Connecticut Political Reporter

Malloy And His Critics

2012-01-28T15:28:00.002-05:00

Kevin Rennie, a political columnist who writes for the Hartford Courant, very likely can expect a sling or an arrow to be coming his way sometime soon. Malloyalites do not react with equanimity to sharp criticism, and in a recent column Mr. Rennie notes that Mr. Malloy, short on cash he needs to plug a reappearing budget deficit, is “squeezing the Mohegans,” owners of one of Connecticut’s two Indian casinos, “for political contributions at the same time he is wielding the power of his office.”

Mr. Rennie notes that the Clean Election Fund, which gave Mr. Malloy more than $8 million to level the playing field between candidate for governor Malloy and his Republican rival, has tapped itself on the shoulder in its annual report for having made it possible for Connecticut citizens to reclaim “their government with the already dramatically reduced role of special interest influence in Connecticut elections."

But they haven’t, Rennie writes:

“No, it hasn't. On Feb. 3, the head of the Mohegans will hold a funding luncheon for Prosperity for Connecticut, Malloy's political action committee, at a casino hotel. The price per ticket is $750, the maximum the law allows. The pressure is on to sell a lot of tickets. The Mohegan PAC slipped a maximum contribution to Malloy's committee on Dec. 28, so it's allowed to give again in the new year.”

The Mohegans have little choice but to play the usual political game: “Competition is increasing. The recession and stagnant aftermath damaged their business. The tribe is trying to refinance more than a $1 billion in bonds. It faces February and April deadlines to pay investors. It needs a piece of online gaming.”

This is not the sort of thing St. Francis would approve of if he were governor of Connecticut.

Mr. Malloy’s real problem, however, is what it always has been: funny budget numbers.

Connecticut once again is in the red, according to a below the fold story in the CTNow section of the Hartford Courant written by Christopher Keating .

And the lede, which probably should have run on the front page: “Gov. Dannel Malloy's estimate of pension savings over 20 years was wrong by $3.1 billion, the legislature's nonpartisan fiscal office said Friday.”

The non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis was NEVER able to verify the savings figures claimed by the governor and his Malloyalites when, weeks before a much publicized set-to between Mr. Malloy and SEBAC, Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, the state budget was presented to the Democratic dominated legislature for approval. The legislature approved the budget with its penciled in figures before negotiation between Mr. Malloy and SEBAC were complete, an astounding dereliction of constitution responsibility on the part of a General Assembly that did not want to leave its fingerprints on a budget close to the coming elections. The legislature simply took a hike when the governor was negotiating with unions for putative givebacks, pre-approving the budget before negotiations were complete and by default investing Mr. Malloy what amounted to plenipotentiary power to finalize the budget.

As an amusing sidelight, a group of budget conscious rebels associated with The Roger Sherman Institute last June took the state to court a few weeks after the Malloy-SEBAC document, full of fanciful figures, had been approved by the General Assembly, arguing that it was not in balance. They implored Superior Court Judge James Graham to order the legislature to produce a constitutionally required balanced budget.

Fat chance there. The judge decided that a balanced budget was more or less a term of legislative art. Now, months after the suit, we discover that the state budget is off by $3.1 billon, which ought to bring a blush to the cheeks of derelict Democratic legislators in the House and Senate.

Fat chance there. The Democrats in the General Assembly who surrendered their constitutional prerogatives to Malloyalists and SEBAC have no sense of shame.

One of them, Speaker of the House Chris Dovovan, is asking the people of the 5th District to send him to the U.S. House, so that he can represent the interests of all the people in the state that he, the governor, SEBAC, the Malloyalists and the constitutionally flaccid House he runs have so successfully hoodwinked.

The Brave New World Of Political Campaigns

2012-01-26T10:05:00.003-05:00

The pre-nominating convention battle, now in full swing among Republicans, is a painful winnowing process. Already a number of Republican presidential hopefuls – Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, businessman and entrepreneur Herman Cane, Texas Governor Rick Perry – have succumbed to the political grim reaper.

Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, former Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich, Senator Rick Santorum and U.S. Representative Ron Paul have been left to tell their tales. They continue to battle, mostly against themselves, with occasion forays against President Barrack Obama who, one supposes, is enjoying the show – and taking notes -- while political operatives outside the closed circle of his campaign advisers are editing Republican clashes for YouTube. Mr. Paul has a tight-fisted articulate crowd of libertarian admirers following him wherever he goes; Mr. Santorum has done remarkably well among conservative Republicans; Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich have pasts, which continue to haunt them.

The knock on Mr. Paul is that, while his message is convincingly anti-Obama, he cannot win a general election. Mr. Romney has been attacked by both Democrats and BigPAC, money raising groups operating outside the failed campaign financing laws promulgated by McCain-Feingold in the Senate and Shays-Meehan in the House, as a conscienceless corporate raider intent on putting American workers out of work. The same ploy was used successfully here in Connecticut by friends of Dannel Malloy in his gubernatorial campaign against Republican Party nominee for governor Tom Foley. Mr. Santorum has been attacked as a benighted social conservative. Mr. Gingrich, perhaps the most adept debater in the group, has been attacked by movement conservatives as an ambitious faux conservative, by Democrats as a loopy idea man, and as unelectable by scorched-earth conservative Ann Coulter. In his climb up the greasy ladder of political success, Mr. Gingrich has left in his wake at least one wife who spilled the beans to a reporter hiding under the Gingrich marital bed. Mr. Gingrich, those unfriendly to the former House Speaker have intimated, has Achilles’ heels on both his cloven feet.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama delivered his “State of the Union” address, an exercise in redundancy since most everyone in the nation understands that the state of the union, after three years of re-inventive stroking by Mr. Obama, is perilous. The national debt has inched past $15 trillion. The gross debt of the United States as a percentage of its gross national product – the value of everything produced by the nation – is 100 percent; a comparable figure for Greece, the economic basket case of Europe, is 130 percent; in Italy, on its side in the Mediterranean and run up against the rocks of reality, somewhat like the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship, the rate is119 percent; Asia, led by China, which holds the largest proportion of U.S. Debt, is 41 percent.

Before the State of the Union address, Republican political watchers suspected that Mr. Obama – whose job approval ratings have dipped after his third year in office to 44 percent from a high of 57 percent during his first year in office – would use the occasion as an opportunity to let loose upon the union his campaign script. They were not disappointed. Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address was only a few hours old when fact checkers with the Associated Press, hardly a conventicle of Republican anti-Obamaites, tore it to shreds.

Republicans continue to tear themselves to shreds. At some point, the winner of the Republican Party nominating convention will meet Mr. Obama on the field of battle, by which time super PACs operating outside the party system and beyond the reach of McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan will have assembled enough YouTube clips of Republican Party family quarrels to wallpaper the walls of Hell. Republican super PACs will be doing the same to Democrats.

Everything will be fair game because the money laundering – and, even more importantly, the inventive, semi-fictional narratives captured by partisan non-partisan outliers – will not betray the fingerprints of either party.

Behold the fruits of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which has moved both money and responsibility away from political parties towards the brave new world of bare-knuckle anything-goes campaigning.

Is The Mayor Of East Haven A Disabled Idiot

2012-01-25T21:48:00.004-05:00

The following note is taken directly from the minutes of a meeting of the State Employees Retirement Commission, an agency under the direction of Comptroller Kevin Lembo:

“I have a matter in the MERS [Municipal Employees Retirement Services] Unit that I would like to bring to your attention. A member of the system was receiving a disability retirement. In November he was sworn in as the Mayor of East Haven. At that time we provided him with a letter advising him that it was necessary to terminate his disability retirement benefit effective November 30, 2011 related to two provisions for MERS. First, under the rehired retiree provisions and second under the disability retirement provisions that to be eligible for a disability retirement you must continue to remain disabled. The member is appealing the decision to terminate his disability retirement benefits.”

The unnamed member in the MERS unit “sworn in as the Mayor of East Haven” is Joseph A. Maturo Jr., who recently came under heavy fire as a possible racist for having ineptly answered a question put to him by a New York TV Reporter.

Following an announcement that the FBI had arrested police officers in East Haven for unjustly hassling Latinos, the reporter asked the mayor, “What do you plan to do for Latinos tonight?”

The mayor responded that he might or might not have some tacos for supper that night. And then realizing he had dug himself a bottomless pit, clumsily attempted a tortuous explanation, jumped into the hole and covered himself in infamy.

The mayor apologized, acknowledged that his was a shallow answer to a shallow question – and what have you done TONIGHT for Latinos? -- said he was fatigued at the end of a long day, went to bed and rose up in the morning a roundly denounced bonafide racist idiot.

From snow swept Davos, there to commingle with the one per-centers denounced by the Occupy Wall-Streeter Movement, Governor Dannel Malloy got in a pretty good lick:

"The comments by East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo are repugnant. They represent either a horrible lack of judgment or worse, an underlying insensitivity to our Latino community that is unacceptable.”

If Mr. Maturo’s appeal of the judgment already made by the State Employees Retirement Commission fails, he stands to lose $43,184.76-a-year in disability payments for back injuries he sustained on the job as an East Haven firefighter.

Continuing to serve as mayor of East Haven, it would appear, would not only stress Mr. Maturo’s fraying nerves; it might strain his bank account as well.

The betting among the large Italian community in East Haven is that Mr. Maturo is not so much the idiot that he can’t do simple math.

This Is A Republic?

2012-01-25T10:55:00.000-05:00

In the wake of a downgrade by Moody’s, Governor Dannel Malloy has deployed his recision authority to trim Connecticut’s budget.

A few points ought to be made. These are recisions made by the governor unilaterally, which means that legislators who will be running for office soon will not be leaving any unsightly fingerprints on what may be temporary budget cuts.

Temporary cuts – the funding can be restored any time – cannot solve permanent problems.

The monies Governor Dannel Malloy will be wringing out of the Department of Children and Families, $28.4 million, and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction services, $14.5 million, are either necessary or unnecessary funds used to provide services for abused children and people afflicted with mental disorders. If the funds are unnecessary, the cuts should be made permanently by a legislature constitutionally charged with the authority to approve budgets. If the funds are necessary, they should be restored to the agencies. It would be much less painful for people afflicted in Connecticut by abuse or mental disorders if the governor and the legislature were to reduce the salaries and benefits of state union workers or raise the retirement age of such workers. But of course in that case both the governor and the Democratic dominated legislature would receive vocal and political opposition from organized unions. The victim of domestic abuse and the mentally ill, fortunately for both the governor and the legislature, are neither organized nor unionized.

Budgets are all about making proper choices. Legislators up for re-election, one must suppose, must be delighted that such choices will not mar their chance at regaining office. Nor is this the first time the legislature has abdicated its constitutional responsibilities. In Connecticut, the legislature simply took a hike when the governor was negotiating with unions for putative givebacks; the legislature pre-approved the budget before the negotiations were complete and by default invested Mr. Malloy what amounted to plenipotentiary power to shape the budget. Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1,000th day the United States has been without a budget.

This is a hell of a way to run a Republic.

Connecticut’s Vanishing Surplus

2012-01-20T17:25:00.006-05:00

The state of Connecticut should not be running surpluses. A surplus is the amount of money the state has overcharged its citizens to meet expenditures. Connecticut has run surpluses ever since former Governor Lowell Weicker engineered his income tax to pay for extravagant spending that has increased the state’s budget from $7.5 billion under former Governor William O’Neill, the last pre-income tax governor, to $20.4 billion under Governor Dannel Malloy. Successive surpluses have been tucked into budgets for the last 20 years, with predictable results; Connecticut’s chief engine of growth for the last 20 years has been municipal and state governments.

Partially owing to surpluses and a perverse notion that the state of Connecticut never had a spending problem during these years of plenty – the operative assumption of pro-spending forces, iterated in scores of editorials and op-ed commentary, having been that the state could solve all its budget problems by increasing revenue -- the bottom line on the state budget tripled during the administration of three governors, two of them Republicans. Mr. Weicker, father of the state’s income tax, was a longtime Republican who created his own party to run as governor. The General Assembly, the organ of government primarily responsible for budgets, was during the same period dominated by Democrats.

Without engaging Republicans in the General Assembly, the governor and Connecticut’s dominant Democratic legislature approved a budget for this fiscal year that contained a surplus of $88 million. A surplus of $496 million was tucked into the 2012-13 budget.

Under the hammer blows of a failing economy, apparently undetected by Democrats in the legislature and the Malloyalists who negotiated putative savings with SEBAC, Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, surplus figures have now been paired back.

The $1.5 billion in new taxes the governor and his Democratic affiliates in the legislature imposed to rid the state of a $3.2 billion deficit in the state’s budget is not subject to the vagaries of our partially free market system. The state can take its tax increases to the bank. Cost savings of $1.8 billion that were supposed to offset the red ink are far less dependable. The relatively non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis was never able to affirm Mr. Malloy’s projected savings.

The biennial budget for fiscal years 2012-13 totals $40.54 billion, about $20 billion a year. Since 1980, state spending has risen from$ 4,400 per household to $10,000 per household, an increase of 227%. Connecticut has a total state debt of approximately $99,751,294,000, calculated by adding the total of outstanding official debt, pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) liabilities, Unemployment Trust Fund loans, and FY2011 budget gap, according to a Sunshine Review report.

Figures such as these point to a spending problem, and spending problems are not addressed by revenue increases. Indeed, spending problems are exacerbated when revenue increases, because the depth of the spending floor increases in exact proportion to revenue gains. The more money you get, the more you spend. The more money you spend, the larger the deficit becomes with each succeeding budget. And when the grim reaper of a recession finally knocks on your door, he will find you knee deep in red ink, scrambling to meet state indebtedness, if you are a left of center progressive, by instituting permanent tax increases and dubious long term cost saving measures.

Mr. Weicker removed from Connecticut its most distinctive and appealing feature, the lack of an income tax. The additional taxes he imposed on the state, including the income tax, made the state less competitive with other non-income tax states. The recent additional taxes imposed on Connecticut by a Democratic governor and a Democratic General Assembly unwilling to include Republicans in their budget deliberations, the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history, sent a clear message to businesses outside the state that might have considered embedding jobs in the state: The spending arc is bending in the wrong direction.

The Malloy-managed solution to “growing the economy” – remove entrepreneurial funds from the private economy by increasing taxes and use the sequestered funds to provide tax relief to large companies – is simply an admission of defeat. Targeted tax credits and loans directed at too big to fail companies are little more than bribery, though it has become difficult in present circumstances to discover who is bribing whom, the crony capitalists or the crony government.

Senate Minority Leader John McKinney's stinging analysis – “This is more proof that Governor Malloy's over reliance on tax increases was a failed approach to balancing the state budget in a responsible way. When the largest tax increase in state history isn't enough to pay the bills, I hope everyone can agree that a significant reduction in the size and cost of government is in order" – preceded only by a few hours a decision by Moody’s Investors Service to further downgrade Connecticut’s general obligation bond rating to Aa3 from Aa2.

The rating agency cited as sufficient reasons for the downgrade Connecticut’s high fixed costs for debt service and post-employment benefits, as well as low pension fund ratios and depleted reserves. Almost instantaneously, Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management Ben Barnes issued through the governor’s office a response hinting darkly that Moody’s downgrade was intended principally to “satisfy their internal corporate need to deflect attention from their historic lack of credibility.”

Moody’s downgrade,” Mr. Barnes wrote in a press release, “reflects their continued reaction to their central involvement in the financial scandals that led to the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Coming on the eve of our budget release, without an imminent bond sale, suggests that the move is motivated by factors other than Connecticut’s creditworthiness.”

Unfortunately, attacking the messenger of bad news is becoming a too familiar deflective strategy among Malloyalists surrounding the governor.

Malloy Re-inventing Taxes

2012-01-17T13:31:00.005-05:00

In the new state reinvented by Governor Dannel Malloy and his Malloyalists, sin taxes are in. And if the state is unable to reap enough taxes from current sins – boozing, gambling and driving cars to work rather than biking to the job -- Connecticut will, with the help of the federal government, create new vistas of sin and tax them to the hilt.

The tax on tobacco products in Connecticut, already the highest in the Republic, was increased in Mr. Malloy’s first budget 27.5 to 50 percent on products such as cigars and pipe tobacco. Snuff tobacco suffered a tax increase from $0.55 to $1 an ounce. Former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal rose to prominence in the state by beating the tobacco industry with a big litigation stick; recently Senator Blumenthal sought to end cigar smoking as at sporting events.

Taxes on gas in Connecticut, an energy product frown upon by the environmental industry, is the highest in the nation, largely because the state realizes a revenue bonanza on gas from two different taxes: the gas tax at 25 cents a gallon, and the gross receipt tax at another 25 cents a gallon. Republican State Senator Len Suzio is contemplating a bill that would cap the gross receipt tax at $3. But a bill adjusting downward a tax in Connecticut is a rare legislative animal, and any such measure is likely to be smothered in its crib by Democratic legislators whose platforms for reelection generally contain smoldering verbiage plighting their troth to middle class nutmeggers taxed by Mr. Malloy.

Like the mafia of old, Connecticut does not tax gambling directly; it simply demands a piece of the action. Former Governor Lowell Weicker is responsible for the contract between Connecticut and its two Indian casinos that regularly dumps a percentage of slot machine business into state coffers. Tax money realized by the state from its two Indian Casinos runs about $33 million per year, and the coming state tax on internet gambling, now referred to by the poofy euphemism “gaming,” promises to swell state coffers even more.

Thanks mostly to an interpretation of a law by a functionary in President Barrack Obama’s Justice Department, the states and the federal government will reap many more tax dollars from a new industry created by legal re-invention – internet gambling. The promise of additional tax revenue flowing from the new internet gambling industry has had a soporific effect on politicians in the state who used to inveigh against gambling, among them former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who went to Washington promising his constituents that he would fight for them as senator with the same passion he brought to the attorney general’s office. The senator is no longer keen on preventing internet gambling.

Shortly after he had been swept into office with a miniscule plurality of votes -- only 6,404 among 1.2 million cast during his joust with Republican candidate for governor Tom Foley, a jobs producer savagely portrayed in pro-Democratic ads as a corporate raider -- Mr. Malloy and the Malloyalites surrounding him plotted a massive tax hike, the largest in Connecticut history, not excepting former Governor Lowell Weicker’s tax raid on Connecticut citizens in 1991 following the former governor’s successful effort in adding an income tax to Connecticut’s revenue producing engines.

An adept politician, Mr. Malloy discovered a way to boil the lobster -- very slowly over a low flame -- to prevent it jumping the pot.

Mr. Malloy mollified arch progressives on the left such as Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, now running for the U.S. Congress in the 5th District, by readjusting tax brackets and rates, increasing tax brackets from three to six and boosting the top marginal income tax rate to 6.7%. A provision was added into Mr. Malloy’s budget that allowed residents who do not pay income taxes to collect from Connecticut’s treasury an Earned Income Tax Credit amounting to 30% of their Federal Earned Income Tax Credit.

In order to increase revenue substantially enough to produce fiscal surpluses, Mr. Malloy broadened the tax base, increased Sales and Use Taxes, Admissions Taxes, Corporation Business Taxes, Excise Taxes and Miscellaneous Taxes. Then he went to work reducing the offsets. The income tax credit for property taxes paid to Connecticut municipalities was reduced from $500 to $300. Mr. Malloy recently formed a commission to study other tax credits offered to businesses in Connecticut with a view to reducing them, thus adding even more revenue to state coffers.

As business production dipped both in Connecticut and the nation at large, Mr. Malloy added to the sagging shoulders of Connecticut corporations a business surtax of 20% that is to apply, provided the tax self-lapses, for income years 2012 to 2014.

Mr. Malloy boosted tax rates as shown below, according to a “Summary of Tax Provisions Contained in 2011 Conn. Pub. Acts 6,” that appears on Commissioner of Revenue Services Kevin Sullivan’s site:

“The general sales and use tax rate increases from 6% to 6.35%;

“The room occupancy tax increases from 12% to 15%;

“The tax on the rental or leasing of a passenger motor vehicle for a period of 30 consecutive calendar days or less increases from 6% to 9.35%;

“A tax rate of 7% applies to the following: the sale for more than $50,000 of most motor vehicles, the sale for more than $100,000 of a vessel, the sale for more than $5,000 of jewelry (whether real or imitation), the sale for more than $1,000 of an article of clothing or footwear intended to be worn on or about the human body, a handbag, luggage, umbrella, wallet or watch."

Mr. Malloy then taxed services that had not been taxed before he was elected:

“Services rendered in the voluntary evaluation, prevention, treatment, containment or removal of hazardous waste or other contaminants of air, water or soil;

“Valet parking provided at any airport;

“Yoga instruction provided at a yoga studio;

“Motor vehicle storage services;

“Packing and crating services;

“Motor vehicle towing and road services;

“Intrastate transportation services provided by livery services, with certain exceptions, including nonemergency medical transportation provided under the Medicaid program, certain paratransit services and dial-a-ride services;

“Pet grooming, pet boarding services, and pet obedience services;

“Services in connection with a cosmetic medical procedure;

“Manicure services, pedicure services and all other nail services; and
“Spa services.”

He imposed new admission taxes never before collected on:

“The Hartford Civic Center;

“The New Haven Coliseum;

“New Britain Beehive Stadium;

“New Britain Stadium;

“New Britain Veterans Memorial Stadium;

“Bridgeport Harbor Yard Stadium;

“Stafford Motor Speedway;

“Lime Rock Park;

“Thompson Speedway;

“Waterford Speedbowl;

“Facilities owned or managed by the Tennis Foundation of Connecticut or any successor organization;
“William A. O’Neill Convocation Center;

“Connecticut Exposition Center;

“Nature’s Art;

“Connecticut Convention Center;

“Dodd Stadium;

“Arena at Harbor Yard;

“Games of the New Britain Rock Cats, New Haven Ravens or the Waterbury Spirit."

Never one to overlook an opportunity to tax sin, Mr. Malloy increased excise taxes:

“Cigarette Tax - Rate increase: The cigarette tax rate will increase from $3.00 to $3.40 per pack on July 1, 2011.

“Tobacco Products Tax - Rate increases: Effective July 1, 2011, the tax on all tobacco products (other than tobacco snuff products) will increase from 27.5 percent to 50 percent of the wholesale sales price of such products. In the case of cigars, the tax will be 50 percent of the wholesale sales price, not to exceed 50 cents per cigar.

“Effective July 1, 2011, the tax on tobacco snuff products will increase from $0.55 per ounce to $1.00 per ounce of snuff.

“Effective July 1, 2011, the tax on cigars will be 50 percent of the wholesale sales price, not to exceed 50 cents per cigar.

“Alcoholic Beverage Tax - Rate increases: Effective July 1, 2011, the various alcoholic beverages tax rates will increase by 20%."

The seventh day not having yet arrived, Mr. Malloy was not quite finished re-inventing Connecticut. He had neglected to tap a rich vein of Miscellaneous Taxes. Perhaps his economic guru Ben Barnes rousted him from slumber with a tap on the shoulder.

“Hey boss, you forget something.

“Oh Yeah.”

“Real Estate Conveyance Tax - Rate increases: For deeds, instruments or writings that are currently subject to the state real estate conveyance tax at a rate of 0.5%, the rate is increased to 0.75% effective July 1, 2011.

“For deeds, instruments or writings that are currently subject to the state real estate conveyance tax at a rate of 1.0%, the rate is increased to 1.25% effective July 1, 2011.

“Estate Tax: For estates of decedents dying on or after January 1, 2011, an estate is subject to the Connecticut estate tax if the amount of the Connecticut taxable estate exceeds $2 million.

“Gift Tax: For Connecticut taxable gifts made by a donor during a calendar year commencing on or after January 1, 2011, including the aggregate amount of Connecticut taxable gifts made by the donor during all calendar years commencing on or after January 1, 2005, the Connecticut gift tax will be imposed if the amount of Connecticut taxable gifts exceeds $2 million (with a credit allowed against such tax for Connecticut gift tax previously paid for Connecticut taxable gifts made on or after January 1, 2005, but prior to January 1, 2011).

“New Electric Generation Tax: Effective for calendar quarters commencing July 1, 2011, there is a new electric generation tax that is imposed on every entity that is providing electric generation services and uploading electricity generated at a facility in Connecticut to the regional bulk power grid. The tax is equal to $0.0025 multiplied by the net kilowatt hours of electricity that are generated and uploaded. The tax does not apply to electricity generated and uploaded exclusively through the use of fuel cells, solar, wind, water, or biomass. Note: This tax is scheduled to sunset on July 1, 2013.

“New Hospitals Tax: Effective for calendar quarters commencing July 1, 2011, there is a new tax imposed on a hospital’s “net patient revenue.”

“New Residential Day User Fee – ICF-MR: Effective for calendar quarters commencing July 1, 2011, there is a new “residential day user fee” on each intermediate care facility for the mentally retarded in this state.

“Nursing Home User Fee: Effective for calendar quarters commencing on or after October 1, 2011, the fee is based on the sum of each nursing home’s anticipated nursing home net revenue multiplied by a percentage set by the Department of Social Services, which percentage will not exceed the maximum allowed under federal law.”

When Mr. Malloy had finished re-inventing Connecticut’s taxes, only sticks, stones and grasshoppers remained unaccosted by the tax collector. The revenue lemon, which represented approximately one half of Mr. Malloy’s “shared sacrifice,” had been squeezed dry.

The new internet gambling tax is very much like the tobacco and alcohol tax in several respects. Smoking, drinking and gambling are discreditable activities. Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Malloy, one supposes, avoid all three. There are no photo opportunities showing the governor or the senator poised at a one armed bandit – so called for a good reason – encouraging a client of Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun to dump their savings into shot machines.

And yet…

Revenue from sin taxes can be turned to good use. The gambler who drops fifty bucks at Foxwoods contributes his mite to teacher pensions, busway projects and Mr. Malloy’s other re-invention activities.

While governors and senators hate the sin, they love the taxpaying sinner. Internet gambling creates a whole new industry for tax plucking purposes. Obstacles will be removed, objections will not be sustained.

No Tax Increases, No Increase In Progressivism

2012-01-13T10:03:00.002-05:00

Governor Dannel Malloy, busying himself with re-inventing Connecticut, has now formed a task force to review and assess the effectiveness of the state’s business tax credits, according to a recent press release.

Executive Order 17 “will create a nine member Governor’s Business Tax Policy Review Taskforce. The taskforce’s mission will be to review the state’s business tax policies to ensure that Connecticut is getting the maximum return on its investments, with an eye toward policies that will make the state even more competitive for future job growth.”

“Over the last year,” Mr. Malloy said, “we’ve made every effort to reinvent our state, so that we could turn around twenty years of job loss and spur our economy. From ‘First Five’ to the bipartisan jobs package, we sent a message across the country and around the world that Connecticut is open for business. This taskforce will make sure that Connecticut is getting a solid return on those investments by closely examining ways to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used to create and retain good, permanent jobs for our workforce. It will also be charged with finding policies that will make our state even more competitive so that we can pull even more jobs into our state.”

In tandem with Mr. Malloy, Comptroller Kevin Lembo let loose his own press release:

“I am delighted that the Governor agrees on the importance of evaluating tax expenditures. Whether through existing law or through the Governor’s new order, I look forward to an open and impartial conversation and analysis of this important portion of our state budget.

“There are more than a half billion state tax expenditures on the books – and we need to confirm whether they’re working. With so many dollars at stake, particularly concerning job-creation initiatives, they must be monitored closely to ensure success.”

Mr. Lembo suggested that the Business Tax Credit and Policy Review Committee, dormant since its 2005, should be raised from the dead “to study and evaluate existing credits against the corporation business tax and to make recommendations on changes or modifications necessary where tax policy …is not providing a measurable benefit sufficient to justify any revenue loss to the state.”

There is no indication in the press releases that the Governor’s Business Tax Policy Review Taskforce will be tasked with measuring the measurable benefit of the governor’s First Five program and its effect upon tax receipts that might better be put to use elsewhere.

Reading between the lines of these mystery laden media releases yields the following possibilities.

1) Net taxes once again will increase, this time by pruning unnecessary tax credits, i.e. those in Mr. Lembo’s view that do not prove “sufficient to justify any revenue loss to the state.” The operative premise of this view is that taxes attributable to tax credits not collected by the state already belong to the state; businesses presently using such forgiven taxes for other purposes – for instance, to pay the salaries of their workers – are simply renting the tax money from a once and no longer generous government.

2) Net tax receipts will not increase because Mr. Malloy, serious about resetting the relationship between business and state, will abandon all tax credits and, at the same time, reduce business taxes proportionally, thus sharing the benefit of lower business costs with every business in the state, as well as every business outside the state drawn to Connecticut by a promise of equal and fair dealing.

The first choice is the path to ruin. All business taxes are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Small businesses, working within a very tight profit margin, cannot afford to increase costs without making economies elsewhere, usually by reducing the price of labor. This is done by firing workers and increasing joblessness.

The second choice will not be the first choice of Connecticut’s ruling class because, in the short term, a reform that does not increase taxes deprives progressive politicians of the walking around money they need to shore up the support necessary for reelection. And in the long run, we’re all dead.

Politics as usual suggests that Mr. Malloy and Mr. Lembo, after laundering the responsibility for their choices through nine member Governor’s Business Tax Policy Review Taskforce will settle upon number 1. No taxes, no progressivism.

Shays Attacks McMahon

2012-01-13T08:23:00.003-05:00

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As always, I love it when Republicans go at each other. Here's a great one, in case you missed it:

Former U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays is trying to strip Linda McMahon of her belt as the true job creator in the Republican race for U.S. Senate, saying McMahon's record as former chief executive of WWE is rife with the tragic deaths of the very same wrestlers McMahon has made part of her campaign narrative of corporate success and economic prosperity.

"Let's think about it: She's got over 41 people 50 years and younger who've died in her jobs. That's quite a job record that she's created," Shays said Wednesday...

"While she was in her entertainment business, which promotes bullying, I was balancing the federal budget and creating 8 million federal jobs," Shays said. "While I was doing that, she was in the entertainment business making millions. Some people ended up dying because of it. It's all part of her record."

Hearst newspapers reporter Neal Vigdor, no friend of liberals, piles on:

During the 14 months of McMahon's 2010 Senate candidacy alone, five former WWE wrestlers under the age of 60 died.

Who Are The Ron Paul Independents?

2012-01-12T15:27:00.001-05:00

Reporting on the New Hampshire primary, NBC Politics on MSNBC noted:

“Remarkably, self-described independents accounted for nearly half of all voters Tuesday – a piece of data which has implications for November. Paul won 32 percent of independents, with Romney getting 29 percent, and Huntsman picking up 23 percent of them.”

The datum on the Independent vote is important for a number of reasons.

New Hampshire and New England is considered fertile political ground for liberals, which is why Barry Goldwater said many years ago that if you lop off California and New England, you have “a pretty good country.” It is remarkable that half of people voting in the Republican primary were Independents. And it is equally remarkable that Mr. Paul, a libertarian who is by no means moderate, was able to garner such a large chunk of the Independent vote.

The literature on Independents is scant. Woodrow Wilson International Center scholar Linda Killian has written a book due out in May titled “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power Of Independents” that identifies various independent groups: “NPR Republicans,” socially moderate and fiscally conservatives; “America First Democrats,” working class Midwesterners armored in traditional values; “Facebook Generation” voters, usually under 35 and reluctant to join groups other than those organized on the internet; and “Starbuck Moms And Dads… real power voters,” socially moderate, chiefly concerned with education and security, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

Perhaps the Independent species in New Hampshire is different in the rest of the country. But if it is not, President Barack Obama should begin worrying.

4,872 donors in 2011 power Murphy to record-setting fundraising

2012-01-12T12:48:00.003-05:00

Ω

With more pre-election year donors than any federal campaign in Connecticut’s history, Chris Murphy’s campaign for U.S. Senate raised over $720,000 in the final fundraising quarter of 2011, bringing the campaign’s total raised to $3.5 million. Murphy enters 2012 with a staggering $2.5 million in the bank.

“When we kicked off this campaign 12 months ago, I’m not sure I could have imagined that a year later we’d already have almost 5,000 donors to the campaign, and 7,000 individual endorsements from Democratic and progressive activists,” said Murphy. “I’m so proud that 8 out of 10 contributions are from Connecticut residents, and that the vast majority of donations are under $250. We’re building a fundraising base that doubles as a grassroots operation.”

Murphy has demonstrated consistent and sustainable growth, building momentum through 2011 with over a thousand new contributors joining Team Murphy each quarter: Q1 – 1,594; Q2 – 1,106; Q3 – 1,023; Q4 – 1,149, for a total of 4,872.

In addition, thousands of individual Democratic and progressive activists across Connecticut have endorsed Murphy each quarter: 2,513 at the end of second quarter, growing to 5,138 at the end of the third and 7,031 total by the end of the fourth quarter.

Here is an interactive map of Murphy’s grassroots support across Connecticut:

http://www.chrismurphy.com/2011-grassroots-map

Sicily And Malta, A Political Odyssey

2012-01-11T10:55:00.005-05:00

“It’s not what you known that counts. It’s not even who you know that counts. It’s what you got on who you know that counts.” -- Sicilian saying

It may be possible that there is a Sicilian crouching in the soul of every journalist worth his ink.

My recommendation for people who travel is to allow for a bit of serendipity in their trip. Malta, for Andree and me, was the serendipitous part of our travels to Italy and beyond. Why, it may be asked, Malta?

Because of Mary from Malta, of course. We met MFM while living in Bethel Connecticut some years ago, when the world was young and Europe was not on the point of economic collapse. Mary and her husband lived next door, and Andrée and she struck up a friendship that revolved around Malta, a mystery my wife had not yet penetrated. Andrée is a voracious reader of mysteries -- and people.

When after several trips to Europe we became poorer and poorer – owing mostly to politicians on this side of the pond who do not know how the economy works – Andrée decided we ought to give Europe one more fling before it disappeared down the rat hole of history. There are some sentient beings on the planet, Mark Steyn among them, who think Europe is already a basket case. Greece has about it the foul odor of decomposition, Spain is on the edge, and Italy, where we were bound, is suffering from McCawber’s syndrome:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness, “Mr. McCawber says to David Copperfield. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and… and, in short, you are forever floored. As I am.”

As a good part of Europe is. As the United States will be if the country, as seems likely, continues on its pointless route to economic Hell in a hand basket. Prior to our trip, Italy was spending about 25% more than its income in revenue.

The faltering world economy may put an end to much European tripping. Battered by inflation, the dollar is a shadow of its former self. Europe is running out of money. China, the West’s financier, is dealing in funny money. The American president, the most profligate spendthrift in U.S. History -- not excepting President George Bush the second -- had weeks earlier sent a mild reproof China’s way: He warned that if the maximum leaders of that country did not readjust their currency to comport with reality, the United States would frown upon them.

This inconsequential threat caused the gaggle of fascists in China to laugh behind their hands at the American boobies.

The only good news on the horizon before we left was a small item in an obscure site advising that Hugo Chavez, the tyrant of once prosperous Venezuela, was down with something fatal and had but two years to live before sulfurous devils dragged him off to perdition. Mr. Chavez sought medical care in Cuba, possibly a fatal mistake, although he certainly was wealthy enough to scout out a capitalist doctor in, say, Vernon, Connecticut.

The death by bullets of Muammar Gadhafi days before we left raised our spirits briefly.

But all this is politics, and I was under orders from wife Andrée not to write about politics during the trip. I was permitted to take notes. This was to be a vacation after all. We were supposed to enjoy ourselves and avoid quibbling with Eurobots, as well as any stray vacationer we should meet in our travels, about “your Goddamed politics.” No computers, no newspapers, no political discussions, nothing, nothing, nothing before us but Virgil’s buzzing bees, Dante’s immoral Commedia and, soon to surround us, Homer’s “wine dark sea.”

Behind me, I was leaving some work that needed to be done, Connecticut’s bizarre politics, and the ubiquitous Dannel Malloy, who has had during a comparable period more face time since having been sworn in as governor than – if such a thing can be believed – the omnipresent Senator Dick Blumenthal, the former attorney general of Connecticut.

Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Malloy changed their monikers once they achieved their ambitions. Dannel used to be known, while mayor of Stamford, as Dan Malloy, while the senator used to be known as Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. In time, journalists peppered by Mr. Malloy’s all too frequent press releases, may find themselves longing for the rather uneventful administration of former Governor Jodi Rell. The former governor had been criticized by the media for gaps in her calendar, during which Rell allowed herself ample time to do nothing. There are no unsightly gaps in Mr. Malloy’s crammed calendar. Mr. Malloy is Wilson rather than Coolidge. H.L Mencken compared the two, and honed in on the essential difference.

“The American people,” Menken wrote, “though they probably do not know it, really agree with Jefferson: They believe that the least government is best. Coolidge, whatever his faults otherwise, was at all events the complete antithesis of the bombastic pedagogue, Wilson. The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves… He never made inflammatory speeches. He engaged in no public combat with other statesmen. He had no ideas for the overhauling of the government… Wall Street got no lecturing from him. No bughouse professors, sweating fourth-dimensional economics, were received at the White House… The worst fodder for a president is not poppy and mandragora, but strychnine and adrenalin. We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas. With a World Saver preceding him (I count out Harding as a mere hallucination) and a Wonder Boy following him, he begins to seem, in retrospect an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen… If the day ever comes when Jefferson’s warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal’s bones, now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite, will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service.”

All this is high praise coming from Menken, who tends to write with hatchet in hand, and his prophesy has been borne out. The White House is now occupied by an energetic disturber of the peace, and people are beginning to long for some kind of normalcy. They won’t get it from Mr. Obama or Mr. Malloy.

Before we left, Republicans on the presidential stump were still beating each other up; President Barack Obama was lashing the Tea Party and greedy Wall Street millionaires who had contributed so generously to his campaign; CBS News reported that in Cleveland an “Occupy Cleveland” protestor told police she was raped in her tent.

The OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement was, before we left, putting forth some exotic buds.

From the Daily Cardinal, a University of Wisconsin paper:

“A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters.

“In addition, officials agreed further occupation should not be allowed to continue without restrooms on site to avoid further public health violations.

"’You can't be affecting the safety and health of other people around you,’ Madison Fire Prevention Officer Jerry McMullen said. ‘With the public health violations and the complaints I've heard, I don't believe it meets the spirit of the ordinance to a street use permit.’"

In Manchester, New Hampshire, the Union Leader reported:

“A city woman is accused of pimping a 16-year-old girl she met in Victory Park during the Occupy NH demonstrations.”

Hardy protestors in Providence Rhode Island preparing to confront an early winter storm looked to George Washington for inspiration, the Associated Press reported:

"’Everyone's been calling it our Valley Forge moment,’ said Michael McCarthy, a former Navy medic in Providence. ‘Everybody thought that George Washington couldn't possibly survive in the Northeast.’"

However, winters are neither kinder nor gentler than some police: “But the dangers of staying outdoors in some of the country's harsher climes are already becoming apparent. In Denver, two protesters were hospitalized with hypothermia this week during a storm that brought several inches of snow.”

And in New York, the epicenter of the OWS movement, the Daily News reported:

“Fights are erupting among Occupy Wall Street protesters, so much so that one corner of Zuccotti Park has emerged where protesters say they won't go for fear of their safety.”

A millionaire siting had been reported by the San Francisco Chronicle at the Occupy Oakland site:

“As Mayor Jean Quan finished fielding reporters’ questions Friday afternoon at City Hall about the clash between police and protesters earlier this week, she was suddenly drowned out by cheering coming from Frank Ogawa Plaza for Occupy Oakland’s newest celebrity guest: documentarian and political activist Michael Moore.”

While anecdotal comparisons have been made between the Tea Party movement and the anti-capitalist OWS, no reports on the Tea party movement thus far have featured frequent fights, pimping opportunities, masturbation, or millionaire anti-capitalist Palm D’Or recipient documentarians. Tea Party folk do not erect tents or stroke erections in public.

It is always well to note points of difference when one makes comparisons.

Peter Schiff, who ran in a Republican primary in Connecticut against other Republicans running against the sainted Mr. Blumenthal, invaded “Occupy Wall Street” and attempted to engage New York protestors in polite conversation. When he disclosed that he paid around 50% of his income in taxes, the crowd was aroused. How much more than 50% would be a “fair share,” he asked?

Confronting a woman who apparently thought that rich people stuffed their pillow cases with their ill-gotten gains, Mr. Schiff said he could easily sell his business for a nifty profit and retire in luxury if greed were his only motivation. But in that case, the people he employed would be out of work. This aroused the crowd. Finally when Mr. Schiff told the protestors that he employed over a hundred people in his business and asked a particularly voluble lady how many people she employed, the crowed lapsed into silence – for about 3 seconds, after which they were aroused.

The week before we set off, members of the Italian cabinet were fisticuffing each other. The south of Italy is in a bad way, the north less so, and some in the North do not wish to carry the south on their sagging shoulders. Everybody in Europe looks to salvation from Germany and dislikes Germany which, along with China, is expected to bail out Greece, the pauper of Euroland.

Here in the United States, 40% of every dollar is borrowed money, and if taxes truly are “investments,” we are overinvested in a losing proposition.

Most people who know something about the economy know that Mr. Obama knows nothing about the economy. People surrounding the president who remember their Econ 101 course have fallen silent because they already have committed themselves publically to the Obama Way.

An unusual October snow storm, a Nor’easter, visited us four days before our departure, an awesome omen. Huge branches of oak trees, their crowns still full of leaves and unable to bear the weight of the snow, are lying in my front and back yard, along with downed wires. It took me three day and much scurrying to clean up the mess. I also cleaned up the front yard of one of Andree’s friends.

Among some Italians, omens continue to matter. Shakespeare’s Cesar thought they were important, though the omens were always sifted through his outsized hubris. Others trust to God. Atheists trust to fate. Here in Connecticut, what Henry Mencken used to call the booboise trust to Democrats.

Sicily

Friends who inhabit the mighty town by tawny Acragas
which crowns the citadel, caring for good deeds,
greetings; I, an immortal God, no longer mortal,
wander among you, honored by all,
adorned with holy diadems and blooming garlands.
To whatever illustrious towns I go,
I am praised by men and women, and accompanied
by thousands, who thirst for deliverance,
some ask for prophecies, and some entreat,
for remedies against all kinds of disease – Empedocles

Sicily is that part of Italy that appears on the map as if it were being booted by the boot, which is the rest of Italy, and it has always resented the impudence, first of Greece, then of Rome, and finally of the new nation of Italy, a nation younger than the United States.

Much conquered, Sicily has acquired over the years useful inner defense mechanisms. It nods to the conqueror, while giving him the finger in its pocket.

First the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, then the Carthaginians, then the Romans despoiled Sicily. Rome depended on the island for grain to feed its soldiers and increasingly imperious emperors. Sextus, the son of Pompey who was executed by the Egyptians, situated himself in Sicily following the assassination of Julius Caesar and finally brought the Roman triumvirate to favorable terms by withholding from Rome the grain crop.

The spirit of Sicily has ever been the spirit of the ancient Roman Republic, that space of time too brief between the Roman kings and the advent of the Caesars, every one of whom was deservedly roasted by Suetonius in his “Lives of the Twelve Caesars.” Suetonius, to be sure, treaded softly on the reigning emperor Hadrian and his forbearers; one does not want to bite the jewel encrusted hand that feeds one. But he let loose on many of the others, belaboring them about 200 years before Rome fell and the barbarians put an end to the empire, which resettled itself in Alexandria while Rome rotted, the plaything of soon to be Christianized barbarians.

Coming into Sicily, one is struck by the fortress-like cliffs, perpendicular to the sea. Palermo, the capital city, is sprawling. Here, as in Rome, the drivers are half mad. Later, our guide, an effervescent Daniela, will tell us that there is here, as in most countries, a north-south bifurcation. The north of Italy and Sicily is hard working, goal oriented, the south more placid.

The Valley of the Temples in Agrigento is one of the most important archeological sites in the world. Here one finds the remains of the great ancient temples of ancient Akragas: the Temple of Hera (Juno) Lacinia, Concordia, Heracles (Hercules), Olympian Zeus (Jupiter), Castor and Pollux (Dioscuri) and Hephaistos (Vulcan). Further down, on the bank of the Akragas river, near a medical spring, stood the Temple dedicated to Asklepius (Eusculapius), the god of medicine. At the mouth of the river was the harbor and emporion (trading-post) of the ancient city. The pre-socratic philosopher Empedocles was pleased to call Akraga home, and many were the moderns who sang its praises, including Goethe, Guy de Maupassant, Alexander Dumas, Anatole France, Murilo Mendes, Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster, Francesco Lojacono, Nicolas de Stael, Salvatore Quasimodo and Luigi Pirandello.

The best preserved of the ancient temples is Concordia, pretty much complete but for the roof, always made of perishable wood.

The temple is surrounded by a defensive wall. As Christianity arose before and after Constantine’s reign, the temples were abandoned. They became places to pasture animals or quarries used to recirculate stone, the temple blocks carried off and placed in church walls. There is an early Christian cemetery abutting the Temple of Concordia. The wall is hollowed out in several places, providing sepulchers in which Christians tucked their dead to await the resurrection. There is something more than poetic in the notion of a defense wall containing tombs in which early Christians sleep the sleep of the just, impervious to the madding world about them.

The Old World is a theatre of ruins, which is to say it is a place of lessons unlearned, a land of walls breeched and overcome.

The new Sicily is opened to all, a land of fierce cliffs, churches like fortresses atop high wind-swept hills, many of them under cultivation, honest eyed people, clusters of civilization swarming shops or sipping an espresso while talking together in a quiet plaza, all bathed in sun and surrounded by the breathing sea.

The last time we were in Spain, Andree raced down to the surf to put her foot in the Mediterranean, the font of Western civilization. Here, she was able to race on the water’s edge of both the Mediterranean and the Ionian Sea, that body of water that kisses Greece, the bottom of Italy’s boot and the Eastern portion of Sicily.

Here one finds Syracuse, one of the great city states of Magna Grecia, and the imposing Cathedral of Syracuse built by Bishop Zosimo in the 7th century over the great Temple of Athena, six columns of which still can be seen incorporated into the walls of the cathedral. In the eighth and seventh centuries BC, various crises – famine, overcrowding, and perhaps most especially the relentless search for commercial opportunities and ports -- induced the Greeks to settle in southern Italy. It was this spirit of enterprise, the piety of the Greeks and their absorbent culture that now spread outwards to Sicily and southern Italy.

It was as we were leaving Sicily for Malta that we first heard on Sky News of the fall of Silvio Berlusconi’s government. Italians are used to fallen governments, but this collapse, followed by the fall of Greece and the anticipated fall of Spain, was of a different order of things. Here were fallen countries hollowed out on the inside by a populist demand for comfort, security and ease on the cheap that no government can afford.

Malta

Malta, the home of the Knights of Saint John, is two tear drops of islands in the Mediterranean south of Sicily.

The Knights Hospitaller or the Order of Hospitallers or simply Hospitallers were founded by Blessed Gerard about 1023 and evolved into a military-hospitaller order during the first Crusade. It was chartered with the care and defense of the Holy Land, operating from Rhodes and later Malta after the re-conquest of Jerusalem by Islamic forces.

After much wandering in the world, the Knights of Malta were established when in 1530 the King of Sicily, Charles V of Spain gave to them the island of Malta, Gozo, now a part of Malta, and the port of Tripoli in perpetual fiefdom in exchange for a nominal annual fee of one Maltese falcon

The Ottomans, led at the time by the Sultan Suleiman, known in the West for sound reasons as “The Magnificent,” were not pleased at the rehabilitation of the knights, and in 1565 Suleiman sent an invasion force of about 40,000 men to besiege the 700 knights and 8,000 soldiers and expel them from Malta. Both Sicily and Malta throughout history were necessary stepping stones for conquerors of every stripe to gain access both to the Mediterranean and Western Europe.

To his own Ottoman subjects, Suleiman was known as “The Lawgiver.” The historian Lord Kinross captures the man in a brief description:

“Not only was he a great military campaigner, a man of the sword, as his father and great-grandfather had been before him. He differed from them in the extent to which he was also a man of the pen. He was a great legislator, standing out in the eyes of his people as a high-minded sovereign and a magnanimous exponent of justice.”

Then as now, Sharia law, the divine law of Islam, was unchangeable, but the law known as the Kanuns, or canonical legislation, depended entirely on Suleiman’s will. Cannon law covered large areas of social law, criminal law, land tenure, taxation and such. And it was here that Suleiman’s made his mark, First collecting all the judgments made by the nine Ottoman Sultans who proceeded him, Suleiman eliminated duplicate judgments, chose carefully between contradicting judgments, all the while taking care not to violate sacred laws, and molded all into a single legal code that enabled his growing empire to adapt to changing circumstances. In their final form, the Kanun laws became known as the kanun-i-Osmandi, the Ottoman laws operative for the next three hundred years.

In 1565, Suleiman sent to Malta an invasion force of 40,000 men to besiege and expel from Malta 700 knights and 8,000 soldiers. He had already been successful in expelling the knights from Rhodes. Suleiman’s ambition was to gain a base in Malta to launch another assault on Europe.

By August 18, the plight of the knights was becoming desperate. Expected aid from Sicily had not arrived, possibly because orders from Philip of Spain to the Viceroy of Sicily were so subtly worded as to allow the Viceroy himself to decide whether or not to commit troops to Malta. The Viceroy dallied, fearing that a committal of troops and a loss in Malta would expose Sicily to ruin, until the battle in Malta had almost been decided by the abandoned Knights. Finally, the Viceroy was forced by the indignation of his own officers to commit a modest contingent.

The final effort by the troops of Suleiman the Magnificent, a scholar of military campaigns and one of the greatest military strategist since Alexander the Great, came on August 23. Except for Fort St. Elmo, the fortifications held. But the force of the last attack was thrown back with great sacrifice. Working through the day and night, the garrison, its numbers far diminished, repaired the breeches. Even the wounded took part in the defense. On June 23, the Ottoman troops lost commander Dragut, the most skilled admiral of the Ottoman fleet. Turkish commanders neglected communications with the African Coast; they had used their massive fleet effectively on only one occasion. In crowded quarters during the summer months, Ottoman troops had fallen ill. No attempt was made to watch and intercept Sicilian reinforcements.

A final effort was made on September 1. By that time the fighting spirit of the besiegers was flagging, and the remaining troops in Mata were encouraged by the prospect of deliverance. The Ottomans first heard of the arrival of Sicilian reinforcements in Mellienha Bay. Not realizing the force sent was small, they broke off the siege and departed for home on September 8. At parting, the Hospitallers had 600 men under arms. Of the 40,000 besiegers, 15,000 returned to Constantinople. The Great Siege of Malta would be the last military action in which a force of knights won a decisive victory.

Today, Malta is a rock of stability in the Mediterranean. A comparison with Sicily is instructive.

Both countries have been besieged by conquerors over the years, in most cases the very same conquerors. Both countries are fiercely patriotic. Both Sicily and Malta suffered indiscriminant bombing by both Germans and the Allied states in World War ll – indiscriminate because civilian populations were not spared. We are familiar with the Nazi Blitzkrieg of London, but four times as much ordinance was dropped on Palermo, the capital of Sicily. Gozo, a part of Malta, had no air defenses at all during the war, and yet the island was bombed mercilessly by the German Luftwaffe – until Americans engineers placed an airbase in defenseless Gozo and American airmen started dogfighting with the Germans. Only then, did the citizens of Gozo, who had taken refuge in caves, return to their shattered homes. And many there were in Malta who lit candles in their churches for American airmen.

On April 9, 1942, a 500kg Luftwaffe bomb was dropped on the Rotunda (Church of Saint Mary) in Mosta, Gozo. The bomb pierced the church’s dome during a service when the floor of the church was crowded with people. The ordinance did not explode and no one in the church suffered the slightest injury. The dome, the fourth largest in the world, was repaired when architects refashioned a new dome around the bomb shattered old dome. Among the people at service in 1942 was a relative of one of the tour guides who spirited us through the church, then a young boy. He recalled the bomb sliding hundreds of feet across the floor, the vast hole in the dome, plaster dust filling the air, and his astonishment when the bomb, later defused and now shown to tourists who visit the scene of the miracle, came to a stop before the feet of his surprised family.

Time not only heals old wounds, it wraps them in imaginative narratives, the swaddling clothes of all art. Saint Paul’s Cathedral in the city of Mdina (pronounced M, as in the letter “M,” DINA), a Phoenician fort in 700 BC, is built on the site where governor Publius was reported to have met Saint Paul following his shipwreck off the Maltese coast.

All the buildings in Malta are made of the same limestone, organic pearly white blocks of hewn stones produced by marine life with hints of yellow and pink.

Malta confronted Europe’s most recent conqueror, self-indulgence, some twenty years ago. The country has reorganized its business products and reduced the price of labor by pairing back its entitlements. Over its battlements, it saw the enemy advancing: Italy did not. Much of Europe did not.

Here in Connecticut, Governor Malloy has just unionized day care workers. In Malta, the home of Hospitaliers, volunteers do such work at a minimal charge, if at all.

Andree and I did not meet Erik Nelson while we were in Malta. Mr. Nelson hails from Stamford, Connecticut, once the stamping grounds of Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy. But Mr. Nelson was there somewhere. At a small eatery near our hotel that makes the best pizza in Malta – where everyone speaks English, thanks to British imperialism – he very easily could have been a customer. Two years after Napoleon conquered Malta en route to Egypt in 1798, the British fleet seized the island from the French and remained there until the islanders were granted independence in 1964.

Some of the customers in the restaurant spoke Italian, and the waitress spoke Italian. Some spoke French, and the same waitress, from Germany we discovered, spoke French. But all the waiters, all the tour guides, all the service staff at the casino (not Indian owned) near out hotel, all the small business owners in Valletta – were all conversant in English.

Mr. Nelson is a refugee from Connecticut, a research analyst at FMG USA LLC, the U.S. arm of FMG, a fund of funds specializing in emerging and frontier markets.

FMG, across the harbor from Valetta, Malta’s capitol, runs funds that invest in markets from Iraq to Mongolia. FMG recently moved its corporate headquarters to Malta from Bermuda, and the company hired Mr. Nelson to head up their new office.

The hedge fund stampede to Malta has begun, according to recent story in Bloomberg:

“In 2010, nine companies from the British Virgin Islands, seven from the Cayman Islands and six from Luxembourg switched their legal domicile to Malta, according to the MFSA.

“In addition, at least a dozen large U.K. hedge funds and funds of hedge funds have shifted part of their operations, including accounting and investor relations, to Malta.

“These include Clive Capital LLP, which has about $4 billion under management, Comac Capital LLP, which has $5.2 billion under management, the $1.2 billion commodities and energy hedge fund BlueGold Capital Management LLP and the $2.8 billion fund- of-funds company Liongate Capital Management LLP…

“As of early November, the number of funds located in Malta had grown to more than 500 with 8 billion euros ($10.7 billion) under management from 165 funds with less than 5 billion euros under management in 2006, according to the Malta Financial Services Authority, or MFSA."

Why are hedge fund workers moving to Malta from such places as Connecticut? Had they had private conversations with Mary from Malta?

When the British Empire receded, it left in its long recession a rich deposit. The English language was not the only legacy. English law was grafted onto Malta’s civil law system, as was the Western work ethic.

Andrew Frankish, the director of client relations for IDS Group, a South African fund services company that set up offices in Malta in 2010, put it this way: “They definitely work more like beer drinkers than wine drinkers.”

Islands, insular and with scarce resources, concentrate the mind wonderfully and lead to creative thinking about, let’s say, regulations.

Prime Minister Laurence Gonzi, sitting in his office at the Auberge de Castille, a palazzo that once belonged to the Knights of St. John, is dealing with a full hand. The fund industry has grown so rapidly in the last few years that he now wonders whether Malta – population 414,000 -- has financial analysts and accountants enough to handle the demand.

What accounts for the growth in business?

Malta has prepared for the upsurge. Companies in Malta pay a nominal income tax rate of 35 percent, but the taxers can be lowered to 5 percent or less for most foreign-owned corporations, and most capital gains and dividends aren’t taxed.

The Maltese have adjusted to Europe’s financial crisis. Investors, they realize, want transparency, which is why Malta requires quarterly financial statements and background checks for fund owners and directors.

Mr. Nelson, the Stamford, Connecticut replant says, “At the beginning of 2008, we started to see investor sentiment changing. Regulation, liquidity and transparency were becoming real factors in the decisions that investors were making.”

And the Prime Minister of Malta agrees: “We want to be a financial center of the highest reputation possible.”

At the same time, the government attends to its own balance sheets. It is not greedy. While the government takes in little in the way of direct taxes and maintains a low threshold of taxes, the inrush of firms now doing business on the island have boosted both employment and business spending for office space, hotel rooms restaurants and transportation.

Malta’s ambition is to boost financial services until it accounts for 25 percent of the country’s GDP by 2015. And the country is on track to meet its goal.

And Connecticut?

In Mid-January, TopRetrirements.com published its list of “Worst States to Retire 2012,” and Connecticut had the distinction of placing first.

“1. Connecticut. We actually had a numerical tie for 1st place. CT won the tie-breaker because it has much higher property taxes, income taxes, and cost of living than Illinois. It offers no exemption for social security, and most pension income is taxable. CT had the 3rd highest tax burden of any state in 2009. The Nutmeg State does have considerable charm and some terrific places to live, if you can afford to live there.”

Connecticut’s Politicians And Their Gambling Hormones

2012-01-10T13:03:00.005-05:00

Republican leader John McKinney, very much alone, has decided that Connecticut should oppose a ruling by a U.S. Justice Department functionary to open the doors of the Republic’s 50 states to internet gambling.

On the question of internet gambling, Governor Dannel Malloy has already folded – pun intended. Mr. Malloy has said that internet gambling is at least as inevitable as death and taxes. The enabling ruling revises an earlier understanding that internet gambling should not be permitted, while at the same time holding out to states the promise of a hefty return in new tax revenue.

Appearing on The Talk of Connecticut with Brad Davis, Mr. McKinney said in so many words that the expansion of gambling and its attendant taxes ought to be firmly resisted.

In his effort to re-define Connecticut, Mr. Malloy has mounted soap boxes all across the state in vigorous attempts, largely successful, to push forward his tax and spending agenda for Connecticut. Mr. Malloy instituted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history. Only the proverbial man from Mars could believe that spending increases will not follow, one might say inevitably, in the wake of such tax increases.

This re-invention business is no easy task; neither is it cheap. On the question of opening his state to internet gambling -- and coincidentally to an additional revenue stream much needed by Mr. Malloy to produce surpluses necessary for pushing the state forward on the governor’s predetermined path – Mr. Malloy has become unaccountably camera shy and powerless. He has not mounted a single soapbox in the state to inveigh against internet gambling. He had not publicly instructed by letter the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, all Democrats sitting in the same ideological pew as the governor, to attempt an legislative assault on the interpretation of a Justice Department functionary. Neither has he asked Attorney General George Jepsen to resist that ruling in federal courts.

The governor finds himself in good company. The editorial board of the Hartford Courant has agreed with the governor that internet gambling is inevitable. When good men do nothing, inevitability happens. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal who as attorney general once strenuously opposed internet gambling for all the right reasons suddenly finds himself suffering from moral anemia.

Only four years ago, Mr. Blumenthal flexed his considerable muscles as attorney general when New York state decided to open a horse race betting parlor on the internet, writing indignantly to the New York gaming Commission in one of his morally infused letters:“An out-of-state entity taking Internet wagers from Connecticut also violates the federal Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978, which says, ‘the states should have the primary responsibility for determining what forms of gambling may legally take place within their borders.’"

Huffing and puffing, Mr. Blumenthal continued: "The New York tracks cannot trample our vital rights to prohibit Internet gambling - luring children and compulsive gamblers. Internet gambling is fraught with insidious pitfalls - particularly for children - which is exactly why Connecticut prohibits it. I am hopeful that New York officials cooperate and respect federal and state law. My office will continue to work closely with the Division of Special Revenue to enforce Connecticut gambling laws."

“States… primary responsibility…” Huh? Internet gambling “luring children and compulsive gamblers… fraught with insidious pitfalls…” Come again?

Attorney General Blumenthal used to operate as a one-man temperance league. Now, as U.S. Senator representing a state that’s stone broke from overspending and desperately in need of additional tax resources – even if the resources are filched from helpless children and desperate people unable to master their gambling addictions – internet gambling seems to him a rare inevitability; it will, after all, supply Connecticut with additional tax dollars Mr. Malloy may then dispense to those less fortunate than Mr. Blumenthal or U.S. Reps Jim Himes and Rosa DeLauro, millionaire members in good standing of the one percent club in Washington’s Beltway.

“We've got more than enough state-sanctioned opportunities for people to lose money,” another Courant commentator wrote, “but Malloy is probably right when he says that outlook is irrelevant now that the federal Department of Justice has given the OK to turning computers and mobile devices into virtual casinos. It's hideous, but that won't stop it from coming to your local Internet connection.”

The Malloy administration seems fully prepared to save Connecticut citizens from the hideous effects of the hideous practice it will allow, perhaps by instituting yet another administrative department to bind up the wounds it has caused by abjectly surrendering to the inevitable. This work of salvation, one may be sure, will be costly.

Given the scraping and bowing of Connecticut’s moral epigones before a practice they regard as “hideous,” perhaps Mr. McKinney might consider engaging the services of Bob Englehart of the Courant to produce the following cartoon:

A bordello, above which hangs a shabby but insistent sign -- “Raging Hormone Bordello And Internet Betting Parlor.” Seen through the window, a flimsily dressed, fetching creature wearing a banner that reads, “Place your bets here.” On the street milling in front of the bordello, a crowd of people that includes Mr. Malloy, Mr. Blumenthal and Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation, all singing the following tune shown in large bubble: “We can’t help our raging hormones. We are only human.”

Such a cartoon would make more sense than the next dozen of the state’s commentaries yielding abjectly to an inevitability that will increase state revenue at a time when some politicians have begun to understand that there must be a ceiling to profligate spending.

Curry On Obama The Populist

2012-01-07T12:09:00.003-05:00

Another rumor about President Barack Obama has been exploded, this time by Bill Curry, a two term state senator defeated by moderate Republican Nancy Johnson. Mr. Curry held a seat previously held by Toby Moffett, once a progressive legislator, now a big time Beltway lobbyist who most recently was in the news explaining why he was proud to represent a country that seems determined to eradicate Christian Copts.

Mr. Curry is famous enough to enjoy face time on Wikipedia where it is recorded that “During his political career Curry has been the favored candidate of liberal Connecticut Democrats and pundits frequently at odds with the old style moderate policies favored by such figures as former Governor William O'Neill and former party chairman John Droney.”

The false rumor had it Mr. Obama was planning to buy the late Katharine Hepburn’s estate on the Fenwick waterfront in Connecticut.

Absurd, said Mr. Curry, the author of a soon to be released book on Mr. Obama titled “Barack Obama and the Politics of Populism.”

If the rumor had been true, it might have affected the sales of Mr. Curry’s book. “If he bought it, he wouldn't be practicing the politics of populism."

Malloy’s Gadfly

2012-01-06T15:39:00.003-05:00

Even Greece at the height of its powers had a “gadfly.” The Greek term was used by Plato to signify the rather uneasy relationship between Socrates and the political scene in Athens. Plato described Socrates as the goad of Athens, a city he compared to a dimwitted horse. Athens, as we all know, had the last word in its dispute between the city’s most famous gadfly and city fathers who could not abide what Socrates himself called the sting of truth: “If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” Socrates considered his role as that of a public critic whose purpose it was “to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth." Athens convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city and forced hemlock upon him as a remedy to quiet his fearless outspoken tongue.

Not to put Senator Len Suzio in quite the same category as Socrates or even Jeremiah, the irritating prophet who compared Egypt to “very fair heifer” but noted, ominously, “the gad-fly cometh, it cometh from the north,” even so, Mr. Suzio has managed to cause some perturbation among the Malloyalists who surround Governor Dannel Malloy.

Mr. Suzio bit the heifer a little hard on the question of Mr. Malloy’s financing of the reinvented UConn Health Center, causing Mr. Malloy to explode in mock anger in Connecticut Post reporter Ted Mann’s 18th installment of the life and times of the state’s first Democratic governor since former Governor William O’Neill hit the skids, “’The world is flat! Flat! Flat! Flat!’ Dan Malloy slams his palms flat against the top of his desk, again and again. ‘Flat, I tell you! Flat! Flat! Flat!’”

One gets the impression that anyone in the Malloyalist contingent would be willing to administer the hemlock to Mr. Suzio, provided it could be done discreetly.

The final agreement between Mr. Malloy and Jackson Lab, however, suggests that Mr. Malloy had half an ear turned towards his gadfly critics. The governor evidently altered his initial agreement to accommodate some critics of the UConn-Jackson Lab deal, among them gadfly Suzio.

A new wing on the deal arranged between Mr. Malloy and Jackson Lab includes, according to one news account, “several provisions designed to protect the public's investment, including one that gives the state a slice of the royalties from any lucrative drug therapies born from the research.”

The slice on royalties is a very iffy proposition. In what Mr. Malloy calls “a unique intellectual property-sharing agreement," Connecticut will receive 10 percent of any net royalty proceeds up to $3 million and 50 percent of those royalties over $3 million starting in the 10th year and running for 15 years.

Assuming these best laid plans are not torn asunder, Connecticut will not pull even on the deal until Jackson Labs realizes earnings on it its intellectual property of $600 million. In 2010, the company’s financial report showed revenue of $129 million, excluding donations and government grants, and $170 million in expenses. Government support so far has kept the company above water. In arrangements such as that concluded between the Malloy administration and Jackson Labs, those financing the project – donors, federal taxpayers, and now Connecticut taxpayers – assume risks, while the corporation reaps the lion’s share of profits.

Gadfly Suzio, the Flat-Earther, said he was pleased that the final deal included a provision giving the state a piece of the royalty pie: “One of my explicit criticisms was if we're going to be risking taxpayer money in some sort of venture capital way, why would we not reap the potential benefits?''

The final deal obligates Connecticut to provide a $192 million contingent loan to Jackson Lab that the company will then use to purchase a new 250,000 square-foot building on the site of the University of Connecticut Health Care pink elephant in Farmington. The state also will award Jackson Lab $99 million in research money.

The contingent loan is “forgivable” provided Jackson creates within 10 years 300 direct positions including 90 for senior scientists. Once Jackson Lab creates 600 direct jobs, it may purchase the state-owned land for $1, a win-win prospect for Jackson Labs.

Those who assert positively that the Jackson Labs-Malloy deal is an unqualified win for Connecticut are not Flat-Earthers; it would be uncharitable to label them as such. But they are much in need of gadflies to keep their ungovernable optimism rooted in the real world.

Performance Artist Damages Painting

2012-01-05T12:38:00.002-05:00

According to Greg Wilson of NBC Southern California, a possible Colorado performance artist, allegedly drunk, “was arrested after scratching, punching and, well, rubbing her butt against Clyfford Still's ‘1957-J no.2’ and causing an estimated $10,000 damage to the artwork at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.”

Mr. Still died in 1980. He was considered, according to the NMBC report, “one of the most influential of the American post-World War Two abstract expressionist artists, although he was not as well known as others such as Jackson Pollock” – until now.

Four of Mr. Still’s paintings were auctioned last year by Sotheby’s and brought in $114 million, a sum that endowed the Denver museum, which opened in November.

The performance artist, Ms. Carman Tisch, “dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over a painting valued at $30 million,” according the NBC report. Tragedy was averted when the lady attempted to urinate on the painting – and missed. Her aim apparently was off.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office told the Denver Post, "You have to wonder where her friends were."

Evidently, they had scurried away, muttering a few words from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”:

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think."

Possibly her friends were in search of a Jackson Pollock elsewhere in the museum.

Ms. Tisch was charged with felony criminal mischief on Wednesday and has been held on a $20,000 bond since the incident in late December, said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney's Office.

There has been no attempt from the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) to snatch Ms. Tisch from the clutches of benighted prosecutors unaware of the Constitutional rights of performance artists.

The story bears watching.

The Republican Presidential Race: National Review Mauls Gingrich

2012-01-03T14:21:00.002-05:00

The Republican Presidential Race: National Review Mauls Gingrich

National Review, the county’s premier conservative magazine, wacked Newt Gingrich with a big stick in its December 31 pre-Iowa vote issue.

The magazine featured on its cover a zany cartoon of Mr. Gingrich on the moon with a lead line above its masthead – “The Editors: Against Gingrich.”

There are four feature articles on Mr. Gingrich, all cripplingly critical:

“’How Speaker Newt Balanced The Budget’ (and why president Newt would not)” by Kevin Williamson; “‘Amnesty Again’ (Gingrich’s plan would reward criminals and make the law arbitrary)” by Kris Kobach; “‘Some Shade Of Green’ (The former Speaker has a longstanding love-hate relationship with environmental reform)” by Jonathan Adler; and perhaps most devastating, “‘The Gingrich Gestalt’ (You take a dubious record. You take some wacky ideas, you take a narcissistic personality…)” by Mark Steyn, more politically astute than the late Christopher Hitchens and just as dangerous.

Together the articles do not represent, shall we say, a vote of confidence by the editors of National Review.

Here is Mr. Steyn belaboring Mr. Gingrich:

“Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachman, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai… oh, wait. That one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy black-out curtains.”

Most of Mr. Gingrich’s moles are prominently displayed in the issue, days after Mr. Gingrich, pummeled by negative ads, plummeted in the polls.

Out With The Old In With The New

2012-01-02T11:06:00.000-05:00

The New Year has finally arrived, and with it old things have or soon will be put away.

Among them are former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now comfortably ensconced in Hollywood as the chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America and, within the year, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, once a Democrat and now an Independent. It may be worth mentioning that Mr. Dodd’s last vow in leaving office is that he would not – no, never – become a lobbyist.

This sweeping out of the old is what is called in politics a “sea change.” Some things, of course, will not change. Connecticut will remain a blue state even if by some stroke of Divine Providence a Republican is able to wrest Mr. Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat from progressive or liberal Democrats. Connecticut’s congressional delegation has for a long while been the private preserve of the Democratic Party and presently is home to three millionaires: U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and U.S. Reps Rosa Delauro and Jim Himes, who made his money on Wall Street.

Mr. Dodd waited until his lobbyist job opened before becoming a millionaire. If Connecticut’s Democratic millionaire office holders were to be transported back in time to 1942, during the reign of progressive war president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they would be paying in taxes more than 100 percent of their salaries.

Before World War II, fewer than 5 percent of Americans paid income taxes. From 1940 to 1942, personal exemptions were drastically lowered and the number of Americans paying income taxes jumped tenfold, from $4 million to 39 million. The year 1942 introduced the first mass tax in U.S. history and was also the first year of withholding taxes at the source. Congress passed the first income tax law in 1913-14. The tax was made retro-active so that dollars could be immediately extracted from millionaires, but to ease the pain of payments the 1913 tax was payable in 1914, a lapse in payment that lasted thirty years. FDR’s much broader tax subjected some taxpayers to double taxation in 1943. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 forced some millionaires to pay double taxation and eliminated the lapse. Result: For each of the war years, 1944-1945, those earning $1 million per year owed $1,006,750 in taxes. When Democratic U.S. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana was asked how some people could pay more in taxes than they earned, he replied coolly, “I submit that the [rich] taxpayer is likely to have accumulated sufficient assets with which to make the necessary income payments.” Even at confiscatory rates, Mr. Roosevelt was convinced that millionaires were not paying their “fair share” in taxes, according to a luminous article in The American Spectator written by Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, the authors of "FDR Goes To War."

The New Year has finally arrived, and with it old things have or soon will be put away.

Among them are former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now comfortably ensconced in Hollywood as the chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America and, within the year, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, once a Democrat and now an Independent. It may be worth mentioning that Mr. Dodd’s last vow in leaving office is that he would not – no, never – become a lobbyist.

This sweeping out of the old is what is called in politics a “sea change.” Some things, of course, will not change. Connecticut will remain a blue state even if by some stroke of Divine Providence a Republican is able to wrest Mr. Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat from progressive or liberal Democrats. Connecticut’s congressional delegation has for a long while been the private preserve of the Democratic Party and home to three millionaires: U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and U.S. Reps Rosa Delauro and Jim Himes, who made his money on Wall Street.

Mr. Dodd waited until his lobbyist job opened before becoming a millionaire. If Connecticut’s Democratic millionaire office holders were to be transported back in time to 1942, during the reign of progressive war president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they would be paying in taxes more than 100 percent of their salaries.

Before World War II, fewer than 5 percent of Americans paid income taxes. From 1940 to 1942, personal exemptions were drastically lowered and the number of Americans paying income taxes jumped tenfold, from $4 million to 39 million. The year 1942 introduced the first mass tax in U.S. history and was also the first year of withholding taxes at the source. Congress passed the first income tax law in 1913-14. The tax was made retro-active so that dollars could be immediately extracted from millionaires, but to ease the pain of payments the 1913 tax was payable in 1914, a lapse in payment that lasted thirty years. FDR’s much broader tax subjected some taxpayers to double taxation in 1943. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 forced some millionaires to pay double taxation and eliminated the lapse. Result: For each of the war years, 1944-1945, those earning $1 million per year owed $1,006,750 in taxes. When Democratic U.S. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana was asked how some people could pay more in taxes than they earned, he replied coolly, “I submit that the [rich] taxpayer is likely to have accumulated sufficient assets with which to make the necessary income payments.” Even at confiscatory rates, Mr. Roosevelt was convinced that millionaires were not paying their “fair share” in taxes, according to a luminous article in The American Spectator written by Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, the authors of "FDR Goes To War."

It is a safe bet that none of the members of Connecticut’s bluer than blue progressive congressional delegation would admit to being quite as progressive as FDR. Millionaires Mr. Blumenthal, Mrs. DeLauro and Mr. Himes, asked to contribute their “fair share” in taxes as “fair” and “share” were understood during FDR’s presidency, very likely would resist the imposition.

At the turn of this year, Connecticut’s media was full of swan songs in a minor key as Mr. Lieberman sought an exit door that would not bang him too fiercely on the rear. So off message was Mr. Lieberman with progressives and peace-at-any-price Democrats that it must have seemed to them the life-long Democrat was on the verge of bolting his party.

In foreign policy matters, Mr. Lieberman is what used to be called a “Scoop Jackson” Democrat, nearly the last of a dying breed. Mr. Lieberman disagreed sharply with Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama’s views on foreign policy, and his hawkish ways did not endear him to those in his party who, along with Mr. Obama, vigorously resisted what they regarded as President George Bush’s war in Iraq. When Mr. Lieberman backed then Republican Party presidential contender John McCain over Mr. Obama, he crossed a bridge too far. A political neophyte, Ned Lamont, challenged Mr. Blumenthal in a party primary, defeated Mr. Lieberman and was in turn defeated in the general election after Mr. Blumenthal had re-entered the lists as an Independent.

A liberal in domestic policy and a “Scoop Jackson” Democrat in foreign policy, Mr. Lieberman’s leave taking will mark, for good or ill, the end of an era.

Gambling Then And Now, Blumenthal Then And Now

2011-12-30T09:15:00.000-05:00

In moving from Connecticut’s attorney general’s office to the U.S. Senate, Dick Blumenthal left behind a truckload of news releases sent out on an almost daily basis to the local media, as well as a few hundred moldy cases quickly dismissed by incoming Attorney General George Jepsen as unsound.

No doubt some of those numberless press releases are rattling around like dry old bones in the news morgues of many a Connecticut newspaper.

A few of them relating to internet gambling and the stories they mothered can be fetched from the internet.

Attorney General Blumenthal, as early as 1997, sent out to various newspapers in Connecticut, some of which were much in the habit of reflexively printing his news releases as received, an anti-internet gambling thunderbolt entitled “Blumenthal Urges Effort to Ban Internet Gambling.”

Mr. Blumenthal noted in his release that “Gambling and the Internet is a mix that is a recipe for deceit and financial disaster.”

Along with other state attorneys general, Mr. Blumenthal appeared at the time before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to endorse legislation he said was essential to preserve state regulation of gambling.

Mr. Blumenthal testified that internet gambling would be, according to his press release, “rife with problems, including no regulation or control over those operating the Internet gambling -- including possibly criminals -- and no protections for those who placed wagers.”

That was then.

Coincident with a memo written by Virginia Seitz, head of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and a possible Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, stating that previous legislation bars only internet betting on sports – not internet betting in general – Governor of Connecticut Dannel Malloy said that “he welcomes the ruling as a way to raise more money for the state,” according to a report by WTHN News 8.

The Christian Science Monitor has pointed out that “To win Senate approval to serve on the court, she [Ms. Seitz] would need the support of Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada. Last year, most of Nevada’s big casinos became big backers of an effort to overturn the federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.”

Other cash strapped governors across the fruited plains salivated uncontrollably after the legal opinion that allows states to authorize Web-based, non-sports gambling within their borders.

The ruling breaks open the tax piggy bank at a time when spendthrift legislators and governors had been forced by circumstances to cut spending in their states. The rush of new taxes from newly permitted internet gambling would relieve their anxieties and postpone politically wounding cost saving measures, perhaps beyond the upcoming elections.

It should be noted that internet gambling could not effectively be regulated by current state strictures governing state betting parlors. Internet gambling is a new game that would need new regulations, as well as a federal regulatory apparatus to insure a happy outcome.

Mr. Blumenthal, whose opposition to internet gambling has thawed since 1997, recently told News 8 that "What we really need” are federal regulations that will protect “consumers, so that credit card fraud and identity theft do not come with online gambling.”

In 2002, then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was one of the keynote speakers, along with Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton and Jeff Benedict, author of “Without Reservation,” at a public forum sponsored by the Coalition Against Gambling Expansion (CAGE).

In a media release, CAGE noted a series of “facts” surrounding gambling that have not been disputed by Mr. Blumenthal:

“Crime rates in communities with casinos are 84% higher than the national average… Gambling hurts local businesses. One-third of Atlantic City’s retail businesses closed within four years of the arrival of casinos… Gambling costs taxpayers money. Every $ 1 in gambling revenue costs states between $ 3 to $ 7 in hidden costs… Gambling eliminates jobs. For every 1 job created by casinos, surrounding communities lose 1 to 2 jobs… Gambling hurts our kids. In states with legalized gambling, 5% to 11% of the teenagers will become compulsive gamblers… Gambling is addictive. A Connecticut study showed that 47% of those who gamble in the state are problem or pathological gamblers… Gambling wrecks lives. In states with legalized gambling: 99% of compulsive gamblers commit crimes; 100% of compulsive gamblers become physically abusive, especially towards children; 25% of compulsive gamblers end up in the legal system…”

Such “facts” cannot be mitigated through regulations. But, then again, inconvenient truths are not likely to weigh heavily on the consciences of Democratic senators and governors whose overriding concern in an era of diminishing tax returns is – how best to raise tax revenue to allow increases in state spending levels without spooking the geese that lay the golden eggs.

Donovan: North Korea is a Monarchy

2011-12-29T14:25:00.014-05:00

At long last, the Democrats may have found their Sarah Palin, a Republican Vice Presidential candidate much criticized for having said, probably not in jest, that one could see Russia from Alaska.

In an extensive interview with Hartford online radio network’s “On The Horn”, 5th District U.S. House candidate Chris Donovan several times referred to North Korean dictators as monarchs (not butterflies), a flub that would portend alarming ignorance in lesser Republican candidates. Mr. Donovan called both the elder Kim Jong IL and his peachy-cheeked son “kings.”

Here is a transcription of Mr. Donovan's remarks on Korea:

"Horn: We have things going on in North Korea I want you to comment on… What do we do with places like North Korea, where we have the boy king?

"Donovan: Well, it’s still pretty much of a mystery right now. We’re seeing more of North Korea than we’ve seen in decades. I mean, the stories that were told to the populace about the former king and his exploits on the golf course (pause), amazing the information going on. Again, like what’s going on in the Arab world, it’s a challenge for us. And it’s an opportunity for us as well. We’ve had tough years with North Korea in the last few years, due to the personality of the then king. I think we should reach out as aggressively to the new king. There’s a better way. We can help your populous of your country where people apparently are starving. And the Unites States can play a role. I know that in South Korea, there’s a real bitterness towards the former king. I think the United States can move into a place where maybe South Korea can’t, and try to pull them in and help them change in a way that is helpful to the area, as well as helpful to the United States and helpful to the people. I see this this as a real opportunity. I think we should do our best to say – all right, there’s a new king."

Mr. Donovan also said of Cuba, a country proximate to Florida – though it cannot be seen from there – that it ‘is not a wealthy country.” Cubans under King Castro, who make about $9 dollars a month in salary, are considerably less wealthy than state workers in Connecticut. Both the Castro brothers, who through state regulation more or less own the means of production in Cuba, are wealthy. A few years ago, Cuba’s dictators did away with caps on salaries that assured doctors should receive the same salary under socialisimo as people who cleaned their offices, according to a report in The Guardian. That experiment in capitalism may prove beneficial. It also may result in the kind of wage disparity increasingly denounced here in the United States by Mr. Donovan, who may be surprised to discover that unions are frowned upon in wealthy Cuba.

NOTE: The text has been corrected. Mr. Kantrowitz pointed out that Mr. Donovan did not say, as initially reported on this blog, that Cuba was wealthy. He said it was NOT wealthy. On a second hearing, Mr. Donovan’s “NOT wealthy” is obvious. My thanks to Mr. Kantrowitz for calling it to my attention.

Choices, UConn And Bust

2011-12-22T18:10:00.004-05:00

UConn is raising its tuition. Is anyone surprised?

The surprise, if any, might be checked at the door after reading the latest edition of Ted Mann’s magnum opus covering the first year of Connecticut’s first Democratic governor in twenty years.

Both Governor Dannel Malloy and the crowd of Malloyalists surrounding him are highly ambitious. They believe previous governors have been treading water. The state now has a progressive reformist at the helm who wants to “reinvent – his word – the state of Connecticut. As is the case with most modern progressives, education is a political palliative – good for what ails you; when you run out of options, boost education. Reformation, naturally, is costly, but politically popular. In the hands of Mr. Malloy and the Democratic legislature, any reform of education is likely to advance the interests of teachers at the expense of taxpayers.

Jonathan Pelto, himself an ardent liberal, reminds us that Mr. Malloy pointedly did not extend his “Shared Sacrifice” to municipalities when he was hammering out his budget with SEBAC, the union coalition authorized to negotiate union contracts with the state. Shared cost savings from teachers therefore were off the table before bargaining commenced.

Responding to a statement made by Malloy budget director Ben Barnes that cuts at UConn “were comparable to what the rest of state government took,” Mr. Pelto remarks in a careful analysis of tuition increases proposed by recently installed UConn President Susan Herbst, “This statement is blatantly false. In fact, there were a number of government programs that were not cut at all (such as municipal aid), with others that only received minor cuts and even a few programs that received increased state funding.”

The money “saved” by Mr. Malloy in state funding cuts to UConn has now been backfilled by Ms. Herbst through tuition increases.

Behold, Mr. Pelto writes, the Malloy version of “Shared Sacrifice”:

“The Malloy version of ‘Shared Sacrifice’ – More taxes for middle income families and then, as a result of state budget cuts, those same families will now face significantly higher costs to send their kids to college.”

At its best and worst, politics is all about making choices. If Mr. Malloy, the architect of Connecticut’s future, had not chosen to spend nearly $900 million on the UConn Health Center (UCHC), the pinkest of pink elephants, he would have had wads of cash on hand to defray tuition costs at the college proper. Why? Because Mr. Malloy and his Democratic controlled legislature had jacked up taxes sufficiently in their budget to produce the usual Connecticut surplus. And then he spent it on a roll of the dice.

A review of Mr. Mann’s serial account of the first year of the Malloy administration will show that Ms. Herbst was one of the prime movers in the re-invention of the UConn Health Center.

We discover from Mr. Mann’s account that Mr. Malloy at first told Ms. Herbst and Cato Laurencin, the head of UCHC, that he didn’t want to invest money in the rehabilitation of the ailing facility. Mr. Malloy and the Malloyalist had already performed a political audit: “If they were going to ask him to pour more money into that hospital, and take it between the eyes from every deficit hawk and editorial board in the state, well, they need to show him something bold.” It was Ms. Herbst who sold the reinvented UCHC to Jackson Laboratories.

“She's already begun the hard work at UConn of whacking back the weeds,” Mr. Mann wrote, “cutting undersubscribed Ph.D. programs and winnowing unnecessary expenditures to free up more funds for research. They're fundraising, and they're lousy with ‘free labor’: undergraduates desperate to work for course credit and resume-building lab experience. They are, in short, just the sort of forward-thinking host community a lab organization like Jackson ought to be looking for, she says.”

And now UConn now needs additional professors to reduce class sizes from 18 students per professor to 15. The most pampered institution in the state, UConn will now cover putative losses in state aid, said to be about $300 million, by bumping up tuition 6 to 6.8 percent for the next four years.

The stinger here is that we all live in a world of finite choices -- and finite resources. Non-politicians learn to live within those parameters. Political choices have consequences. Those who do not like the consequences should have opposed the precipitating choices. They didn’t. Now, weeping copious tears, UConn students have been saddled with tuition increases. Really, it’s a bit of a crush watching those responsible for spilling the milk weeping crocodile tears over their spilt milk.

Understanding Kim Through Dramaturgy

2011-12-19T10:08:00.004-05:00

The following piece appeared in Connecticut Commentary five years ago and is reprinted here on the occasion of the passing of Kim Jong Il.

Shin Sang-ok enters the stage and approaches a large standing mirror with great trepidation. At the end of his monologue, he will fade out and only the mirror, with Kim Jong Il’s image in it, will be seen.

Shin Sang-ok: I am not Kim Jong Il, though people have told me I look a bit like him; it’s the pompadour, I think. Kim could not be here. That would be impossible.

To understand Kim, you must understand something of the uses of imagery. I have a comprehensive understanding of the science of imagery, for I was a movie producer in South Korea, before I was abducted and taken to the North. One of Kim’s agents put a bag over my head and spirited me off. Well, you know -- North Korea; it’s not Hollywood… Having tried and failed to escape several times, I was put into a reeducation camp for four years.

Why is it always four years, I wonder? Why not ten, or eleven and a half? (He laughs) You are surprised, perhaps, that the camp did not rob me of my sense of humor? But believe me, when you are in camp – and everything that has brought you joy is stripped away from you, so that what remains is nothing but a naked, shivering ego, shorn of all its comforting illusions – a sense of humor may be your only saving grace. It took me years to become serious again.

I suppose the North Koreans, who have next to nothing, find themselves in similar circumstances; or at least they might, were it not for the reality bending enchantment of imagery. Once I was released from camp, thoroughly re-educated, I was treated well enough. I was conducted from the camp straight to Kim Jong Il’s … I will not call it a palace; but neither was it a hovel. Kim greeted me like an old friend. Here, in the permanent blackout of the North Korean peninsula, a light glows in the darkness. Kim Jong Il, you can be sure, is the light of this world, a product, mostly, of his creative imagination.

On the day of my liberation, Kim was light in every way: jovial, witty and bright, even though he has had little formal schooling. Light on his feet, he danced across the floor to greet me, one old school chum embracing another after a long absence. “Hello old fellow! Good to see you.” Would you believe it? The women of the country consider him “cute.” I cannot forget the image of Kim dancing to greet me, his face suffused with light. I know sincerity, and this scene was sincerely warm.

After the camp, where many of us had survived on a diet of corn flour and grass, to be received so cordially was (smile) somewhat disorienting, until I realized, almost at once, that here was a man who had no independent existence apart from his imagery. He was a living film. Kim opened a door and waved me into a room – and there it was: the largest private collection I had, until then, seen anywhere – fifteen thousand films. It is somewhat of an understatement to say that Kim is a film buff. He is, at once, the producer, director and principle actor in the film that records his life and the recent life of his crippled country. And here I was, a film maker -- a minor deity, to be sure -- in the presence of this maestro of image making. How could we fail to get along?

He was generous -- after my rehabilitation. He bought me a Mercedes, and reunited me with my wife, who also had been kidnapped by his imps and impets; she too had the marks of the prison camp on her. But our days of deprivation and re-education, we were given to understand, were now over. Apparently, Kim had need of a film maker. I was paid three million dollars a year. He settled upon me as his Leni Riefenstahl. Not a bad deal; Riefenstahl lived to be 101, outlasting Hitler by some 45 years, convinced to the last that she was an artist, not a propagandist. Perhaps she was an artist – one of those who create dangerously.

As for myself, I was impressed into service; I was not a willing subject. In the absence of freedom, it is somewhat arrogant to speak of free choices. In the prison camps, we had no choice of meals; flour and grass were on every menu. But the citizens of North Korea, so many of them, have had even fewer choices. Even here, in Pyongyang, the very center of Kim’s imagination – for the entire country is an imaginary construct -- there has been whispered talk of starvation.

In refugee areas across the Chinese border, boney children stare with eyes floating in sunken sockets at the desolation of their villages. Odd: One expects monsters such as Kim to be monstrous always. But it is not so. With me – perhaps because I was from the South, and a film maker – Kim was honest, after his own fashion. He could be brutally honest. Perhaps he wanted to have near him one man to whom lies could not be other than lies.

Our conversations sometimes were confessionals – not often, but sometimes. Even the great kings of Europe had their fools, and sometimes kings would permit their fools a certain license denied to even the most privileged courtiers. The people to whom Kim has dedicated his life and his most sacred honor, after all, live in the future he has imagined for them; they know little else. But me, I am from the South. I do know better. And Kim knew that I knew better, that I had a frame of reference different than those North Korean children, with distended bellies, who risked their lives crossing the Chinese border for a bit of rice they might bring back to their starving families.

Can’t fool me. “What did he want?” I often asked myself. Those children who crossed the border to gather food were ashamed that they had fallen so far short of their Dear Leader’s extravagant expectations of them. They were not self reliant enough to starve quietly; their bellies told them that self reliance was a sham. Kim threw a party for my wife and me when we were rejoined after the camps. Two bands played, a male and a female band. When the women in the band cheered him, he patted my hand and said, “Mr. Shin, all that is bogus. It's just pretense.”

What did he want with me? Affirmation, I finally decided. He wanted to be able to affirm to someone that he knew the truth, that he was not a captive of his own imagination, that he was not mad. That and, of course, he needed someone to jump start a propaganda effort. Propaganda is to these tyrants what cosmetics are to aging actresses: When the crow’s feet begin to appear around your eyes, you apply a little paint, and they appear to disappear. But underneath the propaganda, things remain as they are: Children starve and whip themselves because they are not self reliant. (Fade out)

Kim Jong Il: (Kim appears in the mirror. He steps out of the mirror) There is a little truth in all lies. First there was the testimony of my cook – that bastard! That ingrate! Now this!

One thing you can be sure of: People outside North Korea will always be ready to believe the worst of me. But here – where people know me – I am universally loved… Well, to be honest, not universally loved, but deeply loved. The people loved my father as well.

You see, in North Korea, heroism is still possible. We are brought up to identify with heroes, such as my father and – if it is not too immodest to say it -- me. But in the West, your heroes exist only in your films, which is why I have such a large collection of Western films. I have learned a good deal from them. They are my university.

There are differences between Western heroes and Eastern heroes – and similarities too, though I think the differences are more important. The Western hero is a loner; he takes his courage from what he believes to be right. But the ethic of the West is fast changing, don’t you think? What John Wayne thought to be right is not what, say, any modern hero more representative of the West thinks is right. There is something defective about this loner theory too, don’t you think? A man alone is not a blank sheet, because a man is never alone; never an island unto himself, but always part of the mainland.

And, as to the propaganda value of films, well intelligence has always been used that way. It was, after all, Hollywood that won World War II; Hollywood and George Patton, a true American hero. Film is a kind of collective intelligence, and I value it for that reason.

But I meant to say… What was it?... Oh yes, the Eastern hero is different; the wellsprings of his heroism are different. We are not afraid of insularity, self development, self-reliance – but always within the context of serving the greater good. Apart from the greater good, what is self reliance but selfishness? It is not given to everyone to know what the greater good is. When Shin Sang-ok was here, I tried to explain all this to him. But his time in the West had scribbled ineradicable messages on his soul. South Korea is the West; it is the West as surely as New York, or any large city in America, Paris or Germany, is the West. And, sadly, he agrees with me. In South Korea, the external promptings – entirely Western – have overcome internal resolve. Even in the West, the traditional Western messages – notes of conscience – are daily being overwritten by the environment. The Western hero is no longer one who struggles against his environment; he yields to it, the way a weak man yields to a beautiful woman.

That is the truth. The West is losing its struggle with the East. It may not seem so. But the West is weak, faint of soul. That is the truth. Externalities are deceptive. Rome was rich and technologically proficient when it fell. You see: I study the West; but you do not study the East. If you had studied us, you would know that isolation is our strength. The more you isolate us, the stronger we become. We are like Antaeus in the Roman myths. Our strength comes from the earth -- from the people. To kill Antaeus, the son of the earth, Hercules had to hold his feet above the earth, and strangle him; for when his foot touched ground, Antaeus grew in strength. Are you surprised I know these things? Do you think I spend all my time in the cinema? (laughs wildly).

Christmas And The New Puritans

2011-12-17T19:46:00.007-05:00

The season of joy and merriment once again is upon us, and anti-Christmas fascists are out in force.

In the “greatest deliberative body on earth” – that would be the U.S. Congress – we find that senators “may use officially related funds to mail holiday cards to constituents,” but they may not use “the frank to mail holiday cards,” even though the funds from both sources come from the same plundered taxpayers.

The prohibition against sharing joyous greetings in the House is considerably more forbidding. House members must submit official mailings for review to the congressional franking commission. The Grinches there regularly tell House members that no Holiday Greetings – and especially not ‘Merry Christmas’ – can be sent in official mail.

Just prior to Christmas, an inquiring reporter who called the commission “for clarification” was told that “Merry Christmas” always and everywhere was verboten. Also House members may not, under pain of de-frankification, wish their constituents a “Happy New Year.” However, House members may include in their franked mail the expression “have a happy new year,” because the lower case greeting references “the time period of a new year, but not the holiday.”

Got it?

It is said that excessively pedantic scholastics around the time of St. Thomas Aquinas spent much of their time debating how many angels might fit on the head of a pin. Such deliberators were babes in the crib when compared to the members of the congressional franking committee. House members, it turns out, are lashed, but senators escape the whip; this inequitable treatment is only fair in a congressional body in which some pigs, to borrow an expression from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Crushing news for those who suppose that national forests belong to the nation's people: The Mariposa Gazette, California's oldest weekly newspaper of continuous publication, has sent out an advisory that culprits who acquire a Christmas tree from a nearby national forest or transport said tree are subject to a penalty of “$200 with a maximum of $5,000 and/or six months in jail. If more than one tree is taken, violators are fined the value of the trees at maturity.”

Maturity, as they say in Norway, lies in the roots of things. In 2004, a Norway Spruce “of the species traditionally used to decorate European homes during Christmas,” a shrubby mountain survivor, was found “at an altitude of 2,985 feet (910 meters) in Dalarna Province,” according to a report in the authoritative National Geographic. The mature tree sprouted from a root system that “has been growing for 9,550 years.” Apparently, these Christmas trees clone themselves from undisturbed roots.

Nature has nothing to fear from Christmas tree thieves. And Christians have everything to fear from pedantic bureaucrats and lawmakers who uproot joyous traditions for the pure pleasure of destruction. The anti-Christmas crowd, a sad bunch, has become “puritanical” in the sense in which Henry Mencken used the word when he defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The new Puritans, every bit as energetic and menacing as the old ones, are never so joyful as when they are sprinkling ashes on the joy of Christians. Their idea is not to engage in a frontal attack on public displays of Christianity but to use the engine of government, most especially the courts, to disturb its message. In this, they have been largely successful. But the season itself blasts through their crusty secularism. On the first day of joy, the first crèche, as in modern times, was crowded round with the sad remnants of paganism and unbelief. But joy, never-the-less managed to find a way into a world thirsty for joy.

"Joy, said C. S. Lewis, “is the serious business of Heaven." And, of course, God being a very tricky fellow, one can never be too careful. It may break out anytime, anywhere.

David Faces Goliath

2011-12-16T09:34:00.005-05:00

In any public scuffle between a lowly lawyer and the Malloy administration, one would ordinarily cast the lawyer in the role of David, slingshot at the ready.

But in this case, Rich Rochlin – who, we are told, toiled in obscurity until he, a bit like David, bumped into Goliath – has some physical characteristics that one of Malloy’s men, the formidable Roy Occhiogrosso, finds amusing.

Mr. Occhiogrosso, who during his long and eventful career toiled more or less in obscurity before he joined forces with Goliath, does not hold back. An aide to Mr. Malloy has attributed to Mr. Occhiogrosso a remark that Mr. Rochlin “seems not to be playing with a full deck.''

In one scene recorded for posterity by journalistic embed Ted Mann, an able reporter for the Hearst chain of newspapers, Tim Bannon, Mr. Malloy’s Chief of Staff, receives from Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo’s chief aide a salty response to Mr. Malloy’s persistent criticism of Mr. Cuomo: “We operate on two speeds here: Get along, and kill." Mr. Occhiogrosso seems to have internalized the aide’s operative principle:

“The guy is everybody’s worst impression of a lawyer,’’ Occhiogrosso said of Mr. Rochlin. “He’s like a cartoon character. Hopefully, this guy’s 15 minutes of fame are up soon. … There are several pieces of silverware missing from the drawer. As to what happens to Rich Rochlin, hopefully he just goes away. He’s achieved his objective. This has been a fairly unusual and odd marketing campaign. We’re done dealing with him.’’

Mr. Roachlin is representing a handful of state workers vilified in the media for having allegedly – an investigation is underway – fraudulently applied for a federal handout following Connecticut’s freak snow storm in November.

Mr. Roachlin has been described in some media accounts as “a colorful character with a beard,” a “hard-charging lawyer who has hurled rhetorical bombs at Malloy and his aides in an unorthodox style that included showing up at Malloy’s press conference,” a “newcomer to politics,” unlike Mr. Occhiogrosso, also a colorful character who began his long and eventful career politics and a union “go-fer” tutored by Leo Canty, the union impresario still battling, after all these years, Connecticut’s governmental Goliath.

Mr. Roachlin has been characterized by Mr. Occhiogrosso current boss, the media shy Governor Dannel Goliath, as “a $250-per-hour lawyer who would say whatever was necessary to help his clients,” somewhat like Andrew McDonald, the governor’s current Legal Counsel or Michael Lawlor, the governor’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, both of whom are gold plated lawyers. Mr. Malloy also has a law degree.

Much to his credit, Mr. Occhiogrosso has been spared the indignity of attending law school or representing clients before the bar. When Mr. Occhiogrosso needs to lawyer-up, he hires one.

Chris Keating, a Hartford Courant reporter and one of its best diggers, disclosed in his report that Mr. Occhiogrosso had once hired the “cartoon character” to represent him in a legal dispute Mr. Occhiogrosso had with a contractor who, given Mr. Occhiogrosso operational principles, one hopes is still alive.

Mr. Roachlin, enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, has returned Mr. Occhiogrosso’s fire:

“Roy is on my marketing team. He keeps extending my 15 minutes by 10 minutes every night. I thought he was a pro, but he’s getting schooled by a novice, so I feel for him. I thought this guy was a pro. This is amateur hour. It’s like he just came out of an online school for communications. How pathetic. If he needs advice on how to personally attack me, he has my number. He’s keeping me in the news. I thank him for that. … He’s making all the classic mistakes. My clients’ story is getting out. The governor’s administration is being exposed as incompetent. The governor won’t look at the evidence, so we have to keep talking about it.’’

The out-take message for Goliath might very well be: Don’t sweat the small stuff; save the howitzers for the big guys.

Malloy Cool To DeStefano

2011-12-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

Governor Dannel Malloy, we are advised by Newsday, has reacted “coolly Wednesday to New Haven Mayor John DeStefano's plan to ask the Connecticut General Assembly to allow illegal immigrants who live in the city to vote in municipal elections.”

Mr. Malloy explained, "It's not an idea that I'm particularly comfortable with. I think there are obligations that run with citizenship and there are privileges that run with citizenship."

On the other hand, Mr. Malloy was not so offended as to freeze out Mr. DeStefano entirely, as he had done in the case of General Assembly Republicans who wanted a bit of input during the governor’s meandering budget negotiations with state union workers.

Mr. Malloy told Newsday that “he was willing to ‘hear the mayor out’ on his proposal, which follows the lead of other cities.”

This “man bites dog” story first appeared in the New Haven Independent, was picked up by NBC Connecticut and found its way into The Drudge Report. It will not be long before someone in China or Nigeria – Drudge has a long reach – happens on the story and begins to wonder whether New Haven is a country separate from the United States.

DeStefano has announced plans “to lobby the state for a ‘resident voting rights’ bill that would allow any resident of New Haven—regardless of immigration status—to vote in municipal elections in New Haven. He said he’ll launch the effort during this upcoming legislative session, which runs from February to May.”

The bill, Mr. DeStefano said, is about “how you define community, and how you define responsibility in community.”

President of the World Policy Institute Michele Wucker, the author of “Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right,” offered a novel take on duel citizenship to justify Mr. DeStefano’s possible bill:

“The idea is that when you live in a city, you are essentially a citizen of that city, which is separate from federal or national citizenship. The logic is that everybody is better off when everyone on their block and in their town has a stake in staying on top of issues and working together and to get safe and clean streets, good schools, reliable transportation, and good health care.”

It is not clear at this writing whether the General Assembly would be willing to consider New Haven the equivalent of a separate state, conferring upon its illegal residents a right of citizenship that is usually a prerequisite to voting in municipal elections. But the fearless Democratic dominated legislature should not be underestimated.

The mayor of New Haven has estimated that his city is home to 10,000 “non-citizen immigrants,” half of them above the age of 18. Mr. DeStefano, according to the New Haven Independent story, was launched into the national spotlight in 2007 when during his “quest to make New Haven more inclusive of its immigrant community” he issued a general order preventing police in New Haven from “inquiring into people’s immigration status,” for of course such inquiries might have disclosed that nearly as many members of the New Haven “immigrant community” were “illegal immigrants” as opposed to legal immigrants.

Taking a progressive leap forward, the mayor has now proposed to convert 10,000 non-citizen illegal immigrants into Democratic voters, and 10,000 municipal votes certainly would represent a safe buffer for Mr. DeStefano. The mayor’s success easily could be repeated in other Democratic dominated cities. Many large cities in Connecticut are secure Democratic bastions, and allowing illegal residents to vote sure beats other historic forms of voting irregularities that had been winked at in the good old days of Tammy Hall by Democratic Party bosses. In pre-Civil War New York, the Dead Rabbits, a political gang then supporting New York Mayor Fernando Wood, secured his re-election by forging votes using the names of dead people.

Robbing votes from graves is perhaps too obvious a fraud to pass muster in modern day Connecticut among party bosses, some of whom are mayors. God does not always sleep; neither do newly elected governors or the sometimes drowsy tribunes of the people. Allowing non-citizens to vote is a bit more subtle than the methods employed by Mr. Wood of blessed memory and his Dead Rabbits. Even so, it may be politically risky to ignore obvious distinctions. To many people it is a matter of some importance whether a voter is dead or alive, a citizen or a non-citizen.

Hope And Change

2011-12-13T05:46:00.001-05:00

After 35 months of hope and change under the administration of President Barack Obama, a majority of people in Connecticut are beginning to lose hope, according to a poll conducted by the Siena College Research Institute:

“More than half of people in Connecticut believe America's salad days are over, according to a new survey.

“The next generation will have to accept a lower standard of living and the country's best economic days are behind us, 52 percent of state residents said in a survey by the Siena College Research Institute, based in Loudonville, near Albany, N.Y.”

All The Governor’s Men

2011-12-11T09:05:00.002-05:00

Jon Lender, investigative reporter for the Hartford Courant, examines some savory or unsavory – depending on one’s point of view -- connections between the Malloy administration and Northeast Utilities:

“For several years ending last December, Global's Hartford office was run by Occhiogrosso. Then, when Occhiogrosso quit to take his current job in the governor's office, Global hired an NU communications executive, Tanya Meck, to take his place in Hartford.

“What significance is there in this interlock of personnel, politics, consultants and clients? According to Occhiogrosso, none.

"’It doesn't mean anything,’ he said. ‘It's a big company in a small state — doesn't mean anything.’"

The Courant And Connecticut’s Death Penalty

2011-12-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

The editorial board of the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, waited patiently until a penalty hearing jury brought in a finding that Joshua Komisarjevsky must die by lethal injection before getting into print, only hours later, an editorial demanding the abolition of the state’s death penalty.

The editorial is only incidentally related to the case at hand, and very likely portions of it were written long before a jury of his peers decided that Mr. Komisarjevsky should be executed. It is an all-purpose declaration, suitable in every death penalty case, a suit of argumentation that will fit any body of evidence.

For instance, the editorial points to “endless reviews and appeals,” not at all uncommon in death penalty cases, and laments that both Mr. Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, earlier condemned to death by a different jury for the same crime, the murder of three women in Cheshire, “are more likely to die of old age before they are executed.”

This is true enough. There are a number of people on Connecticut’s death row whose seemingly endless appeals have so far have forestalled their execution. The gap between the commission of a murder in Connecticut, a trial, a second penalty phase trial and the execution of a death sentence is uncommonly long, bridged by seemingly endless appeals. The paper asks whether these “agonizing and expensive trials accomplish anything?”

The answer the paper is angling for is – No. Since the capital felony process in Connecticut can be subverted by seemingly endless appeals, the state should throw up its hands, concede that its death penalty is unworkable, and abolish a procedure that is unworkable, expensive, immoral and inherently unjust. The death penalty is unjust, according the editors of the Hartford Courant, because it is rooted in revenge and subject to misapplication.

Most of these objections are all purpose caveats. Each one of them begins to collapse once they are applied to the Komisarjevsky-Hayes case.

There is no question of a misapplication of the death penalty in the Komisarjevsky-Hayes multiple murder case. There is not a single member of the editorial board of the Hartford Courant who could argue persuasively before a jury of third graders that either Mr. Komisarjevsky or Mr. Hayes did not commit the crimes of which they have been accused. And while it may be argued that somewhere in the world the death penalty is even now being misapplied, that datum simply has no bearing on the Cheshire murder case.

The notion that the Komisarjevsky jury, which returned a verdict of guilty and later found in a separate penalty hearing trial that the multiple murderer should suffer execution, was motivated by vengeance is a howler that even a shameless comic would hesitate to drag on stage; this kind of special pleading, bordering on demagoguery, just ain’t funny. Vengeance, as a general, rule is swift and inexpensive; it dispenses with costly trials and retrials. Vengeance does not empanel juries to decide questions of innocence or guilty. It does not resort to penalty hearing trials. It is emotional and not deliberative. It occurs most often out of the presence of juries, judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors. These processes bear no relation to murder, and people who argue that the death penalty appropriately applied is “judicial murder,” some of them lawyers, do not understand the meaning of the word “murder” or the word “judicial” or the word “is.”

“When the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, it was with the hope that it could be administered impartially,” Courant editors write. “There is much evidence that this hope has not been met.”

No kidding?

Connecticut has executed two people in the last fifty years. Where is the evidence in either case that the death penalty in Connecticut has been administered in a partial, unjust manner? There is no such evidence.

Once the baby is thrown out with the wash water, the baby is irrecoverable. We are to abolish the death penalty because opponents of the death penalty have been successful in so prolonging the gap between non-vengeful conviction and the application of death sentences as to make capital punishment expensive and harrowing for the family victims of multiple murderers such as Komisarjevsky and Hayes. This is the real argument against capital punishment in Connecticut.

Abolition proponents who are legislators have yet to tell their constituents what punishment they would recommend in the case of a convicted murder serving a life sentence who commits a second murder in prison, or whether they think a terrorist who successfully kills hundreds of people should be spared the indignity of a non-vengeful and just public execution.

Someone should ask them.

Teddy And Barack

2011-12-09T17:28:00.003-05:00

In a campaign stump speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “new nationalism” speech, President Barack Obama threw a few flowers in the direction of the “roughrider,” the father of the modern progressive movement. And then the president bestowed on the Bull Moose president the ultimate compliment: He compared himself – slyly, indirectly – to Teddy.

Mark Twain, who thought Roosevelt a shameless fraud, was not so kind. Here is Twain erupting in a letter to the New York Times, written in 1908:

“Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth's surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.

“For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health - four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.

“Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”

In another piece on the bank panic of November 1907, Mr. Twain noted that the nation had been saved at the last moment by the millionaires Mr. Roosevelt had been excoriating in his campaign stump speeches:

"Last week a prodigious and universal crash was impending and but for one thing would have happened; the millionaire 'bandits' whom the president is so fond of abusing in order to get the applause of the gallery, stepped in and stayed the desolation. Mr. Roosevelt promptly claimed the credit of it, and there is much evidence that this inebriated nation thinks he is entitled to it.”

The Surplus State

2011-12-09T17:08:00.001-05:00

Is anyone surprised that the tax increases initiated by Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic dominated legislature have now produced a budget surplus of nearly a half billion dollars?

When the budget was put to bed months ago, Connecticut Commentary correctly characterized the surplus it produced as an artificial surplus:

“Mr. Malloy passed his budget through the General Assembly without being put to the inconvenience of discussing the matter with leading Republicans who, unlike union representatives, were wholly shut out of the process. The governor’s budget figures were such as to produce what I have called in the blog and in columns an artificial surplus of about a billion dollars. Real surpluses are produced when taxes are not increased but the state never-the-less realizes an increase in revenue owing mostly to increased business activity. Mr. Malloy’s artificial surplus is now flowing into a series of crony capitalist projects. Mr. Suzio is right about the UConn Health Center: It’s a budget busting black hole the state – which is broke, broke, broke -- can little afford to support. Attaching a non-profit, non-tax generating research center to the UCHC does not make the combination more profitable. This may be the first time in Connecticut’s history that a serviceable neck has been draped around an albatross.”

From its inception, Mr. Malloy’s budget -- a so called “shared sacrifice” plan -- was never intended to be revenue neutral.

Taking a page from former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, the current administration pegged taxes and putative “cost savings” in its budget in such a way as to produce a surplus. The Malloy administration already has distributed nearly a billion dollars of tax collections to the UConn Health Center, one of the state’s most absorbent tax sponges.

The latest figures leave state government with an additional half billion dollar surplus.

Mr. Weicker and succeeding governors folded their surpluses into the state’s spending program, which is why Connecticut’s budgets have increased threefold since the income tax was implemented. This governor differs from Weicker only in degree: his is the largest tax increase is state history.

Continuing surpluses will not be trimmed to assure no net increases in spending. They will be folded into future spending plans, and the surpluses will allow Mr. Malloy to continue to assert that relative to other states Connecticut is in “good shape.”

The state is unfortunate in having produced a string of governors who are incapable of making the proper distinction between the state – that is, the people of the state – and state government, their elected reopresentatives.

In all times, in all places, in all nations, the relationship between the people of the state and their government has ever been the same: The richer the government, the poorer the people.

The state of Connecticut, the surplus state, not at all well off; its government is flourishing.

Mann’s Malloy

2011-12-06T16:23:00.003-05:00

Ted Mann has written for the Day of New London a multipart opus on the Malloy administration that purports to be an inside look at the “malloyalists,” Mann’s term for the Brights surrounding Connecticut’s first Democratic governor in 20 years.

The difficulty with all such accounts is that embedded journalists tend to be stage managed by the principal actors in the drama. And the malloyalists are energetic stage managers. George Bernard Shaw was no admirer of autobiographies; they were all self-serving, carefully edited to show the hero of the piece in the best light. To the extent that a putatively objective piece of political drama approaches autobiography, it will be practically useless. A biography of Napoleon written by his butler might be useful, Shaw thought. But autobiographies – not so much.

An account of the Napoleonic years written by Madam DeRemusat, Lady in Waiting to the Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s cast-off wife, is useful to historians precisely because the lady, she who could not be stage managed, was not one of Napoleon’s most ardent admirers.

“Tell the truth,” Emily Dickensian said, “but tell it slant.” Truth be told, every truth is told slant, but it matters greatly who is slanting it. Would a biography of Napoleon written by Lord Nelson be more truthful than an autobiography written by Napoleon? Better to stick with the butler.

Among American journalists, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame is perhaps best known for writing embedded accounts of various administrations.

In a recent speech at the Organization for International Investment’s annual dinner at D.C.’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Thursday, Mr. Woodward told the crowd that former Vice President Al Gore was not the best conversationalist at table.

“Now, sitting next to Gore is taxing,” he said. And milking the laughing crowd, Mr. Woodward added, “In fact, it’s unpleasant.” Then Mr. Woodward, who had been criticized in some of his writings for making up conversations – to add verisimilitude to his narratives – tossed a bit of beef to the crowd.

He had asked Mr. Gore how much the public knew about what went on in the Bill Clinton administration, to which Mr. Gore responded, “About one percent,” a response that made Mr. Woodward feel “icky,” according to a report in The Hill.

“I kind of died inside and have to confess to having an unclean thought.”

Pressing on, Mr. Woodward asked Mr. Gore how much Americans would know if the former VP had written a memoir.

“Two percent,” said Mr. Gore, causing Mr. Woodward’s icky meter to implode.

There is some reportage in Mr. Mann’s account so far that will cause some eyebrows to arch. One includes an incident involving Mr. Malloy and Speaker of the House Chris Donovan. Mr. Donovan threatened to upset Mr. Malloy’s best laid budget plans by altering an understood arrangement concluded between the Malloy administration and the Democrat dominated legislature. The Malloy administration was operating on the assumption that it had a free hand to insist on further spending cuts should its deal with the unions fall apart, at which point a call came in from “Brendan Sharkey, the House majority leader, with a distressing message relayed from Chris Donovan himself.”

The House leadership, by which we are to understand Donovan, was now proposing “they tweak the language of the agreement. They want the budget bill to say that all its contents -- all those tax hikes, all the spending reductions -- are contingent on a deal with the unions,” a politically unpalatable move on the part of Mr. Donovan, who appears in Mr. Mann’s piece as a fervent pro-union politician, in opposition to Mr. Malloy, an uber-democrat who invariably has the best interests of Connecticut in mind.

In news accounts at the time, Mr. Donovan took great care to suggest that his role in the Malloy-SEBAC struggle was minimal and without consequence. Apparently, this was not true in the retelling. SEBAC is the State Employees Bargaining Agents Coalition authorized to represent unions in contractual arrangements.

Two of the malloyalists are stunned that Donovan seems incapable of understanding the political implications of the tweek. One malloyalist tells Mr. Donovan, “In my view, that is the worst-case nightmare of what it means to have Democratic government. The one thing we absolutely have to avoid, because we'll get ridden out of town on a rail, is turning over control of the budget to the state employee unions."

Mr. Donovan, now running for the U.S. House in the 5th District, very likely will be endorsed by the astonished malloyalists. They’ve had the use of him as a union foil, and in a few months the Speaker’s undemocratic attempt to thwart both the legislature and the governor will be discreetly forgotten by all except, one hopes, Mr. Malloy’s Boswell, Mr. Mann.

Technoautocracy

2011-12-04T08:33:00.004-05:00

Just as in the modern world the opposite of “bankruptcy” is “bailout," so the opposite of “democracy” is not "dictatorship" but “technoautocracy.”

During the great financial blow-out that occurred at the end of the Bush regime, continuing into the Obama years, while the U.S. Congress was debating whether or not to bail out too big to fail banks with a $700 billion blank check, financial technocrats were slipping $7.7 trillion to Wall Street under the table. Since none of the technocrats were elected to office, none of them had to worry overmuch about angry constituents, and no explanations were forthcoming – or even necessary.

In 2009, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg news, members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, unelected technoautocrats authorized to dictate monetary policy in the United States, passed along to Wall Street’s biggest players $7.7 trillon in no-strings-attached, super low interest loans.

In a stunning commentary, Tom Hartman notes:

“Six of the nation's biggest banks - like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America - pocketed a not-too-shabby $13 billion in undisclosed profits, thanks to the deal with the Technocrats at the Fed. So today - thanks to a decision made by technocrats - and not politicians - the too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger - and Wall Street has raked in more profits in just the last 30 months - then they did in the entire 8 years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.”

Ross Dothat, another commentator, notes that technoautorcracy is in the process of being internationalized:

"For the inhabitants of Italy and Greece, who have just watched democratically elected governments toppled by pressure from financiers, European Union bureaucrats, and foreign heads of state, it evokes the cold reality of 21st-century politics. Democracy may be nice in theory, but in a time of crisis it's the technocrats who really get to call the shots. National sovereignty is a pretty concept, but the survival of the European common currency comes first."

ADDENDA

According to a later Reuter’s report, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has disputed the $7.7 trillion figure.

“Mr. Bernanke has written to lawnmakers "that the figure and other estimates of larger total amounts of lending, were ‘wildly inaccurate.’ On any given day, Fed credit from its emergency liquidity programs was never more than about $1.5 trillion, he said.

"’These articles ... have contained a variety of egregious errors and mistakes,’ Bernanke told the chairmen of the U.S. Senate Banking and House of Representatives Financial Services committees."

Bloomberg stands by its initial story

Inside Crony Capitalism

2011-12-02T08:53:00.003-05:00

Wall Street, or at least that portion of it that writes editorials for the Wall Street Journal, is not, members of “Occupy Wall Street” may be happy to learn, on friendly terms with greedy Crony Capitalists.

The Crony Capitalist is the politically connected “entrepreneur” who finances risky ventures with taxpayer’s money so that, when the venture goes belly-up, the risks will be borne by taxpayers rather than private investors. When and if the company succeeds, of course, the profits will flow their way. It’s a win-win situation for crony capitalists because its financier is Uncle Sam.

The “bank” that supplies Crony Capitalists with their ill-gotten investment funds is the U.S. government, which also happens to be the national tax-collector-in-chief. Lord Acton, who said that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” should have lived to see the day that Solyndra, the green energy company that was given a half billion dollars in tax money, went belly-up.

Following Solyndra’s inevitable crack-up, the handful of congressmen interested in bridling run-away spending had an opportunity to take a gander at e-mails flowing back and forth between officials in President Barack Obama’s administration and the spendthrifts in Solyndra, and they do not paint a pretty picture. The crack-up was inevitable because the cost to produce Solyndra’s product, solar panels, exceeded the price Solyndra was charging for their product. This way lies ruin, as any 12-year-old lemonade stand vendor would have been able to advise the “investors” in Mr. Obama’s administration.

In April 2010, a month after PriceWaterhouseCoopers raised a red flag concerning Solyndra’s solvency, a staffer in the White House Office of Management and Budget telegraphed his fears. The Department of Energy (DOE), he wrote, “has one loan to monitor and they seem completely oblivious." Another red flag waver said it was “terrifying" to consider that some of DOE's next projects would make Solyndra look "better, according to the WSJ report. Rumbles were heard among Mr. Obama’s insiders as well. Venture capitalist and Obama donor Steve Westly, communicating with White House Aide Valerie Jarret in May, said “many of us believe the company's cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term." She wrote to Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who touched base with the DOE. An official there relayed the calming message, “We believe the company is okay in the medium term, but will need some help of one kind or another down the road."

The back and forth between Mr. Klain and Ms. Jarret is wonderfully obtuse. Far from launching a serious preview of Solyndra’s viability, Mr. Klain advised Ms. Jarrett that he supported a pending visit of the president to Solyndra even though there were “risk factors” involved. “It looks like it’s OK to me,” Mr. Klain wrote Ms. Jarrett, “but if you feel otherwise, let me know.” Ms. Jarrett did not feel otherwise, and she let Mr. Klain know, “I’m comfortable if you're comfortable," to which Mr. Klain responded, “The reality is that if POTUS (the President of the United States) visited 10 such places over the next 10 months, probably a few will be belly-up by election day 2012—but that to me is the reality of saying that we want to help promote cutting edge, new economy industries."

Obama administration officials may have wrongly supposed that even this crisis need not have gone to waste. Republicans in the coming election will make full use in their campaign advertising of the visit the president and vice president made to Solyndra, as well as clips taken from testimony before the U.S. congress in which failed Solyndra mucky-mucks are shown rather stiffly asserting their right under the constitution not to disclose to congress information that may incriminate them. A house hearing on the issue may provide other juicy tidbits.

Crony Capitalism lies at the root of the Solyndra scandal, curled around the base of the Obama administration like a serpent coiled around a tempting apple tree.

State houses, it should be noted, are also prone to the allure of Crony Capitalists. Solyndra was a green feather in Mr. Obama’s campaign cap, and the company never minded renting taxpayer resources to cover its economic failings. Governors elsewhere have yielded to similar temptations to boost their popularity. The way up is always exhilarating just before the fall.

The Sinkhole State

2011-12-01T10:27:00.004-05:00

In any tousle between business and government, business usually has the last word, and more often than not the word is, “We’re outta here.”

Sikorsky Aircraft, a Connecticut company of long standing, has initiated two rounds of job cuts.

Early in 2010, Sikorsky President Jeff Pino, “under marching orders to raise the division's profits,” according to a news story, boasted to stock analysts, “We've nearly tripled the amount of direct production labor hours from 2006 to 2009. And for the first time in the history of our company, more than half of our hours are outside of Connecticut. We're very proud of that because outside of Connecticut, as I told you last year, by definition is low-cost sourcing."

Having met his goal of a 10 percent profit margin in 2010, Pino presently is aiming for 14 percent by 2014.

Playing its strategy close to its vests, company officials declined to share details of the cost saving cuts with Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, for instance, was not apprised of the details of the earlier September cuts, which included the elimination of 567 positions, 419 of which were in Connecticut. In the first round, 384 hourly members of the Teamsters union were let go.

In the current round, the company hopes to reach its goal of about 525 workers. No details of the cuts were shared with Mrs. DeLauro.

The company may be suffering from post-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal syndrome. Before he hopped to the U.S. Senate from his suit stained position as attorney general, Mr. Blumenthal intervened on behalf of union workers at Pratt&Whitney, a company that like Sikorsky operates under the aegis of United Technology (UTC), successfully if temporarily averting layoffs. Unfortunately for Mr. Blumenthal and workers in the vast beehive of United Technology, cost savings lost in one UTC company is often recovered in another.

Of UTC’s 205,000 global employees, 26,000 work in Connecticut, the majority of them at Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky and Hamilton Sundstrand. Employees at Pratt & Whitney have diminished over the past two decades from 15,000 to 3,700.

Mr. Pino is not alone in thinking that Connecticut is a forbidding place in which to do business. Last February, while speaking at a Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce breakfast, CEO of Aetna Mark Bertolini told the group, “We've done the analysis, and, quite frankly, Connecticut falls very, very low on the list as an environment to locate employees . . . in large part because of the tax structure, the cost of living, which is now approaching, all in, the cost of locating an employee in New York City.”

Rising above critics of his administration, Governor Dannel Malloy was last Thursday, according to a press release, “a featured panelist at the Bloomberg Hedge Funds Summit, where he will speak about his efforts to generate growth in the state’s financial services industry and attract new businesses and jobs to the state”– this barely week after the non-partisan Institute for Truth in Accounting (IFTA) tagged Connecticut as a “sinkhole state,” one of the five worst states in the nation:

“It is one of five states in the worst financial position in the country. According to research conducted by IFTA, while Connecticut has $29.4 billion worth of assets, only $10.1 billion are available to pay $63.4 billion of bills as they come due. IFTA's research also indicates each taxpayer's financial burden is $41,200.”

Mr. Malloy, the architect of the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history, which included a painful income tax hike retroactive to January, has done very little to control spending, Connecticut’s most pressing problem. And even some of the governor’s putative “savings” have been costly. The state will realize virtually no savings from a budget item requiring state workers to accept a provision requiring medical exams. Workers who declined the states’ offer were to pay a penalty fee that appeared in the budget ledger as a savings. But -- big surprise! – fully 90 percent of the state workforce chose to participate in the plan, and the projected saving vanished. The Office of Fiscal Analysis continues to insist, ad infinitum, that it cannot assess savings components of the budget approved last May. The office has been advising the administration and the Democratic controlled legislature since May that lacks the requisite information to confirm that a union concession deal concocted between the Malloy administration and SEBAC officials will provide nearly $2 billion in savings over two years.

One needn’t wonder whether Mr. Malloy will make use of such data in any of his future reports to business leaders. It hardly matters. Real job producers and business entrepreneurs have already read the signs of the times. Expected cuts in defense contracts, the continuing temptation on the part of left of center legislators to increase taxes on entrepreneurial capital, the possible crack-up of the Eurozone, the increase in crippling regulations authored by former senator – now Hollywood mogul -- Chris Dodd and soon to be former U.S. House Rep. Barney Frank, the continuing housing market blow-out midwifed by the same two culprits, the never-ending bailouts of companies not permitted to go bankrupt … all this and more will punch massive holes in state and federal budgets, at which point some Greece-like states, "sinkhole states," will have no choice but to slash spending – because no one will be able to afford tax increases.

We’ve been there, done that. And we’re still broke.

Frank Throws InThe Towel

2011-11-28T21:44:00.005-05:00

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank’s announcement that he will not be seeking reelection follows the signing by Governor Deval Patrick of a law creating new state congressional districts in Massachusetts, according to the Boston Globe.

In past elections, Frank has depended upon votes in his hometown of Newton and also the Democratic strongholds of Fall River and New Bedford. Redistricting deprived him of New Bedford, while the conservative towns added to the reconfigured district west and south of Boston and in Bristol and Norfolk counties would have proved difficult for him.

Additionally, Frank lost status when Republicans regained control of the U.S. House.

Frank is best known for the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that heavily regulates business at a time when the nation is shedding jobs. Co-author of the bill, former U.S Senator Chris Dodd recently packed it in and, having pledged never to become a lobbyist, took a position as a lobbyist for the motion picture industry.

Occupy Everything

2011-11-25T06:40:00.002-05:00

According to a recent news report, the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has moved its operations from Wall Street, chock full of greedy financers, to Main Street, chock full of greedy merchants. This is encouraging and depressing; encouraging because the protestors have recognized a vital connection between Wall Street and Main Street, and depressing because the connection is misconstrued.

The OWS movement has refocused its ire on publically traded retailers, according to a Stop Black Friday website: "The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits.”

Among the companies to be boycotted are:

“Abercrombie & Fitch [ANF 44.88 -0.79 (-1.73%)] - Amazon.com (yes, we have to stay away from Amazon, too!) [AMZN 188.99 -3.35 (-1.74%) - AT&T Wireless [ATT 27.21 0.17 (+0.63%) - Burlington Coat Factory - Dick's Sporting Goods (I was surprised, too!) [DSG-FF 27.745 -0.76 (-2.67%) - Dollar Tree [DLTR 76.61 -0.48 (-0.62%) - The Home Depot [HD 36.52 -0.58 (-1.56%) - Neiman Marcus - OfficeMax [OMX 4.25 -0.24 (-5.35%) - Toys R'Us [JPM 28.38 -1.03 (-3.5%) - Verizon Wireless [VZN 95.50 --- UNCH (0) - Wal-Mart [WMT 56.64 -0.21 (-0.37%)]”

The listing is necessarily partial. A full listing of companies that trade on the stock exchange would include, sadly, Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream makers who sold out more than a decade ago to mega-giant Unilever. The franchise owners were concerned at the time that “the new owner would preserve the unusual aspects of Ben & Jerry's, particularly its commitment to social causes like helping the homeless and conserving the environment. Unilever maintains on its Web site that it is working to preserve clean water resources and is involved with other issues,” according to a story in the New York Times.

Slate Magazine, usually not chummy with greedy Wall Street trade traders, slammed the deal at the time as a sellout:

“It's easy to imagine that, if we could transport this deal back in time 10 years, it would have been frankly labeled a sellout, in the most pejorative sense of the term. Just a few days ago becoming a part of Unilever seemed like a distasteful option, as company co-founder Ben Cohen attempted to cobble together a counter-deal involving ‘socially responsible’ investors.”

In analyzing why “pretty much no one is going to accuse Ben & Jerry's of selling out,” the magazine hit the proverbial nail on the head:

“What has changed in the last 10 years to make such an accusation so unlikely to stick? The critical change is the evolution of the idea of ‘shareholder rights’ as something that now has an almost populist connotation. After all, a huge percentage of the kinds of people who care about "social responsibility" now own stocks. And while ‘social responsibility’ is kind of a murky term, ‘shareholder rights’ not only sounds virtuous, but is very easy to understand: You, the shareholder, have a right to see your shares go up.”

We are all shareholders now – including OWS protestors attending colleges that invest funds in publically traded companies.

Three years ago, Jon Meacham wrote an essay for Newsweek provocatively titled “We Are All Socialists Now.” Mr. Meacham’s liberal credentials are unimpeachable. He is the former editor of Newsweek and co-anchor of PBS's new TV and web newsmagazine Need to Know. His best-selling biography, American Lion, about Andrew Jackson, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. President Jackson is the father of the modern Democratic Party whose fulminations against large banking systems more than match those of the protesting OWSs.

The central point of Mr. Meacham’s piece is that the United States has already passed over the bar:

“The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state... A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French… The architect of this new era of big government? History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion.”

Welcome to the Eurozone. Not only is the OWS movement boycotting with a too broad brush, it is painting the wrong wall.

Father Dick

2011-11-23T08:33:00.006-05:00

Ages ago, long before it was considered proper to call priests by their first names and when honorifics were on every child’s tongue, we called father Richard Bollea “Dick,” for he was a member of the family who, at an early age and listening to the whisper in the whirlwind, heard the call to the priesthood.

By the 1950’s, it had been common for more than century for males in a family to become priests. The families that gave their children to the church usually were large. Just before the Civil War, the Mother Superior of a convent in Boston who had faced down a mob that threaten to burn down the papists convent was a member of a large family. In a second round of anti-Catholic violence, after the nun had told the now whiskey fortified mob to “disburse immediately or the bishop of Boston,” who had the requisite forces at his command, “will push you into the sea,” the drunken mob did burn and sack the convent. They had been incited by Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a powerful Unitarian preacher who had delivered an impassioned sermon to the then sober protestants of Boston, ever aflame with ineradicable anti-Catholic prejudices, the oldest in the country, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger.

This fierce and poisonous prejudice, locked into the DNA of the nation -- in the revolutionary period, the hoi polloi of Boston regularly celebrated “pope’s day,” during which an effigy of the pope was paraded through the streets and pelted by celebrants -- had long since abated by the time Dick was shipped off to Paris, where he studied.

He was admitted to the priesthood in 1962 and, when we next saw him, bore a new honorific before his last name, Father Bollea, a title that seemed a bit cumbersome to members of his family and his closest friends. My brother Jim had married Dick’s sister, and so his friends and his now extended family called him “Father Dick,” reserving honorifics – mister, miss, missus and, in the case of nuns, sister – for everyone else at a time when even town drunks were crowned by children with their proper proletarian titles.

Father Dick’s last priestly assignment was as chaplin in Waterbury Hospital and Coordinator of the Hospital Apostolate for the Archdiocese of Hartford, where he consoled the sick and dying for many years. God, who does work in mysterious ways, had deposited my wife and me in Malta on the day Father Dick died. Owing to the fierce storm that ravaged Connecticut, in combination with my own stupidity – I had left behind my cell phone battery charger – we learned of his death only on our return a few days later. On the day Father Dick’s painful death, my wife and I had entered Saint John’s splendidly appointed 17th century baroque style co-cathedral in Valetta, Malta, a church richly adorned by the Knights of Saint John of Malta, first hospitalists and later fierce warriors. The church was commissioned in 1572 by Grand Master Jean de la Cassière as the conventual church of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John.

From the Middle Ages to the present day, Malta had been recognized as Europe’s hospital. In the dark days of the Second World War, it’s world renowned hospital received and cared for allied troops crushed in the fierce gears of the bloodiest of centuries. And so it seemed appropriate, entering this cathedral, to offer a prayer and light a candle to Father Dick who, while far less favorably situated than the wealthy knights, was never-the-less engaged in the same good works.

The beauty of the cathedral was overpowering. Everywhere were gilded walls, magnificent paintings and statues of one or another Knight of Malta. The tombs in the floor where many of the knights were buried were decorated with wondrous hand crafted marble tiles that put before the viewer each knight’s narrative.

But all the splendor of the cathedral was dwarfed, even in the days of the Knights of Malta, by the small and modest Byzantine icon of the Blessed Virgin, The Philermos Madonna, said to have been written by St. Luke and housed in Malta from 1530 to 1798. It was in memory of this less resplendent holy icon that we lit a candle in the co-cathedral of the hospitaliers and said a prayer that She who receives the petitions of the poor banished children of Eve might show tenderness to a man and priest who had dedicated the last years of his life to the poor and suffering.

The Perfectly Named Republican Candidate (Almost)

2011-11-15T16:11:00.002-05:00

Ω

Steve Obstinate is running in the 4th Congressional District.

OK, I jest.

Malloy’s Business Model

2011-10-29T16:42:00.002-04:00

The road taken by Governor Dannel Malloy in providing specific businesses with disappearing tax breaks and other temporary business incentives is not the road less taken. Most recently, President Barack Obama provided Solyndra with millions in tax dollars because Mr. Obama wished to encourage the production of green energy. The problem was that the product made by Solyndra was underpriced – the sale price of Solyndra’s solar panels was less than the cost of production -- and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that company bigwigs, after successfully pressing the administration hard multiple times for tax subsidies, took the money and ran.

The Solyndra drama is still unfolding. Called to testify before a congressional committee, the top dogs at the bankrupt company took the fifth, and not because they feared they might in their testimony betray their company’s trade secrets. The captains of this industry were trying to avoid jail time.

The practice of enticing a company to produce a product by showering it with temporary tax reductions does not always lead ineluctably to jail house doors. Not all executives who accept tax dollars from presidents and governors are crooks and flimflam artists. Some are businessmen loathed to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Targeted tax credits, low interest loans and the like cannot be a magnet for all companies. If Mr. Malloy were to give a tax credit to every company in Connecticut, as well as companies considering moving into the state, his tax credits would be tax reductions; and tax reductions, most especially permanent tax reductions, would both attract businesses to the state and serve as a retaining wall for those businesses in Connecticut seeking a kinder and gentler entrepreneurial environment elsewhere.

Permanent tax reductions, however, are the bane of heroic politicians. Tax reductions produce red ink in the short run, the only run most politicians on the make are interested in. And, worst of all, the way to black, after a politician has cut taxes, requires painful spending cuts. Once cut, a tax is difficult to resurrect. Tax credits and other devises purporting to encourage business growth are more easily revoked. When the state of Connecticut decided during the administration of former Governor Lowell Weicker to institute an income tax two decades ago, it set its foot irrevocably on a spending path it has trodden ever since. Off in the hinterland, other companies, observing the drift of the state over many years, maintained a discreet distance. Within the state, companies that could move to greener pastures elsewhere did so, and prosperity has been frozen to the spot for twenty years.

Like Mr. Weicker, Mr. Malloy’s first act on becoming governor was to institute the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history, more wounding than Mr. Weicker’s income tax because Mr. Malloy’s tax increases were added to Mr. Weicker’s, at the time the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history. Mr. Malloy’s multiple tax increases considerably broadened the tax base.

Signing his jobs program recently in the company of Republicans leaders who previously had been ejected from the room while Mr. Malloy negotiated with unions, the governor boasted, "How often to you see this happening in Washington? Putting people back to work and making Connecticut more business-friendly aren't goals owned by any one party and they aren't owned by any one branch of government."

Goals are all fine and good, but there are some Republicans who continue to insist that Mr. Malloy’s policies will not move Connecticut toward a desirable and effective goal line. Much of the cost savings Mr. Malloy threatened to apply to unions in his Plan B budget never made it out of the gate. Some applied cost reductions were rescinded after union members were bludgeoned by the leaders of SEBAC to accept a slightly revised Plan A, and the cost savings option most welcomed by Republican leaders in Mr. Malloy’s jobs creation package is the formation of a study group to examine ways in which the state may save money – another one of those.

Mr. Malloy’s tax increases are real, permanent and deep, while much of his cost savings measures are theoretical, temporary and highly attenuated.

A business writer for a state-wide paper who cannot be accused of conservative rhetorical thuggery described Mr. Malloy’s jobs creation program this way: “On Wednesday night the state legislature committed a walloping $626 million on basically the kitchen sink of jobs programs. If it might work, it's in there: farm restoration, outright corporate greenmail, loans for dry cleaners, cash for manufacturers to train workers, a massive boost for tech investment, bribes for companies to hire unemployed people, airport development zones, expanded film tax credits and much, much more.”

The chief problem with top down, government inspired stimulus programs aimed at creating jobs for businesses is “that we can't create demand for their goods and services. And that, more than money, more than trained workers, more than slashing red tape, is what they need.”

Got that right.

The Occupy Everything Front: Tea Party vs. OWS

2011-10-29T13:11:00.002-04:00

From the Daily Cardinal, a University of Wisconsin paper:

“A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters.

“In addition, officials agreed further occupation should not be allowed to continue without restrooms on site to avoid further public health violations.

"’You can't be affecting the safety and health of other people around you,’ Madison Fire Prevention Officer Jerry McMullen said. ‘With the public health violations and the complaints I've heard, I don't believe it meets the spirit of the ordinance to a street use permit.’"

In Manchester, New Hampshire, the Union Leader reports:

“A city woman is accused of pimping a 16-year-old girl she met in Victory Park during the Occupy NH demonstrations.”

Hardy protestors in Providence Rhode Island preparing to confront an early winter storm look to George Washington for inspiration, the Associated Press reports:

"’Everyone's been calling it our Valley Forge moment,’ said Michael McCarthy, a former Navy medic in Providence. ‘Everybody thought that George Washington couldn't possibly survive in the Northeast.’"

However, winters are neither kinder nor gentler than most police:

“But the dangers of staying outdoors in some of the country's harsher climes are already becoming apparent: In Denver, two protesters were hospitalized with hypothermia this week during a storm that brought several inches of snow.”

And in New York, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, the Daily News reports:

“Fights are erupting among Occupy Wall Street protesters, so much so that one corner of Zuccotti Park has emerged where protesters say they won't go for fear of their safety.”

A millionaire siting had been reported by the San Francisco Chronicle at the Occupy Oakland site:

“As Mayor Jean Quan finished fielding reporters’ questions Friday afternoon at City Hall about the clash between police and protesters earlier this week, she was suddenly drowned out by cheering coming from Frank Ogawa Plaza for Occupy Oakland’s newest celebrity guest: documentarian and political activist Michael Moore.”

While anecdotal comparisons have been made between the Tea Party movement and the anti-capitalist OWS, no reports on the Tea party movement have featured frequent fights, pimping opportunities, masturbation or millionaire anti-capitalist Palm D’Or recipient documentarians. Tea Party folk do not erect tents or stroke erections in public. It is always well to note points of difference when one makes comparisons.

The Occupy Everything Front: Tea Party vs. OWS

2011-10-29T13:10:00.002-04:00

From the Daily Cardinal, a University of Wisconsin paper:

“A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters.

“In addition, officials agreed further occupation should not be allowed to continue without restrooms on site to avoid further public health violations.

"’You can't be affecting the safety and health of other people around you,’ Madison Fire Prevention Officer Jerry McMullen said. ‘With the public health violations and the complaints I've heard, I don't believe it meets the spirit of the ordinance to a street use permit.’"

In Manchester, New Hampshire, the Union Leader reports:

“A city woman is accused of pimping a 16-year-old girl she met in Victory Park during the Occupy NH demonstrations.”

Hardy protestors in Providence Rhode Island preparing to confront an early winter storm look to George Washington for inspiration, the Associated Press reports:

"’Everyone's been calling it our Valley Forge moment,’ said Michael McCarthy, a former Navy medic in Providence. ‘Everybody thought that George Washington couldn't possibly survive in the Northeast.’"

However, winters are neither kinder nor gentler than most police:

“But the dangers of staying outdoors in some of the country's harsher climes are already becoming apparent: In Denver, two protesters were hospitalized with hypothermia this week during a storm that brought several inches of snow.”

And in New York, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, the Daily News reports:

“Fights are erupting among Occupy Wall Street protesters, so much so that one corner of Zuccotti Park has emerged where protesters say they won't go for fear of their safety.”

A millionaire siting had been reported by the San Francisco Chronicle at the Occupy Oakland site:

“As Mayor Jean Quan finished fielding reporters’ questions Friday afternoon at City Hall about the clash between police and protesters earlier this week, she was suddenly drowned out by cheering coming from Frank Ogawa Plaza for Occupy Oakland’s newest celebrity guest: documentarian and political activist Michael Moore.”

Another Pig, Another Poke

2011-10-26T13:15:00.004-04:00

Duane Billington, a retired engineering technician and civic activist from Naples, “fought for 18 months against Jackson Laboratory's plan to expand in Florida,” according to a story in the Hartford Courant.”

Ultimately Mr. Billington was successful. Jackson Laboratory pulled up their negotiating stakes in Florida.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief of staff, Roy Occhiogrosso, read about the failed attempt to pitch the deal to Florida in a newspaper, evidentially shared the information with his boss, and a contingent from Connecticut was sent to Bar Harbor Maine to negotiate a deal with Jackson Laboratory administrators. The Courant story does not mention the names of members of the Connecticut contingent sent to negotiate with Jackson. The deal apparently was consummated and a letter of intent was signed between the parties.

When two members of the General Assembly, Senator Len Suzio and Senate Republican leader Leonard Fasano, asked to see the memorandum of understanding between the state and Jackson, they were sternly rebuffed. Malloy officials asserted the documents contained trade secrets that could not be disclosed to members of the General Assembly who would be asked to provide funding for the deal. The same claim was made in Florida, an overreach that some say soured the state on the deal.

Suzio has scoffed at the transparent dodge.

“I've got a business guy here who fell off his chair laughing,'' Suzio said of a colleague's reaction about trade secrets. “Why would there be any confidential information in a letter of intent? We're not asking for the disclosure of secret formulas. It's laughable.''

Many of Suzio’s questions were bridges too far; Mr. Malloy’s aggressive administration very early acquired the habit of pushing things through with minor participation on the part of the people’s representatives. Republicans in the General Assembly were simply pushed out of the way during budget negotiations.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Malloy administration has to some extent been trying to sell the Democratic dominated General Assembly a pig in a poke. The Malloy-Jackson deal, according to the Courant story, “is scheduled to come to a vote Wednesday in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Malloy is calling for the state to borrow $291 million to construct a new building on 17 acres of state-owned land at the University of Connecticut Health Center campus in Farmington and provide $99 million in research money for Jackson. The nonprofit institute is pledging to create 300 jobs within 10 years and 600 jobs within 20 years, making it slightly larger than the Florida plan in jobs and state subsidies.”

Mr. Billington certainly is not shy of reporters.

"They couldn't find a home here in Collier County or Sarasota because they don't have a product to deliver,'' Mr. Billington told a reporter. “Their business is to produce genetically altered mice for other scientists to study and use in experiments. This thing they're going into is a totally new deal for them. They have no expertise. It's an exercise in venture capitalism. It could work, and it might not.''

Jackson Laboratory has had success in genetically altering mice sold to prospective buyers in other research facilities. The Connecticut operation would break new and untested ground for Jackson, which now is seeking to move into an entirely different field, that of genomic medicine, the study of genes and genetic interactions that, according to a 26-page brochure that was distributed to Connecticut legislators, are "essential to creating new medicines and treatments for some of humankind's worst diseases and conditions.''

Mr. Billington told the Courant reporter, “We're glad to be rid of them. I feel bad for the state of Connecticut if you all have politicians who are swallowing the Jackson line hook, line and sinker.”

This is the second time the Malloy administration has asked the Democratic dominated General Assembly to swallow an unpalatable deal. Asked to vote on a budget the details of which had not been finalized in negotiations between Malloy administration officials and SEBAC, a union coalition authorized to negotiate contracts, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly persuaded their caucus to vote in favor of an unfinished budget. The leaders of the Democratic caucus, President of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, apparently like the taste of hooks and lines and sinkers.

Mr. Donovan, SEBAC’s best friend in the legislature, is running for the U .S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5th District.

Since the Malloy administration enjoys an insuperable majority in the General Assembly, it does not need Republican votes to pass measures the details of which have not been adequately ventilated in public. Calls on the part of Republicans to put off the vote Wednesday until the pig in the poke – minus the trade secrets, which always may be redacted in publically disclosed documents – has been put on public view and debated fully by the General Assembly will no doubt be ignored by the Malloy administration. And the deal will go down on Wednesday, possibly with the concurrence of some Republicans in the General Assembly who have acquired a taste for hooks, lines and sinkers.

All the “buts” will not arrive until much later.

Mike Hyde, Jackson’s Vice President and fund raiser, no longer concerns himself with Mr. Billington's criticisms. "I'm delighted to be in Connecticut,” he has said. “It's a great state. I really don't have any hard feelings about what happened in Florida. This is here. This is now.”

Florida rejected Jackson’s best offer because the state is flat on its back and broke, unlike Connecticut. For now, at least, the state is flush in quickly disappearing funds owing mostly to the largest tax increase in its history imposed upon it by its “shared sacrifice” governor. This is here. This is now.

And the future? Let the future eat cake.

Connecticut’s Social Gospel

2011-10-24T10:25:00.006-04:00

What might be called Connecticut’s social gospel is prospering under the hand of progressive Governor Dannel Malloy. Should anyone doubt that Mr. Malloy is a born again progressive, he has only to pay heed to remarks the governor made at a progressive panel discussion in Washington D.C., the epicenter of modern Democratic progressivism.

When president CEO of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, asked Mr. Malloy to display his progressive credentials, the governor unscrolled a partial list that included:

• The passage of Connecticut’s new earned income tax credit program

• The decriminalization of marijuana use in small portions, “the third most robust of its kind in the country,” according to CTNewsJunkie

• The passage of a law providing in-state public college tuition rates to undocumented Connecticut students

• A new law outlawing discrimination against transgendered individuals

• The implementation within the Department of Correction of a new risk reduction credit program that some think will reduce prisoner recidivism

• An executive order that provides a path for state child care workers and personal care attendants to unionize

• And, not mentioned by Mr. Malloy at the progressive conference, a pledge to sign a bill abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty

A bill abolishing the death penalty was presented during the administration of Mr. Malloy’s predecessor, Jodi Rell, who vetoed the bill. That attempt arrived on the heels of Michael Ross’ murder spree. The bill Mr. Malloy has pledged to sign will be presented following a particularly horrific crime in Cheshire.

Mr. Malloy’s crowning achievement was the passage of Connecticut’s paid sick day law.

“This year,” CTNewsJunkie reported, “Connecticut became the first state in the nation to pass a law mandating some employers provide paid time off for workers when they are ill.”

A pleased Mr. Malloy told the gathering of progressives, “So it was, I think, a pretty progressive agenda,” the passage of which was made easier by a General Assembly dominated by like-minded progressive Democrats.

The progressive social gospel in Connecticut is eclectic and politically pragmatic, its doxology wedded to no firm principles. This makes the gospel infinitely elastic. The same governor who on Monday raises taxes both on businesses and individuals can on Tuesday appear before a union group and assure them that at heart he is Samuel Gompers, which is reasonable enough. But then to reappear on Wednesday before yet another business group to sooth and stroke them with his plan to create jobs is a bit of a stretch for most chamber of commerce types who may have graduated from Capitalist University. The disjunctions do not seem to trouble Mr. Malloy, and indeed, once economic prosperity is coupled with crony capitalism the disjunctions disappear altogether. If job production is dependent on governors who pick and choose economic winners and losers, capitalists are reduced to beggars at the throne, and those who cozy up to power win the spoils. The invisible hand of commerce rewards entrepreneurs according to merit, which is determined by consumers who vote for products with their dollars. The visible hand of crony capitalism rewards political benefactors, the prizes being given out by politicians most of whom have never met a payroll or employed a worker who was not on the public dole.

When political parties did this sort of thing during the real progressive era, progressives and muckrakers in the media made it a point to inveigh against both the crony capitalists and governors and presidents who fed them from the public trough. The whole point of progressivism Teddy Roosevelt style was to bust up monopolies created by an alliance between powerful businessmen and politicians. Even Mr. Roosevelt, the scourge of monopolists, agreed to waive the Sherman Antitrust Act during the panic of 1907 so that U.S. Steel, owned by acquisition maestro J. Pierpont Morgan, could acquire Tennessee Coal & Iron (TC&I) to avert a Wall Street collapse of companies too big to fail.

That was then. Modern day Pierpont Morgans are made in Washington – and in the states by progressive governors who lavish upon them tax money in amounts that would bring a blush to the cheek of Mr. Morgan.

Jackson Laboratory, The Done Deal

2011-10-23T11:15:00.002-04:00

Jackson Laboratory has found some important friends in high places in Connecticut. Among them are Governor Dannel Malloy and, almost certainly, the Democratic caucus in the General Assembly, which has tended thus far to march to the music of Mr. Malloy’s drum on all issues of importance. Here and there, critics of the deal privately arranged between the governor and Jackson have surfaced.

“Republicans,” one commentator wrote, “are right to question the deal and get as much information as possible. But by the experts’ accounts, this is a good risk for Connecticut. And as in so many other ways, Connecticut should not be like Florida.”

Jackson was considering a move to Florida, but the deal in that state was never consummated. It has become part of the narrative of Connecticut Democrats supporting the deal that the governor of Florida failed to engage in the negotiations and so the state lost out on a promising deal that a wide awake Connecticut governor thereafter snatched from Florida’s jaws.

Connecticut 1, Florida 0.

Mr. Malloy, an activist governor, has vowed to remake Connecticut. Previous governors have been content in improving the general business climate in the state so that all businesses large and small, relying upon a set of governmental laws and regulations that did not favor one business over another, could plot their futures and compete together on what former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal use to call “a level playing field.” In bygone days of yore, if a regulation or a law did not apply equally to the local barber shop and a large employer such as Pratt & Whitney, that law or regulation would die in utero, because in the glory days of the republic laws and regulations were general and equitable. In the modern period, brimful with lobbyists and crony capitalists, governors see fit to determine the economic future of states by remaking business environments -- while in the process rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies.

Oh, happy day.

The “deal” to which the commentator above referred is, of course, the “private arrangement” worked out between Mr. Malloy and Jackson Laboratory to move the Jackson’s research operations to the UConn Health Center (UCHC) in Farmington.

Prior to the deal, Mr. Malloy had awarded the health center nearly a billion dollars, presumably to improve its failing operations. The installation of Jackson at the reconfigured UCHC will cost Connecticut taxpayers an additional $291 million -- initially. UCHC, a failing enterprise before Mr. Malloy and the Democratic dominated General Assembly decided to douse it with money, has been a tax sponge for decades. Jackson Laboratories is a successful non-profit business, which means that, unlike other overtaxed businesses in Connecticut, the research laboratory will not be returning tax dollars to the state. As a general rule, non-profits are tax revenue losing operations because, among other reasons, they do not produce a taxable product. The tax revenue value of Jackson rests in its magnetic quality: It is supposed by eternally optimistic Democrats that a research complex involving Jackson and Connecticut’s educational institutions will in time attract to the state tax revenue producing businesses.

Unlike Jackson, Pfizer of New London, a large pharmaceutical company that also engages in research, is a tax revenue producer. Interestingly, Pfizer was given tax credits and loans by the state when it opened operations, but recently the company had moved jobs out of state after the deal between the company and the state had been fulfilled and tax reductions had disappeared.

As a former communications director for state Democrats, the commentator above may, at least emotionally and ideological, still have a dog in the fight, but he generously acknowledges that “Republicans are right to question the deal and get as much information as possible.”

And there is the rub.

Some Republicans, much to the annoyance of Mr. Malloy and Roy Occhiogrosso, the governor’s chief cook and bottle washer, are asking for information that has not been forthcoming. They want to see the agreement arranged between Mr. Malloy and Jackson before they vote to commit tax money to what may or may not be a promising project. Their request has sent the deal makers into a crouch position that revolves around trade secrets. The General Assembly, which will be asked to pony-up the tax money that will keep the UCHC afloat for the near future, appears to have swallowed this lame excuse; even top military secrets that the U.S. government is loath to share with Wikileaks are provided on demand to the relevant overview committees in the U.S. Congress, possibly because national congressmen still take seriously their constitutional obligation to represent the will of the people to both presidents and lobby infested businesses. On such occasions, damaging information, made available to the committees, is redacted before the committee reports to congress and the people.

In a recent hearing that will determine the fate of millions of tax dollars, state legislators were told they had less than two hours to question representatives from Jackson. The people’s representatives were limited to one question apiece, and when Senator Leonard Fasano, the second-ranking Senate Republican, said he wanted to see the written agreement signed between the governor and Jackson, he was told to go fish.

"Everybody understands the term 'trade secrets' - meaning they are pieces of information that you don't want your competitors to know about,” said gubernatorial mouthpiece Occhiogrosso. “The law says we can't release the document. What he asked for, he can't get by law.''

At least not before the shameless, representation averse, rubberstamping General Assembly votes in favor of the funding.

The Resistance, A Self Interview

2011-10-20T09:16:00.003-04:00

Q: Whither the Connecticut Republican Party?

A: It’s good question. I put up a blog recently that was a review of a Chris Shays interview with Dennis House on “Face the State.”

Mr. House asked Mr. Shays whether he thought Connecticut had drifted so far to the left as to make it impossible for Republicans to win a seat in the U.S. Congress. Mr. Shays is running as a Republican for Senator Joe Lieberman’s seat. Mr. Shays said “Absolutely,” he thought the state had moved very far to the left.

The blog produced a response from Jon Kantrowitz, a liberal commentator who is himself an articulate unabashed progressive. “By the way,” Mr. Kantrowitz wrote, “it's true - the state has gone too far to the left to elect a Republican - and thank goodness for that!”

There are some few Republicans about who are not as thankful as Mr. Kantrowitz, though it is difficult to disagree with the major premise of his proposition -- namely that the state has moved very far to the left. The entire U.S. congressional delegation is Democratic. The state’s safer districts are occupied by unapologetic progressives like Mr. Kantrowitz, now moving up within the national Democratic caucus food chain. U.S. Reps Rosa DeLauro and John Larson are both pull-no-punches progressives. In what used to be called swing districts, congressional Democrats are a bit more cautious. In the General Assembly, state Democrats had until just recently a veto proof margin in both houses. And during the last election cycle, the Democrats captured the gubernatorial office, previously held by moderate Republicans and one ex-maverick Republican, former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax. In addition, all the state’s constitutional officers are Democratic. So, I think it is safe to agree, along with Mr. Kantrowitz, that Democrats pretty much own the whole political kit and caboodle, while disagreeing with him sharply that we ought to thank God for this turn of events. While God may not be a Republican, one likes to believe He is no political plutocrat.

Q: Where does that leave Republicans?

A: In a resistance posture. The point of a party surely is to offer resistance to the reigning power. History has not dealt kindly with parties that have cooperated with the prevailing regime. The one party state, like a rolling stone, gathers no moss, but the single party state is an invitation to corruption; which is why, come to think of it, God created the two party system.

Q: Why haven’t Republicans been able to offer effective resistance to what you have characterized repeatedly in your Connecticut Commentary as Connecticut’s one party state?

A: Because Republicans have too often cooperated with the prevailing regime. You cannot cooperate without being coopted. It is important to understand that Mr. Kantrowitz is partly right. The Republican resistance has been washed away in Connecticut. Here and there, one finds brave blades of grass shooting through the concrete. During the last elections, two Republican conservatives – state senators Len Suzio and Joe Markley -- won office, both of whom may be considered part of a resistance vanguard. When Bill Buckley, who used to live in Stamford, started National Review, he proclaimed that the mission of the magazine would be to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” Rolling stones don’t like that sort of thing.

I’ll give an example. Len Suzio, a conservative Republican who won his seat in a special election, has lately come out against deal made between Mr. Malloy and Jackson Laboratory. The Laboratory is to be attached to the UConn Health Center (UCHC), a business black hole that has absorbed millions of dollars in tax bailouts. Shortly after his budget passed muster with SEBAC, Mr. Malloy handsomely rewarded UCHC by giving it about a billion dollars.

The laboratory, apparently a successful non-profit enterprise that will itself generate no tax revenue, will absorb tax money from both federal and state grants. Mr. Suzio’s objection to the deal was forceful: “This is a lose-lose situation for Connecticut taxpayers. All the risk money is coming from the state of Connecticut. ... We don't get a nickel of interest in the technology that they develop. That is stupid."

Senior advisor and chief spokesman for the governor Roy Occhiogrosso responded that the project was a solid investment in personalized medicine and bioscience. This was a smart rather than a dumb risk: “There's a difference between taking a smart risk and a dumb risk. This is a smart risk. Taking a risk that 10 football games a year will turn the economy around is not that smart. The next thing you know, Senator Suzio will go on the radio to try and convince the people of Connecticut of his view on the flatness of the world. No matter how he tries to spin it, this is the best thing to happen to Connecticut in a long, long time.''

Mr. Suzio did not mention the “B” word on this occasion: Connecticut is broke, broke, broke. But the important political point is this: Even if Mr. Suzio is right, it will not matter – because Mr. Malloy has the votes in the General Assembly to do whatever he likes. If Mr. Malloy wanted to build a Ziggerat in Farmington – which, by the way, would produce a momentary spurt of jobs – he could do it, because the Republican resistance has no battalions. Napoleon’s quip to a pope who offered him a mild resistance was to ask: How many battalions has the pope? Answer: Not enough to resist the prevailing power of the day.

And THAT is the problem for Connecticut.

Mr. Malloy passed his budget through the General Assembly without being put to the inconvenience of discussing the matter with leading Republicans who, unlike union representatives, were wholly shut out of the process. The governor’s budget figures were such as to produce what I have called in the blog and in columns an artificial surplus of about a billion dollars. Real surpluses are produced when taxes are not increased but the state never-the-less realizes an increase in revenue owing mostly to increased business activity. Mr. Malloy’s artificial surplus is now flowing into a series of crony capitalist projects. Mr. Suzio is right about the UConn Health Center: It’s a budget busting black hole the state – which is broke, broke, broke -- can little afford to support. Attaching a non-profit, non-tax generating research center to the UCHC does not make the combination more profitable. This may be the first time in Connecticut’s history that a serviceable neck has been draped around an albatross.

Q: So, What’s wrong with crony capitalism?

A: Glad you asked. Anyone who is a proponent of the free market must be an anti-monopolist. I am here using the word “monopoly” to indicate existing monopolies, many of them stamped “Made in Washington D.C.” – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac come to mind -- as well as political systems that tend towards monopoly. This is why the free marketer must be an anti-monopolist: Monopolies, which are cornered markets, frustrate competition, and competition is the economic virtue par excellence of a truly liberal society.

In the modern period, monopolies have been facilitated by governments. In a truly free market that fosters competition, cornered markets are less possible. It is when companies are given an opportunity to use government as a tool to gain an advantage over their natural competitors that monopolies flourish.

The process that produces state sponsored monopolies is called “crony capitalism.” The crony capitalist and his facilitators tilt the playing field in favor of large monopolistic enterprises by using presidents, governors and legislators to gain an advantage denied them in a free and fair competition.

This unfair advantage has its analogue in the sports arena. Americans, who like to see the best man or team rise to the top in a fair competition, would react disapprovingly, I like to think, to any “fixed” competition in which the presumed impartial judgment of a referee has been purchased by one side or another; and yet this is precisely what happens when a single political party has captured control of a congress or an executive department or a city or a state or a town.

There are signs all about us that singe party states and governments are infested with corruption. Alert politicians and – as I like to think -- wide awake journalist will be able to read the signs of the times. There is no reason to suppose that reporters, editors and commentators in the legacy media are comfortable with monopolies of any kind, political or economic.

There is an old biblical saying: By their fruits shall ye know them. We are familiar with the bitter fruits of crony capitalism. What applies to business monopolies applies as well to political monopolies.

The government of China, for example, is as much a political monopoly as – just to reach for an example – the government of, say, Bridgeport Connecticut. Of course, the consequences of corruption in China are more severe because there are in that country no mediating democratic institutions, such as a critical press, to soften the iron fist of an unquestioned authoritative regime. The arc of monopolistic political regimes bends towards fascism; they corrupt absolutely because they needn’t worry that their political customers will be able effectively to demand a better service or a better product. Within the one party state, any hope of political competition has been effectively abolished. Political monopolies are nursery beds of corruption, because they permit governments to rent to favored groups instruments of government power that ought to be used for the benefit of all.

The legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. And it may seem to some who are paying attention that the remarks made several times by Governor Dannel Malloy to unions to the effect that he will never forsake them – “Oh, my darling” -- indicate that unions need not tailor their interests to the general interest, so long as both the governor and the General Assembly have their back. Indeed, it seems that unions were not made for the state; the state, rather, was made for unions. The very last party to sign off on Connecticut’s budget was not the legislature, the preeminent organ of government in democracies and republics, but SEBAC, a coalition of state unions that one commentator has called Connecticut’s fourth branch of government.

So then, we have in Connecticut a Democratic governor, a General Assembly dominated by Democrats – one of whom, Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, himself unusually friendly to union interests, is running for the U.S. House in the 5th District – a media blithely undisturbed by the prospect of a one party state, and a U.S. congressional delegation composed entirely of Democrats.

That is a recipe for, among other things, crony capitalism and its attendant corruptions.

In connection with politicians – the crony capitalist makers – the age old question arises: Qui Bono? Or to put it in the modern idiom: What’s in it for them?

Lots. They are given an edge on their competitors, usually smaller fry, and they have arranged with the politicians to share sacrifices: Taxpayers will share in the paying of their debts when their companies fail; and they will take the lion’s share of profits. Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that the public has soured on businesses too big to fail and those politicians who have contributed their mites to the creation of monopolistic enterprises?

I’ve been amused by the notion that Republicans have a lock on millionaires. Within the Democratic Party, we are invited to think, there are no millionaires: no Dick Blumenthals or Rosa DeLauros, both of whom are millionaire Democrats coasting along in seemingly impregnable Democratic districts.

According to the myth peddled by Democrats, businesses in the United States prop up Republicans with generous campaign contributions – but rarely Democrats. Nothing could be further from the truth. The late Senator Ted Kennedy could depend on regular infusions of campaign cash from captains of industries in the United States: Ditto former Senator Chris Dodd, showered for years by financial groups that he was supposed to be regulating as chairman of the banking committee. Mr. Dodd has now cashed in on his many years of experience in the U.S. Senate by becoming a lobbyist for Tinsletown. Mr. Dodd’s Hollywood adventure began only a few weeks after he had shaken the dust of the U.S. Congress from his feet, about a month after he had told his supporters on the left that he would never, ever become a lobbyist.

Money continues to be the Mother’s Milk of politics, and mouths are everywhere. So long as crony capitalists feel that they can be assisted in cornering markets by politicians, they will continue to buy politicians. In the last Republican-Democratic campaign in the 1st District, the incumbent Democrat, John Larson raised $2.7 million, much of it from financial interests; his Republican competitor, Ann Brickley, managed to get along with a slender $250,000.

If one may be so bold as to measure the wealth of a politician by the contributions he receives, we should conclude that Mr. Larson was the millionaire, while poor Mrs. Brickley was in financial campaign rags. Mr. Larson was in this race – and indeed, in all his races – the Mr. Bumble of the Democratic workhouse, while Mrs. Brickley was Oliver Twist, begging for more workhouse gruel. It’s wonderful – to me anyway – how desperately people who have been writing about politics in the state most of their adult lives cling to these myths, the work, for the most part, of ideological ad-men and Orwellian spin-masters.

In late September, as FBI agents were carting boxes of information from Solyndra -- the environmentally friendly, technologically advanced, politically correct, and now bankrupt company into which the Obama administration had poured its heart, soul and taxpayer money – administration officials, including the president, were avoiding comment. We may wonder why. The media, so far, has focused its attention on the vast sum of money “invested” in the now bankrupted solar panel producer. That focus is not misplaced. But we ought not to forget several other important points.

The e-mails now pouring out of the scandal suggest that the whole business was an improperly vetted photo opportunity for the president and vice president. Any kid selling lemonade from a lemonade stand might have told any one of the financiers in the Obama administration now busing themselves with ending a seemingly intractable recession that when a product’s cost of production exceeds the amount of money one expects to receive through sales, the company is incurring a risk of bankruptcy. In an S-1 filing a year ago, Solyndra reported its average sales price was over $3.20 a watt, about 65% more than leading crystalline-silicon PV manufacturers. Its cost of manufacturing was an astounding $6 a watt. These figures are irreconcilable.

Solyndra was not one of those companies in the United States deemed too big to fail, and so it failed – which means, a bankruptcy judge will be assessing the company’s assets and selling them off, parceling out a portion of redeemed value to the company’s investors. In Solyndra’s case, about a half billion dollars of tax money was frontloaded into the collapse. The Solyndra loan was part of a $38.6 billion program to aid green energy that the Washington Post says has created exactly 3,545 jobs, about $10,888,575 in loans per job – all vanished. Perhaps, with the FBI on the case, someone will go to jail. In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the tax money was both frontloaded and backloaded; the company is now bigger than ever, and no one went to jail.

The government financing of select companies it chooses as prospective winners in a competitive market place is wrong for multiple reasons. Government intervention in decisions generally made by consumers distorts demand signals and creates moral hazards for investors. Government is notoriously inept at choosing winners; increases in the price of stamps have not prevented the U.S. Post Office from painful consolidations. But the most objectionable feature of Crony capitalism is this: It funnels profits to private investors and shifts debts to taxpayers.

Somehow, something in my bones tells me that millionaire Democrats in safe districts like Mr. Larson, or private business- punishing former attorneys general like Senator Dick Blumenthal or tax the millionaire proponents, who continually deny that our country and state are beset with a spending rather than a revenue problem, do not pass their days worrying about such things. But the people of Connecticut should – because we are living in a time in which our problems will kick in our front doors if we ignore them. They are coming to sleep with us in our beds; they will be sitting in a chair next to us at our work sites. They will be sitting in the passenger seats of our cars.

We no longer have the comfort of ignoring them.

The chief difference between Republicans and Democrats in the coming campaign will be this: Republicans are interested in increasing prosperity through a series of painful but necessary reforms. They want small, efficient and responsive federal, state and municipal governments and an expanding economy. Democrats want to expand the range of influence the government has over our lives. One party would shrink the private sphere and expand the public sphere; the other would do the opposite. We must never forget that in democracies and republics the citizenry gets the kind of government it votes for. Having crossed the bar to the 21st century, we should wonder and worry whether the challenge thrown down by Ben Franklin at the founding of the republic will be properly answered. When asked by a woman what kind of government the founders at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had given to the country, Franklin said, “A republic madam – if you can keep it.”

We are under a moral obligation to those who came before us and to those who will succeed us – to keep it.

Chris Shays’ Face The State Appearance With Dennis House: Keeping It Real

2011-10-18T15:16:00.001-04:00

In the course of his interview with former State Rep. Chris Shays, host of Face the State Dennis House pressed Mr. Shays on a series of issues. A transcript of portions of the interview follows below, accompanied by some Connecticut Commentary notes.

Dennis House (DH): So, you’re planning on a primary, regardless of the convention in May, right?

Chris Shays (CS): There will be a primary. If I win the convention, I assume others will want to primary; and if I don’t win the convention, I’m in a primary.

This is a pretty straightforward declaration of Shays’ intentions. It is not altogether certain that Linda McMahon would primary should Mr. Shays be declared the Republican convention nominee. In her last run for the U.S. Senate, Mrs. McMahon snatched the convention nomination from former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, who went on to wage an on-again off again campaign against her.

DH: If you lose in a primary, would you run as an independent?

CS: Well, I don’t think about losing, but I’m running as a Republican. And that is what I’ve always done. I have always been a Republican; have never been on another line, always helping my fellow Republicans in their elections, working harder for those I believe in, being respectful for those I am maybe not as excited about…

Mr. House was not satisfied with the non-answer. Independent campaigns are not unusual in Connecticut. Former Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, turned away by his party in a re-election campaign, later started his own party and ran for election as governor as an independent. Current Senator Joe Lieberman, who managed to defeat Mr. Weicker with some help from Weicker-whipped Republicans, later lost a primary campaign to Ned Lamont. Mr. Lieberman then went on to wage an independent campaign and retained his seat.

Mr. House tried again with a follow-up question.

DH: So, you’re ruling it out, a [potential] independent run?

CS: What I am saying to you is I can’t imagine doing that.

Mr. House pressed on.

DH: If Mrs. McMahon wins the primary, will you support her in the general election?

CS: Depends on how she wins it.

DH: What do you mean?

CS: Well, it depends if she runs an honest and fair race. If she attempts to do to me what she did to Rob Simmons, good luck. I mean, what she did to Rob Simmons was outrageous.

DH: You’re saying she was dishonest in that campaign?

CS: I’m saying what she did was outrageous – accusing him of being a big spender. This guy wasn’t a big spender – accusing him of a lot of things that he wasn’t, and not recognizing that he was a good and honorable man who served his country with incredible distinction. So, the answer to your question is: I don’t intend to lose. But the question will be: How do you conduct a race?

These charges require additional close questioning. Mr. Shays’ notion of outrageous campaign behavior is a little severe. There were no dramatic groin kicks in Mrs. McMahon's campaign against Mr. Simmons. Generally, one is not in the habit of bestowing compliments upon opponents in campaigns.

The Hartford Courant certainly was not in Mrs. McMahon’s corner before, during or after the Republican nominating convention. The paper’s report on the convention mentions no outrageous declarations damaging to Mr. Simmons on Mrs. McMahon’s part. The paper did note, however:

“The battle between Simmons and McMahon was notable for its acrimony. Simmons made character an issue, consistently questioning the sexually graphic and violent content promoted by the WWE, as well as the use of steroids within the industry.

“McMahon played up her outsider credentials. ‘Linda has not spent her life in politics,’ said Torrington Mayor Ryan Bingham, who seconded McMahon's nomination. ‘If the people of Connecticut want a career politician, they'd just send Chris Dodd back for a sixth term.’”

The paper also mentioned an uncharacteristic reversal in Mr. Simmons’ pledge not to pursue a primary should Mrs. McMahon win the Republican nomination.

“Throughout most of the campaign, Simmons had repeated stated his intention of dropping out of the race if he did not win the backing of convention delegates. But on Friday night [when Mrs. McMahon secured the nomination], Simmons said he would wage a primary.”

In a story filed a month earlier, the Courant noted that Mr. Simmons took up a cudgel Democrats had effectively weilded against Mrs. McMahon:

“After months of relying on campaign surrogates to attack chief rival Linda McMahon, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rob Simmons publicly questioned the character of the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO, who is also seeking the GOP nomination.

“Simmons stood on the north steps of the state Capitol before a half-dozen reporters and cataloged what he called McMahon's lack of credibility and disrespect for the law. He blasted her for painting herself as a political outsider when her company has spent a million dollars on Washington lobbyists. He said her answer to a questionnaire in connection with her appointment to the State Board of Education constitutes a lie.

“And, most significantly, Simmons cited McMahon's role in a federal investigation into steroid use by professional wrestlers. According to a 1989 memo obtained by both The Day of New London and the Politico website, McMahon tipped off a Pennsylvania doctor about the impending investigation.

“Said Simmons, ‘These are the actions of someone who does not respect the law and it leaves one to ask the question: How can you write the laws if you don't feel bound by them?’

“McMahon was never charged with any crime in connection with the incident. McMahon spokesman Ed Patru accused Simmons of trading in ‘the politics of personal destruction’ and said his charges are a desperate move by a candidate whose public approval numbers had fallen sharply”

Mr. House was curious what a Shays campaign against his likely Democratic opponant, U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, might be like.

DH: What do you think of Congressman Chris Murphy in the race?

CS: You know what, you’ll have to ask him.

This answer visibly stunned Mr. House. His appropriate follow-up question has a “Say what?” flavor to it.

DH: Well, what do you think? You’re going to have to run against him.

CS: But you know what, I’m not going to talk about him. I’m not going to talk about … I’d be happy to tell you this: the job that the president has done, and the Democratic congress, has been outrageous…. We have a congress that is not facing up to what we have to do, and I put Chris Murphy in there with others.

Three possibilities suggest themselves: Either Mr. Shays had not yet had a chance to review Mr. Murphy’s record in office as a prelude to his campaign, perfectly understandable since Mr. Shays had only recently filed campaign papers; or Mr. Shays felt that any attack on Mr. Murphy would be, at this early point in his contest, premature; or he felt it would be strategically inappropriate to show his hand to Mr. Murphy before he disposed of Ms. McMahon either in the Republican nominating convention or in a primary.

DH: You were the last republican congressman in New England when you left. Do you think the state has gone too far left to elect another Republican?

CS: Oh, absolutely. The problem with this state is that it doesn’t understand economics; the legislature just doesn’t get it. They don’t understand they’re chasing away wealth. They don’t understand that they’re chasing away employers. We have not had a net job increase in 20 years.

It should be pointed out that Mr. Shays is answering only one barrel of Mr. Houses’ double barreled question. Mr. Shays does not “absolutely” believe that a Republican cannot be elected in a state that has drifted so far to the left; otherwise, he would not be putting himself to the trouble of waging either a nominating convention contest or a primary campaign against a Republican candidate who may or may not be chosen by the leaders of his party to represent them in the U.S. Congress. Given Mr. Shays' answers above to Mr. Houses' probing questions, one may assume Mr. Shays would be loathed to initiate an independent run for the senate. As a faithful long term Republican, Mr. Shays has strongly implied he would be reluctant to wage a campaign against he congressional nominee of his party.

Peeling Away The UConn Health Center Onion

2011-10-17T15:03:00.000-04:00

In a potentially explosive Hartford Courant story, reporter Josh Kovner discloses that no fewer than seven – possibly more – lawsuits claiming sexual harassment and workplace retaliation by UConn Health Center administrators have been filed against that part of the UCHC branch that provides mental-health and medical services to the state prison system.

Two women involved in two of the cases, Mr. Kovner reports, “both seasoned clinical social workers at different high-security prisons, said that nothing an inmate ever did or said to them ever made them feel as uncomfortable and compromised as did the actions of a UConn correctional health care manager or a co-worker.”

The cluster of law suits filed between mid-May and September, Mr. Kovner reports, “is the largest cluster of employment cases to hit management at Correctional Managed Health Care since the UConn Health Center first assumed the no-bid contract with the Department of Correction in the mid-1990s. The contract, now hovering around $100 million a year, has regularly been renewed without competition from private correctional health care companies or public-private partnerships.”

Had the UConn Health Center, heavily reliant on successive bailouts involving taxpayer money, been a private enterprise, it may not have survived over the years. Tax payer commitments have created within the health center an atmosphere of inviolability that may well have contributed to the many suits filed against it. Enterprises that cannot fail, state-run or privately owned, create a moral hazard that contributes to business failure.

State and federal bailouts are not just bailouts: They are permission given by the state in the form of money grants clearly rewarding activity that, under ordinary circumstances in the private sphere, would plunge an unprotected business into bankruptcy and court receivership. The state’s continuing bailouts of the UCHC send to its business administrators the implicitly clear message: “Failure with you is not an option because, however dramatic your failure, the resources of the state will rescue you from the inevitable consequences of your failing administration.” Such bailouts facilitate and encourage irresponsible and possibly illegal practices.

The same sense of inviolability is created on the legal side by statutes that require the state’s attorney general to represent state agencies in prosecutorial matters. In cases of gross negligence within the private sphere, employees may sue administrators for money damages. But state statutes, quite reasonably, protect those defending state agencies from money damages by conferring partial or total immunity on the state’s prosecuting agencies, the attorney general’s office and the chief state’s attorney.

This immunity necessarily creates a moral hazard. Both offices are dependent upon information provided to them by the administrators of state agencies who in some cases may use a rented immunity from prosecution as a shelter from activity that may be either ethically or legally suspect.

Any innocent whistleblower in state service, caught between the grindstones of seeming perpetual litigation, which impoverishes the whistleblower, and the sheer power of state resources deployed against him, will be intimidated from calling to the attention of correcting agencies abuses that would not be tolerated outside of state service.

Some responsible legislators are on the verge of proposing that the work done at UCHC should be privatized. Government oversight agencies are passably competent in overseeing problems that occur in the private marketplace. But to suppose the fox might competently guard the hen house may be tempting the fox beyond his endurance to resist.

It is said that the Malloy administration may consider privatizing the UCHC branch that provides mental-health and medical services to the state prison system. Republican State Senator Rob Kane and Democratic Representative Bryan Hurlburt both have called for increased public oversight of the UConn Health Center’s suit battered division. Both the state – and Mr. Malloy politically – are heavily invested in that division of the UCHC that only a short while ago was awarded an exclusive contract by means of a questionable no-bid procedure to provide services for the state’s prisoners.

If the UConn Health Center is broken, those associated with the Malloy administration who nodded approval when prisoner services were awarded to UConn though a highly questionable “memorandum of agreement” now own the problem.

They should fix it.

Process Nullification And The Death Penalty

2011-10-16T15:55:00.002-04:00

Juries, occasionally rising above the deadening process of the law, will engage in what lawyers call jury nullification. Jury nullification involves putting aside process in favor of justice. Instead of ruling as a judge or the law might wish, a jury occasionally will throw process to the wind and bring in a surprising verdict.

Death penalty opponents in Connecticut, some of whom are leaders in the General Assembly and the judicial system, have for the past few decades been practicing what might be called capital felony process nullification.

The idea is effectively to vacate jury findings by absurdly extending the legal process in death penalty cases. Such jurists and legislators, reasoning that the death penalty is an abomination – even in cases in which it may be justly applied, such as in multiple murder cases or cases in which a capital felon already sentenced to life in prison takes a life in prison or in terrorist cases or in cases in which the crime is especially heinous – encourage and permit an endless process of litigation that fairly assures the capital felon will die of old age in his prison bed before justice is visited upon him. In so doing, a fetish is made of process and just sentences are nullified.

Additionally, the cost of capital felony executions are artificially increased so that those opposing capital punishment may argue with some degree of plausibility both that capital felony executions are prohibitively expensive and also that they needlessly prolong the suffering of the family members of the victims of capital punishment. This last objection is on a par with the absurd defense of one who murders his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. In Connecticut and across the nation, common sense still holds to the view that murderers are primarily responsible for murder and that in certain cases capital punishment is a condign and just punishment.

Apart from a direct reference to a specific case, most judgments concerning capital punishment are irresponsibly useless. In the case of Joshua Komisarjevsky, recently found guilty by a jury of his peers of capital felony in the murders of three women in Cheshire, opponents of capital punishment have marshaled a series of pointless generic arguments.

It may be true in some cases that capital punishment has been unjustly applied, but this is not true in any of the capital cases awaiting final disposition in Connecticut. And it is very difficult to argue plausibly that the two convicted criminals in the Cheshire murders are not guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused because a) both have admitted to the murders, and b) both were found guilty of the crimes after just trials that bear no relation at all to acts of vengeance.

In fact, nearly all the generic arguments marshaled against capital punishment – that capital punishment is inherently racist; that it is judicial murder; that it cannot be applied with a sufficient degree of certainty; that the penalty should be abolished because it is not applied in every instance in which it may be appropriate – fall to the ground when applied to the Cheshire murders.

As generic objections are brought before the court of public opinion in specific cases, the justice of the objections themselves may be measured and affirmed or rejected. And that is why, in the Komisarjevsky case, those opposing capital punishment resort to all-purpose objections: Capital punishment is offensive to soon to be normative views of morality; it creates emotional hardships for family members who must run the knout of seemingly endless appeals; it is expensive; it is a fraud.

In retreat from specificity, anti-capital punishment opponents fall back upon what one might call the argument from inevitability: History is marching against capital punishment, and soon it will be overthrown here in the benighted United States. Why not get rid of it in Connecticut, recently the scene of two separate mass murders, now?

The argument from inevitability, however, does not have quite the force of the murders committed by Mr. Komisarjevsky and Mr. Hayes, which is why when average, non-vengeful people in Connecticut are asked whether capital punishment should be retained in the Cheshire murder case they respond in numbers too large to ignore that it should.

Malloy on Taxes: So What?

2011-10-12T09:38:00.005-04:00

Tom Dudchik’s popular site, Capitol Report, featured a picture of Democratic Connecticut Govern Dannel Malloy side by side with an accompanying picture of Republican Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman. Mr. Malloy looks a little stern and sour, lips pursed, jaw jutted forward, rather as if he had just told the leaders of SEBAC that they would have to wait on their Cost of Living Increases for a couple of years, while fighting off as he did so an army of benighted tax resistors still smarting from the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history. Mr. Heineman, on the other hand, appears relaxed and expansive. The title below the pics reads, in an assertive font:

CAPITOL REPORT

RAISE’EM; CUT’EM

The lede on another report was not cheery:

“In Nebraska, Republican Gov. Dave Heineman enacted the biggest tax cut in state history, and the state's unemployment rate of 4.2 percent is now the second lowest in the nation.

“In Connecticut, Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy enacted the largest tax increase in state history this year, and the state's unemployment rate of 9.1 percent ranks in the bottom half in the nation.”

Ditto in the case of a dozen other media reports.

Mr. Heinman chairs the National Governors Association. In that capacity he came to Hartford to boast about the advances his state has made in perilous economic times.

The tax cuts and the consequent economic growth in his state have propelled Nebraska into the top 10 “most business friendly” states:

"It made a real difference in our tax-competitive climate, our business-friendly climate. We know we need to do more. It's all of these things combined. It's not just one. It's taxes. It's regulation. It's workforce development. It's education.''

Mr. Malloy, it need hardly be said, is big on all three -- education, taxes and regulation – though Mr. Heinman was at pains not to point fingers, governors being a bit more collegial than, say, tempestuous congressmen. Republicans as a general rule tend to regulate government whenever possible, leaving Democrats to regulate everything else. Both nationally and stateside, Democrats have been much in the habit recently of transferring tax monies from have-not hard pressed taxpayers to large businesses too big to fail or flee.

The fear nationally is that large failed companies will increase unemployment if they are permitted to go belly-up; therefore they must be propped up by so called millionaires, defined by tax-hungry congressmen in Washington as anyone making more than $200,000 per year. The states fear that large companies, few of them in danger of bolting, may, if they are not supported by hairdresser taxes, scoot across the border into more tax friendly states, giving an advantage to tax cutting governors – almost everyone but Mr. Malloy. And so the large financially secure are bribed to stay, for the time being.

Mr. Malloy responded that Connecticut was also business friendly. The governor first had to kill the Hydra before he could begin to straighten out the state. He raised taxes on hairdressers he said “… so that I could look business in the face and say, 'Listen, I believe we've got the bulk of our problem behind us. We've balanced a budget. We've taken the steps necessary to wrestle a structural deficit to the ground and we move forward…I think we are a tax haven. Although our personal taxes may be high, primarily driven by our over-reliance on property taxes, if you look at our corporate tax structure, we have one of the lowest effective rates on the corporate level.''

Given the large opening in Mr. Malloy’s tent, a critical camel rushed in. Said Republican leader John McKinney:

"So Governor Malloy thinks this is a tax haven? I had no idea. I think the governor's comments that we’re a tax haven show that the governor doesn't get it. Maybe the multi-national large corporations are attracted by a lower corporate tax rate, but our economy is driven by small business owners. ... The way to tell business that you have your house in order is to get spending under control. He doesn't cut spending. He increases spending. I'm almost left speechless at the fact that here's the governor of Nebraska talking about cutting taxes and our governor is believing that increasing taxes improved our business climate. Every small business owner pays the personal taxes that Governor Malloy thinks are too high.''

The Governor’s conference will be a ten day affair. It’s flu season. Perhaps Mr. Malloy can arrange to catch something.

Rangel Hearts Larson

2011-10-11T14:03:00.003-04:00

U.S. Congressman Charlie Rangel, noted progressive and tax evader, compliments fellow congressman John Larson on his discernment in supporting the “Occupy Wall Street” movement :

“It is truly historic when we see union groups, leaders like Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and House Democratic Caucus Chairman John B. Larson, and fellow Members in the Congressional Progressive Caucus all come out in favor of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This new wave of support gives me renewed hope that we can bring about change in America.”

Prowling around the periphery of the movement are a few Ron Paul supporters such as Chris

One supposes that neither Mr. Rangel nor Mr. Larson supports Chris’ fervently expressed attack on the Washington Industrial complex.

The beat goes on.

Shays On Representation

2011-10-11T09:59:00.001-04:00

Former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays spoke at Yale early in October shortly after he filed papers to kick off his candidacy for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The following citation is taken from the October 7th issue of the Yale Daily News:

“Shays is known as a leader among centrist Republicans and an advocate of socially moderate views. He defended his moderate position by saying that ‘a party needs to be broad enough to allow a representative to represent his or her entire district.’ Because his district is moderate to conservative, Shays said that it is his duty to encompass the views of all the people.”

In the state of Connecticut, Democrats outnumber Republicans about two to one, and so called independents or unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats by a slight margin. Given these statistics, Mr. Shay’s notion of representation – namely, that it is “the duty a representative to encompass the views of all the people” – would necessarily impel him to vote the Democratic line on bills in proportion to their presence in Connecticut. In other words, he would be disposed to vote for Democratic measures by a ratio of two to one. That is what a purely numerical representation would involve, and on issues of great importance, it probably would be wise for him to vote the straight Democratic line, thus assuring that his austere demands of true representation should be met, while also assuring his re-election to office.

There is no way, other than votes on congressional measures, for Mr. Shays to push his party to the left so that the Republican Party would broadly represent the interests of the greatest number of his constituents, which in Connecticut would be Democrats. Since independents have few representatives in Congress, their interests and programs are beyond finding out.

Republicans devoted to changing political demographics in their state, rather than succumbing year after year to the ratio of Republicans to Democrats cited above, naturally would resist Mr. Shays’ view of representation.

Too many commentators speak of moderation as if it were an ideological position, rather than a safe harbor between positions. There is nothing especially redeeming about moderation, except as moderation applies to personal habits and inclinations. Which of us, living in the time of Samuel Adams, would wish to take a moderate view of punitive taxation? Martin Luther King was not known for supporting a moderate position on the question of Jim Crow.

Some fights are worth fighting, because in some cases the fate of nations rests on the outcome of battles fought in the field and in legislatures by men of sound principle who know that success depends on armies both legislative and military. No man is an army unto himself. And the fate of states is rarely secured by putative go it alone mavericks who drift to the left – very easy to do in a state dominated by Democrats – and present themselves to the members of their own party as so called centrists. If the center in Connecticut politics cannot hold against the persistent pressure that has pushed it leftward, it may be because no effective countervailing resistance had been offered by moderate, compromising Republicans.

The course recommended by Mr. Shays in his address at Yale is not one that has not been tried; it is one that has been tried and found wanting. Mr. Shays, it should be recalled, was the last so called “moderate” Republican U.S. Representative in New England before he was up-ended by Democrat Jim Himes, who successfully presented himself to members of the 4th District as a Democratic moderate, surely in the age of Obama a vanishing species. But the moderate Republican in Connecticut is also a species that has vanished, perhaps because independent voters, given an opportunity to choose between sunshine Republicans and authentic Democrats, will cast their votes for authenticity.

Deflated Republicans will not be anxious in a primary to vote for Democratic look-alikes. The independent vote will always be a question mark, but the drift of independents away from the national direction set by Mr. Obama suggests a spirit of resistance that may not be satisfied by congressmen sent to Washington to compromise with the prevailing regime. When the context of the political play has changed so radically, there is little room for repetitive second acts.

Ripening Scandals: Solyndra And DEEP Do-Do

2011-10-08T11:43:00.001-04:00

The Solyndra energy scandal is beginning to ripen.

ABC News is now reporting that a top fundraiser for President Barack Obama who was hired to help oversee the administration’s energy loan program “pushed and prodded career Department of Energy officials to move faster in approving a loan guarantee for Solyndra, even as his wife's law firm was representing the California solar company, according to internal emails made public late Friday.”

And here in Connecticut, Jon Lender of the Hartford Courant is reporting that the wife of state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) commissioner Daniel Esty, Mrs. Elizabeth Esty, a former state representative now running for the U.C. Congress, has received campaign contributions from Northeast Utilities, an energy company regulated by her husband:

“With controversy already enveloping the $205,000 in consulting work that Daniel C. Esty did for Northeast Utilities before he became commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, it turns out that NU executives also have contributed to the congressional campaign of Esty's wife, Democrat Elizabeth Esty, public records show.”

More Incoherent Poetry From U.S. Rep. John Larson

2011-10-06T07:43:00.012-04:00

U.S Rep. John Larson, who likely will be at his post in Connecticut’s 1st District long after Hell freezes over, has given an exclusive interview to the Daily Caller that is, to put it charitably, incoherent.

Larson addressed a group of activist and journalists from Egypt and Tunisia on October 4 and later gave an exclusive interview to reporter Vince Coglianese of the Daily Caller in the course of which he said that the United States had drawn inspiration from their countries. It is required on such occasions to throw rhetorical bouquets in the direction of the audience. Mr. Larson continued to advise the activists that as a result of their exertions the United States, considered by some to be a crucible of constitutional revolution, is experiencing its own “Arab Spring, if you will.”

The Arab Spring in the United States was occurring on Wall Street even as he spoke. The “Occupy Wall Street” protest is now in its second week, and plans are afoot to plant sprigs of the coming revolution in other state capitals, including Hartford.

At the point when Mr. Larson let loose his effusions, The American Arab Spring was yet a diffuse movement; protesting groups had not issued, as is usually the case with leftist anti-business groups, a set of demands, preferably non-negotiable. But the group’s website outlined a common frustration: “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

No one, even on the far fringes of the right, is for greed and corruption.

Following his speech, Mr. Larson told the Daily Caller that left wing activists with “’the right morals’ are pushing America’s democracy to ‘evolve.’”

Mr. Larson, his communication director nowhere to be seen, then lapsed into a sort of pre-campaign poetry:

“They see the inequities that exist in this country, and the point is that even an advanced democracy like ours — the Constitution says, ‘We the people, in order to create a more perfect union.’ We’re not there. It’s something that continues to evolve... They’re standing up and saying the things they feel deep inside that are working unjustly and unfairly against them, and everybody ought to take heed, that it’s not only an ‘Arab Spring,’ but there is an ‘American Fall’ as well.”

Presumably, Mr. Larson would be grievously disappointed should protests against greedily capitalists in the United States evolve into the kinds of mob scenes that have become common in Greece, a country flat on its economic back once considered the birthplace of both democracy and republican government.

Following Mr. Larson’s hearty approval of the group’s aims and perhaps reacting to claims that its program was rather amorphous, The American Arab Spring protesters released their non-negotiable demands on their web site. They are, according to a piece in Fox Nation, as follows:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" (sic) by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise (sic) the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr (sic).

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. (sic) investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same (sic) bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone (sic) can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah (sic) or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

Not all of the 13 demands (why 13?) are equally absurd. And who in the world is the “I” in "Demand one", and why is the word “books” capitalized and imprisoned in quotes? Is the author of the “demands” perhaps a student anarchist preparing to default on his student “loan”?

Following publication on their site of the demands, someone at the official site, while not disavowing the list, lately has claimed that the demands are not "formal" and were issued by a single commentator.

In any case, the 60’s radical political showman Abbie Hoffman would be proud of the Arab Spring authors. Mr. Larson, not having had the advantage of seeing the demands before he made his remarks, may be considering, some political watchers suppose, a re-think of his perhaps premature poetic ejaculations

UPDATE

An Iranian military commander, apparently agreeing with Mr. Larson’s views, said on Sunday, October 9 that “the protests spreading from New York's Wall Street to other U.S. cities are the beginning of an ‘American Spring,’ likening them to the uprisings that toppled Arab autocrats in the Middle East,” according to a recent Reuter’s story.

"'The failure of the U.S. president to resolve the Wall Street crisis will turn this economic movement into a political and social movement protesting the very structure of the U.S. government,' the official IRNA news agency quoted Gen. Masoud Jazayeri of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as saying Sunday."

Shays The Spoiler?

2011-10-05T07:53:00.008-04:00

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling indicates that Chris Shays may have a certain value, among Democrats mostly, as a spoiler candidate.

The poll shows Linda McMahon leading former U.S. Rep. Shays in a Republican Party primary by an unsurpassable margin of 60-27 percent. Since primaries were first introduced into party politics, more or less as a democratic instrument to pry decision making from party bosses, primaries have been the gateway to general elections.

The 60-27 spread is a hurdle that would inspire second thoughts among most supermen politicians who are used to leaping tall buildings in a single bound. The spread among those in the state identifying themselves as “very conservative”, 81-14, is even more daunting.

Is it possible that Mr. Shays has agreed to play Rob Simmons to Mrs. McMahon in her second bid for the U.S. Senate?

Very early in the campaign for U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s seat, Mr. Simmons was leading the senator in some polls. Mr. Dodd’s prospects had run aground on several sandbars, one of which involved a pricy cottage on an 11 acre spread in Ireland the senator bought for a song, only $160,000, along with William Kessinger, a business partner of Edward Downe. Mr. Dodd and Mr. Downe, who pleaded guilty to insider trading and securities fraud in 1993, once owned a Washington condominium in partnership. Before President Bill Clinton left the White House, Mr. Dodd successfully lobbied the president to secure friend Downe a pardon, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

Mrs. McMahon entered the race and was chosen as the nominee of her party at the Republican Party convention in Hartford, at which point Mr. Simmons, following party protocol, might have gracefully withdrawn. This he did not do.

Sensing a vulnerability in then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senatorial nominee, Mr. Simmons decided to primary Mrs. McMahon. Mr. Blumenthal had several times falsely claimed he served in the Vietnam War, an imposture exposed by Mrs. McMahon and the New York Times. Mr. Simmons had served honorably in Vietnam, and several political commentators thought at the time that Mr. Simmons would be able to exploit the issue much more effectively than Mrs. McMahon. Serving honorably in Vietnam for 19 months, Mr. Simmons had been awarded two Bronze Star Medals.

Conducting a poor man's campaign, Mr. Simmons put his active campaign on hold but left his name on the ballot, in effect imprisoning for the duration support that might have gone to Mrs. McMahon. And so Mr. Simmons hung in there and hung in there and hung in there, while Mr. Blumenthal hit the mattresses, hiding out from prying journalist and coasting into office on his reputation as the nation’s most fervent consumer protection ad-man. Mr. Simmons’ challenge was, shall we say, sporadic, but disabling enough to shuttle a few votes in the direction of the Democratic Party’s camp. Mr. Simmons’ malingering was no help to Republicans, who still wince whenever his name is mentioned in polite circles.

Recent elections have been career enders for once seemingly impregnable incumbent politicians: Mr. Dodd left the congressional premises more or less under an order to vacate issued by both Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Lieberman, still doubtful about who he may endorse for his soon to be vacated seat, has had his day. National Democrats in the U.S. House, palsied and unable to produce a budget during the years they enjoyed a veto proof margin in the U.S. Congress, were given the heave-ho in the last election and replaced by combative conservatives. Surely, the recent flow of politics suggests that voters have taken a dark view of professional politicians who have passed along to a generation of Americans a legacy of unsupportable debt and joblessness, not exactly what former President John Kennedy had in mind when he announced the passing of the torch to a new generation of nation builders.

One senses in the air the fragrant odor of Jeffersonian gunpowder: Said Tom Jefferson, very much in a revolutionary mood, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.” The Jeffersonian spirit – “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” -- does not run hot in the veins of politicians who have spent a good part of their public lives in the middle of the road dodging commitments and principles.

Is DeLauro Self-Dealing?

2011-10-03T12:46:00.002-04:00

You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far
Cause you know it don’t matter anyway
You can rely on the old man’s money
You can rely on the old man’s money -- Hall and Oats Song

Human Events is preparing a story that may involve self-dealing on the part of 3rd District congresswoman Rosa Delauro and her husband Stanley Greenberg, whose firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, has done business with powerful beltway politicians.

Mr. Greenberg, the CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, boasts that his firm “is one of the world's premier research and strategic consulting firms. Beyond data, we provide the strategic insight necessary to develop the right messages to achieve our clients' goals. Smarter, faster and committed to our clients' interests: we work harder and think deeper than the rest.”

The list of Mr. Greenberg’s political clients includes such political shakers and movers within the Democratic Party as President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Vice President Walter Mondale and a host of both national and international corporations and issue groups.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research specializes in "political polling and campaign strategy, helping political candidates, parties, and ballot initiatives succeed across the country and around the world."

The lede of the Human Events story should spur some controversy in Connecticut: “Federal documents reveal a self-dealing relationship between a Nutmeg State congresswoman and her political consultant husband.”

At first blush, figures involving campaign contributions transferred over the years by Mrs. DeLauro to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and business deals awarded to Mr. Greenberg's firm seem to suggest a connection that is at best questionable.

According to Human Events:

“Federal Election Commission data reveals that over the past four election cycles, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) donated more than $ 1.2 million dollars to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Over that same time period, the DCCC paid $1.9 million for polling services to Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. GQRR’s founding partner is DeLauro’s husband of 33 years, Stanley B. Greenberg….

“DeLauro's campaign donated $275,000 to the DCCC in 2005-2006, nearly double her $140,000 donation during 2003-2004, and the DCCC paid GQRR $382,996—down from the $472,708 GQRR received in 2003-2004.

“In the 2007-2008 cycle, however, when DeLauro’s campaign presented $51,400 to the DCCC in October alone, totaling $376,406, DCCC payment to GQRR rose to $464,200.

“In 2009-2010 DeLauro’s campaign raised its special October donation to $107,500; this increase, added to $325,006 for the entire year, sums to $432,506. The DCCC paid GQRR in two installments of $298,967 and $289,834, summing to $588,801, while Friends of Rosa DeLauro ranked among the DCCC’s top contributors.”

One of the of the wealthiest members of Congress, Mrs. DeLauro has won her past four elections by unbeatable margins, usually cresting above 20 and even sometimes 50 percent.

Human Events reports that Mrs. DeLauro may not have communicated to her donors via e-mails or fundraising letters that a good portion of campaign funds she has contributed to the DCCC has circuitously made its way back to her husband, who no doubt is grateful for the business.

Of late, Mrs. DeLauro has not attended closely to events that might well sink the political prospects of incumbent politicians representing more politically competitive districts than the 3rd, which has been held firmly in the grip of the Democratic Party for more than 30 years.

Since the district was first organized in 1837, it has been anchored politically by one of the state’s largest cities, New Haven, and its suburbs. The district occupies about four fifths of New Haven County, a small chunk of Middlesex County and Stratford in Fairfield County. Parts of two other large cities, Middletown and Waterbury, are also included in the district.

Cities in Connecticut have not shaken off the remnants of political organizations first formed and employed by party bosses back in the day when political parties distributed money to its favored politicians and favors to its generous campaign contributors. For this reason, urban political hubs in Connecticut tend to wag the district dog. For all but six terms, The Democratic Party has held the district. Departing U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman suffered his only general election loss in the district in a 1980 U.S. House race. In 1980, the price of gas rose above $1.00 for the first time, and in Connecticut’s cities the fragrant cigars smoke that filled the infamous back rooms of state politics still scented the air.

Not a few of Connecticut’s cities are still impregnable Democratic castles. But the trouble with well-fortified fortresses is that the guards on the walls, trusting in the impregnability of the fortifications, sometime sleep.

When Mrs. DeLauro, usually attentive to her district, lingered among well to do vacationers at the Hotel Poseidon in Positano on the Amalfi Coast in Italy while tropical storm Irene ripped through her district last month, some in Connecticut thought the snoozing was highly uncharacteristic. East Haven was hit hard, 25 homes along Cosey Beach having been condemned or swept away and dozens more damaged.

A video clip in which a tongue tied DeLauro seeks to justify her absence was not the 11 term congresswoman’s finest hour.

Now this.

The Komisarjevsky Trial And The Significance Of Pins

2011-10-03T12:19:00.003-04:00

There was a point during the Cheshire murder trial when one of the defense attorneys representing accused murderer Joshua Komisarjevsky became concerned that small pins worn by family members of the murder victims might unduly prejudice the jury against their client.

The judge in the case, Jon Blue, ruled that the pins were not so indiscrete as to trip the prejudices of jurors.

The pin challenge by the defense followed by some months the publication of an interview Mr. Komisarjevsky gave to a reporter while incarcerated that was, the First Amendment still being the law of the land, widely covered by several state newspapers. The Komisarjevsky prison interview was fashioned into a hastily written book that found its way into libraries across the state. An effort was made, unsuccessfully, to pry the book from the hands of aggressive librarians conversant with the First Amendment.

Mr. Komisarjevsky, a very talkative fellow, also made a statement to police shortly after he was apprehended that was, most lawyers would agree, high incriminating, though Mr. Komisarjevsky was prudent enough to suggest in his statement that his companion in crime, Steven Hayes, earlier convicted of capital murder, had spread gasoline throughout the house and lit the fire intended to destroy evidence of their crime. This “evidence” included three victims, the wife of Dr. Petit and his two daughters, 11 years old Michaela and 17 year old Hayley.

So then, were the pins more or less prejudicial than Mr. Komisarjevsky several statements?

Most non-defense lawyers might agree that Mr. Komisarjevsky’s frequent admissions of participation in the Cheshire murders would more powerfully sway a jury in the direction of a guilty verdict than the discrete pins worn by family members that so alarmed defense attorney Jeremiah Donovan.

Catching sight of the pins, Mr. Donovan referred to those wearing them as the “Petit posse” and sought to prevent the members of the hanging mob from displaying the prejudicial pins in sight of prospective jurors. The pins, worn in memory of Mr. Petit’s wife and daughters, were intended to support, according to one report, “the education of young people, especially women in the sciences, and those affected by chronic illness and violence.”

Possibly it was at this point, in the early jousting among prosecutors and defense attorneys that usually occurs before any trial’s main event, that some trial watchers may have concluded Mr. Donovan was, in his assault on discreet pins, tilling the ground for future appeals. In death penalty conviction cases, appeals are necessary to run out the clock. And the more appeals the better, because protracted capital offense cases run up a tab. And the more tabs the better, because one of the generic arguments urged by death penalty opponents is that capital punishment is prohibitively expensive.

Since the death penalty itself is both an offense against God and nature, one should use every means at one’s disposal to overthrow it. Extremism in defense of virtue, the virulently conservative Barry Goldwater once said, is no vice. And if one must use a justly convicted murderer as a mere prop to overthrow a moral evil such as capital punishment, well then …

This argument is akin to that used by brother-in-law Roper in the Robert Bolt play, “A man for all seasons. Mr. Roper was asked by Thomas More how far he would go to cage the devil, to which he responded that he would cut down ever law in England to do it, receiving from the soon to be martyred More the following rebuke:

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”

Roper responds that the law itself has become More’s “golden calf,” a mere fetish that must be overthrown in the defense of a greater moral good.

The real question involved in all death penalty cases – What winds would blow if the law were to be cut down? – is not one that should be decided by clever Ropers committed to subverting death penalty laws. Jurists should aim at justice, which is the giving to all what is due them under the law. If the law must be changed, it should not be changed by legal chicanery – but by sober, morally driven legislators, like More.

The Dodd-Frank Banking Fee

2011-10-02T11:40:00.000-04:00

According to a story in Investment.com, the $5 monthly fee bank of America intends to impose to recover losses incurred by the Dodd-Frank bill probably should be named the Dodd-Frank fee.

The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act put a limit on fees banks could collect from sellers when their customers make debit card purchases — cutting 44 cent fees to 21 cents.

“Throwing their weight around at the height of the banking crisis, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut vowed to stick it to banks. They blamed them for the mess to cover up the fact that they forced banks to lend to favored constituencies who could not repay.

“The two Democrats pushed through the much-vaunted Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed and touted as one of the signature accomplishments of his presidency.

“That act, which included a micromanaging amendment on fees, carried a $2.9 billion implementation cost for that alone over five years, according to the Government Accountability Office...

“The ‘economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations,’ a bank spokeswoman told ABC News Friday.

“BofA says it stands to lose $2 billion from the arbitrary Durbin price-fixing amendment and now has no choice but to make up for the lost revenue some other way.”

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd, once associated with the senate’s banking committee and now a gold plated Hollywood lobbyist, felt compelled to hammer banks after the mortgage industry in the United States went belly-up, largely in response to impositions imposed on them by Dodd and Frank in a successful attempt to encourage banks to lower their lending standards so that people who could not afford mortgages would be able to buy houses. Canada, which maintained standards widely observed here in the United States before Dodd and Frank began to micromanage the banking industry, has few mortage and housing problems.

Dodd also was principally responsible for undoing the last remnants of the Glass Steagall Act, a measure adopted during the enlightened administration of Franklin Roosevelt that prevented rapacious financial institutions from meddling with the bankbooks of Dodd’s constituents.

And here we are – in lowdive.

McMahon’s Second Throw Of The Dice

2011-09-28T07:51:00.003-04:00

Linda McMahon having thrown her hat once again into the political ring, the question arises: What are her chances? Mrs. McMahon will run for Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat in the U.S. Congress.

On the left, the media once again is preparing to draw their long knives from their scabbards. Mrs. McMahon’s background as CEO of World Wide Wrestling, since renamed World Wide Entertainment (WWE), has freed much of the left of the necessity of thinking seriously about her positions, such as they are and will be, on important issues of the day. In lieu of reasoned criticism, Video clips of Man Mountain Indian wrestler Dalip Singh Rana hoisting a victim over his shoulders and slamming him to the mat may be deployed against her, as was the case in her last campaign.

The cast of characters this time around will be different: Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has moved up in the world into the U.S. Senate. He was a formidable opponent for a number of reasons. The Attorney General’s reputation as the St. George of Connecticut politics was difficult for any Republican candidate to overcome. His popularity, larger in Connecticut and more expansive than that of Dalip Singh Rana, much of which was self-generated in a twenty year series of seemingly endless, self-absorbed press releases, tends to clot the analytical synapses of voters’ brains. Going in, Mr. Blumenthal, trailing behind himself a cloud of military murk, enjoyed what turned out to be an insuperable advantage. Mr. Blumenthal lied, several times, concerning his service in the military. He said he had served in Vietnam when he had not and was called out by the New York Times and others. The imposture did him no good, but Mr. Blumenthal squirreled himself away from media stalkers and survived the ordeal un-decapitated. When as a newly minted senator Mr. Blumenthal applied for a position on a committee overseeing veterans, none of his comrades in the congress so much as blinked.

But Mr. Blumenthal is, as is said in the Icelandic sagas, “now out of the story.” And whatever may be said of Democrats vying for Lieberman’s seat, neither U.S. Rep Chris Murphy or his likely primary opponents are Mr. Blumenthal, including former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, whose rubberized reputation easily rebounds from blows that would shatter Mr. Dalip Singh Rana.

The 2012 campaign script is likely to be different as well.

President Barack Obama, the lodestone of the last presidential election, has, according to polls even in bluer than blue Connecticut, fallen out of favor. Mr. Obama’s positives have crashed along with the economy, and no one in Connecticut expects the economy to improve any time soon. The state was ten years recovering from the post-Lowell Weicker recession. The Obama recession will be deeper, longer and more intractable. As jobs go, so goes the presidency. Some so called “moderate” Democrats in the congressional delegation have put a three foot pole between themselves and their Democratic leader; as the economy continues to go sour, the pole, like Pinocchio’s nose, will elongate.

There are differences of strategy between Republicans and Democrats that easily could be exploited by Mrs. McMahon.

Democrats, as a general rule, are concerned with creating jobs, preferably stamped “made in Washington,” for they are not interested in fostering for example energy jobs tied to non-green producers they wish to discredit. Republicans generally busy themselves with increasing prosperity – not the same thing -- and continued prosperity depends to a large extent on an interrupted supply of developed and available energy products. Democrats want to regulate everything but government. Republicans are interested in regulating and reducing targeted rather than general governmental regulations they perceive as binding down a no longer competitive bound Gulliver, the private economy. Democratic programs of a “made in Washington” variety privatize the rewards of companies too big to fail, while at the same time socializing debt, which is assumed by taxpayers. Taxpayers thus bear the costs incurred by failed “too big to fail” companies, while earned profits, including taxpayer subsidies, are parceled out to failed CEOs and somnolent boards of directors.

In the next election, Republicans will be attempting to convert the above paragraph to an easily digestible bumper sticker?

The McMahon campaign must discover some means of corralling women’s votes. Mrs. McMahon very easily could surprise those in the legacy media who suppose her upcoming campaign will be a reprise of her previous losing battle by, for instance, unreeling three or four major speeches on topics of general interest that will satisfy the media’s lust for intellectual probity, not considered to be her strong suit. Those who know Mrs. McMahon well know she is a very quick study passionately committed to certain conservative propositions that just might surprise the state’s blue media. The bump on her – that there is no political there there – is a wildly exaggerated piece of Democratic campaign propaganda.

A Governor Of Unions?

2011-09-25T20:58:00.003-04:00

Governor Dannel Malloy banged the knuckles of some state unions when SEBAC, a coalition of union leaders, failed to pass what he called “Plan A,” a budget that some legislators friendly to unions thought was inordinately friendly to unions. Sen. Edith Prague, long a supporter of union interests, said at the time she thought union members who had voted down Plan A were mad to have spurned a plan so favorable to their interests.

The governor had concocted at the same time a default Plan B that simply was not a serious contractual proposal; Plan B was designed to bludgeon recalcitrant union members into voting for Plan A. Union leaders, at the behest of the governor, then unilaterally redrafted union rules so as to facilitate a favorable vote on a slightly readjusted Plan A. The intimidation, along with the compliance of union leaders, worked, and Plan A2 finally was adopted by unions months after the General Assembly, dominated by Democrats, had voted to pass Plan A.

There was some grumbling at the time among a few legislators conversant with the separation of power doctrine: They wondered whether, having voted to accept a budget that would in the near future be subject to alterations imposed on it by unions and the governor, they had in essence surrendered their constitutional obligations to an undemocratic plenipotentiary process. But their scruples were not inhibiting, and in due course a budget, thought by some to be out of balance even now, finally was set in concrete. Apparently, constitutional scruples in the constitution state are more easily disposed of now that the state has become a one party operation.

In mid-September, addressing the AFL-CIO annual convention at Foxwoods Casino Mr. Malloy sought to quell fears that the governor’s lifelong affection for unions hadf suffered a rupture. Previously, Mr. Malloy had been making cooing sounds in the direction of Connecticut’s larger business and awarding carefully selected firms millions of dollars as a part of his First Five Plan.

At the event, Mr. Malloy was praised by executive director of AFSCME Council 4 Sal Luciano for being one of the few governors in the nation that had decided to raise taxes to balance his budget. Mr. Luciano thought much of the anger over the concession agreement between unions and the governor could be traced to poor communications and pronounced himself pleased that the pro-union governor had not declared war on labor: “It’s the first time in a long time we’ve had a governor that hasn’t actively declared war on the labor movement.”

The governor was bathed in warm applause when, contrasting himself with other more brutal governors, he said the final agreement between unions and the executive office was a necessary linchpin “to making sure we did not have to take apart our higher educational system. That was a lynchpin to making sure we didn’t have to cut aid to every municipality in the state.”

Mr. Malloy “delivered” to unions recently by issuing an executive order that will pave the way for the unionization of day care workers and personal care attendants. The order, some queasy legislators say, violates an explicit separation of legislative and executive powers and may be Mr. Malloy’s way of further soothing union restiveness.

Following his soothing address before AFSCME, Mr. Malloy hopped down to Greenwich to assure hedge fund managers he was not, as they might have supposed wrongly from his address to AFSCME, antagonistic towards the captains of industry and Wall Street. The hedgies fear excessive regulation, and the governor showed up to soften their angst.

“There is too much regulation and decisions are made far too slowly,” the governor told the group in his keynote address at the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association’s Global Alpha Forum. “Let me very clear I’m not interested in more regulation. I’m trying to streamline regulation. We know the old adage that time is money… we need to move more rapidly and responsively.”

One newspaper noted that “In a further assurance to an industry that an audience member termed the state’s ‘crown jewel,’ Malloy said that he is not in favor of moving to regulate beyond federal policy.”

The governor gave no indication that he would be willing to work with Connecticut’s wall-to-wall Democratic congressional delegation to lop off the Dodd-Frank bill some regulatory hydra heads. Nor has he been asked by the legacy media whether he intends to lobby other Democrats in the U.S. Congress to pare back onerous federal regulations on behalf of his new hedgie friends. The locution – “Let me very clear I’m not interested in more…” – was last used by the governor in multiple pre-campaign speeches with reference to tax increases. As it turned out, Mr. Malloy was not unfriendly to new taxes.

Will Lieberman’s Endorsement Of Shays Matter?

2011-09-21T09:28:00.001-04:00

An endorsement by current U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in the race for the senate seat he will vacate when his term expires just might, unlike the usual light-as-air endorsements of has-been politicians, carry some weight.

Mr. Lieberman is loathed by Democratic leftists in Connecticut. Hell hath no fury like that of a progressive scorned.

Progressive radicals, feeling their oats, were prepared to rejoice heartily and even strew a few rose petals at the senator’s feet had he yielded to them following the Lieberman-Lamont primary, which was won by progressive heartthrob Ned Lamont. Mr. Lieberman, however, was not prepared to go quietly into that good night of whipped politicians; and so, having lost the primary, he challenged Mr. Lamont in a three way general election – and won.

This was not the way to win friends and influence Connecticut progressives. If the progressive movement in Connecticut had an imam in it, a political fatwa would have been urged against Mr. Lieberman by progressives such as former Lamont campaign director Tom Swan, the head of the far left Connecticut Citizens Action Group (CCAG).

Mr. Lieberman’s political activity in the senate following his general election defeat of Mr. Lamont has only enraged the progressives further. While Mr. Lieberman, a professed Independent, has caucused with Democrats in the Senate, he has, on some issues of importance to progressives -- war and peace, for example -- gone his own way. Mr. Lieberman’s primary loss to Mr. Lamont , the senator claimed, liberated him to be his own man. In this, he has followed in the wake of another party-independent, former senator and governor, no-man-but-yours Lowell Weicker, infamous for using his party as a foil to advance his own political interests.

Now comes what may be Mr. Lieberman’s final bow-out blow – a possible endorsement of Republican Chris Shays for Mr. Lieberman’s’ soon to be open seat. According to a recent report in “The Hill,” Mr. Shays, who has announced he intends to challenge in a Republican primary former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, is a longtime friend and colleague of Mr. Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman does carry some weight in what used to be called moderate wing of the Democratic Party, but in recent years that wing has been clipped by lean and hungry progressives, even as the moderate wing of the Republican Party has moved rightward. The political gap between Republicans and Democrats over the past couple of decades has not become deeper or wider; but as bridges continue to be burned, the gap becomes more and more unbridgeable. Friendly gestures across the political aisle are now considered treacherous displays of near treason by those in warring camps with knives in their brains. The vital center now has been cleft in two. There are two moderate centers, a remnant in New England within the Republican Party and a Southern moderate faction within the Democratic Party.

Mr. Shays is part of New England’s nearly vanished moderate Republican nub, and though he has said his eyes are fixed on the general election prize, he must get over the hump of a primary to compete in a general election. A world has changed since Mr. Shays last strutted his moderation in the U.S. House of Representatives. Losing a race to present U.S. Rep. Jim Himes in 2008, Mr. Shays, who following his defeat left Connecticut for points south, became the last Republican moderate in New England, the first time in almost 150 years that no Republican represented the New England states in the nation’s capital.

Some have accused Mr. Shays of being a carpetbagger, a foolish claim easily disposed of. The real sticking point is that, the political vectors having changed radically since Mr. Shays left the congress, time may have made of moderation a pointless exercise in futility.

Where is the point where a moderate may safely stand as Connecticut and the union both totter towards a Grecian denouement?

Greenberg Calls Upon Donovan To Quit Redistricting Committee

2011-09-17T08:46:00.003-04:00

Mark Greenberg, a Republican running for the House in the 5th District, has called upon Chis Donovan, the Democratic Speaker of the state House running for the same seat, to step down from the redistricting commission that will recommend new borders for Connecticut’s five U.S. House of Representative districts.
The committee is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and Mr. Donovan is the only member of the commission who will be seeking higher office.

Other members of the commission are:

Senator Martin Looney, (D, 11th District)
Representative Sandy Nafis, (D, Newington)
Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams, (D, 29th District)
Minority Leader Representative Lawrence Cafero, (R, 142nd District)
Senator Len Fasano, (R, 34th District)
Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, (R, 28th District)
Representative Arthur O'Neill, (R, 69th District)

“Chris Donovan,” Mr. Greenberg noted in a press release, “is a declared candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 5th District and his participation on the redistricting commission is as blatant a conflict of interest as I have ever seen. In fact, I’m surprised that Chris does not see this for himself.

“A declared candidate sitting on the panel that is recommending new district boundaries gives the absolute worst appearance. Our elected officials must be committed to transparent and open government. By not stepping down, Chris Donovan is engaging in the same old back-room politics and seeking an unfair political advantage. If he refuses to step down, I believe Connecticut voters will see right through his true motives.”

Perhaps. But the true motives of any legislative mover in the General Assembly are hardly transparent. Mr. Donovan – the Speaker of the State House, a position comparable in influence to President of the Senate Don Williams, both of whom steer the business of the General Assembly – is hardly an equal among equals.

In the political barnyard, George Orwell noted in his novel “Animal Farm,” everyone is equal; but the pigs are more equal. Both the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House wield more influence than any other legislative members of the Gerrymander Commission.

So inordinate is Donovan's influence in the General Assembly that at times the Speaker has overturned the gubernatorial ambitions of both Republicans and Democrats. Last June, when SEBAC and Governor Dannel Malloy were pulling budgetary taffy, the coalition of state unions having rejected the governor’s Plan A, Mr. Malloy wanted the General Assembly (read: Mr. Donovan and Mr. Williams) to pass a bill that would calculate pension payouts without including overtime pay.

The bill passed in the Senate but met grief in the House when Mr. Donovan, long a step-and-fetch-it for unions, refused to bring it up for a vote.

Much later, after Mr. Malloy touched SEBAC with his cattle prod, forcing union leaders to accede to PlanA2, the governor was asked by Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender what should happen now with the bill in the House.
While the SEBAC-Malloy-Donovan-Williams boosted from three to five years the pension calculation method employed for new employees hired since July, tens of thousands of employees were untouched by the more severe pension calculations – until 2022, ten years down the road.

Never mind, said Mr. Malloy, overtime in the future would be reduced through better management practices. Mr. Donovan, now running for the U.S. House in the Connecticut’s 5th District, no doubt appreciated Mr. Malloy’s accommodation. Mr. Donovan will need union support to give him an edge over his competitors in the upcoming election.

The now infamous Gerrymander – a district so shaped by influential politicians to give them an advantage they might not otherwise enjoy in a (small “d”) democratic election – was named after governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry, who signed a bill that redrew state election districts, one of which was so distorted that it resembled in outline a salamander.

The Gerrymander Commission should not permit Mr. Donovan, the largest and most influential pig in the legislative barnyard, to shape a district he hopes to claim in a democratic election. Mr. Donovan is the only legislative member in the above list currently running in a U.S, Senate district that may change as a result of his participation in the committee over which he will wield, by virtue of his position as House leader, an inordinate influence.

Mr. Donovan should withdraw from the commission. Failing that, he should be booted out for the following reason: The Speaker’s participation will forever taint a process that should be non-partisan, fair and un-piggy.

Blumenthal’s Two Faces

2011-09-14T09:54:00.003-04:00

A newspaper has noted in an editorial rough-up of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal that energy costs in Connecticut are among the highest in the nation, owing in part to the former attorney general’s itchy trigger finger.

As an AG with attitude, Mr. Blumenthal, who even now understands little about how the free market works, very quickly intervened in a host of self-serving situations to prevent an increase in the supply of widely available energy products.

The easiest, quickest and most rational way to reduce the cost of a product is to increase its supply. When we have a surfeit of oranges or gas or any other consumable product, the price of the product is reduced and the consumer benefits from the abundant supply because his monthly costs are correspondingly reduced, which means he has more money to spend on products that may disappoint some politicians such as Mr. Blumenthal – say, gas guzzling cars or wine, women and song – but the trickling down to consumers of abundant low cost products is what keeps the country humming along.

When, during his successful run for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Blumenthal’s Republican opponent asked the attorney general to explain how a job was created, the poor thing stumbled like a doe with its hoof caught in a snare through a tortuous and wrongheaded explanation. He hobbled along on his shattered foot as best he could, but his answer suggested that all the good and acceptable products would in the future be stamped “made in Washington D.C.”

As attorney general, Mr. Blumenthal’s quarrel with Connecticut’s energy suppliers centered upon the energy product itself; even now he regards some energy products – nuclear, oil derivatives and other affordable resources frowned upon by radical neo-pagan Greens – as the devil’s paw, toxic to Mother Earth and less friendly than, say, bird slaughtering wind turbines and other futuristic unaffordable and undeveloped energy sources.

If Mr. Blumenthal “was responsible for anything,” the paper observed, “it was choking off supply while demand was increasing, and that meant rising rates for families and businesses. Indeed, while he was attorney general, inflation-adjusted electric rates in the state rose almost six times faster than the national average.”

Now that Mr. Blumenthal has moved from the attorney general’s office to the U.S. Senate, he is finding it difficult to leave behind his old public persona. Old habits die hard. The new face Mr. Blumenthal will unveil as he progresses up the Beltway ladder -- a senator “who is willing to work hard for Connecticut” -- is yet in its fetal stage. The new mask is not yet in place on either of Mr. Blumenthal’s faces.

And so, when Connecticut Light and Power (CL&P) intimated it might raise rates to cover losses from the recent tropical storm, an unforgiving and relentless Mr. Blumenthal dashed off one of his attorney general philippics denouncing the energy supplier.

Sure, the hurricane -- downgraded in Connecticut to a tropical storm – resulted in unusual expenditures. But now, when some householders in the state were suffering from the battering, was no time to recover costs by raising prices. Mr. Blumenthal did not in his letter suggest a more convenient time.

Mr. Blumenthal was troubled, very troubled, by a suggestion made in a state-wide newspaper that CL&P “will be considering steps to recoup financial losses from this storm by raising utility rates on the very customers who have been left without power. This suggestion for raising rates is unacceptable. I urge CL&P to immediately and publicly disavow and abandon this idea and assure the people of Connecticut that they will not be forced to bear this additional burden.”

There was no immediate disavowal forthcoming and, had Mr. Blumenthal retained his options as attorney general, his profound disappointment would have been accompanied by a threat to sue the toxic producing energy suppliers, thus reducing their obscene profit margin, thus forcing CL&P to maintain costs through attrition – worker reduction, a reliance on out of state staff and resources, annoying expedients that make it less possible for energy suppliers to respond with alacrity to occasional tropical storms that race through the state like media hungry politicians who leave in their wake shattered economies and businesses too big to fail that ultimately must be rescued by frequent transfusions of taxpayer’s blood.

And so the merry dance goes on and on, benefiting lawyers who live in regulatory webs like spiders, politicians on the make, and sundry other public nuisances – but not those consumers who ultimately bear the costs of political excess.

Shays Promises Slugfest

2011-09-11T14:26:00.003-04:00

In a brief interview with Hartford Courant writer Rick Green, former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays has given an indication that he will pull no punches in his likely Republican Party primary with Linda McMahon.

Mr. Shays told Mr. Green that Mrs. McMahon’s record as a former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) will be an issue in his campaign.

"Her record and her conduct,” Mr. Shays said, “are an important part of the process. Everything that she's done is going to be an important part of the campaign. I'm not going to take punches. I'm not a Quaker."

Mr. Green writes that Mr. Shays “also promised to stick to his moderate Republican roots. ‘I'm not going to try to win the primary and lose the general election.’"

A possible battle between Mr. Shays and Mrs. McMahon is certain – provided Mr. Shays sticks to his script – to have a “déjà vu all over again” flavor to it, Mr. Shays serving as a double for former Rep. Rob Simmons, who lost to Mrs. McMahon in a Republican Primary and was rather peevish about his loss.

Both Mr. Simmons and Mr. Shays were “moderate” Republicans, each of whom lost to fairly moderate Democratic contenders. Mr. Shays had the distinction of being the last moderate Republican congressman in New England, the breed having died out with him.

Mr. Shays is not quite ready for a re-run. The former congressman left Connecticut for parts South after his loss and may have a little boning up to do on national issues before he takes a hammer to Mrs. McMahon’s likely run for office.

In the meantime, Mr. Shay’s Democratic opponents also will outfit themselves with brass knuckles. On the Democratic side, present U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy and former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz will be struggling for an opportunity to meet the winner of the Republican Primary on the field of battle, and neither Democratic candidate is a Quaker.

Mr. Murphy, who defeated long term U.S. Rep Nancy Johnson, also regarded as a moderate Republican, is on his way to becoming a perpetual politician. His very first job in politics was as an intern to U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul; he managed Charlotte Koskoff’s near upset campaign against Mrs. Johnson, and also worked for a couple of years in the late 90’s for then State Senate Majority Leader George Jepsen, now Connecticut’s Attorney General. Mr. Murphy’s work record is unblemished by any connection with the real world economy. Mrs. Bysiewicz recent political background needs no introduction, beyond noting that comparisons have been made between her and Lady Macbeth. Neither of the two Democrats are inept in exploiting the logs in the eyes of their Republican opponents, and both would be delighted to see blood on the Republican Party primary floor.

Mr. Shays’ record in office is not without blemish. One may expect Democratic operatives to make much ado about Mr. Shays’ former felonious campaign manager, Michael Sohn, who absconded with more than $250,000 in money filched from Mr. Shays’ 2008 campaign against present Rep. Jim Himes, widely regarded as more moderate than, say, the tempestuous John Larson, a U.S. 1st District Rep who will be replaced by a Republican moments after Hell freezes over.

It is not precisely accurate to say that Mr. Sohn took money from Mr. Shays. The ten most generous donors in the 2008 campaign were individuals and PACs associated with large financial firms, and the money was stolen from them. Mr. Sohn may have been, at least in sprit, a larval Democrat in supposing that the ill-gotten gains of the super-rich were in some sense his due.

There is a delicate irony associated with Mr. Shays’ troubles that is not likely to be noticed by thuggish roustabouts in both the Republican and Democratic Parties who are interested in bruising Mrs. McMahon because of her unsavory association with wrestlers or Mr. Shays because of his fatal inattention to the felonious Mr. Sohn.

The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), a group whose mission it is to promote and defend citizens' First Amendment political rights of speech, assembly, and petition, noting that Shays had for well over a decade “fought tirelessly to enact greater restrictions on campaign speech, finally succeeding with the passage of the Shays-Meehan (or "McCain-Feingold") bill in 2002,” observed, following Mr. Sohn’s arrest, “…it is ironic that the Shays campaign may now face added penalties from the Federal Election Commission. It seems a bit absurd, but that's how it works when campaigns are victims of embezzlement - the embezzler is usually someone with the ability to alter campaign finance reports in order to cover his tracks, so as a result the campaign files false reports with the FEC.”

Noting that corruption inheres in corrupt individuals, CCP wondered whether Mr. Shays ever would be forced to face “the cruelest moment of all - will Mr. Sohn's actions force Mr. Shays to realize that he spent much of his political career attempting to restrict the speech of his fellow private citizens, without accomplishing much of anything having to do with public corruption?”

It is a point not likely to be pressed by Mr. Shays’ possible Democratic opponents, some of whom look upon campaign finance reform as the holy grail of politics. But there are vigorous Constitutional proponents around every corner in the Republican Party barracks for whom Mr. Shays’ ardent support of McCain-Feingold – the campaign finance bill that was supposed to eliminate corruption – remains a red flag waved before a bull’s nose. And these folks, talking a page from Barry Goldwater’s adage that moderation in the pursuit of liberty may be a vice, are not Quakers.

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2011-09-10T10:23:00.002-04:00

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The Skeletons In Blumenthal’s Closet

2011-09-02T11:37:00.002-04:00

Very quietly – much too quietly – Attorney General George Jepsen has closed “513 of the 699 whistleblower cases he inherited from his predecessor, former Attorney general Richard Blumenthal, according to a storycirculated by The Associated Press (AP) and published in the Washington Post.

During his campaign for Attorney General, Mr. Jepsen was pressed by Republican candidate for attorney general Martha Dean quickly dispose of cases handled by Mr. Blumenthal during his 20 year tenure. Mrs. Dean ran for attorney general twice, once against the popular Mr. Blumenthal in 2002 and again in 2010. In the course of the Jepsen-Dean debates, Mr. Jepsen seemed particularly sensitive to delays in resolving such cases, and Mrs. Dean was insistent that, should she be selected as attorney general, she would immediately institute a review of Mr. Blumenthal’s crippling backlog and close cases that never should have been prosecuted, tendering apologies to those of Mr. Blumenthal’s litigation victims who were left for years to hang on hooks in the attorney general’s own private torture chambers. A good many of Mr. Blumenthal’s suits against persons and companies were left unresolved after more than four years of litigation.

In virtually all his prosecutions, Mr. Blumenthal sent out press releases to most, if not all, Connecticut media outlets. The recipient of one of Mr. Blumenthal’s press releases dutifully would advertise the prosecution, occasionally printing the releases almost verbatim, as well as subsequent releases relating to the case at most stages of a long and tortuous litigation process. National outlets were also inundated with media releases that, we now discover, were unnecessarily destructive to 513 of Mr. Blumenthal’s targets.

Unfortunately, not as many news outlets as have printed press releases relating to the cases closed by Mr. Jepsen will print follow up stories concerning the vindication of the victims of Mr. Blumenthal’s unnecessary prosecutions.

Mr. Jepsen, who told the AP in an interview that many of the probes he dismissed “lacked merit,” is to be congratulated for having acted so expeditiously in his review. The number of cases dismissed in which “something meaningfully wrong is going on,” Mr. Jepsen told the AP, was small.

Matt O’Connor of SEBAC, a coalition of state employee unions, remarked that he could not recall “such a large number of whistleblower cases being closed. But because allegations of fraud or shoddy work by government agencies and contractors are protected from public release, he said there’s no way to know why Jepsen acted.”

Jepsen said he terminated several probes of companies and organizations, according to the AP report, “because he and the companies settled the dispute ‘or it may be that there’s not very much there.’”

Mr. Jepsen warned that public officials should tread carefully in those cases in which the regulation of business and job creation was at stake and invited a comparison between himself and Mr. Blumenthal. He said of himself, “I’m a pretty low-key person. I like to see all sides of an issue before I jump in. My background academically and professionally and politically is non-confrontational. We do plenty of litigation here but I just generally view litigation ought to be as a last resort.”

Jepsen noted that he “has been a political ally of Blumenthal’s for decades, even working as an intern for Blumenthal in 1979, and that any contrast between the two is ‘really more my own style and background’than it is about policy differences,” according to the AP report.

Mr. Blumenthal responded to the implied charges of incompetence in the AOP story with a mixture of injured innocence and chutzpah.

Refusing to comment decision made by his successor, Mr. Blumenthal said he kept cases open even though they were not active because, according to the AOP story, “important information could always develop later. He said he had no knowledge of which cases were closed and declined to comment on differences between his and Jepsen’s approaches to the job.”

Mr. Blumenthal -- who used his accomplishments as attorney general as a springboard to higher office as a Democratic U.S. Senator – told the AP “I would say very emphatically my record speaks for itself, for my aggressive and proactive approach to law enforcement to protect business people, consumers, all the people of Connecticut.”

The AP, the recipient of thousands of Blumenthal press releases over the years, noted in its story that Mr. Jepsen’s approach “is a marked contrast to Blumenthal, who was elected to the U.S. Senate last year after 20 years as attorney general. Blumenthal sued numerous companies over allegations of consumer rip-offs, illegal dumping and violations of workers’ rights in the name of agencies such as the Department of Consumer Protection and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.”

At some point – one hopes against hope – Mr. Jepsen will post on the attorney general’s website a list of the 315 cases Mr. Blumenthal improperly prosecuted as attorney general by case name and docket number so that journalists in the state may review then in the light of Mr. Jepsen’s review and dismissals.

In connection with one case settled after much litigation, Connecticut Commentary noted that Mr. Blumenthal had been much in the habit of hanging his victims on litigation hooks for long periods of time, during which they became progressively poorer as their reputation were battered by Mr. Blumenthal’s artfully worded press releases. Those who relied on Mr. Blumenthal’s many releases, one likes to think, have some obligation in restoring the reputation and public standing of those who – in 513 of the 699 whistleblower cases Mr. Blumenthal litigated – were innocent as charged. A legislative review of the cases dismissed by Mr. Jepsen, with a view to establishing a less personalized method of prosecuting cases in the attorney general's office, would not be out of order.

Quantifying Media Bias

2011-09-01T14:28:00.002-04:00

It is often said, mostly by conservatives, that the main stream media is biased in a liberal direction. Over the years, some studies confirming bias have drifted in: Slate magazine, for instance, polled its writers and discovered – big surprise! – that about 90 percent of the lads and ladies identified themselves as liberal. A similar poll among the writers at, say, National Review likely would show a like degree of bias in a conservative direction. But these are not hard news sites.

Some time ago, a more “scientific” study was done in connection with major news outlets, and again – big surprise! – the pollsters discovered that a preponderance of mainstream news writers were liberal. The authors of that study may or may not have been surprised to discover the Wall Street Journal’s news pages -- not its commentary pages, which are widely recognized as conservative – rate, according to a study done by Tim Groseclose, as the most liberal in the nation.

Until Mr. Groseclose, then a professor of political science and economics at UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo, then a public policy professor at the University of Chicago and now holder of an endowed chair in social sciences at the University of Missouri, first published in 2005 a scientific study of media bias in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Harvard University publication widely regarded in academia as one of the four top scholarly economic journals on in the country, there was no reliable scientific methodology to quantify bias in news outlets.

Having first produced a method that allowed a rigorous quantitative analysis, the two discovered that most major American news outlets, which included newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, newsweeklies such as Time and Newsweek, newsweekly television shows such as CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, and Internet sites such as – big surprise! -- the Drudge Report contained a sharp liberal bias.

After assigning an ADA-based number to the members of the House and Senate, Groseclose and Milyo then examined the frequency with which individual members of Congress, in bolstering their floor and committee arguments, cited the research of various think tanks and advocacy groups around Washington and elsewhere—organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution. By combining the frequency numbers with the PQs of the members of Congress, Groseclose and Milyo were able to assign PQs to the top 50 cited think tanks themselves—a far more objective way, in their thinking, to assign an ideological perspective to a think tank than simply to assume, for example, that the Heritage Foundation is conservative and the Sierra Club is liberal.

In a third step, Groseclose and Milyo quantified the frequency with which stories by reporters for various news outlets cited research and quoted spokesmen from those same think tanks as they fleshed out the facts that they reported. That enabled the two to calculate the outlets’ slant quotient, or SQ. As Groseclose and Milyo pointed out (and as Groseclose reiterates in Left Turn), the news stories themselves were seldom false or inaccurate. There was almost never anything intentionally dishonest about the reporting. It was just that the reporters presented their stories in a way that reflected, probably unconsciously, the reporters’ liberal ideological leanings. They used material from liberal think tanks and advocacy groups far more frequently than material from the tanks’ conservative opposite numbers. They highlighted or omitted facts as their personal political predilections dictated, even though their stories, in an effort to maintain journalistic impartiality, might contain a quotation or two from spokesmen for the conservative side.

In a review of Mr. Groseclose’s new book, “Left Turn,” Charlot Adams reports in the Weekly Standard:

“The range of SQs that Groseclose and Milyo calculated was shocking. The most liberally biased news outlet proved to be the Wall Street Journal (its news pages, that is, not its conservative editorial and opinion pages). The WSJ turned out to have the slant quotient of the average Democrat, about 85, only a few points below the 89.2 PQ of the late Ted Kennedy. Of the rest of the mainstream media, only Fox News (with an SQ of about 42) and the Washington Times (with an SQ of about 40) registered below the midpoint—and both outlets are way more liberal in their reporting than the average Republican, whose PQ is less than 20. The Drudge Report, although regarded as troglodytic by progressives, has an SQ of around 50—that is, its reporting is about as centrist as the average American voter these days.”

Matt Drudge, centrist – who woulda thunk it?

The No Way Busway

2011-08-30T19:48:00.000-04:00

Governor Dannel Malloy’s notoriously expensive busway proposition – on completion, the rapid transit project from New Britain to Hartford spanning 9.4 miles will cost more than $573 million, about $952 per inch – has engaged the interest of a few penny pinching legislators, among them state Senator Joe Markley and Rep. Whit Bette, both of whom have co-signed a letter written to House Speaker John Boehner urging Mr. Boehner to reject $460 million in federal funding for Malloy’s folly.

The busway is a prime example of politicians leveraging federal dollars: The federal government announces the availability of funds for a state project, say $460 million to build a ziggurat in New Britain. The governor is asked to pony up a modest $113 million, at a time when the state has accumulated crippling deficits and is bleeding jobs. Turning the proposition over in his mind, the governor, always alert to charges that he has fiddled while his state burns, decides to swallow the proposition, as they say, hook, line and sinker.

A good deal, right? We get $460 million from the feds on an expenditure of $113 million. Who could be so impertinent to object? So what, really, if the busway is a waste of money. It is a waste of other people’s money -- federal money. What has that got to do with us? If the Feds want to throw money out their windows in the direction of Connecticut, should we not grab it?

Now, along come critics of the deal. And in this case, the critics are not merely members of the chattering class whose business it is to blow hot and cold in columns that may concern the state. They are two state legislators. How to handle this delicate situation?

Best to ignore them until the embers burst into flame.

The Hartford New Britain busway is a political streetcar named desire. It is visible proof of an arcane proposition that in times of recession and national humiliation salvation must trickle down from beneficent congressmen in Washington, to be gratefully received by local politicians who in the past have not escaped the notice of influential writers:

Will Rogers: "This country has come to feel the same when congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer…It is awful hard to get people interested in corruption unless they can get some of it."

H. L. Mencken: "If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

Mark Twain: "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress… We have the best congress money can buy."

William F. Buckley, Jr.: "No one since the Garden of Eden -- which the serpent forsook in order to run for higher office -- has imputed to politicians great purity of motive."

Thomas Sowell: "Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default. ... The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously."

G. K. Chesterton: "It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."

Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1866: "No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session."

Joe Markley: ““I am not concerned about leaving federal funds on the table. Federal or state, it’s all our money, and we shouldn’t waste it. Projects like this shouldn’t even be entertained until we get our fiscal house in order. I find it ironic that we are in the midst of a $6.2 billion deficit and the Governor is asking the legislature to spend more money we don’t have.”

All of the writers cited above were or are Americans, with the exception of Mr. Chesterton, here quoted simply because the sentiment he expresses, humorously but forcefully, is as American as apple pie. The point in choosing the remarks cited above, almost at random, is to show that that caustic commentary on the foibles of politicians is itself as American as apple pie.

So then, why have we seen so little rip roaring commentary in connection with Mr. Malloy’s redundant busway, an outrageously expensive people carrier that would be prohibitively expensive had we not swallowed the tempting fable that the cost of the project will be assumed by altruistic strangers?

Mr. Betts noted in the letter he signed jointly with Mr. Markley, “This is a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer dollars. In the end the annual cost to the state is expected to be $11 million, ticket sales estimates are $4 million leaving a $7 million hole. I am against spending state money for a transportation project that is expected to incur losses. ”

And Mr. Betts is not here tickling a funny bone. One wonders how many legislators in the Democratic dominated General Assembly are more than willing to finance a project “that is expected to incur losses?”

The answer is: Nearly all of them. That answer would not surprise any of the political commentators cited above. On September 12, Mr. Markley will be the guest speaker addressing attendees at a Talk of Connecticut Dinner With Dan (Lovallo) at the Stonewell Restaurant in Farmington. The subject of Mr. Markley’s remarks will be the busway to and from nowhere, and Mr. Markley is known to have a charming sense of humor. The cost of the dinner, at $25, will be considerably less than the cost of the busway boondoggle.

Those who wish to attend the event may do so by calling for reservations at (860) 677-8855