Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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

Democrat Bill Curry has just bowed out of what promises to be an energetic tousle in Connecticut’s 5 th District. “Some of you,” Curry noted on his Facebook page, “ know I ‘ve spent the last three years studying public corruption; the grass roots movements that have sprung up-- everywhere but here [in Connecticut] -- to fight it; the tools being used around the world to curb it. It’s the big problem that keeps all our other big problems from ever getting solved. The project is close to my heart; after three years it is just now bearing fruit. In the month since Rep Esty said she wouldn’t seek reelection I’ve tried to find a way to keep the project moving forward and still make this race. I couldn’t. The race looked winnable to me and I’m confident it will prove so for one of the fine Democrats contending for the nomination. I promise I’ll help.”

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” The saying was attributed to President Harry Truman by a playwright, but just because Truman may not have coined the phrase does not make it any the less true. Washington DC can be a cutthroat corner of the world. This is not to say that all well-mannered pols have cashed in their chips and left the casino in the hands of brutes. Some U.S. Senators still feel that politics should not be a murderous affair. If you do catch your enemy in a compromising position, it would be prudent to leave open a back door through which he might escape with his honor intact. Your enemy will appreciate the graceful gesture and, perhaps in some future encounter, pause and consider before he draws the knife across your throat”  

Stories like this open a window into sealed rooms in which the usual favorable campaign propaganda is produced by the truckload. This one, which ran in the Washington Post , is not good news for U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty, most recently seen bobbing her head in assent to a vigorous attack on the National Rifle Association (NRA) by a teenage rabble rouser in Washington DC. The Post story begins with a knock-out lede: “The threat from Rep. Elizabeth Esty’s chief of staff arrived in a voice mail. “’You better f-----g reply to me or I will f-----g kill you,’ Tony Baker said in the May 5, 2016, recording left for Anna Kain, a former Esty aide Baker had once dated.”

An obedient Democratic National Convention soldier, U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty has always eagerly followed orders, according to hacked  emails dumped on the general public by Wikileaks. The dump coincided with the opening of the Democrat National Nominating Convention in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. CtNewsJunkie reports   that “A majority of the emails involve her [Esty’s} participation in a DNC conference call with reporters a few months ago regarding the issue of gun control. The call followed Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s appearance at the NRA leadership forum.” The false exclusive connection between the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association (NRA) – Democrats own guns too --promises to loom large in the upcoming General Election, owing to the efforts of Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, and the state’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation.

‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”  – Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide Connecticut US Senator Chris Murphy appeared for an  interview with Bret Baier of Fox News  just as the National Democratic Nominating Convention was reeling from email disclosures that set even fierce Hillary Clinton supporters back on their heels. Mr. Murphy bullied his way through Mr. Baier’s questions but, alas, reality, that annoying spoiler of unreasoned optimism, poked its nose into Mr. Murphy’s tent. Even as the Dr. Pangloss of Connecticut Democrats was saying that all was the best in the best of all possible Democratic worlds, the convention floor was bursting with rancor and – not too extreme a word – disgust. The Democratic world had just been shaken by the release of 20,000 emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), some of which appeared to confirm Socialist Bernie Sanders’ notion that the DNC had set its face against his cand...

In the heyday of Tammany Hall, an intrepid reporter regularly interviewed a Tammany Hall chieftain, ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, and later put together in a small book an illuminating and unintentionally hilarious compilation of the interviews, “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.” One of the book’s chapters is titled “Honest Graft.” There are two kinds of graft, Mr. Plunkitt explained: dishonest graft, which benefits only the grafter, and honest graft, which benefits the grafter, usually a politician, and the general public as well. Honest graft advances the public good, dishonest graph advances only the private ambitions of bad men. Distinctions of this kind, though subtle, are important for politicians who wish to put a halo around questionable activities.  Democrats in Connecticut recently ran into a moral speed bump when, following a sit-in arranged by 1st District U.S. Representative John Larson, the Democratic Party used the occasion to raise funds for politicians in Connec...

Readers of this page may be surprised to learn that the U.S. Congress still prays. Convocations during opening sessions are common among Congressmen even today when, largely because of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, open displays of religious expression are discouraged. In what may be his most famous inaugural address, President Abe Lincoln said, “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 bond-men’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 by 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.’”

Here is a chicken or the egg question: In political corruption cases, should the targeting of suspects for prosecution precede or follow the investigation? Most of us would agree that the targeting of conspirators and co-conspirators in political corruption trials should follow an investigation, because it is the investigation itself that determines culpability. “First the verdict, then the trial,” says the Queen of Hearts in the topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll’s “ Through the Looking Glass .” The world confronted by Alice in Wonderland is supposed to be inverted, the way images are seen in a mirror. But in the real world, we want verdicts to follow trials and targeting in political corruption trials to follow complete and exhaustive investigations. At some point in the corruption investigation of John Rowland, prosecutors decided to target Mr. Rowland as conspirator number one. Other apparently less important conspirators in the case were Brian Foley, the owner of ...

WARNING TO THE CARELESS READER: WHAT FOLLOWS IS NOT – REPEAT NOT – AN ASSERTION OF INNOCENCE BY REASON OF STUPIDITY IN THE LONG RUNNING ROWLAND/LISA WILSON FOLEY/BRIAN FOLEY CORRUPTION CASE. It’s a he said, he said controversy. The parties in dispute are former radio talk show host John Rowland’s attorneys and the attorneys for Lisa Wilson Foley, who was, at the time she was charged and found guilty of a misdemeanor by prosecutors, a failed candidate for the US House of Representatives in the Connecticut corruption infested 5 th District.

During the midterm elections of 2010, President Barack Obama invited members of the U.S. House, then controlled by Democrats, to join him on a plank hovering above shark infested waters. They did so and lost the House. The loss was substantial. Regaining control of the House they had lost in 2006, Republicans picked up a net total of 63 seats, the greatest party loss for Democrats in a House midterm election since 1938. In yet another off year election, Democrats have now lost the Senate in what some are calling a Republican sweep.

Will former Governor John Rowland’s upcoming court trial tar Connecticut’s GOP? The answer to the question will depend on who is wielding the tar brush. There is some indication that left of center media outlets are disposed to take seriously the state Democratic Party’s absurd attempt to tar brush the GOP. In point of fact, an unbridgeable breach between the GOP and Mr. Rowland occurred more than a decade ago when Mr. Rowland was nearly impeached. The impeachment panel included prominent Republicans who today would most vehemently dispute state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo’s characterization of the current connection between the state Republican Party and Mr. Rowland. Ms. DiNardo told a Register Citizen reporter “The CT GOP bringing back John Rowland’s close friend, Jeb Bush, on the eve of more expected felony indictments for Rowland only reinforces the fact that the Connecticut Republican Party is still influenced by Rowland.”

By endorsing Mark Greenberg’s candidacy for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5 th District, a seat now held by U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty, state senate leader John McKinney has tossed a wrench into the political machinery. Mr. McKinney is an announced candidate for governor , a position now held by Governor Dannel Malloy, the first Democratic chief executive in more than 20 years and the nominal head of his party.

The FBI’s singing canary in the Donovan probe, “labor activist” Ray Soucy, was not given prison time for the part he had played in the attempted corruption of former Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan. The lede on a story in a Hartford paper  ran as follows: “A labor activist at the center of an attempt two years ago to kill a tax on tobacco by bribing a top state lawmaker with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign money was sentenced Monday to three years probation, the first six months to be served at a halfway house.” Connecticut’s majority Democratic Party is full of “labor activists.” It’s only a slight stretch to say Governor Dannel Malloy, who has marched on the picket line with union workers, is himself a “labor activist.” Mr. Malloy pledged his troth to unions when he was in the political nursery, and he has renewed his vows several times during his administration, most notably when his first budget was on the drawing boards .

On “social issues,” as defined by Democrats in the Northeast, here is no “there” there within the Republican Party’s ancient regime. Northeast Republicans have only one election card on their table – the economy, stupid. There ain’t no more.  Slothful Northeast Republican Parties have permitted Democrats to define all the social issues; for them, such subjects as abortion on demand, gay marriage and the abolition of the death penalty are strictly verboten.  Among gentlemen Republican moderates in Connecticut, discretion on social issues has been the better part of valor for more than two decades, which may help to explain why there are no more social issue averse Republicans in New England.

U.S. House members Rosa DeLauro and Elizabeth Esty, the congresswomen from Planned Parenthood, are mightily disturbed by a bill that passed the House that would ban abortion once the fetus is older than 20 weeks , except in rape cases or those in which the life of the mother was at risk. The bill cuts off abortions after 20 weeks because it is at that point that the child in the womb can feel pain.

Apparently, snowballs do have a chance of not melting in the fiery furnace. A Hartford paper reported over the weekend that all seven members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have “offered sharp criticism after newspapers revealed the administration’s sweeping government surveillance programs, which monitor cellphone and internet traffic in the name of national security.” U.S. Representative Jim Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, thought the monitoring program was too intense and overbroad: “I feel like the government is breaking all kinds of precedent here in increasing the intensity of its surveillance. There's a balance to be struck and generally it feels like we have lost that balance in favor of over-intrusive investigation and [data] collection." Having opposed covert national security operations during the administration of George Bush, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy had little choice but to object to the expansion of the program und...

This is the sort of headline successful politicians do not want to see in their political resumes: “Feds Subpoena Middletown Health Center s Records Relating to Officials Including Wyman and Malloy's Budget Chief.” Last December, a grand jury subpoenaed documents – e-mails, paper communications and other records – from a host of democratic officials and aides including Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy 's budget cruncher, Ben Barnes,   the governor’s Secretary Office of Policy and Management.

It is abundantly clear from remarks made by the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, both before and after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, that the litmus test of effective gun legislation is that such legislation should prevent future Sandy Hooks.

The last of the Hartford Courant’s increasingly irrelevant U.S. Congressional delegation endorsements appeared in the paper on Friday. The Courant -- shocking the entire state – endorsed U.S. Representative Chris Murphy over former soft-porn WWE impresario Linda McMahon who, in the course of her run for Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat, snubbed Connecticut’s left of center media. Courant endorsements are “conservative” in the bad sense. Connecticut’s congressional delegation is non-diverse; all the members of the delegation are Democrats, and it is clear, following the paper’s endorsement of Elizabeth Esty over moderate Republican Andrew Roraback, that the publisher of the paper and its editorial board members prefer it this way. Adding its endorsement of Democrat Elizabeth Esty’s to that of former Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, the Hartford Courant in its editorial, “Democrat's positions edge Andrew Roraback's bona fides,” tipped its hat to moderate...