It Takes A Village (Of Idiots) To Make A City

H&R Block, the guys that help bewildered taxpayers send their “fair share” in tax receipts to federal and state governments, reported that Bridgeport, Connecticut was the highest taxed city in the country, and news outlets across the country ran with the item.

This brought out the beast in Bridgeport Mayor Bill Fitch, who issued a carefully calibrated response that appeared, among other places, in Lennie Grimaldi’s “Only in Bridgeport” blog.

The blockheads at Block simply got their figures wrong, said Mr. Finch. The Block study relied on an incorrect income-to-home valuation: “This study is based on a hypothetical family of three making $50,000 owning a home valued at $369,609.” However, “Median income of a Bridgeport resident is $38,000. The average home is valued at $170,000.”

While taxes in Bridgeport are high, Mr. Fitch announced, they are NOT the highest in the nation.

And even if one assumes the computations in the study are fair, there are mitigating circumstances: “I don’t dispute that our residents pay a lot of taxes–the state of Connecticut bases its revenues on an over reliance on property taxes, making it one of the more highly taxed states in the U.S. For cities like Bridgeport, which is one of the smallest municipalities in the country and the hub of nonprofit services such as hospitals, colleges, courts and jails, it means that we depend on state reimbursements to make up for lost revenues.”

The same mitigating circumstances apply to other large one-party cities in the state. Connecticut’s Capitol City, Hartford, is also small in area and, like Bridgeport, it is located in “one of the more highly taxed states in the U.S.” That would be Connecticut, which now may be accurately described as a one-party state. Democrats in Connecticut now control the governor’s office, both chambers of the General Assembly, all the state’s constitutional offices and Connecticut’s entire U.S. Congressional delegation. Sourpuss conservatives sometimes allege that Democrats also unduly influence Connecticut’s media and courts; such is the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party hegemon.

If Bridgeport were located in, say, South Carolina rather than high tax Connecticut, the tax burden falling on the shoulders of Bridgeportites would be considerably reduced. Mr. Fitch stopped short of recommending that Bridgeport should be moved to the Carolinas, or that its jails and nonprofit services such as hospitals, colleges and courts should be re-located to Greenwich, Connecticut. But there is more than a hint in Mr. Finch’s heartfelt plea that the state, one of the highest taxed states in the nation, should be a little more generous in sending tax relief to tax battered Bridgeport. Democrats in the Capitol city of Hartford generally make the same case: Our tax needs are increasing at the same time that our tax resources are diminishing.

Is there any connection between these diminishing tax resources and the tax burden in Bridgeport or other large Democrat dominated cities in Connecticut? If so, Mr. Fitch breathes not a word of it in his ardent defense of the ruling Democratic Party in his city. Could it be – is it possible? – that reductions in spending might provide the city of Bridgeport with tax resources that can no longer be drawn from the city’s overburdened taxpayers? If your taxes remain constant but you spend less, do you not realize an increase in disposable tax receipts? That is how people outside the political bubble save money, which they may then use to buy necessities – and only necessities: We are, after all, living in one of the top ten highest taxed states in the nation; why quibble over first place?

If there is a connection in Bridgeport and throughout Connecticut between spending and infinitely expanding budgets, the ruling party in the state is keeping that connection hidden behind mountains of smarmy equivocations.

Has Bridgeport at long last reached the end of its tax receipts rope? Not to worry. The Democratic mayors of cash strapped cities can always urge the one-party Democratic state, also cash strapped, to pay cities for their inability to collect taxes from hospitals and social service agencies. No need to put a break on spending. Happy times are just around the corner. One of the chief political benefits of the unitary city and state is that its administrators need never fear correction from an aroused citizenry determined to vote into office an alternative political party that, for all practical purposes, is invisible.

The Democrats’ Rowland Problem

One would have thought that former Governor John Rowland would have been safe from criticism after he had wandered into the profession of journalism following his stint in prison for having deprived the citizens of Connecticut of honest services.

As everyone knows, journalism, in the form of gossip, is the second oldest profession in the world, following close on the heels of prostitution which, as we recently have learned, is legal in Cartagena Columbia. Prostitution in Connecticut still is illegal, though an enlightened legislature has long since legalized “gaming” (AKA gambling) in order to tax it and fill the state’s depleted treasury with money gathered by the world’s third oldest profession, politics. Journalism is the natural evolution – some would say the perfection –of gossip. Could it be possible that that the crudely drawn depictions in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in France are first attempts at political cartooning made by the prehistoric ancestors of some politician-baiting modern relative?

Though Mr. Rowland had been for some time a member of the world’s third oldest profession, the shadow of the prison lies heavily upon him, even though Mr. Rowland, unlike Ernie Newton – the former state senator from Bridgeport who spent three years in the hoosegow for having evaded taxes and accepted bribes while in office – is not running for political office this year.

A released, rehabilitated and refurbished Mr. Newton, some commentators and reporters surmised prior to the Bridgeport nominating convention, had an even chance of being reelected to his old seat in the General Assembly, newly redesigned following redistricting and kept warm in the intervening years by state Senator Edwin Gomes. At 75 years young, Mr. Gomes, like many urban Democrats, is a magnet for union votes. Unfortunately, he has been rendered frail by recent triple bypass surgery, which opened the door to Mr. Newton, far more vigorous after his prison stay and determined to lift Bridgeport from the ashes.

Stumping in the city last January, Mr. Newton, an amateur evangelist, pithily summed up the Sermon on the Mount:“I've always lived by the philosophy that every sinner has a future and all saints have a past. I haven't been too happy with what I've seen in Bridgeport since I came home. This city needs a leader and I intend to be that person."

Entering the State Senate in 2003, Mr. Newton was appointed by then Senator Kevin Sullivan as Deputy President Pro Tempore, the third-highest leadership position in that august body of eloquent Ciceros. A booster rocket was attached to Mr. Sullivan’s own distinguished political career when he was appointed by Governor Dannel Malloy as the state’s Commissioner of Revenue Services, Connecticut’s chief tax collector. Mr. Newton’s post imprisonment ascendency is good news for Bridgeport and struggling politicians everywhere: Though the high may fall low, they easily bounce back because their nether regions are made of rubber.

As it turns out, the surmises were not farfetched. On May 21^st, Mr. Newton was chosen as the Democratic nominee for the 23rd State Senate District, an area covering about 75 percent of Bridgeport and a portion of Stratford.

From Testo’s Restaurant, moments after he was selected to represent the good people of Bridgeport in the State Senate, having snatched victory from the jaws of two non-felonious Democrats both of whom sought to deny Mr. Newton the nomination, Mr. Newton provided some moral uplift to the people of Bridgeport: “The message I am bringing to the people is that it’s time that our community redeem the great promise we have. We have too many, both young and old, that have lost the passion to fight, that have lost the belief that these communities can rise and be great. I am here as an example that our redemption is upon us. It is at our doorstep…. We need the opportunity to work. We need the opportunity to be safe. And we need the opportunity to believe again…whether it’s property taxes, continued improving relations with our police force, jobs for people in our community, cleaner streets and neighborhoods.”

It is said that Mayor Bill Finch frantically had attempted to support the nomination of State Representative Andres Ayala, young, intelligent and not a graduate from Prison U. Possibly, the mayor wanted to spare Bridgeport the contumely he feared might be in the offing from the host of Democrats and political commentators who cannot bear to mention Mr. Rowland’s name without adding the dishonorific “felon.”

When asked if she would discourage voters from returning Newton to the General Assembly, State Democratic Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo, rarely a profile in courage, replied, “I think that's up to that district to make that decision, not me."

Among politicians, Mrs. DiNardo is in the majority. Mr. Fitch is far outnumbered by those who worry that Mr. Fitch needn’t have worried.

Malloy And The Supremes

Taking his education reform show on the road, Governor Dannel Malloy on Thursday crashed into former Bridgeport Board of Education member Maria Pereira, one of the plaintiffs in a successful suit that overturned the dismantling of a Bridgeport Board of Education.

"On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overturned your administration's illegal takeover of the Bridgeport Board of Education," Mrs. Pereira told Mr. Malloy in a packed room at the Village South Center for Community Life in Hartford, "and I want to know if your plans to reform our schools are all about disenfranchising parents in schools all over the state like you're attempting to do in Bridgeport?"

Mr. Malloy attempted to deflect the question by asking Ms. Pereira, “How happy are you with the Bridgeport schools?"

Ms. Pereira acknowledged that the school system could use improvement. “No, the Bridgeport Board of Education hasn’t done a good job in the last 20 years,” she responded. “It’s been controlled by Democrats, that’s why. This is a democracy, not tyranny.” Ms. Pereira quickly turned the conversation back to its original track: “For you to say that we don't have the intelligence to have Bridgeport voters do the right thing …this is democracy, not tyranny."

“When Pereira was done speaking,” according to a report in CTNewsJunkie, “Malloy began to respond. When Pereira tried to interject, the governor told her she was done speaking at that point and went on to explain his position regarding the Bridgeport Public Schools.”

“Tyranny,” Mr. Malloy responded, “is sending the children to a school, year after year after year, knowing that it is performing at a rate that will not allow the vast majority of children … to compete." The governor aimed a well-deserved kick in the pants to the board of education that had been illegally supplanted with his approval. The governor said he didn’t want the state to take over failing school districts, but "Your school board basically threw up their hands and ran away."

The Supreme Court days earlier had ruled that the Malloy administration violated state law when it took over the board’s operations, purging the board without having first initiated the required retraining of the members it replaced before the takeover. Justice Peter Zarella, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that the State Board of Education “does not have the authority to authorize reconstitution until it first requires the local board to undergo and complete training.”

The court’s decision, the governor said, was “undoubtedly right," after which Mr. Malloy, almost reflexively, hustled any responsibility for illegal actions out the back door: “The prior education commissioner should have made sure that should have been done.” The present Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor, began his term on October 1 2011, six months before the Malloy administration disbanded the Bridgeport Board of Education, time enough, one would suppose, to allow Mr. Pryor to consult with Mr. Malloy's General Counsel, Andrew J. McDonald, who having served in the state Senate from 2003 to 2011 is no stranger to proper legislative processes.

Following the Supreme Court’s nearly unanimous decision, Mayor of Bridgeport Bill Finch urged the governor and others to circumvent the court’s ruling through a bill that “fixed” the court’s objection by means of a questionable legislative maneuver. If the law could be changed retroactively so as to apply to board members already discharged, the governor need not be put to the trouble of complying with the court decision by a) re-installing the original dismissed board, b) retraining defective members of the board, and c) reconstituting the board as necessary after the legal proprieties have been observed.

The difficulty with the shortcut being tossed around by the governor and legislators is that Supreme Court justices, as a rule, do not appreciate questionable legislative circumventions of their most recent “undoubtedly right” rulings. The court did not rule substantively on the underlying constitutional question that lawyer Norm Pattis is likely to press if the decision of the court is effectively circumvented by political legerdemain: May a constitutionally authorized democratic process of election be subverted by the governor of the state?

The court’s recent ruling presages serious difficulties with the Malloy administration educational reform package. The Malloy reform package, which seems to promise a speedy resolution to the problem of incompetent teachers, also holds out to replaceable teachers a process that would require retraining and reevaluation before discharge. If teacher tenure may be regarded as the shut door in a unionized closed shop, the retraining of incompetent teachers is the lock on that door. The provision in Mr. Malloy’s reform package that would require retaining before dismissal would, like teacher tenure itself, inhibit for long periods of time a necessary corrective to the “tyranny” the governor inveighed against in his remarks to Ms. Pereira.

The Bridgeport Pile

Doug Schwartz has done some digging in the Bridgeport pile, and he has thrown up a few truffles. It’s a pity he is not an investigative reporter for one of Connecticut’s drowsy newspapers – because he is asking all the right questions.

By Doug Schwartz

Date: Friday, November 5, 2010, 4:19 PM

I conclude there was pre-meditated vote fraud in CT, and the reason CT's largest city (Bridgeport) is so slow to report their results is the classic motive behind vote fraud cases: they needed to wait until they learned how many votes they were short, and then they went out and found them. As I show below, if you run the numbers on the quantity of ballots ordered and received and do the timeline of the judge's ruling, this reeks of pre-meditated fraud. This conspiracy began long before Tues. There are a host of basic questions below we need answers to, and which the press is not being too curious about finding -- Recall that it is the Mayor of Stamford who is running for Governor -- ". . . specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively, during the 2008 election season.

According to Corelli, on August 1, 2008, her office received 1,200 ACORN voter registration cards from the Secretary of State’s office. Over 300 of these cards were rejected because of “duplicates, underage, illegible and invalid addresses,” which “put a tremendous strain on our office staff and caused endless work hours at taxpayers’ expense.” Corelli claimed the total cost of the extra work caused by ACORN corruption was $20,000. Likewise, Borges contended that: “The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive which has produced over 100 rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens…” Among the examples cited by Borges was a seven-year old child who was registered to vote by ACORN through the use of a forged signature and a fake birth certificate claiming she was 27-years old.

The FBI and Department of Justice opened an investigation. However, the Obama Justice Department, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” closed down the investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws."

I took the time to wade through the FOI'ed documents that JW received from the FBI in this case (available from a link to a .pdf from the link above), and there is zero doubt there was outright fraud. Examples included things such as an inmate being registered without his knowledge, number bogus addresses and registration of children.

Recall also that Obama [on his next to last day of campaigning this year] and Clinton made last-minute appearances in Bridgeport right before the election, so we know they had big plans for the place.

Malloy also ran on the Working Families party line, gaining 24,755 votes.

Working Families is simply an ACORN front group. So we know they have a significant impact on this race, accounting for about 4.5% of Malloy's total votes, not including the Bridgeport totals which are not yet available but which will likely increase his ACORN percentage. Note that in Hartford, Malloy's WF line votes were almost as high as Foley's Republican line totals.

Then there are the illegal reverse 911 calls which went out in Bridgeport on election night.

This was both an illegal use of the 911 system and an equal protection violation in how it was administered.

I looked it up, and in the 2008 Presidential election, there were 40,682 votes cast in Bridgeport. Yet they only ordered 21,100 in 2010 to "save money." How likely is it that Bridgeport political hacks were truly concerned about saving money? How much money would they have saved if another 20,000 ballots were printed? A few grand at most. Where does the number 21,100 come from? This is nuts, nobody orders anything in other than a round number. How many ballots were ordered in 2008? It must have been greater than 40,682, because they did not run out. Yet two years later they order half as many?

There is now some double talk from Mayor Finch et al, claiming that it was all a clerical error, that saving money was not the issue. I believe Bysiewicz said something about this is the first election when municipalities had to pay for the ballots themselves.

The Bridgeport registrar said the number of ballots printed was based on the number voting in the past 3 elections. I checked: 2007 municipal election around 13,000. 2006 state-wide election (comparable to this year's) 19,954. Yet they only ordered 1,146 more ballots, to be distributed to all of the polling places, each of which would have required extras to avoid running out. I would love to know the ballot orders for each of the past 3 elections.

If you read the judge's order extending voting hours, there are several anomalies. Why were the Republicans ordered to receive notice and not the Democrats? It was because it was the Democrats who obtained this from the judge, the same judge, in fact, who gave Secretary of State Susan Byseiwitz a pass on her qualifications to run for attorney general, a judgement found wanting by Connecticut's Supreme Court. . Note the time of the order, 7:54 PM. What time did they run out of ballots? Would this order have been valid 6 minutes later? Almost certainly not. How was word conveyed to each of the 12 polling places listed on the order in that 6 minute span? By phone? If so, how many people made the calls and what was the phone number list they worked from? This works out to 30 seconds per phone call if 1 person called 12 polling places. Did all polling places receive word of this order prior to the 8:00 closing? If not, do votes from them count? Note the final line or the order, which unlike the rest of the document, has blanks with handwritten date and time inserted. What gives? How far in advance had this been drafted? Days? This makes no sense to draft a custom, one-off document and then leave blanks. I can maybe see a blank for the time, but for the date??? Was the last-minute nature of this court order to preclude a Republican challenge? The ballots ran out many hours earlier, and if so, a 7:54 ruling smells. How many photocopied ballots were produced in those two hours, where was this done and how were they then distributed to the polls? Who applied for this court order? Had photocopying of ballots commenced prior to the order? How many photocopied ballots had been cast prior to 8:00? It took time to make an application for a court order, obtain a judge, hear the case and draft the decision. This whole timeline needs to be known to the citizens. Amazingly, all this gets done in the nick of time.

This whole thing makes zero sense. On Tuesday evening, Bysiewicz reports that they were able to get another 10,000 ballots from the printer, and that the hearing before the judge took about 20 minutes. So we know they waited hours to go to the judge. Was it to present him with a deadline he had to meet, or was it to keep the Republicans in the dark and denying them time to appeal? Note that it does not appear to be an adversarial hearing, and no Republican attys. were present. So about 10,000 additional printed ballots, plus who knows how many photocopied ballots, which means a total of at least 31,000 ballots. Note the reporter's question which informs us that at 5:00 Bysiewicz had told him that she had already ordered photocopying of ballots. Yet today we learn the vote total in Bridgeport was only 22,072 for the two leading gubernatorial candidates combined, plus maybe 2 or 300 more for Marsh. So where did all these extra ballots they printed go?

Foley reports: "the numbers keep changing around. In last twelve hours, the Bridgeport number has swung over 900 votes.”

Healy on Oct. 20 filed a complaint alleging that two individuals obtained and distributed more than 250 applications for absentee ballots listing a vacant lot on North Avenue as their address.

Watch the video from inside a polling place. It's not pretty. More smelly stuff.
How many of the people in this video are involved in cooking the books?
FRIDAY UPDATE

 Now we learn that "a very small number" "less than 100" ballots were cast after 8:00. Why did Bysiewicz state that it was around 500? Conveniently, most questionable post-8:00 ballots have vanished, now appearing in the pre-8:00 column. in a 6:20AM press conference, Finch says it was absolutely not a financial decision to print so few ballots. He has already appointed a 3-person whitewash commission [even going so far as to bring in a Maryland resident!] to explore the subject of the number of ballots printed. The reason they bring Finch out for the presser is that he is slick enough to pull it off. He claimed, in answer to the question from a reporter, that the reason he was giving the presser, rather than the registrar, that he had "no idea" where the registrar was. If they brought out the registrars, the impression would be one of vote fraud.

Mayor Finch Taps Three Professionals To Assess Election Procedures.

So citizens are supposed to take comfort that a former Bridgeport mayor (and current Maryland resident) is going to conduct an honest investigation because he was a Republican. Why not bring in former mayor Ganim, released in June after a 7 year federal prison sentence. He surely has plenty of time on his hands. Ganim got VIP treatment at the Obama rally last Saturday:  Or what about Finch's predecessor as mayor, a known coke head.
Bridgeport has a long history of vote fraud. And none of this is new to Connecticut's media which, in the present case, appears to be suffering froim aphasia.

What we have is a cascading sequence of suspicious events leading to a conclusion of a pre-meditated conspiracy:

• DOJ drops the FBI's solid case against ACORN in Bridgeport and Stamford (and surely elsewhere in CT)
• Obama and Clinton visit right before the election.

• A little more than half of the ballots required in the previous election are ordered printed in Bridgeport.

• Bridgeport conveniently runs out of ballots, allowing an unusual [drafted days earlier?] court order to keep the polls open 2 extra hours.

• Many thousands of PRINTED, let alone photocopied, ballots remain unaccounted for.

• Reverse 911 calls are made to select portions of the Bridgeport electorate, both illegally and unconstitutionally.

• Only about 500 photocopied [printed?) ballots were cast in the extra two hours, but it takes 3 days to count them?

• Conflicting values circulate for the number of photocopied ballots cast. Now we are told it was less than 100, conveniently removing the issue of a substantial number of post-8:00 votes.

• News reports indicate voters helped themselves to more than one photocopied ballot.

• A slime-bucket whitewash commission is immediately appointed, before the votes are even counted, to cover up the mess.

Some of the reader comments on The Day's web site are instructive.
1. There was not one vote for the independent candidate in the city of Bridgeport, according to the town by town lists of voting numbers. That is statiscally impossible to happen with that many voters. You mean to say that out of over 20,000 voters, not one chose to vote against Malloy or Foley?

2. The reverse 911 call was used, but only to certain parts of the City of Bridgeport. I would like to see the voting statistics from previous elections on how these "areas" typically voted.

3. Absentee ballots were counted for addresses that turned out to be vacant lots.

Channel 3 had a report this AM of people in Bridgeport voting without showing their driver's licenses [APPARENTLY NOT REQUIRED BY LAW], and in some cases, people taking more than one ballot.

The mayor now claims only 100 votes cast between 8 and 10 pm Channel 3 [VS. BYSEIWICZ'S CLAIM OF ABOUT 500] had a report just before 9am and now the registrar of voters in Bridgeport states the tally is still not correct and mayor over step his bounds giving them. I would suggest people see the video channel 3 showed of people grabbing ballots off the table in Bridgeport!

Let's do the math. The Bridgeport mayor says there were 17,800 votes for Malloy and 4,075 for Foley making 21,875 total, less the 21,100 printed, leaving 775 short, less the around 500 cast between 8-10 Pm which leaves, at best, 275 short during the day. Long lines for only 275 ballots short spread throughout the city ? I don't think so. This doesn't add up.

Let me get this right. Bridgeport ran out of ballots between 1 and 2 pm. They ordered 21000 ballots. So between lets say 2pm and 10pm only 875 people in bridgeport voted, but it took them 36 hours past the deadline to count those votes.

One of the local news station just reported that at one voting place in Bridgeport people were given double ballots, names were not checked to make sure the person voting was a registered voter and ballots were misplaced. This is all on videotape.

And none of it is ancient history.