Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Blumenthal U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, recently appointed to the Veteran’s Affairs Committee , may have had yet another Zelig moment when, resisting efforts to regulate abortion, he declared, “I'm new to the Senate but I'm not new to this battle. Since the days of Roe v. Wade, when I clerked for Justice Blackmun, as a state legislator, as attorney general, I have fought this battle.” Following Mr. Blumenthal’s remark, a CTMirror reporter commented, “the problem is, Blumenthal clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1974, the year after Blackmun wrote the Roe v. Wade decision,” causing Mr. Blumenthal’s chief of staff, Laurie Rubiner, to erupt indignantly, “This is a very unfair route you are going down. We'll remember this." In a previous incarnation, Ms. Rubiner was the Vice President for Public Policy for Planned Parenthood, described in Ms. Rubiner’s Planned Parenthood biography as the “nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care advocate and ...

Facing abysmally low poll ratings, U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd chose to bump himself off a few days ago, wherefore all the professional politicians who for years thought Dodd was bee’s knees breathed a huge collective sigh of relief. Republicans scratched their heads in dismay when Caligula announced his availability for Dodd’s seat. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, never one to shy from a camera -- having waited what was for him a decent interval before Dodd’s corpse, metaphorically speaking, had been trundled off the stage, a mere two hours – jumped into the race and later made an appearance on Fox News the same day as Dodd’s valedictory. Most pollsters have already anointed Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as Connecticut’s next U.S. Senator. But Professor Gary Rose, Chairman of the Department of Government and Politics at Fairfield University, is not quite ready to leap on the bandwagon. Rose has an issue with Blumenthal’s TV presence. “There’s not the most appealing image o...

No doubt about it, the antics of the co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Michael Lawlor and Sen. Andrew McDonald, are enough to drive a saint to drink or, at the very least, to intemperate language. Radio host and blogger Hal Turner clearly went over the edge when he said about the two, "It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die." Exclamation point! "Or die?" a Hartford paper remarks in an editorial. "Turner defends his passionate beliefs not with a copy of the Constitution, but with the promise of ‘bullets.’” “That would be wrong at any time, but especially now, when hate speech, mostly from the far right, and incitements to violence are so prevalent.” To these reasonable objections, one can only reply "Here, here" -- and then proceed to quibble with some minor reservations. T...

The devil appeared in Wallingford last week, and some students at Choate Rosemary Hall discovered he had no tail or hooves. Karl Rove, the Svengali of the George Bush administration, denied admission to the Choate Rosemary Hall graduation ceremony, snuck in through a back door and there was pelted with questions from the students, some of whom were anxious to catch him in an embarrassing moment. The media was denied admittance, but an exception was made for a single Hartford Courant reporter, who filed a story that appeared a day later in the paper.