I don’t own a dishonest dollar. If my worst enemy was given the job of writin’ my epitaph when I’m gone, he couldn’t do more than write:

“George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took ‘Em.”

The more things change, the French say, the more they remain the same.

Murphy on the US Iran War

2026-04-08T15:08:00.004-04:00

Things are not going well, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told a Hartford paper.

Perhaps Murphy should bone up on his Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and military theorist who wrote in his seminal work On War (Vom Kriege) that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Clausewitz meant that war serves as a political instrument that secures the objectives of diplomacy when peaceful measures fail. The political goal, however, must always guide the conduct and intensity of military action.

When President Ronald Reagan was asked what goal he would pursue with the Soviet Union during his presidency, Reagan answered, “We win, they lose.”

Clausewitz was not simply theorizing. He was stating an incontrovertible historical fact. Diplomacy with Germany and Japan at the conclusion of World War II was much easier than it had been prior to the winning of the war. So it has been throughout history, as Murphy might say, Period!

“Trump has created a disaster for the whole world that he can’t solve,” Murphy told the Hartford Courant. “The only way the Strait [of Hormuz] will open is for the war to end. Period. Stop. There is no way for the U.S. military to reopen that strait. It is an abomination that he [Trump] is threatening war crimes in order to force Iran to open the Strait… We all woke up on Easter morning to the president threatening to commit war crimes: bombing bridges and roads and power plants as a means to try to force Iran to reopen the Strait. I just don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of foreign policy malpractice in our country’s recent history. He’s got to end the war.”

We all know war is Hell. Perhaps the most significant campaign during the American Civil War was Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, during which about 60,000 Union soldiers marched from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, covering about 285 miles. The purpose of the campaign was to induce the civilian population to abandon the Confederate cause by destroying military targets, infrastructure, and civilian properties along the way, resulting in a swath of destruction approximately 60 miles wide. Sherman's strategy was to demonstrate that the Confederate government could not protect its citizens from Union forces, according to History editors.

If war itself is a crime, then Trump certainly has committed a crime in engaging Iran in a war. We do not yet know whether Trump will be successful in his goal of opening the Strait of Hormuz so that the shipping of oil may continue unobstructed by whoever has been left in charge of the war-shattered “republic.” Buyers and sellers of oil who have in the past moved their cargo unobstructed through the straight may disagree with Murphy, despite his assurance that “there is no way for the US military to reopen that strait.”

As journalists sometimes say, “We’ll see.” It would be political folly to cede ownership of a free waterway to a militant state that has for forty seven years managed successfully to declare itself the enemy of Western culture.

Wednesday’s top of the front page spread in the Hartford Courant should prove embarrassing to Murphy, one of President Donald Trump’s more vituperative critics, although U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, pushing for yet another Trump impeachment should Democrats reclaim the U.S. House, is a close runner-up. National Democrats are fully aware 1) that the only punishment for an impeachment finding in the U.S. House is removal from office, 2) that Trump will not retain office beyond the completion of his second term, 3) that the punishment therefore will be redundant, and 4) that any future impeachment proceeding is necessary for campaign reasons alone. Democrats have been through this tortuous business two times already and, according to “No Kings” furiosos, King Trump has not yet been dislodged from the presidency.

A story on the right of the front page of the Hartford Courant contains a subtitle – “Senator [Murphy] says president [Trump] has created ‘disaster for the whole world’ as vital strait [of Hormuz] remains closed” – while a companion story to the left blares –“After warning that ‘whole civilization will die’ president [Trump] pulls back, offers 2-week ceasefire.”

Murphy’s “world disaster,” it is apparent, has been remediated – in one day, possibly the shortest “world disaster” in world history.

The senator’s wildly wagging tongue has outrun his brain, a problem not limited to campaign intensity. Soren Kierkegaard somewhere mentions a common theme in fairytales in which a giant in pursuit of the princess finds himself far in front of her. Such is the nature of any thoughtless political ambition that has forsworn forethought and afterthought, Prometheus and Epimetheus, the Greek gods who stand as sentinels of rationality and good sense.

Even Murphy’s most ardent admirers will have difficulty swallowing the notion that Iran, left unmolested, will abandon its foreign policy ambitions of forty-seven years -- to crush and humiliate Big Satan, the United States, and Little Satan, Israel. Thus far, these unholy ambitions have been thwarted.

God and Man at Yale Revisited

2026-04-04T18:29:00.006-04:00

Commentary on a pending visit of U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to the Buckley Institute, located on the grounds of Yale University, has been scattered and occasionally scatterbrained.

The Yale Daily News tells us, “In an interview, Yale President Maurie McInnis lauded the Buckley Institute for scheduling an event with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose department has investigated Yale and slashed federal funding for universities.”

Driving the point home, the paper adds, “McMahon is slated to speak about diversity, gender and the government’s education policies at an April 16 event hosted by the Buckley Institute, a group that brings conservative voices to campus. The secretary, a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, oversees a Department of Education that has canceled billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding grants to universities across the country.”

Much of Connecticut’s media is in danger in its news accounts of becoming the nation’s premier pabulum pusher among hard-wired anti-Trumpists. Like love, conservatives know an anti-Trump bias when they see it.

Chris Powell, the former Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, now retired, though he continues writing a column for the paper, reminds us that McMahon has not been a politician favored by Connecticut’s media. Newspapers across the state, once independent and privately owned, have now been swallowed up by large national and international chains that push out what some conservatives dismiss as prefabricated media pabulum.

Powell, who has written often on education in Connecticut and the nation, laid his finger in a recent column on several sore points: “Of course indications are that education in the United States has declined substantially since the {Federal Department of Education] was established. For indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record to defend.

“It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while enrollments fall.”

Powell’s commentary is often dangerously fresh. He is without doubt an inspired contrarian, unwilling to go along to get along, a journalistic disturber of the peace such as William Randolph Hearst, the namesake of the present Hearst media empire. Here are some of Hearst’s notable quotes on the subject of newspaper independence:

"The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth."

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed."

"In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy."

These strictures apply as well – or should apply as well – to universities, or at least to universities like Yale that are massively endowed through the generosity of their alumni and other freely contributing friends of Yale. The university’s endowment is so large it needn’t worry overmuch about cuts proposed by the U.S. Government.

As stated in her answers to questions presented to her by Yale’s newspaper staff, Yale’s President Maurie McInnis reinforces and adds weight to Hearst’s perspective.

“’Buckley does an amazing job, as do many of our other student groups, of inviting leaders to come speak on consequential topics,’ McInnis said in her interview on Tuesday. ‘I applaud that they have invited her.’”

Asked if she believed the Education Department should be scrapped, McInnis responded “’… the U.S. Department of Education serves many wide and diverse functions, many of which serve our students very well,’ mentioning Pell Grants as an example. ‘I certainly think that those functions are absolutely vital and need to continue,’ she added, emphasizing the word ‘functions.’”

Asked what she would most want to convey to McMahon if given the chance, McInnis said she would highlight the University’s commitment to open inquiry. “I would stress what an extraordinary educational opportunity Yale was able to provide to students who have wide ranges of views” adding, that Yale offers to its students “open opportunities for debate and dialogue.”

Buckley’s Book God and Man at Yale -- subtitled “The Superstitions of Academic Freedom,” first published in 1951 and republished with a new introduction by Buckley in 1977 -- caused an upheaval in academia. George Will called the book “a lover’s quarrel with his [Buckley’s] alma mater.”

The new introduction to the book is well worth the price of admission: “I know why Yale shouldn’t be turned over to the state. Because there are great historical presumptions that from time to time the interests of the state and those of civilization will bifurcate, and unless there is independence, the cause of civilization is neglected. The critical difference [between Berkley and Yale} is the critical sense of mission. At Berkley, that sense of mission is as diffuse and inchoate – and unspecified and unspecifiable – as the resolute pluralism of California society. At the private college, the sense of mission is distinguishing. It is however strangled by what goes under the presumptuous designation of academic freedom. It is a terrible loss, the loss of the sense of mission. It makes the private university, sad to say, incoherent; and that is what I was trying to say when, two months out of Yale, I sat down to write this book.”

Buckley is here attacking the levelers, those who believe that a loss of character and mission is not ruinous. The Buckley Institute’s mission is to see to it that character, coherence and mission is not swept away by temporary enthusiasms, such as a distaste bordering on irrational hatred for things Trumpian.

Good Friday, He Is Risen

2026-04-02T08:59:00.000-04:00

For Christians, the Resurrection of Jesus, called the Christ, lies at the very heart of their belief and faith. Good Friday, then, is a very good day indeed. It is a day in which the promises of Jesus and those of the Old Testament were fulfilled.

The New Testament is a gradual unfolding for Christians of the realization that God is with us -- in every sense of these words. God is “for us”; he will not abandon creatures he has made in his image. God is trustworthy, and we believe in his promises. He is alive in our lives. This is the sum and substance of Christianity.

Jesus offers his disciples a foretaste of his divinity in New Testament accounts. The resurrected Jesus tells doubting Thomas, “You have seen and you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

The apostle Peter, recognized by Christians as the rock upon which Jesus built his church, was a believer in the divinity of Jesus – up to a point. Three times he denied he knew Jesus before he was scourged and crucified. Meeting Jesus at the Sea of Galilee following the resurrection, Peter is questioned: “Peter, do you love me more than these? [the other disciples who were present.] Peter responds, “You know that I love you.” Peter is asked the same question three times, and he responds similarly, according to John 21:25 – three denials and three reaffirmations.

Immediately following the crucifixion, the apostles, fearing a like fate, fled in fear and hid themselves. The first to recognize the risen Christ was Mary Magdalene, according to the gospels of John and Mark.

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved [John], and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him’” (John 20:1-2).

“Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her” (John 20:17-18).

Because Jesus entrusted Mary Magdalene to relay the good news of his resurrection to the other apostles, she is called among some Christians, the “Apostle to the Apostles.”

On what grounds do you believe is a reasonable question, but it is preceded in importance by the question: What do you believe? We go to scripture for assurance, to be sure. But in troublesome times that challenge belief, we go to it for courage. A man’s son is troubled by seizures caused, he thinks, by an unclean spirit. The apostles were of no help. In despair, the man turns to Jesus and is told to believe. “I do believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

Details such as these, C.S. Lewis thought, are accurate non-invented reports wholly unlike those that a novelist like Lewis would conjure. Lewis says somewhere that he as a novelist knows the difference between a fictional representation of invented facts and a true account of a witnessed event. The New Testament is strewn with accounts of witnessed events.

Christian scholars used to believe that the Gospel of John, very poetic, was written very late, but modern scholars place it early in the 2^nd century. It was regarded as less historical than earlier gospels, but archeologists, using descriptions in John, discovered a few years ago the site where Jesus was judged, Pilate's Judgment Hall, also known as the Praetorium.

The courage to believe is a separate matter, essential to discovery and faith. And it is essential to evangelization, i.e. sharing the good news.

On this Good Friday, may God give us the gift of courage and fill out hearts with gratitude.

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Addendum:

Visiting San Marco convento in Florence several years ago, my wife Andree and I were astonished by the above fresco – and others -- of resident monk Fra Angelico.