Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers , a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law. Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credi...

Republican Gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley has been accused of plagiarism in an attack ad endorsed by Governor Dannel Malloy. Should there be an FBI investigation? Knowing the ways and means of powerful political incumbents, an investigation of some sort may be in the offing. Incumbents have a way of turning the great water cannons at their disposal against their, relatively speaking, inoffensive challengers. When Hartford Courant columnist Robert Thorson  protested that innocent plagiaristic-like slip-ups were common in this the era of “copy and paste,” he risked being set upon by the righteous forces supporting Mr. Malloy, who has not yet been accused of plagiarism, though in this regard he is guilty as Foley. Mr. Malloy’s recent Bibb ad, in which former workers at the Bibb factory step before the cameras to accuse Mr. Foley of snatching food from the mouths of their children, was plagiarized from an earlier assault on Mr. Foley produced by Jamestown Associates and end...

President Barack Obama’s past has come up several times in the national debate. Is this a legitimate issue? The disreputable pasts of other presidents have been noticed in other campaigns. President Bill Clinton, some people recall, had a “bimbo” problem. President John Kennedy had serious health problems, and he also wandered from his marriage vows. President Nixon may not have been a crook, but his politics was not always straight and narrow. Mr. Obama’s past has been examined since he has been in office. It turns out the book that introduced him to the American public, “Dreams of My Father,” was not, as many people supposed at the time it was issued, a strictly factual production. There are huge chunks of Mr. Obama’s past that are only fleetingly touched upon in his supposed autobiography. Many of the incidents in the book, it appears on close examination, are fictional; some of the characters in the book are “composites.”

A day before the primaries, Citizens For Change (CFC) has released the names of those candidates who thus far have “publicly committed to the people of Connecticut that they will address the numerous public policy challenges confronting our state and our nation,” according to the group’s press release. CFC is inviting all candidates to sign its COMMITMENT FOR CONNECTICUT documents the group has made available on its website at http://www.cfc.us/ . Richard Olivastro, a spokesman for CFC, said that 17 candidates have led the way for others by signing the documents. They are: United States Senate : Peter Schiff United States House of Representatives : Mark Greenberg, Dan Reale, Rob Merkle, Justin Bernier, Scott DeShefy; LT Governor: Mark Boughton CT Attorney General : Stephen Fournier CT Treasurer : Jeff Wright CT Secretary of the State : Jerry Farrell CT State House : Kathryn Brown, Ken Nelson, John Searles, Malvi Lennon CT State Senate : Neil Nichols, David Pia, Len Suz...

Fitch rating service is one of those annoying organizations, as yet unsued by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, that rates bonds, lowering the bonds for risky enterprises such as Greece, now kaput, and Connecticut, heavily in debt and unwilling to cut costs through reasonable measures. Fitch has lowered Connecticut’s bond rating one level to AA . This is why: Connecticut last year borrowed $947.6 million to cover a deficit. The state this year is borrowing $956 million to close a budget gap beginning July 1. Rather than cut costs, the state has fairly eliminated its rainy day fund and raised the top income tax rate for its residents when tax collections fell 15 percent in the year that ended June 30, 2009. Connecticut has $13.7 billons of bonds outstanding and is preparing to borrow $600 this month. Other rating agencies have lowered Connecticut’s rating, Standard & Poors to AA and Moody’s to Aa2. The degraded rating, Fitch said, “reflects the state’s reduced financial fle...

The contrarian’s sympathies flow towards Rev. Wright. Now that Obama has been elected president, the Rev. Wright has been defanged and, to some extent, rehabilitated. He is just one among other discarded bodies thrown out of the plane on the route to Obama’s election. In this regard, Obama resembles former president Bill Clinton, who did not hesitate to pull the trigger on his old friends. The Rev Wright will be appearing in Connecticut, according to an Associated Press dispatch in the Hartford Courant, at the Kingdom Life Christian Church in Milford on Thursday night to debate religion, race and American history: “Organizers hope the forum will allow people to hear more than the sound bites that embroiled Wright and Obama in controversy this spring. “The organizer says Wright will expound upon his views of the history of the black church and black liberation theology.”

While barrels of ink have been spilled over the New Yorker cover, not much has been said about the story that appeared in the magazine. From the point of view of the publisher, the cover was a clever device. It certainly produced a good amount of controversy. If you are a magazine, it’s always better to be noticed, and the cover was the equivalent of a bared breast. Cartoons of this kind always carry a mixed message. The partisans on the right were not unpleased, and for those on the left, the cover made their point: that much of the criticism issuing from the fever swamps on the right was silly, cartoonish. Michelle Obama is not, as pictured, a bomb throwing 60’s radical; Sen. Barack Obama is not a practicing Muslim but a Christian politician. Even Fox News, generally held up by the left as the simulacrum of right wingnut politics, acknowledged that this kind of criticism was unfair. The real problem with the cover was that it detracted from a fair and fulsome account of Sen. Barack ...

It would be imprudent on Sen. Barack Obama’s part to imagine that racism will take a holiday during his campaign. It is therefore prudent of him to head it off at the pass. At the end of June, after Obama warned a friendly crowd it could expect a resurgence of racism, the Washington Post ran a story about neo-Nazis and segregationist groups spurring racism on internet sites. The presence of some racist bad apples on the internet should not give anyone pause to suppose that the opposition party apple cart is infested with racists and, though it doesn’t happen often enough, even racists are redeemable. Sen. Robert Byrd waved farewell to the Klu Klux Klan long ago and grew up to be, at present, the longest serving senator in the U.S. Congress. Conservatives and Republican well wishers have in their stables many non-racists politicians and political commentators such as Condoleezza Rice and Thomas Sowell, both of whom are African American non-racists. Still less should anyone suppose tha...

Barack Obama has decided to forgo public financing in the general campaign against John McCain. Is anyone surprised? Obama has been a money magnet for some time. Forgoing public financing, he likely will outspend McCain by a ratio of two to one. More money means more advertising; more advertising means more spin. Advertising dollars are a protective wrap that keeps the candidate far from the prehensile grasp of inquiring reporters. Obama also has decided not to appear with McCain in town hall settings, where both candidates might have a go at each other, opting instead to rely on canned public speeches. Some of the leads in newspaper stories mentioned that Obama “turned down $84.1 million in federal dollars” by opting out of the federal system, not exactly a selfless act. Well, if any of us could triple or possible quadruple the amount to money we would receive by waving away $84 million, what would we do? There are no surprises here. Why should it surprise anyone that the candidate of...

Television host and mega-celeb Opra Winfrey was, according to a story in Newsweek, “a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." Op...

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...

In the May 19 issue of National Review magazine Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Policy Center, puts some of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s wilder flights of fancy into their proper context, and finds the context as disturbing as the statements themselves. Far from being in the mainstream of the black American church, Chicago’s United Trinity Church of Christ, Kurtz writes, is “the most radical black church in the country.” The “theology” of the church has been lifted from the writings of James Cone, “the founder and leading light of black-liberation theology” and the author of Black Theology & Black Power . “Wright acknowledges” Cone’s work as the basis of Trinity’s perspective, Kurtz writes, “and Cone points to Trinity as the church that best exemplifies his message…Cone’s theology is the first and best place to look for the intellectual content within which Writes views took shape.” Presently the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Un...

Denouncing the nutty uncle in his closet, Barack Obama said in a recent news conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's statements that they ``offend me, they rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced and that's what I'm doing very clearly and unequivocally today." It must have been the reference to “garlic nosed Italians” that did it for Obama. At some point -- later to be determined -- Obama figured it was time to throw the incubus overboard. No one yet has asked Jesse Jackson, one of Obama's supporters and also a Reverend, whether he thinks Obama did the right thing.

The press today – and by that I suppose we shall have to include such organs of the media as YouTube and MyLeftNutmeg – is exceedingly concerned with moral reprobation. For those who do not know, MyLeftNutmeg is a hard hitting leftist blog site in Connecticut. It’s good to be hard, bad to be soft. I do not mean to single out my honorable brothers on the left here for… well… moral reprobation; all this is merely by way of example. MyLeftNutmeg receives the bulk of its political ethic, such as it is, from other blog sites, MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post, for example; proving, once and for all, that the press – or the media, as some would prefer – is 10% thought and 90% repetition. It is important not to underestimate the power of repetition -- as a propaganda tool. Lenin said that if you label something effectively, you do not have to argue with it; this includes both people and propositions. People who have been labeled effectively within the past month include the not-so Reverend ...

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 ...