Another Embarrasing Video

A clip, courtesy of News Channel 8, shows a mano e mano between Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo and Merrick Alpert, who met unarmed in a Hallway to discuss democracy.

Alpert Stiffed By Democrats

The Day thinks Merrick Alpert, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s worst Democratic Party nightmare, might get stiffed at the upcoming Democratic nominating convention.

David Collins thinks Alpert will not be permitted to address the convention.

Alpert has consistently been turned away by town committee chairman who do not want him to interfere with the coronation of King Dick.

The final decision on speakers rests with the elected delegates of the rules committee, which won't meet until the eve of the convention.

According to Brian Lockhart’s blog, Alpert has supplied a list of the Democratic Town Committees that shut the door in his face, a who’s who of anti-democratic Democrats.

Blumenthal, Good For Business?

"To blame law enforcement for unemployment,” said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal at a forum sponsored by some of the companies and industries he has sued, “is beyond wrong, it's silly and shouldn't be given any credibility. In fact it is a disservice to public service itself and to the law-abiding, hard-working business people.”

The report from which the above quote is taken does not disclose the reaction from those in the audience to Blumenthal’s remarks, some of whom work for companies sued by Blumenthal.

At an earlier debate with Democratic opponent Merrick Alpert, Blumenthal answered a charge that his many suits have had a deleterious impact on Connecticut’s job growth by charging that, on the contrary, they enhanced business activity and actually create jobs.

This time, at a forum sponsored by some of Connecticut’s major companies, Blumenthal’s response was more polished and carefully modulated.

Almost all business, Blumenthal said, have nothing to fear from law enforcement:

"My job has been to enforce the law. What I'm hearing from this table is a philosophy of law enforcement that Bernie Madoff would love. We've just come through a period where lack of enforcement by the federal government enabled and encouraged one of the greatest economic catastrophes in our nation's history."

Not only do honest businesses follow the law, “they welcome the level playing field that strong law enforcement provides to every one of them," Blumenthal said. "They do not want to be out-competed and underbid by law breakers who save costs on the backs of our consumers or our hard-working men and women."

Actually, Blumenthal’s job is to defend state agencies in legal matters. The attorney general’s office was transformed from this rather modest purpose during the administration of then Attorney General Joe Lieberman, now a U.S. Senator, who advertised himself as the people’s lawyer. That job spec has been considerably enlarged by Blumenthal, under whose direction the hundreds of lawyers who work for him several years ago focused on a target in East Hartford, a computer business that supplied equipment for the state, quickly putting the business out of business.

During the forum, Alpert charged that Blumenthal had deliberately attempted to destroy a small business, Computer Plus Center, by means of a suit charging that the company had defrauded the state.

The owner was not Bernie Madoff, nor was the business as large as some of the corporations sued by Blumenthal whose representatives in the audience heard the attorney general say, by way of answer to a failed suit that may cost the state $18 million, “mistakes were made in that case.”

Who made the mistakes? This would have been the obvious question for anyone on the dais to put to Blumenthal.

A jury had determined that litigators working for the attorney general had improperly sued a company. Did the jury make the mistakes? Were the mistakes made by the prosecuting attorney who permitted the jury to see a discredited affidavit on the basis of which Blumenthal secured an ex parte judgment against the company that permitted him to effectively put Computer Plus Center out of business?

Blumenthal evidently did not agree that the jury finding and its multimillion dollar award provided justice in the case, thereby leveling the playing field for other litigation shy companies that might, in view of the jury’s finding, feel a trifle less cautious in moving into a state in which the attorney general has sued more than 800 companies in the last four years, many of them small Main Street rather than Wall Street businesses.

Instead, Blumenthal promised more litigation, boasted that the state had not paid out a dime and said he expected the award to be reversed on appeal, which may stretch the litigation well beyond the upcoming elections.

Blumenthal is expected to be nominated for the seat in the U.S. Senate left vacant upon U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s retirement. He has a commanding lead in the polls over his Republican challengers.

With more than a hundred lawyers at your back, though only a few of them litigate cases, company owners far less wealthy than Madoff eventually collapse under the litigation pressure and settle for deals that might have been struck before Blumenthal’s questionable legal badgering began.

Blumenthal is fond of saying that his office brings in more money to the state -- none of it audited regularly by outside inspectors -- than is spent by his office. But this rude calculus does not tally the amount of money lost to the state though attrition. The jury award to Computer Plus Center is an alarm bell ringing in the night: Given the awesome powers marshaled by the attorney general’s office, what business more comfortably situated in states with less aggressive attorneys general would want to set up shop in suit prone Connecticut?

A Blumenthal-Schiff Cage Match

A debate card featuring Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now running for the U.S. Senate seat Chris Dodd intends to vacate at the end of his term, and Peter Schiff, Connecticut’s economic Cassandra, would be far more interesting than the debate concluded March 1 between Blumenthal and incrementalist averse Merrick Alpert.

Debates that include candidates on fire always are spectacles worth our time. Americans, certainly more often than the British, tend to confuse passion with authenticity, and there is little doubt that Alpert was, in his debate with Blumenthal, a man aflame. Perhaps fortunately for the attorney general, Blumenthal may not have to debate Alpert again.

When the Republican debate rolled around at the university a day later, media adepts who had been expecting rhetorical fisticuffs between senatorial hopefuls Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons, both of whom had been peppering each other with e-mails and press releases, were disappointed and deflated. They had been expecting Thermopylae and got instead, as one commentator put it, “a snoozer of a debate.”

It was generally agreed by commentators who had packed away their telltale preferences for the duration of the debates that Alpert won his and Schiff won his, both having been pronounced more authentic than their plasticine opponents. One commentator, an ardent progressive, confessed he found Schiff’s honesty refreshing, though he was anguished by his message.

Schiff is a man on fire. The calculating Blumenthal is very much like Sen. Joe Lieberman, sometimes called the Hamlet of the U.S. Senate. Hamlet was thought to be too thoughtful for his own good. But in the end, not an advocate of incrementalism, he turned out to be a decisive man of action and an accomplished murderer.

In the presence of Schiff, and perhaps some other Republicans, Blumenthal would not be able to get away with asserting, as he did in the Merrick debate, that the litigatory actions of his office “actually create jobs, because businesses actually welcome competition and a level playing field.”

To pick up on just one point, it is folly to think that businesses would appreciate the way Blumenthal has used fatally defective affidavits to secure from judges in ex parte proceedings the authority to seize the business assets of companies that find themselves on the wrong end of Blumenthal’s constitutionally disruptive litigation. While Blumenthal’s senatorial narrative is centered on the black dealings of large, greedy, socially semi-conscious and unscrupulous companies, such as lung damaging tobacco giants, a partial listing of corporations in which the plaintiff has had an AG appearance from January 07 to the present  contains upwards of 900 entrees.

In the Merrick debate, Blumenthal intended to speak over the head of his opponent to an audience that would vote for him the general election. His narrative was carefully crafted to this purpose.

Merrick threw a wrench into the narrative by insisting that Blumenthal’s backing of President Barack Obama’s venture in Afghanistan was a) too expensive at a time when federal dollars might better be devoted to knotty domestic problems, and b) Bush-like in its wrong-headedness.

Blumenthal was flustered by Alpert's charge that he was a prevaricator at a time when the entire country was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, an accusation that easily could be launched at Blumenthal from the Republican side by Schiff, whose solutions to the malingering recession are, Schiff insists, painful but effective and necessary.

Like most regulators and redistributists, Blumenthal has a tough time wrapping his brain around the notion that an increase in distribution levels cannot occur in when the revenue to be distributed is on the downslide, usually the case in recessions and mini-depressions. When there is no soup in the soup kitchen, it is idle to speak of distributing soup to the poor – or to anyone else. Neither does Blumenthal understand that a complex ever changing regulatory apparatus introduces uncertainty into business activity that results in depressed markets, or he would not have insisted, laughably, that his suits have the effect of increasing business in the state.

This is the worst kind of hokum, far more dangerous in its effects than the peculations of politicians like Tammany Hall chief George Washington Plunkett or, coming closer to the heart of the 21st century, his modern equivalent, U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, who appears to have received a temporary indulgence from madam Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

A cage match between Schiff and Blumenthal might even wake up the commentators in Connecticut’s media who think wrestling matches are real rather than highly scripted staged events.

Alpert-Blumenthal

Debates are tricky things. There was no one, debate coaches for example, at the University of Hartford to formally score the debate between Merrick Alpert and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. But no one need wait for this to attempt to answer the question “Who won?

Answers please.