The Trials Of John Rowland

Former Governor John Rowland, now a former radio talk show host, may have been “guilty,” in a metaphorical sense, of using his position to advance the political interest of one particular candidate over another. It has been said that Mr. Rowland had subjected poor Andrew Roraback, at the time a Republican Party candidate for the U.S. House in the 5th District, to a severe interrogation on his radio program, formerly called “Church And State.” Since being appointed to Connecticut’s Superior Court by Governor Dannel Malloy, Mr. Roraback has moved out of the political into the less contentious judicial arena. Apparently, Mr. Roraback had suffered no permanent harm, and losing a Hartford Courant endorsement to his Democratic opponent certainly cost the socially progressive Republican Party endorsed candidate more negative votes than Mr. Rowland’s barbed questions.

Mr. Rowland’s preferred candidate for the slot, it has been said, was Lisa Wilson Foley. At the time Mr. Rowland was hard grilling Mr. Roraback, the talk show host was employed as a consultant for Apple Rehab, a business owned by Mrs. Foley’s husband. Mr. Rowland implausibly claims he was assisting Mrs. Foley’s campaign on the side as an “unpaid consultant.”

Similar impostures – though news of them may shock the willfully ignorant – have been deployed in the news business from time immemorial. Abe Lincoln came very near to fighting a duel with one of his outraged political competitors when it was discovered that editorials in a Republican paper had been written on the sly by Mr. Lincoln; actually, one of the newspaper pieces had been written by his intended wife. Because it would have been ungentlemanly for Mr. Lincoln to involve his fiancée in the quarrel, he accepted responsibility for the satires but characteristically refused to issue an apology. Eventually, the matter was settled outside the law courts, without either of the antagonist having used against each other the large military broadswords Mr. Lincoln had selected as his choice of weapon. Mr. Lincoln, who towered over his opponent, hacked off a tree branch with his sword while the two stood facing each other on Blood Island, and the display of superior reach led to an amicable resolution.

In Lincoln’s day, newspapers were outrageously partisan, little more than party organs. In our day, newspapers are slyly partisan. If subtle partisanship were a crime, Connecticut prisons would be overflowing with journalists and editorial writers.

Charlie Morse, for many years the chief political writer for the Hartford Courant and an unabashed Weicker-liker, produced tons of columns favorable to then Senator Lowell Weicker, one of the papers most pampered political pets. The Courant, during Mr. Weicker’s push for an income tax, was solidly in Mr. Weicker’s gubernatorial corner. Before Mr. Weicker had been sworn in as governor, Mr. Morse accepted an offer from Mr. Weicker to work for him while continuing to write for the paper for a few weeks. After his inauguration, Mr. Morse left the Courant and began working for Mr. Weicker. There is no indication that Mr. Morse was being paid for his fawning columns. Some writers do it for love, others for money.

The Courant, a left of center publication, supported Mr. Weicker because its editors regarded the “Maverick” Republican as a sort of Jack the Giant Killer. “Maverick” was the title of Mr. Wicker’s “fact based” autobiography, most adequately reviewed by Journal Inquirer columnist Chris Powell under the title “Mr. Bluster Saves The World.” While Mr. Weicker and the editorial board of the Courant were synergistically attached at their navels, little did the Courant understand that Mr. Weicker was not killing the giant; there were NO conservative Republicans in office in Connecticut at the time. He was killing Jack -- his own Connecticut based Republican Party.  

There are no laws criminalizing journalistic bad habits.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects partisan and non-partisan journalists alike. Even if the accusation against Mr. Lincoln had been correct, he easily could have won his case in court by draping across his chest the breastplate of The First Amendment – or at least that portion of it that guarantees freedom of political speech. The freedom of religious expression clause in the very same amendment is not as hotly defended by the media because modern journalism tends to be instinctively anti-clerical. Some of us who understand why a watchful media should resist authoritarian displays of power cannot for the life of us understand why the same media should be so willing to bed down with grey headed incumbents whose first term in office coincided with the arrival of Noah’s Arc on Mount Ararat. Surely in our day, incumbent politicians are much more powerful than the ministers and priests who now preside over Gary Wills’ “Bare Ruined Choirs.”

Though Mr. Rowland’s defense attorneys have focused of the charges brought against him in a motion to dismiss, the First Amendment conceivably could be brought into play as a sleeper defense during the promised Rowland trial -- “promised” because it is always possible the trial may be ditched in favor of some plea agreement never made public between Mr. Rowland’s high priced Washington attorneys and prosecutors. Neither Mr. Rowland nor Mrs. Wilson-Foley were practicing politicians at the time Mr. Rowland, essentially a journalist, allegedly “favored” Mrs. Wilson-Foley, an aspiring politician, on his radio program. This means that no political favors either way could have been exchanged for allegedly “corrupt” money received by Mr. Rowland.

It is still very early in “the judicial process.” During Lincoln’s day, matters were adjudicated in courts of law, and instructive precedents were established. Nowadays, justice itself hangs from “process” nooses. Deals are made in private between Star Chamber prosecutors and defense lawyers, and precedence is a stranger at the hidden proceedings. Grand Juries, many political commentators understand, are Star Chamber proceedings, and Grand Jury findings released to the media are always highly prejudicial. They should be taken by a truly non-partisan critical media with tons of salt.

Republicans, Martin Luther King, And The Strangers In Our Midst

Anyone who has been following Connecticut Commentary – and the stats suggest many people are – knows I  have written extensively on cities, territorial pools more or less owned by Democrats over the years. Here are some few columns, all of which have been printed in a handful of Connecticut newspapers.

In one of them, I fell to my knees and beseeched Republicans not to cede this fertile ground to Democrats. That cry has not resonated with many Republicans, but it should. And by Republicans I mean the whole enchilada:  Republican leaders safely ensconced in the General Assembly; Republican worker bees of every kind; African American and Hispanic Republicans who have found, much to their surprise, that one of the chief difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties is that The Republican Party is NOT a closed shop; and minorities and whites who have survived the left leaning biases of academe and are familiar with the history of both parties from the post-Civil War period through 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was established.

The Civil Rights Act, it will be recalled, enforced the constitutional right to vote, conferred jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States of America to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, empowered the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes. After lengthy filibusters by Democrats, the Senate bill was voted upon in the House. Democrats favored the bill 63-37 percent, Republicans 80-20 percent.

The first time a Civil Rights Act was presented to Congress was in 1875. Republican Congressmen Robert Brown Elliott and Josiah Thomas Walls, both African Americans, spoke in favor of the bill in the House of Representatives.

Congressman Walls said, "Men may concede that public sentiment is the cause of the discrimination of which we justly complain...If this be so, then public sentiment needs correction...Let it be understood that individual rights are sacred and it is the duty of men, in whose hand is trusted the destiny of the Republic, to remove from the path of upwards progress every obstacle which may impede its advance into the future."

Fredrick Douglass was the Martin Luther King of the pre and post-Civil War period, a gifted civil rights leader who, like Martin Luther King, straddled the ages. President Abraham Lincoln invited Douglas to the White House because he wanted Douglas’ opinion on his second inaugural address. It was during that speech that Lincoln quoted from the Bible and said:

“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Douglas gave his approval.

The sentiments here expressed by Lincoln, engraved on the interior North Wall of the Lincoln Memorial, were part of the marrow of Martin Luther King’s bones when he stood on the steps of the memorial, not very far from these very words, and thundered, at the urging of Marion Anderson:

“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God Almighty, We are free at last."

Martin Luther King was a Christian minister of the word and a Republican.

There were some sharp differences between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X at the time. Malcolm X was unwilling to forego violence in response to violence exercised against African Americans, especially in places where the Klan was still operating. After Malcolm X returned from a Hajj in Mecca, where he had met many white Muslims and embraced Sunni Islam, his views on racial separation underwent a change. On his return, he broke publicly with the Nation of Islam and denounced both racism – “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then ... pointed in a certain direction and told to march” -- and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X was assassinated in February, 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam.

The 1960s was the decade of the assassins. Just count the corpses: President John Kennedy (November 1963), Martin Luther King (April 1965), Attorney General Robert Kennedy, (June 1968). Whatever their differences, they all shared in common one golden perception – that real freedom, personal liberty, may only be found on the path that leads to self-reliance. When Malcolm X died in a hail of bullets, it was a free man who died, and the same may be said of Martin Luther King.

So then, how goes it on the freedom and independence front in 2014?

The figures point to a new and resilient kind of dependency. Since the 1960s, the two mediating institutions that truly lift the struggling poor out of poverty – work and marriage – are disappearing in the broader culture, but in the cities they are already a ghostly presence.

In 1970, marriage throughout the United States was the rule rather than the exception: 90 percent of women and 80 percent of men between 25 and 29 years of age were married. The comparable figures today are 50 percent of women and 40 percent of men. It is astonishing to think that in the 1960s fewer than 10 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers.

The poverty gap between the races has grown over the years. Among non-Hispanic white married couples, the poverty rate is 3.2 percent, while the rate for non-married white families is seven times higher at 22.0 percent.  Among Hispanic married families, the poverty rate is 13.2 percent, while the poverty rate among non-married families is three times higher at 37.9 percent.  Among black married couples, the poverty rate is 7.0 percent, while the rate for non-married black families was seven times higher at 35.6 percent.

The strongest and most dependable bulwarks against poverty are solid marriages and a sound education. In the absence of either, one is thrown into bony arms of the solicitous state, where one remains unawakened, doomed to a fitful and uneasy sleep, hoping that perhaps the child of her heart will not fall prey to the ravening wolves prowling about the neighborhood.

It is this challenge from which Republicans retreat when they leave what has falsely been called “social issues” to Democrats who, since the 1960s, have shaped the unsafe at any cost social “safety net” – especially in urban areas, where not a whisper of resistance to Democratic hegemony is possible.

What is missing – what is needed, far more than a crippling and false solicitude – is a Republican Party mission to the very heart of darkness. That mission must have as its object a restoration of those saving and mediating institutions that have always stood between children and a soul-crippling dependency that can only be described as a milder form of slavery, in which the futures of children are thrown upon the mercy of a state that regards them as problems and strangers.

On January 20 – Martin Luther King’s birthday, as it happens -- Regina Roundtree will address issues of this kind at 12:00 (High Noon) at the Legislative Office building adjacent to the State Capitol in Hartford. Ms. Roundtree’s site may be found here, along with travel directions and other information concerning her press conference. For Republicans who want to punch a hole through the wall that so far has prevented them from appealing directly to the victims of Democratic solicitude, attendance will be mandatory.

Memorial Day 2013

A few weeks ago, my wife Andree and I – and of course her guide dog Titan – visited my nephew who has just relocated from Connecticut to North Carolina. We had decided to make our 20 year pilgrimage to Washington D.C. and spent a full day there before pressing on to see David and his wife Corin.

The very first time I had visited the nation’s capital was on November 24, 1963, two days after President John Kennedy had been assassinated. Four of us in Danbury, where I was attending college, had decided to hitch to Washington to attend the funeral and show our respect to a president we all loved.

The years do roll by. The joke between Andree and I was that we would try NOT to make these trips to Washington a habit, a promise easily kept.

On this occasion, our mission was to visit the war memorials: The Second World War, the Korean  and the Vietnam wars. All three memorials are clustered near the Lincoln Memorial, which honors the president who presided over the Civil War. We have a special affection for that memorial and had visited the studio of Daniel Chester French many years ago. Mr. French used Lincoln life-masks in creating the face and hands of his seated Lincoln. Of the memorials we visited, only this one was familiar to us.

The World War II memorial captured perfectly the vast scope of a war that left so many bloody footprints on the desolate ground of a shattered Europe. The Korean War memorial, life sized soldiers in ponchos walking warily through the greenery, was shockingly real. And the Vietnam memorial, names etched on a black wall caressingly fingered by passers-by, recalled the silence enshrouding sacrifices that can be redeemed only through a hallowed silence.

Across the Potomac lies Arlington, its stones on our visit, when no sign of a cloud marred the inscrutable blue sky, white as bleached bones, pure as the purest unstained thought, awakening “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land” and swelling “the chorus of the Union…”

The words, of course, are from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. No one has ever improved on Lincoln, who knew he was writing for the ages.

We came home chastened. And on this Memorial Day, once again the sheer immensity of the sacrifices of those “who gave the last full measure of their devotion” fills us with a steely resolve that these honored dead “shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

To remember is a prayer.

 

Sandy Hook

Adam Lanza – and Adam Lanza ALONE – is responsible for the Sandy Hook massacre, which is to say:

1) Adam Lanza’s mother is not responsible for the crime, nor is his father or brother. The Lanza’s were divorced. In a report from the Daily Mail of Britain, a former classmate of Adam Lanza is reported as having said, “He was a loner at school and hyper intelligent. But in recent years he disappeared off the radar. The word is that he was badly affected when his parents split and that might be what pushed him over the edge.” But divorces do not lead ineluctably to carnage of this kind. There is no necessary connection between solitude and murder.

2) The guns used by Adam Lanza are not responsible for the crime. It is a form of magic thinking to suppose that a law passed by the U.S. Congress abolishing the Second Amendment and punishing those who own weapons would at the same time abolish crimes such as this.

3) The upbringing of Adam Lanza is not responsible for the crime. Apparently, at some point, Adam Lanza was home schooled. Home schooling is not responsible for the crime.

4) Adam Lanza’s Christian religion – a religion of peace that regards such crimes as mortal sins – is not responsible for the crime.

5) The town of Sandy Hook is not responsible for the crime. I lived in Sandy Hook one summer –in a barn, as it happened, abutting a house owned by film maker Elia Kazan –and can testify that there are in Sandy Hook no mysterious emanations issuing from the area that cause people to commit mass murder.

Adam Lanza – and Adam Lanza ALONE – is responsible for the Sandy Hook massacre.

Blaise Pascal said, “In the end, they throw a little dirt on you, and everyone walks away. But there is ONE who will not walk away. At some point, the peace of God will descend on Sandy Hook.

When all the cameras have left Sandy Hook, when the politicians have gone back to their daily grind, when the next news we hear will be about some matter that does not sell quite so many newspapers, when everyone, moving quickly to their own business, have all walked away, there will be ONE who will not walk away.

Suppose – just to suppose – no one walks away. What then?

Sandy Hook has taught us, at a minimum, two things: First, that the human heart is a raging torrent wondrously mixed with good and evil; and second, that words alone cannot quell that mighty river. We are not and never have been a nation of preachers. America is a nation that believes in the sanctification of the deed. When Lincoln at Gettysburg said that nothing SAID at Gettysburg could“hallow’ the blood-soaked ground, but the DEEDs of those who struggled there “have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract,” he was pointing to the beating heart of America.

So then, let the sorrow in our hearts speak deeds. Reports have it that Sandy Hook elementary school has perhaps closed permanently. That is as it should be; you cannot erect the joy of children on polluted ground. The school should be torn down, and the ground should be purified by the Rabbis and priests and ministers and Imams of Connecticut; then it should be rededicated as a place where children can come and play, because that is what children are meant to do. The very air we breathe is purified by the laughter of children. Whatever is built here, let it be dedicated to all those who stood in the line of fire to protect children, and especially the principal of the school and others, these “honored dead” who gave for the slain children of Sandy Hook their “last full measure of devotion.”

Let the school be rebuilt at some suitable place – in Sandy Hook.

And where are we to find the brawn and the finances to meet the deed?

In Connecticut, named after a mighty river. Here the heart is full to bursting. Let it burst. Let the waters of goodness rush over Sandy Hook like a raging river. Let foundation makers and carpenters and electricians put their shoulders to this deed, so that we may show, in the words of King Lear, that the heavens are JUST.

Weicker Faces the State

Like most professional politicians, former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker tends to filibuster journalist’s questions. And, solipsistic by nature, Weicker has a way of relating all questions to his own personal experience.

Dennis House of WFSB’s Face the State opened his interview with Mr. Weicker -- "the only man alive to serve as both governor and senator of our great state” – by asking what he thought of the U. S. Senate race so far.

Mr. Weicker had recently endorsed Democrat U.S. Representative Chris Murphy over Republican challenger Linda McMahon. Mr. Weicker and Mrs. McMahon have a shared past together. Mr. Weicker served on the board of WWE, pulling in, according to one press report $150,000 per year for his no doubt invaluable services. Mr. Weicker was forced off the board, after which his change in salary led to a corresponding change of heart. In his introduction, Mr. House referred to Mrs. McMahon correctly as Mr. Weicker’s “former colleague.”

Abortion Extremists

Andrew Roraback is a “fiscal conservative,” which is to say he is not a “social conservative,” which is to say he is pro-abortion but not sufficiently enthusiastic concerning abortion to merit the approval of NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, a pro-abortion group that will admit no exceptions to abortion on demand.

The very term “social conservative” is highly misleading. There are no congressional bills or judicial decisions that have no social ramifications. Everything politicians say and do and think is said and done and thought with a view towards enforcing or changing the society affected by human action. Even budgets – the last real budget was passed by the U.S. Congress in1997 before Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008 -- profoundly affect the social sphere. The science of economics, dismal though it may be, is a science of human action.

Civil Rights and the Historical Revisionism of the DNC

Henry Mencken, every good journalist’s journalist, was a prolific writer. Asked if he ever got tired cranking out newspaper stories and commentary, he said -- never. During his whole journalistic output, Mr. Mencken said, he felt like a little boy with two stomachs in a candy store. Many of his writings were devoted to Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, which he hugely enjoyed as a buffoonish spectacle.

Of Mencken and conventions, Murray Rothbard wrote:

Campaign Hooey

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class.

They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem.

Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer.

George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president. Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, net worth $212 million; followed by Teddy Roosevelt, net worth $125 million; followed by Andy Jackson, the father of the Modern Democratic Party, at a net worth of $119 million; followed by James Madison, net worth $101 million; followed by Lyndon Johnson, net worth $98 million; followed by Herbert Hoover, net worth $75 million; followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, net worth $60 million; followed by Bill Clinton, net worth $38 million; with John Kennedy bringing up the rear as the 10^th most wealthy U.S. President. Mr. Kennedy did not inherit his daddy’s wealth; most of his income and property came to him through a family trust shared with his siblings. Among the top ten wealthiest Presidents, there are but two Republicans in the bunch, and none of this great wealth, much of it held by Democrats who married well, was a bar to the presidency.

If the Father of the Country ever felt the need to put himself forward to electors as a chip off the old middle class block, he manfully resisted the temptation. Jefferson thought of himself as an enlightenment aristocrat; ditto Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution. FRD’s wealth came to him through marriage and inheritance, and when he ran into difficulties with creditors, his mommy bailed him out. For the notable Democratic presidents listed above, great wealth was no bar to public service.

Here in Connecticut, the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation is studded with multimillionaires. Like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal married well; his wife’s father owns the Empire State building in New York, among other properties. Though U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro often points to her humble roots, she also is a multi-millionaire, and U.S. Representative Jim Himes made his millions on Wall Street not Main Street.

Military service remains for some politicians a springboard into politics. When Mr. Blumenthal sought to inflate his military record during his many campaigns as attorney general, he backed into a truth grinder, and it was discovered that, unlike the more modest Lincoln, Mr. Blumenthal had forseveral years been stealing valor from servicemen who had fought in Vietnam.

His opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate, Linda McMahon, financed her previous campaign from her private fortune. Mrs. McMahon’s great wealth did not come to her through marriage. She and her husband, both bankrupted at one point, earned their riches though enterprise and hustle. And though she never claimed to have been born in a log cabin, Mrs. McMahon’s hardscrabble trajectory does not resemble that of the one percenters who ascended to the presidency. Of course, the differences between Mrs. McMahon and Mr. Lincoln are too apparent not to have been noticed by Connecticut’s vigilant media: One was the CEO of a wrestling empire and the other was a politically astute lawyer from Sangamon County in Illinois well known in the frontier towns for his wrestling prowess.

Claims of modest birth still play well on the stump, even among millionaires operating outside the shadow of the largely mythical log cabin. A military record helps. The anti-authoritarianism lying at the center of libertarianism still tugs at the heart strings, as does an American as apple pie anti-clericalism, which lies at the center of the war on Catholicism being waged by Planned Parenthood and Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation, 100 percent of whom have received from the abortion provider a rating of 100 percent on votes important to Planned Parenthood’s money prospects.

Most political claims are gilded hooey, sometimes honeyed hooey, but always entertaining. It’s best during national and state campaigns to take the advice of Mark Twain and swallow the campaign braggadocio with “a ton of salt,” and then, when slipping into the slough of despond, reach for Henry Mencken: “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in… A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Foley On Malloy’s Current Services Budget Chicanery

After Tom Foley lost the gubernatorial race to then former Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy, he did not slink away into that good night in which many losing politicians find their ultimate repose.

Mr. Foley, a former ambassador and business owner, started a research organization that develops public policy proposals, and a recent op-ed piece Mr. Foley wrote for a Hartford paper represents part of the fruit of his post campaign labors.

Mr. Foley’s column vigorously attacks “current services budgets” as a means used by shiftily, non-transparent politicians to fool some of the people all of the time, in Abraham Lincoln’s piercing phrase.

The method of reckoning getting and spending in Connecticut’s current services budget is little more than a partially successful sleight of hand used by professional politicians to “pitch their causes and confuse their constituents to suit their purposes,” according to Mr. Foley.

Governor Malloy’s current services budget first implausibly assumes that tax policy and state services will not change in the new budget year and then uses this dubious assumption to project future revenues. In planning expenses for the new budget, Mr. Foley writes, current services budget writers factor in “anticipated wage and benefit increases for the same number of state workers and inflationary increases in the cost of things the government buys.”

Under the states current services budget in the fiscal year ending in June 2012, spending will increase 9.8 percent, $1.75 billion higher than spending for this year, a figure Mr. Foley characterizes as “ridiculous.”

Using the current services budget as the base year, Mr. Malloy claims in his budget proposal to have cut spending by $1.76 billion. His proposal shows personal income taxes increasing by $879.8 million, while total taxes increase by $1,840 million. The anticipated give backs Mr. Malloy hopes to recover from unions appear in his proposal as Labor Management Savings and are presented as an expense reduction.

Most people suppose that current year budgets serve as the baseline for future budget projections. But using the current year budget as a staring point, spending in the new fiscal year will increase rather than decrease by $263 million; personal income taxes will increase by $1,443 million; and total taxes will increase by$2,466 million.

And spending for the benefit of state workers will according to Mr. Foley remain “approximately even with this year, i.e., no givebacks… On this basis, the budget deficit is being funded entirely with new taxes and no spending reductions. That is a very different story from the shared sacrifice story being used to sell the budget.”

“Sell” is the operative word. To sell his proposed budget both to the general public and union workers from whom Mr. Malloy hopes to realize a “shared sacrifice,” it helps to peddle the notion that union givebacks – i.e. spending reductions -- are a fait accompli in the new budget; they are not. And anyone who believes that real time spending in the new budget has been slashed or that personal income taxes have been increased $879.8 million rather than by $1,443 million or that inflation will not drive up the costs of various state agencies in the new fiscal year has been successfully deluded by number crunches who rely on current services budget persiflage.

“Using the current services budget,” Mr. Foley asserts, “degrades the clarity and quality of debate on the budget. It enables bureaucrats to pad budgets and move the goal line in the hope of achieving ever higher funding. It enables politicians to obscure bad news and fabricate good news. It enables advocates of government spending to demagogue anyone who questions the ever-increasing funding for their causes. It confuses the concerned citizen who is trying to understand what is going on.”

Early in his campaign with Mr. Foley, Mr. Malloy announced that he would move the state towards a new budget accounting process, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), so as to assure transparency and forestall the budget gimmickry that had allowed prior governors and legislatures to present a false picture of budgets though the manipulation and abuse of sound accounting procedures. According to Office of Policy Management Secretary Ben Barnes, GAAP should be operational by July 1 2013 and begin in fiscal year 2014.

Current service budgeting does for political campaigning what dishonest budget accounting does for politicians who survive budget red ink by fooling some of the people all of the time. Democratic governor of New York Mario Cuomo has honestly addressed budget issues by using immediate prior budgets rather than current service budget chicanery in measuring the progress he has made in stemming the flow of red ink.

With a gentle poke in Mr. Malloy’s easily bruised ribs, Mr. Foley asserts that Mr. Malloy’s dark angel in New York got it right and suggests, “It isn't too late for our leaders in Hartford to follow Gov. Cuomo's lead and begin making things clearer for us as they debate next year's very important budget.”

Joe Lieberman And His Enemies

U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s principled stand in favor of ending the invidious “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the U.S. military has elevated him to heroic status among some liberals, but the news continues to rasp the more tender consciences of puritanical progressives who feel they must applaud Mr. Lieberman’s efforts even as they strenuously condemn the man.

All this hero worship, Greg Hladky writes in the Fairfield Weekly, is a Washington beltway distortion: “Isn't it interesting how different the Lieberman situation appears down in Washington compared to the Lieberman reality back home?... Lieberman stands virtually no chance of winning the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.”

Here at home in the progressive camp, Mr. Lieberman’s dark deeds will not easily be forgotten or forgiven. Mr. Hladky ticks off a familiar bill of particulars:

“It wasn't just Lieberman's unquestioning support for the Iraq war that produced the hostility. It wasn't just Joe's affectionate closeness to George W. Bush, or his decision to speak at the 2008 Republican National Convention and campaign for his buddy John McCain and against Barack Obama, or his suggestion that he might support Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut's U.S. Senate race this year.

“It was all those things and the feeling that Joe has for a long time considered himself better than the Connecticut Democrats who used to believe in him, who used to think they knew who he was.”

Mr. Lieberman’s position and perseverance on the issue of gays in the military received at the more moderate New London Day an encouraging response: “Sen. Lieberman's determination to reverse the policy may help redeem his reputation in his home state, with which he has had a love-hate relationship in recent years.”

The loss of a party primary “due in large part to his unrelenting support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” forced Mr. Lieberman to run as an independent in 2006 and “compelled him, ill-advisedly, to support John McCain for president in 2008, and ironically the GOP senator from Arizona emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of ‘don't ask, don't tell.’"

Some progressives might quibble somewhat with the word “compelled”; the senator is, after all, a grown man and well above the age of reason. Politicians generally are “compelled” to do or say this and that in the same sense that the denizens of bordellos are compelled to do business with each other. Time and chance have not treated kindly some legislators who bolted their parties to run as independents. Neither Charlie Crist (R-I-Fl) nor Arlen Specter (D-R-D-PA) are serving any longer in the U.S. Congress.

Mr. Lieberman incautiously has left in his wake a rich store of UTube clips tracing the outline of what progressive consider his rank betrayal of the left wing of their party. Could he defend himself, Mr. Lieberman likely would say, along with former President Ronald Reagan, that his party left him, though at least one progressive in Mr. Lieberman’s party, President Barack Obama, has since assuming office veered to the middle on issues of war and peace. Tactically, Mr. Obama’s position on Afghanistan bears a striking resemblance to former President George Bush’s position on Iraq.

Similar campaign killer clips – which save lazy commentators the necessity of thinking seriously about issues – were used successfully to torpedo Linda McMahon’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. These bloody slices of demagoguery are the equivalents of knives drawn across the throats of people who cannot argue with damning visuals: wrestlers slamming each other in the ring, Mr. Lieberman bussing Mr. Bush on the floor of congress. Mrs. McMahon was also unfortunate enough to have earned her millions to self finance her campaign; and while Mr. Lieberman is no multi-millionaire, he does have more than a million campaign bucks socked away under his pillow in case one or another of his potential Democratic challengers should summon the courage to attempt to beard the lion in his den.

Mr. Lieberman’s challengers so far are being coy, perhaps hoping that the senior senator from Connecticut will follow U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s sterling example and leave the senate after his weak points have been sufficiently probed by assassins in the media who really should be supporting term limits.

That’s right, term limits. Good for what ails you, term limits would have the same beneficial effect on a sclerotic political system that the retirements of Mr. Dodd Mrs. Rell this year have had in Connecticut on media sales. When time servers leave the political arena, things begin to pop. People come out of the woodwork to vote, patriotism flutters from every street corner, and nearly everyone sinks happily into the comforting illusion that this time the country as a whole will enjoy, in the immortal world of Mr. Abraham Lincoln “a new burst of freedom.”

The Day After The Great Debate

Admirers of the Douglas-Lincoln debates may be disappointed when they discover that the Blumenthal-McMahon debates will not determine the election. In fact, the Douglas-Lincoln debates very likely did not of themselves determine the presidential election held two years later in 1860. Then as now, events were in the saddle and rode men. Ours is a time that will be tutored by events we have haughtily ignored.

In Lincoln’s day, public debates reached the people through a highly partisan press, and speeches, as well as debates, were more polished and sonorous. Lincoln stands as a bridge between the tail end of the post Edwardian age and the modern period -- best represented by the bloody casualty figures at Gettysburg and the beginnings of the great fortunes of the rapacious robber barons of The Gilded Age, a heaping up of personal wealth that could not have been accomplished in the absence of a command economy, itself the result of the Civil War.

In Lincoln’s day, the media was little more than a bifurcated party organ; the Republicans had their press, as did the Democrats. The most accurate record of Lincoln’s speeches appeared in the opposition Democratic press, because Democratic media lackeys were not interested in embellishing Lincoln’s public addresses, an office they performed only for Douglas. The opposite is also true: Douglas’ speeches were most accurately represented in the opposition Republican press, coming as they did straight from a stenographic record.

In the post modern age – that would be us – voters in the know have come of age and are fully capable of reading between the lines of Connecticut’s left of center media reports.

Ned Lamont probably was right when he scored the Blumenthal-McMahon “debate” – really an extended press conference – as a draw. Winners in such contests are determined not so much by a studious examination of what is said but rather by expectation gaps.

Going into the debate, the state’s left of center media had Mrs. McMahon put down on their scoring cards as a light weight contender unwise to the ways of duplicitous Washington. Mr. Blumenthal, puffed up by the media over a 20 year period as St. George the dragon killer, at one time was expected to roll over the novice and uncover her, once for all, as a dissolute rich lady unbothered by drug use and necrophilia. In the debate, Mrs. McMahon failed to live down to these low expectations of her. And somewhere on his path to glory, Mr. Blumenthal fell from grace when it was discovered by an out of state newspaper that he lied about his service record, blighting a two decade old self contrived narrative. Those in the media who believe that only cradle-to-grave representation is fit service in the U.S Congress were disappointed.

The expectation going in was that Mr. Blumenthal would recover sufficiently from his lethargy, and he did not disappoint, though much of his presentation was boiler-pate bumper sticker.

Mr. Blumenthal was caught in somewhat of a snare when Mrs. McMahon asked him to describe how wealth – as in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth Of Nations” -- is produced. Answer: Not through attorney general suits.

One of the questioners ought to have asked Mr. Blumenthal how, in a command economy in which the minimum wage is determined outside the market place in the smoke free back rooms of Congress and the White House, he would know when the minimum wage was set too high or too low.

Mrs. McMahon very likely would have been able to answer the question. This was exactly her worry when the minimum wage question came up in an earlier venue. Her answer as to whether she would support a minimum wage got her in Dutch with rhetoricians in Mr. Blumenthal’s smoke free back rooms. An ad was quickly produced proclaiming that Mrs. McMahon wanted to reduce or abolish the minimum wage. One real reporter, Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent, noted the claim was bogus. But nearly everyone else went along with the imposture, happily manureing Mr. Blumenthal’s verdant pastures. Mrs. McMahon has come to expect such partisanship from the state’s status quo media.

In Lincoln’s time a politician forced to suffer the buffetings from a hostile press, were he wealthy enough, might have started his own newspaper. Or he might have bought the services of a rival paper. Or he might have purchased the affections of an editor or two with a polite bribe. In the post modern period, we have ads. In Connecticut, where reporters and editors have stopped digging for the truth about their pet politicians, one must be grateful for small favors.

Tea Party Patriots, Who They Are

Shortly after a Kamikaze pilot in Texas drove his plane into building occupied by the Internal Revenue Service, leftist bloggers began to speculate, on very slender evidence, that the pilot may have been connected with Tea Party protestors. His obvious preference for communism over capitalism in a sign off letter he left behind soon spoiled that hastily constructed thesis. But the faulty thesis begs the question: Who are these people who call themselves Tea Party Patriots.

In an effort to arrive at an answered to that question, the National Review Institute commissioned McLaughlin & Associates to study two separate groups of Tea Party Patriots: the “6 percent of the 1,000 likely voters polled in mid-January who told McLaughlin that they had participated in tea-party rallies and the additional 47 percent who said they ‘have not participated in a tea party protest but . . . generally agree with the reasons for those protests.’”

The results of the study are certain to disappoint those on the left who feel constrained to demonize the group as a negligible fringe phenomenon.

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