Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The news from Connecticut’s education front is not good. According to a piece in CTMirror , SAT results show that “One-third of high school juniors are not reading and writing well enough to begin taking college courses or start a career, statewide SAT results released Monday show. Math results are even more dire – 59 percent failed to meet the college- or career-ready standard.” The figures indicate that the yawning “gaps in achievement between minority students and their white peers” have not improved. Ajit Gopalakrishnan, Bureau Chief Connecticut State Department of Education Performance Office, said the scores show slight improvements for minority students but there is still work to be done.” The locution “still work to be done” is one of those polite phrases that hide a multitude of sins. Some colleges have added an  “adversity index” to their SAT exams. High School juniors in Connecticut are failing to meet “career ready standards” for reasons other than...

Some people, not generally Friends of Tim Herbst (FOH), think the Republican contender for governor is aggressive. He is, as has been noticed during the Republican primaries, somewhat less aggressive in his advertising than David Stemerman, but then Herbst commands a more modest campaign war chest.   Herbst disputes the slur; he says he is competitive. However, the former First Selectman of Trumbull does have a habit of fondling third rails that other Republicans running for governor fear touching. Some of those rails – a hearty defense of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, every bit as inviolable as the First Amendment; peace and security in Connecticut; the socially disruptive effects of certain Malloy-Lawlor justice reforms; the abolition of Connecticut's death penalty on social rather than legal grounds by Connecticut’s constitutionally confused, left leaning Supreme Court; serious crime ripening in   Connecticut cities; a plenitude of illegal guns in a...

Political prospects do not look bright for Democrats in 2018. They will be carrying a heavy load. When Governor Dannel Malloy does step aside in January 2019, he will have left behind him a state in near collapse. The use of the word “collapse” here is not intended metaphorically. By almost any measure , Connecticut is a state with its feet firmly planted on the road to ruination. It is the only state the nation that has not yet recovered from a national recession that officially ended in June 2009. There are many reasons for this, but the principal one is: the state cannot rely on tax increases to discharge future indebtedness. The tax well has dried up. Both companies and people have for some time past been voting with their feet against a tsunami of tax increases. The Weicker income tax in 1991 has been followed by Malloy’s two tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history.

“Dr.” Michael Sharpe, the CEO of the Family Urban School of Excellence (FUSE), padded his credentials; it turned out he was not a “Dr.” at all. Moreover, a cautiously concealed stint in prison further marred Mr. Sharpe’s record, which was, before journalists began snooping into his past, fairly substantial. It is said that the FBI is now examining FUSE with jeweler’s loops screwed into its many eyes. FUSE, according to its mission statement, is “an education management organization formed in 2012 to continue, guide and expand the work of Jumoke Academy, a high-performing urban charter school in Hartford’s north end.” In an earlier time, Mr. Sharpe’s Pilgrim’s Progress through adversity in the direction of a shining light might have served young urban African Americans struggling with their own demons as a positive object lesson: Here was a man who had pulled himself up from the mire by his own bootstraps. Both Malcom X and Martin Luther King spent some time in jail. Mr. Kin...

I’m going to put some figures before you in the hope they will not put you to sleep. Americans – mindful of a dictum attributed to Disraeli by Mark Twain that there are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies, and statistics – tend to drift off as soon as you drag out the numbers. But, I assure you, these numbers are reliable and pertinent to this discussion. The figures immediately below are taken from Pew Research, because that organization is less prone to “lying” – or, if you prefer, statistical manipulation -- than most politicians on the make who fluff figure for their own sometimes nefarious purposes. For six decades, since the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, black unemployment, relative to white unemployment, has hardly budged.  You may recall the official title of MLK’s march on Washington: “The March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty .” Today, as then, black unemployment is double that of whites. There will always be discussions concern...

Anyone who has been following Connecticut Commentary – and the stats suggest many people are – knows I  have written extensively on cities, territorial pools more or less owned by Democrats over the years. Here are some few columns , all of which have been printed in a handful of Connecticut newspapers. In one of them, I fell to my knees and beseeched Republicans not to cede this fertile ground to Democrats. That cry has not resonated with many Republicans, but it should. And by Republicans I mean the whole enchilada:  Republican leaders safely ensconced in the General Assembly; Republican worker bees of every kind; African American and Hispanic Republicans who have found, much to their surprise, that one of the chief difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties is that The Republican Party is NOT a closed shop; and minorities and whites who have survived the left leaning biases of academe and are familiar with the history of both parties from the post-C...

The Democrat primary campaign, writes Noemie Emery in National Review , certainly is not without irony: “A campaign in which a feminist trailblazer [Geraldine Ferrero, once a Vice Presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket] is called a racist by a post-racial healer [Sen. and would-be president Barack Obama] who indulges a racist bible thumper [the silver tongued Rev. Jeremiah Wright] is a little too strange for their minds to keep up with, but it is the long termed result of the world they created. They never dreamed that the diversity codes they cooked up could snap back and attack them. But they could, and they have.” “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” Obama said some time before he dismissed his pastor as a crank and a demagogue, “just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” The “some” to whom Obama was referring were Obama backers, ardent Democrats all. Ferraro, who l...

Some sensible people who labeled Sen. Barack Obama very early on in his campaign a “post-racial” candidate are beginning to have second thoughts. At the beginning of Obama’s carefully crafted campaign, George Will, the conservative commentator, was not yet among them, but the influence on Obama’s campaign of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Mr. Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is giving rise to profound doubts. Back in December, Will and Shelby Steele , touched lances on the question of race transcendence in the Obama campaign. Will summarized a short book by Steele of Stanford's Hoover Institution on Obama, "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," and then disagreed with Steele's major premise that Obama had embraced the social determinism and identity politics of post-'60s black dogmas. “Since the 1960s,” Will wrote, “the prevailing dogma of black identity has, Steele believes, required blacks ...