Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Blumenthal and Schumer The papers are full of news reports concerning Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long awaited investigation. Both Republican and Democrat antagonists in the apparently never ending President Donald Trump soap opera are claiming vindication. Briefly, the Horowitz report makes and defends two primary claims: 1) that the OPENING of the Trump investigation was justified, and 2) that the prosecution of the investigation on the part of the FBI had been mishandled. Attorney General William Barr and the State Attorney from the District of Connecticut, John Durham, have been roundly criticized by U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who has praised the Horowitz report in extravagant terms as an “authoritative objective report [that] completely demolishes President Trump’s false claims and right wing conspiracy theories that the Russian investigation involved political bias or other improper motive[s]. It explodes President Trump’s fictitious narrative about a ‘wit...

Sometime after Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lee Whitnum was dragged from a debate stage in Brookfield and arrested – apparently for being Lee Whitnum – Connecticut Democratic Party Chair Nick Balletto issued the following directive to Fox News: “We’re a big tent party, we invite people from all walks of life to participate in our Party and the electoral process. But based on Lee Whitnum’s behavior tonight, and based on her behavior in the past, it’s clear that Lee Whitnum should not hold elected office and does not represent the Democratic Party, nor should she participate in Party functions at the local or statewide level.” There will be multiple versions of the event, Whitnum’s and everyone else's. Going forward, the standard among gubernatorial Democrats for dealing with disgruntled declared candidates for governor appears to be -- call the cops. The "big tent" party of law and order is on the prowl, and Brookfield obviously is not a sanctuary town in w...

A Self-Interview February 2017  Q: I’ve heard you say on Jim Vicevich’s radio program that progressivism as we’ve known it during the past few years of the Obama administration may be a spent bullet? A: Yes and no. Q: Give us the “yes” first. A: Barack Obama is a spent bullet. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, Obama might have had a brief afterlife. That did not happen; instead, the country turned, pretty resolutely and in anguish, to Donald Trump, the horse of a different color. The left continues to show its disappointment. Anarchists join a protest march at Berkley and succeed in storming a Starbucks; Trump’s cabinet nominations are delayed; and then there is that tar-bush speech by Elizabeth Warren in the course of which she quoted the late Edward Kennedy on U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, recently appointed Trump’s attorney general. Quoting Kennedy, Warren said ,  "Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Ame...