Foley Charges Partly Vindicated By Critic

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea -- T.S. Elliot

Kevin Rennie, a Harford Courant columnist, is regarded by some in politics as the Torquemada of Connecticut commentators – especially in matters of what one might call political ethics. Many politicians have felt his bite and winced.

After an appearance on WFSB’s “Face the State” with Dennis House, Tom Foley, who is expected in the near future to announce his bid for governor on the Republican Party ticket, had much to wince at.

In the most recent Rennie column, Mr. Foley was still mercilessly flailed – “Foley served a dog's breakfast to viewers in his return as a candidate for governor. Foley was a flailing amateur. He's been unable to provide proof for some of his allegations, despite claiming they met some journalistic standard that lives a solitary life in Foley's head” – but into this whipping crept a softer tone.

One of Mr. Foley’s supposed boneheaded allegations was that the relationship between Governor Dannel Malloy’s former media liaison and flack catcher, Roy Occhiogrosso, and Connecticut crony capitalist head of state was unseemly, profitable to them both and unethical under the standard of ethics embraced by Jesus Christ -- even though the bi-profitable relationship was perfectly legal. A transcription of Mr. Foley’s remarks may be found here at “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State.”

In the course of his “Face the State” interview, Mr. Foley noted that he was relying on multiple reliable sources who wished to remain anonymous, after which he spoke the fatal words: “But these are all things that have been told to me by more than one reliable source, and so it meets a journalistic standard.”

The intake of breath among Connecticut scriveners was audible from New London to Hartford. One could smell brimstone in the air: Who does he think he is, Woodward or Bernstein? These were the two renowned reporters who, relying at the beginning of their investigation chiefly on a single reliable source, “Deep Throat,” finally shoved Tricky Dick Nixon off the political stage? “Deep Throat” remained anonymous for decades after the Nixon putsch, finally outing himself just before he kicked the bucket.

The gauntlet thrown down to Connecticut’s media by Mr. Foley – just investigate this stuff – has now been taken up in part by Mr. Rennie.

And the result is a softer, more gentle Rennie:

“This is state government, so there's always money to be found for friends, no matter what the condition of the economy. I overstated the case last week when I wrote that the contract to Global Strategies had been awarded by competitive bid (emphasis mine).

“Three insiders at Access Health CT invited three public relations companies to submit proposals for the lucrative contract. They did not open the process to the many firms that could meet the basic requirements of a public relations contract whether with innovative or stale ideas. The insiders included former Enfield Democratic state Rep. Kathleen Tallarita, Access Health CT's head of government relations and communications. In 2012, Tallarita became the rare suburban legislator to lose her seat in a party primary.”

This sort of thing happens frequently in Connecticut politics: Backs are scratched; friends are rewarded, enemies punished. Good investigative reporters occasionally uncover dubious, possibly unethical practices when a gored enemy plops a story on their desks. These sources are generally given protective anonymity as the reporter turns over a few rocks and examines the hitherto undisclosed swarm of ethical muck beneath them.

In a one party state, the possibility of such disclosures is markedly reduced. And there is no reporter in the state who does not now know that Connecticut has crossed the bar: The state’s entire U.S. Congressional Delegation is solidly Democratic; the Democratic Party boasts in Mr. Malloy its first Democratic governor in more than two decades; the state’s General Assembly is solidly Democratic. We know from the history we do not wish to repeat that the one party state is more successfully corrupt than the state that has an active two party system in which political power is evenly and justly shared. It’s what you think you know for certain and don’t that kills you. In a one party state the rocks are larger and more immovable.

Moving the rock that seals the tomb requires a media that is unflinchingly non-partisan, alert, energetic and courageous.

The First Murphy-McMahon Debate

The following slug appeared on the front page of a Hartford paperthe day after a Face the State debate between Democratic U.S. Representative Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon, both of whom are vying for U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat:

“Another 90 seconds and no answers,'' he [Mr. Murphy] said, "not a single specific cut that Linda McMahon would support, and another example of fealty to a supply-side trickledown economics that just hasn't worked."

The statement bears close examination, but Mrs. McMahon did not during the debate force such an examination.

In an earlier debate with then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Mrs. McMahon caused some agita when she asked Mr. Blumenthal to explain how jobs are created. Clearly over his head in deep water, Mr. Blumenthal sputtered an answer that showed he did not at all understand how businesses produce jobs.

The embarrassing moment was not fatal to Mr. Blumenthal – he went on to win the race for departing U. S. Senator Chris Dodd’s seat – but it did rip a veil from his persona. Like most politicians who promote command economies, Mr. Blumenthal thought at the time – and still believes – that jobs are made by government intervention in the private market place.

Mrs. McMahon went on to answer her own question:

“Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how your create jobs: An entrepreneur takes a risk. He or she believes that he creates a good or service that is sold for more than it costs to make it. If an entrepreneur thinks he can do that, he creates a job.”

In her debate with Mr. Murphy, Mrs. McMahon easily might have asked Mr. Murphy to tell the listening audience precisely what he meant by“supply side economics,” a term of reproach used by Democrats who have not read any of the essays or books written by George Gilder, the Saint Paul of supply-side theory. A much too brief discussion of Mr. Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty” may be found on the Connecticut Commentary site here: “Of Capitalism I Sing.”

Mr. Murphy passionately supports Obamacare, passed by Democrats in Congress who did not read the bill, but it is plain from much of what he has said concerning health care that he would prefer a single payer system, which is to say a health care system run by Washington D.C. bureaucrats and politicians such as himself who prefer command economies. In such a system, health care would “trickle down” from national health care administrators and administrative technicians in the states to doctors and patients. In fact, the single payer insurance system preferred by Mr. Murphy is an extreme form of trickledown economics: Tax money is collected by bureaucrats in Washington and disbursed only to insurance companies that satisfy the rigorous demands of an authoritarian government. The ensuing regulations effectively prevent the economic creativity and vitality so apparent in free economies.

Mrs. McMahon might have asked Mr. Murphy during their debate why he preferred such an extreme form of trickledown economics. And in defending privately owned insurance companies from a government that seeks to control the means of production through excessive regulation, she easily might have cited the following passage from an essay recently written by Mr. Gilder:

“Capitalism is the supreme expression of human creativity and freedom, an economy of mind overcoming the constraints of material power. It is not simply a practical success, a ‘worst of all systems except for the rest of them,’ a faute de mieux compromise redeemed by charities and regulators and proverbially ‘saved by the New Deal.’ It is dynamic, a force that pushes human enterprise down spirals of declining costs and greater abundance. The cost of capturing technology is mastery of the underlying science. The means of production of entrepreneurs are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts. Enduring are only the contributions of mind and morality.

“All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. Creativity is the foundation of wealth.”

And that is why command economies frustrate the production of wealth – they force upon creative free markets a cookie cutter regulatory apparatus that benefits only the promoters of command economies. Mr. Murphy is one of them.

Mr. Murphy sustained his points in the debate through sheer bluster and chutzpah. He insisted, for instance, that some points in Mrs. McMahon’s economic program were lifted from Washington sources, a point hotly denied by Mrs. McMahon. She is, of course, a Republican, and many of her economic proposals certainly align with those of her party. The same is true of Mr. Murphy, who appears to have borrowed much of his rhetoric from his national party’s playbook, including the absurd claim that Mrs. McMahon is waging a "war on women” because she opposes the Democrat’s war on Christian doctrine.

Of course, in any debate with Mr. Murphy, Mrs. McMahon must be careful to give credit to the architects of a free economy, lest she be accused of lifting ideas from free market proponents much in the way Mr. Murphy has “lifted” a good deal of his command economy notions secondhand from President Barrack Obama’s all purpose made-in-Chicago campaign platform – including the absurd“war on women” meme, the national Democratic platform pro-abortion entente and even the “trickledown economics” rhetorical head fake deployed by Mr. Murphy in his first debate with Mrs. McMahon.

House Grills Donovan

“Embattled” is a word you do not want waltzing around with your name on the eve of a U.S. Congressional election. “Embattled 5th District Congress candidate Chris Donovan,” the Register Citizen reported, “in a taping of WFSB TV’s ‘Face the State’ Thursday, said he has no plans to quit the race even if his campaign’s troubles start to adversely affect other Democrats and party leaders urge him to leave.

Mr. Donovan is under scrutiny by the FBI for campaign financing irregularities. His campaign finance director, Robert Braddock, is under arrest for having conspired to hide the identity of certain donors allegedly involved in influence peddling; and other Donovan connected officials, two of whom are directly connected with his U.S. Senate campaign, have been named in an affidavit supporting the arrest of Mr. Braddock.

Thanks to some impressive digging and nagging by manyreporters, the influence peddlers –tagged anonymously in the affidavit as CC1, CC2 and CC3 -- have now been identified as: Ray Soucy, a labor union activist and a vigorous supporter of Mr. Donovan lately suspended from his position as a correction industries supervisor at Cheshire state prison (CC1); a former “roll your own” smoke shop worker in Waterbury (CC2); and Joshua Nassi, Mr. Donovan’s fired campaign manager (CC3).

As the story unfolded, an uppity Governor Dannell Malloy, who has managed to shove his finger in many political and judicial pies, at first called upon Mr. Dovovan to make himself available to Connecticut’s media for questioning, demanding in rather stern tones that Mr. Donovan give “a full explanation of what he knows." Eventually, the governor calmed down.

Mr. Donovan and all the co-conspirators promptly lawyered-up. Stan Twardy, best known for his service in the administration of former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, was hauled in to conduct an in-house examination of the tangled web in the House Speaker’s office. Mr. Donovan hired a criminal lawyer, who advised her client that he was to respond to every media inquiry concerning the FBI investigation by saying he did not intend to comment on such matters, except to say, as he did repeatedly during the interview with Mr. House, that he was innocent of wrongdoing.

Apparently content that Mr. Donovan had done everything possible to satisfy the curiosity of Connecticut’s media – the same persistent interrogators who had forced the resignation from office of former Republican state Senate leader Lou DeLuca in a previous FBI sting operation-- Mr. Malloy, once an empathetic prosecutor, took a nap, convinced that Mr. Donovan had sufficiently teffloned himself. If Mr. Donovan were to excite among senators and the media the same sense of outrage that nudged Mr. DeLuca from office, the General Assembly would be burbling at this moment with whispers of hearings and impeachment.

"He's met the test of dismissing the individuals,” the governor said of Mr. Donovan.“He has said he had no prior knowledge. He's come forward to speak to the public," Malloy said. "I think the rest of it is up to the speaker and the public” … And Mr. House, who found himself face to face on Face the State with a political armadillo.

When Mr. House noted that neither the governor nor U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, whose seat Mr. Donovan hoped to commandeer, had endorsed him, the Speaker replied that Mr. Malloy was drawn to his Democratic primary opponent Elizabeth Esty, whose husband Daniel is Mr. Malloy’s Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), and then he tossed Harry Truman at Mr. House: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

Off in the distance, Leo Canty, one of the best know union operatives in the state, could be heard chanting, “There’s always people and events that will trip you up. This is just a slight trip in this race. … This is a hiccup and a glitch.” At an earlier union rally in Hartford, Mr. Donovan invoked the shade of Franklin Roosevelt.

“’I have my head held high. No one bought my involvement or my influence on any legislation, period,’ the embattled Speaker said. Touching on the controversy only in passing, Mr. Donovan said he wanted to talk about “fairness, dignity, respect. You take the first letter of each of them and what you get?-- ‘FDR.’”

Mr. Donovan boasted to Mr. House that he would win his primary against his two Democratic opponents, neither of whom is under investigation for possible influence peddling. When Mr. House gently prodded the Speaker, asking what would happen to his best laid plans should he be arrested, Mr. Donovan, according to Mr. House, “bristled.”