Connecticut Commentary

• Axe The Tax Cut

  
  Feeling the pinch, leading Democrats in the state legislature quickly settled on a means of bringing somewhat into balance a recently passed spending plan that Democratic State Comptroller Nancy Wyman asserted was about half a million short early in November, a few weeks after the legislature [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 1:35pm EST
  

• Some Chinks in Dodd’s Armor

  
  
  A distinction may be made between the popularity of persons (non-transferable) and the popularity of positions and programs (transferable, sometimes).
  
  President Barack Obama personality continues to resonate with many people, though there has been some slippage lately. His programs, largely radical, are iffier. [...]
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  Posted: November 27, 2009, 1:46pm EST
  

• Sales Tax Cut Nixed, Another Neck Chop For The Little Guy Who Is Not Too Big To Fail

  
  The Democratic dominated legislature’s sales tax cut has now been given a decent burial. From the very beginning, the tax cut – about half  a percentage point – was tied to a predictable dip in state revenues: If revenue collections were to fall below a certain [...]
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  Posted: November 26, 2009, 10:01am EST
  

• Why Dodd Will Not Resign, And Why Blumenthal Will Not Run Against Him

  There has been some jockeying among Republicans in the U.S. Senate race. Sam Caliguiri has shifted his campaign from U.S. Senator to U.S. Rep, which leaves U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd to the tender mercies of the three remaining Republicans in the race: former CEO of World Wide Wrestling Linda McMahon, [...]
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  Posted: November 25, 2009, 9:03am EST
  

• Doing Good: Judge Norko And The Hartford Community Court

  
  
  Anyone who has ever gotten himself in trouble -- many of us from the age of 12 to 20, though perhaps not in trouble criminally -- knows that there comes a point in a richly deserved punishment when the agony, despair, and humiliation trails off [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 4:16pm EST
  

• MYTHS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

  1. 640,329 jobs “saved/created” in Connecticut’s 45th Congressional district.
  2. U.S. has high Infant Mortality.
  3. 45,000 died because they didn’t have health insurance.
  4. U.S. is unhealthy, only 37th healthiest in the world.
  5. Social Security Trust Fund, Medicare trust fund.
  6. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi despises [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 11:20am EST
  

• Obama In China, Honeymoon's Over

  [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 1:40pm EST
  

• Williams, More Jobs Please

  
  President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s senate Don Williams was invited by the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut to give a talk, presumably on the state’s faltering economy, a delicious irony, rather as if the moneyed classes of pre-revolutionary France were to invite Jean-Paul Marat to [...]
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  Posted: November 21, 2009, 8:57am EST
  

• And God Said, “Let There Be Universal Health Care.”

  
  On the question of a public option in the health care debate, liberal Democrats are now playing the God card, and it would appear that every liberal’s favorite whipping boy, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is in their view a moral apostate.
  
  Lieberman, already in Dutch with [...]
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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 8:15pm EST
  

• Income Tax Proponent Hale, Tax Scofflaw

  
  John Lender of the Hartford Courant notes: “If former Democratic state Sen. Gary A. Hale hadn't voted the way he did 18 years ago, he might not owe the state $77,951 in back taxes today.”
  
  Hale, a state senator in 1991 when the income' [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 10:46am EST
  

• In Defense Of Lisa Moody

  
  The question at bat is: Was Lisa Moody, Governor Jodi Rell’s chief aide, the governor’s Svengalli?
  
  Svelgalli was a fictional character, an evil hypnotist in George du Maurier’s novel “Trilby.” Not even Moody’s most severe critics would assert that she manipulated the governor by hypnotizing [...]
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  Posted: November 15, 2009, 2:17pm EST
  

• Blumenthal, Or The Ambiguities

  
  
  According to a story in the New Haven Register, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal put a stop to the chatter that he might run for governor “at a gathering of students, senior citizens and local dignitaries… arranged by The Women’s Center at Gateway Community College.” [...]
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  Posted: November 14, 2009, 5:18pm EST
  

• Dodd, Dancing with “Scheme Liability” Lawyers

  
  
  In Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, the Supreme Court Ruled in 2008 that companies cannot be sued just for doing business with another firm that had committed fraud. In tandem with another precedent in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver, the ruling put [...]
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  Posted: November 14, 2009, 9:19am EST
  

• This Could Be The Start Of Something Big: Liberal Bloggers Apologize To Bush

  “If you have been reading us for any length of time [ “us” is the liberal blog HillBuzz ] you know that we used to make fun of “Dubya” nearly every day…parroting the same comedic bits we heard in our Democrat circles, where Bush is still, to this day, [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 5:44pm EST
  

• First Person Singular: An Interview With Chris Powell On Connecticut's Senatorial Race

  
  
  Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, is a knowledgeable observer of Connecticut politics whose column appears in that paper and a dozen others in Connecticut and the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. When Powell became managing editor of the JI in [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 9:15am EST
  

• Gov. Lamont’s Free Advice vs Mom's Free Advice

  
  Your mom, in a moment of brute honesty, may have told you that money can’t buy everything. But this was because she was not Ned Lamont or Michael Bloomberg.
  
  Lamont is the millionaire from Greenwich who wants to be governor of Connecticut, and Bloomberg is the present redundantly [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 11:17am EST
  

• God Bless The US Marines On This Their 234th Birthday

  [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 7:07pm EST
  

• SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE, A VIEW INTO OUR FUTURE

  Karyn Frist, an American, had just given birth at Princess Anne Hospital in Southampton, England. She and her husband, William H. Frist, MD, were in England, he on a seven-month assignment from Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
  
  Dr. Frist, for his chief residency in cardiothoracic surgery, would be exposed [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 6:49pm EST
  

• Lauds At Rell Leave-Taking

  One way to gain friends and influence people in the opposing camp, if you are a governor, is to leave office. This will please the opposition, particularly if you happen to be popular. As governor, Jodi Rell was more popular with Connecticut voters than any of the Democrats presently in [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 12:45pm EST
  

• The Rell Frog March: Blumenthal Has A Game Plan

  
  John Lender of the Hartford Courant is reporting that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a partisan Democrat who was mentioned in a focus group discussion conducted by soon to be disgraced professor Ken Dautrich of UConn, is progressing quite nicely with his “investigation” of Republican governor Jodi Rell.
  
  [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 12:12pm EST
  

• Defending Lieberman

  
  Judging from what George Jepsen, a Hartford lawyer and former chairman of the state Democratic Party, might call the preponderance of evidence, it is an easy and painless matter to assault Sen. Joe Lieberman in print.
  
  This happens frequently, most recently when the Hartford Courant [...]
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  Posted: November 08, 2009, 10:24am EST
  

• The Progressive U.S. Congress

  It’s official, Politico reports: There are 237 millionaires in Congress, some of them progressive Democrats.
  
  Quick – before they skedaddle -- tax’em! [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 3:30pm EST
  

• Shays Points The Way

  
  Keila Torres of the Connecticut Post reports that former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England standing – before he was knocked down by Democrat Jim Himes – is selling his house of ten years and has made a handsome profit on the [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 3:15pm EST
  

• To The Millionaires Sitting In Darkness

  
  At the beginning of November, there occurred on the blog site “Connecticut Local Politics” a fruitful discussion concerning the yet nascent conservative movement in Connecticut.
  
  The disputants fell into one of two pews: There were those on the left side of the church who, biting their knuckles, supposed [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 3:13pm EST
  

• Governor Lamont's Chance

  
  The day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans in Connecticut appeared to have staged something of a come-back, evidence that the party is not cold-stone dead, Ned Lamont announced he was forming a committee to explore a run for governor.
  
  The following day, his announcement was wreathed [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 10:09am EST
  

• The Republican Sweep

  
  The Wall Street Journal, the day after a Republican sweep, acknowledged that President Barack Obama was dealt a tough hand, a deep recession and a financial crisis.
  
  “But in New Jersey especially,” the paper notes, “former Goldman Sachs chief Jon Corzine became governor in the belief his [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 10:12am EST
  

• Schiff Among The Liberals

  Liberal journalists don’t quite know how to undermine the candidacy of Peter Schiff, who is running against Sen. Chris Dodd as a Republican, but in time they’ll figure it out.
  
  On Dennis House’s “Face the State,” two liberal commentators, Rick Green of the Hartford Courant and Brian Lockhart of [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 8:58pm EST
  

• Has “Socialism” Become A Red Herring?

  
  Yes, pretty much.
  
  Socialism arrived in Europe with the Christian message, tucked inside an embarrassment of Beatitudes.
  
  There are two sets of Christian Beatitudes. Mathew (5:1-12) is toothless, because none of the blessings in Mathew are accompanied by the red in tooth and claw curses found [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 3:27pm EST