Malloy, Connecticut’s Crony Capitalist-In-Chief

When Governor Dannel Malloy first came into office, some commentators who had paid close attention to his campaign assumed he was ready to vigorously attack spending.

He had often enough during his campaign batted around the catch phrase “fair share.” It was generally understood that everyone in Connecticut would, under the Malloy dispensation, be expected to contribute his “fair share” in taxes and give-backs, and most people expected, after the new governor had imposed on taxpayers the largest tax increase in state history, that the consumption side of government would see proportional reductions in spending.

The tax increase was immediate and, some would argue, devastating to an economy in the grip of a prolonged recession: See President Jack Kennedy’s speech to the Economic Club of New York. Mr. Malloy’s prospective savings, as it turned out, would be distant and amorphous.

Who could have guessed, as the Malloy campaign rolled out, that the governor would soon become Connecticut’s Crony Capitalist-in-chief?

Mr. Malloy has since dumped millions of taxpayer dollars on the state’s economic roulette wheel; he calls this sort of thing “investing in the future.”

Any real investor in Connecticut – and there are some still huddled together in what used to be called Connecticut’s “Gold Coast,” many of whom have made successful investments and consequently have contributed their “fair share” to Connecticut’s economy – could have told Mr. Malloy that such business investments are iffy propositions. The venture capitalist terrain is littered with the dead bodies of venture capitalists who have gone broke investing private dollars in failing ventures.

How does the private market identify the right investment? Well, it consults the appropriate indicators and determines that, taken together, all the parts of the business under review have passed rather stringent tests that indicate its future will be a bright one. Mr. Malloy’s investments of state tax dollars in questionable businesses depend almost wholly on his vision of a future vibrant Connecticut economy – or, to put it in layman’s terms, wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking is the seed bed of Crony Capitalism, and Mr. Malloy’s thoughts concerning the future of his state certainly are grandiose. He wants Connecticut to be a leader in advanced medical research, and to this end he has showered favors upon – just to pick one of Mr. Malloy’s many investments – the UConn Health Center (UCHC). For many years UCHC was a tax sinkhole. But now that Mr. Malloy has attached Jackson Laboratories to the sink hole, it will… what? Non-profit research facilities such as Jackson Laboratories cannot turn a profit, which means such facilities cannot enlarge the state’s treasury. No matter: UCHC will become a more prestigious tax sinkhole, even if no water can be pressed out of that rock.

The winnowing process in the private economy that allows investors to determine profitable from non-profitable investment early on, before the investor loses his shirt and declares bankruptcy, is simply not present in government bankrolled crony capitalists ventures – where all bets are always for keeps.

Suppose Connecticut’s future prosperity does not lie in medical research? Then what?

There are two inescapable problems with crony capitalism. The first is that governors and presidents are not economic seers; they know far less than the private economy – which is driven by supply and demand – what the future portends. The second problem is every bit as serious. A dollar invested in venture A by Governor Know-It-All is a dollar taken from taxpayer B that, had it remained in the private marketplace, might have been more profitably invested in product C, thereby producing an invigorated economy that would have contributed more tax dollars to Governor-Know-It-All.

The private economy creates wealth; crony capitalism creates the illusion of wealth. If you have taken a bucket of water from the low end of the pool and dumped it into the deep end of the pool, have you raised the water level of the pool? Transfers of wealth do not create wealth.

Some commentators have caught on to the imposture. Noting that Mr. Malloy had favored Thompson International Speedway in Thompson, Connecticut  with a tax funded “loan of $800,000 at a sharply discounted interest rate for improvements at the auto racing track, $200,000 being forgivable if the track increases employment by 23 over two years,” Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer writes in his column:

“But there are other auto racing tracks and mortgage companies in Connecticut, and helping just one of each disadvantages the others, and so what is created at one employer may be lost at another. This is a ‘command economy’ approach, with government picking winners and losers and defeating free markets. Because the ‘command economy’ approach transfers advantages more than it creates anything, it is unlikely to help the state's economy much.”

Well… not as much as it will help Mr. Malloy, who dispenses tax dollars to appreciative multibillion dollar companies, haul in campaign contributions to Connecticut’s crony capitalist Democratic Party.

It does not seem to matter much whether a carrot or a stick is used to pry campaign contributions from redundantly rich One-Percenters. If Obamacare ever gets off the ground, one may expect insurance giants to show their appreciation to the crony capitalists who had forced young people -- on pain of paying punishing fines – to purchase insurance they neither want nor need. For similar reasons, the multi-billion dollar companies upon which Mr. Malloy has showered millions in tax receipts or tax credits will show their gratitude when the campaign collector comes knocking on their doors. And that’s always good business for politicians.

Sandy Hook And The Data Trap Updated

This is a self interview

Q: I’ve now read everything you’ve written about the Sandy Hook mass murders, quite a lot [Here sorted by date]. I’ve noticed two things: You have not weighed in on what some people might consider the central legislative issues, the “should” questions – should certain weapons be banned, that sort of thing; and throughout your commentary, you manage to sound like a Jeremiah on what some grey heads in the journalism business use to call “freedom of information.” Is that a right reading of the main thrust of your commentary on Sandy Hook?

A: It’s a fair reading, yes.

Q: Why the emphases on the free flow of information?

A: Because what one does will always depend upon what one knows. It would be more accurate to say “the full and accurate flow of information.” Can I pick a bone with you on Jeremiah?

Q: Sure.

A: Jeremiah was repetitive because he had a positive genius for getting quickly to the decisive point and, of course, repeating it, much to the distress of the hypocritical whitened sepulchers in his audience. Someone – I think it might have been me – once said that journalism was 20 percent thought and 80 percent repetition. That is the nature of journalistic reporting and commentary. Some themes are dearer to you, because they are more important to you, than others, and so you inflict upon your readers the burden of repetition. I’d like to try out on you an answer to the second part of your question.

Q: Okay.

A: Legislators in the General Assembly are now finished with their gun restriction bills. Remarking on the missing data that should have driven their efforts, I said in one of the columns, all of which may be found on a site called “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State,” that the bills were premature because the criminal investigation report was not due to be completed until June, a date that has since been advanced. The General Assembly produced its bill – a bipartisan measure, we were reminded often enough by its architects – in the first week of April, about a month before the criminal investigation report was due to be completed. I think I quoted the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carol’s “Through the Looking Glass” in the course of that blog and column: “First the verdict,” said the imperious Queen, “then the trial.”

Q: Well yes, but people were impatient to get something done.

A: And their impatience had been stoked by politicians and others interested mostly in bum-rushing legislation in advance of the data upon which that legislation should have rested. Why is that?

Q: You had the families of the 26 victims in Sandy Hook waiting patiently for legislation that would…

A: … insure that the slaughter at Sandy Hook would not be repeated. There are so many assurances on this point from state and national politicians, Democrats mostly, that it would be unnecessarily tedious to repeat them here. The two U.S. Senators in Connecticut most voluble on this point were Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy. 

Q: Okay.

A: And how can you write such bills if you do not know what happened at Sandy Hook? To be sure, there were reports in the media, many of which relied upon heavily edited information from sources that may or may not have been accurate. Some of the information in the polluted media stream was partial or inaccurate enough to give credence to absurd conspiracy theories. Very little of the information could be described as authoritative -- because much of the information was in the custody of criminal investigators who were determined to draw about the data an impenetrable iron curtain. Every time you approached a data master with a question, you were told, “Sorry Bud, that information is not available because of an ongoing criminal investigation.” To some commentators, myself among them, the criminal investigation might have been competed earlier, since the two people who might have been charged criminally, Adam Lanza and the mother he murdered, were both dead, as were most of the witnesses to the mass murder. And even if it had not been completed, the General Assembly was poised to write a bill that would affect every gun owner in the state. If the General Assembly needs information to write effective bills, it should be given the information. Finally, as the General Assembly was on the point of emitting bills, the carefully guarded bucket sprang a leak. A New York Daily News reporter loosed upon the public some quarantined details that came to him from a source who had attended a police convention in New Orleans, after which it was decided to release police arrest warrants – be it noted, a full month or more before the final criminal report was due.

Q: Which means what?

A: It means that the data in the arrest warrant could have been release long before to legislators charged with shaping bills. Now, I may say – without, I hope, drifting into the bog of conspiracy theory – that, as a general rule, a political sequence occurs because politicians want things to happen in a certain sequence. Even the data included in the arrest warrant was by no means complete and definitive. Arrest warrants reveal only what police are looking for and what they have found at the beginning of an investigation. The General Assembly should have insisted, right from the get go, that all information in the custody of investigators pertinent to the bill or bills the legislators were constructing be made available to the relevant heads of legislative committees – in camera, if necessary. That did not happen. Connecticut’s very robust Freedom of Information [FOI] law means, if it means anything at all, that the only thing the general public need fear about the release of information is that information necessary to a well ordered Republic will NOT be released. But what happened in this instance goes far beyond FOI laws.

Q: You are not saying that people intentionally edited the data you think necessary so that bills could be constructed as they wished, are you?

A: Well, I do think there is a well-documented tendency among politicians to use available laws and processes to advance a preferred end. That’s politics. If the end they have in view is defective, or if the process leads ineluctably to an end the consequences of which are destructive, you must adjust the laws and processes. Politics, at its best, is the legislative art that conveys us to an end result that increases liberty and justice for all.

Q: But how much of what happened was purposeful?

A: All of it -- I hope. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that our legislators are either stupid or mad. You would have to go to a different planet to find a convocation of reporters and commentators who did NOT think that Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans wanted gun restrictions, whatever the data suggested. The data trap in Connecticut eased their way. But bad or sequestered data makes for bad laws. If Republicans in Connecticut were not a bunch of obliging go-alongs hanging by their torn fingernails to increasingly disappearing legislative seats, they would insist on bills that break down Berlin Walls intended to prevent the liberating and free flow of data. But look what happened: As a result of Sandy Hook, a bill was produced in the General Assembly to restrict information on death certificates. Why? Because some legislators wished to spare the stricken parents of young children murdered in Sandy Hook the resulting publicity that might occur should FOI laws be rigorously enforced. Really? Death certificates, available for centuries to the public, contain only general information. The certificate requires a review of the cause of death by a medical examiner to determine the presence or absence of foul play indicating that a murder may have been committed.  How can the general public know that authorities responsible for apprehending and convicting murderers are doing a proper job if information of this kind is not made available to them? Who are the political beneficiaries of such a bill? Why, dear me, can’t we say it plainly? The bill would largely benefit propagandist politicians whose efforts would be furthered by any restriction that data-traps inconvenient truths and prevents the free flow of information. You control the messenger – there are still in Connecticut some alert reporters, a few brave Jonahs who have managed to escape the maw of Leviathan – by controlling data. Throughout history, the upward progress of politicians has been paved by the careful editing of information. In constitutional republics, some subtlety that veils naked political purposes may be necessary to sell such anti-democratic measures to an increasingly marginalized public. We cannot wish to further wound stricken victims, can we? How could we be so heartless? This is how the liberties of free men disappear, not through honest battles waged on an open field but with a flick of the serpent’s tongue.

Q: Are you satisfied with the final bill signed into law by Mr. Malloy?

A: No. the legislative product was shamelessly oversold by demagogues. The passage of the bill here in Connecticut marked the boundary of overheated rhetoric. Before passage, Connecticut politicians, mostly Democrats driven by a script that bore the watermark of Washington D.C., were telling us that the measures they preferred would make school children across the state safe from the Adam Lanzas of the world. Suffering parents in Sandy Hook, perhaps traumatized by the slaughter of their children, were used to prop up an improbable theory: namely, that restrictions imposed on certain weapons – indeed, the most popular and bestselling long rifle in the United States, the AR15 – would render schoolchildren safe from attack. Even town administrators in Newtown spurned that theory when the town fathers voted to appropriate money to place armed guards in all their schools, including the three private schools in town [Sandy Hook is a section of Newtown]. They knew from direct experience that unarmed interveners however brave, could not stop a determined shooter. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School stopped when armed first responders appeared in the school. After the bill in Connecticut had passed, U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and Governor Dannel Malloy took their show to Washington D.C., where a national gun bill, much more pallid that the Connecticut version, was up for consideration. Here at home, legislators who had championed “the toughest gun laws in the nation,” perhaps with a cautious eye focused on reality, began a tactical retreat from their overblown rhetoric: True, the bill wasn’t perfect, but we should never allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Vice President Joe Biden said at one point that if national gun legislation saved but one life, it would be worth it, which is simply another way of saying that Mr. Biden regards human life as precious. Well, of course he does. All the old canards were trotted out and dangled before an aroused but doubtful public. A rhetorical mountain had been made of a mole hill, and now politicians were concerned with reducing their overinflated mountain of promises so that, when lives once again were lost in what should properly be regarded for purposes of punishment as a terrorist act, politicians who had overpromised in their legislation would not be held to account. Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy both come from a state that had recently abolished a death penalty following a horrific multiple murder in Cheshire committed by two newly released prisoners on parole. Their crime was spectacularly heinous. They broke into a house, beat the male householder with a bat, tied him up in the basement, assaulted three women in the house upstairs, forced a mother to go to a bank and withdraw money, raped two daughters and set fire to the house, killing all the women. That incident sparked massive purchases of guns in Connecticut -- most especially in rural areas, where the response time from police is necessarily longer. Now, if Adam Lanza had survived his attack on Sandy Hook Elementary school, he could not have been executed in Connecticut for having murdered his mother, 20 children and 6 brave faculty members of the school because, largely owing to politicians like Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy, the state, for humane reasons, had deprived itself of a punishment tool. Had Mr. Lanza survived, the political play we are now witnessing would not be the same. We have to begin to focus on the criminal misuse of weapons. In the week prior to passage of the gun restriction law in Connecticut, Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell noted in one of his columns, there were three handgun murders in Hartford alone. “Some of the shots fired there,” Mr. Powell wrote, “may have been audible from the Capitol grounds, at least with those with ears to hear. No one in authority seems to know what to do about such murders, and over the course of a year, such murders in Connecticut’s disintegrating cities will be far more numerous than the murders in Newtown, but nobody has to know or even pretend to know because that part of Connecticut – the part where mayhem is ordinary and daily, not a freak event such as Newtown – can be written off politically. Murder victims in the cities long ago ceased being cute.” Unfortunately, not as many people are like to have read Mr. Powell’s column as those who read Mr. Murphy’s maiden speech in the U.S. Senate on gun violence in the course of which Mr. Murphy pointed out, quite correctly, that guns in the hands of criminals are more lethal than knives. He might have done better had he read Mr. Powell’s column into the legislative record.

Q: In an interview following passage of the gun restriction bill, Senator Dick Blumenthal doubted that the bill would drive gun manufacturers out of the state. He was quoted by the Business Insider as having said, "Gun manufacturers are like other businesses in looking for the highest quality workforce, the best business environment in terms of transportation and taxes and other features unrelated to any regulatory action. Their markets are national. What happens in Connecticut affects only purchases here."

A: Mr. Blumenthal was warned, both before and after passage of the bill, that some manufacturers in his state – called “the constitution state” because Connecticut operated under the New World’s first constitution, the so call “Fundamental Orders,” and the “Provision State” because, since the American Revolution onwards, Connecticut had provided war material and provisions to the federal government – had their eyes cocked on the exit signs. Gun manufacturers were treated shamelessly by the state. Their input on a bill chiefly affecting their business was spurned by a Democratic controlled General Assembly that wanted to add restrictions to gun laws already considered among the strongest in the nation. It was politically convenient for Democrats, as well as the Republicans who joined them in supporting the final product, to come down on the side of gun restrictions. When in doubt, put the gun on public trial. Mr. Blumenthal was wrong. In mid-June, the rumbustious Governor of Texas Rick Perry visited the state, hoping to convince gun manufacturers, among other businesses, to move to no tax regulatory light Texas. But it was South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley who scooped up PTR, a Bristol-based semi-automatic weapons manufacturer. Most of the younger machinists who work for PTR will relocate to South Carolina, a shattering disappointment no doubt to Mr. Blumenthal. Gun manufacturers in the state had been able to submit gun designs to the state police for approval prior to the manufacture of a specific model. After the gun restriction bill had been passed, this business friendly process was rescinded: In the future, gun manufacturers must produce their product and then, AFTER PRODUCTION, the state police will declare the weapon legal or illegal. This is a forthright invitation to gun manufacturers to quit the state. If Mr. Blumenthal does not know this, he should not be serving in the greatest deliberative body in the modern world. Connecticut’s state police will themselves be burdened with the task of enforcing the new sometimes confusing regulations. Even before the bill had been passed, there was a backlog of gun permit cases waiting approval. Enforcement of gun regulations – assuming the new law was not intended merely as a campaign ploy – is labor intensive. It is not certain at this point that the same General Assembly that added the new labor processes will also finance the increased regulation by hiring new state troopers to oversee the execution of the terms of the bill, and state troopers who will in the future be expending their efforts to regulate non-criminal gun owners will have less time to chase down criminals who use weapons purchased on the black market.

Q: At the end of June, some of Adam Lanza’s medical reports and school records fell into the hands of reporters at the Hartford Courant. The documents, which include a medical summary of a visit by Lanza and his mother to Danbury Hospital, “span Lanza’s life from birth to age 18,” according to the exclusive report.

A: … exclusive because no one but the Courant – including the legislators who wrote the gun regulation bill – had the advantage of considering the information in the acquired reports.

Q: And that troubles you?

A: Of course it does.  Listen, everybody who pushed that bill did so because – as numerous political actors said, numerous times – they wished to prevent such mass murders as had occurred at Sandy Hook. Writing such a bill without knowing the medical history of Lanza is comparable to writing a history of the Elizabethan age in England without once mentioning Queen Elizabeth. The information provided by the Courant suggests that Adam Lanza had few problems in school, was not bullied and was not separated out from other pupils for special classes. The paper said it was in receipt of medical information that covered a period in Lanza life from age 8 to 18. Nothing in the information it acquired suggests he was taking psychotropic drugs and, apart from a sensory problem, his performance in school was more than adequate. The legislation produced by the General Assembly was driven by the supposition that Lanza was mentally defective. That may not be true. No information necessary to the creation of legislation should be withheld FOR ANY REASON from legislators creating a bill that advances the public good. This means that exceptions must be made in, say, HIPAA regulations -- or any regulations and procedures that prevent the free flow of information to legislators creating bills such as the gun restriction measure passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly. Legislative committees can receive and consider information in camera. Connecticut’s General Assembly needed information from a much delayed criminal investigation report and health records to write a comprehensive bill that would fulfill the stated intent of those leaders in the General Assembly who were pushing for a quick response to the mass murder of school children in Sandy Hook – and that information should have been made available to appropriate committees in the General Assembly before the bill was finalized. The final bill should have been subjected to a public hearing. It was smuggled through the legislature by means of a questionable emergency certification process, which was blasted by the Connecticut Law Tribune, among others. Gun manufacturers should have been used as a proper resource in the construction of the final bill. Breast beating politicians in the state should have been far more modest in their ambitions. Recently – one supposes through fatigue – Newtown’s First Selectman Patricia Llodra publically called for an end to outside intervention in her town: “the Town will respectfully decline any further special events not currently scheduled by the Town or currently being planned for July/August … We are hopeful that everyone understands the need for us to move into a quieter period.” People in Newtown – harried by reporters, hustled to Washington D.C. by Connecticut’s Congressional Delegation to promote national gun restriction legislation that Majority Leader of the Senate Harry Reid twice failed to deliver, still wracked with private sorrows – should be afforded a private space in which time and silent prayer may help to close their open wounds. She is right.

 

An Interview With Don Pesci: Sandy Hook And The Data Trap

Q: I’ve now read everything you’ve written about the Sandy Hook mass murders, quite a lot. I’ve noticed two things: You have not weighed in on what some people might consider the central legislative issues, the “should”questions – should certain weapons be banned, that sort of thing; and throughout your commentary, you manage to sound like a Jeremiah on what some grey heads in the journalism business use to call “freedom of information.” Is that a right reading of the main thrust of your commentary on Sandy Hook?

A: It’s a fair reading, yes.

Q: Why the emphases on the free flow of information?

A: Because what one does will always depend upon what one knows. It would be more accurate to say “the full and accurate flow of information.” Can I pick a bone with you on Jeremiah?

Q: Sure.

A: Jeremiah was repetitive because he had a positive genius for getting quickly to the decisive point and, of course, repeating it, much to the distress of the hypocritical whitened sepulchers in his audience. Someone –I think it might have been me – once said that journalism was 20 percent thought and 80 percent repetition. That is the nature of journalistic reporting and commentary. Some themes are dearer to you, because they are more important to you, than others, and so you inflict upon your readers the burden of repetition. I’d like to try out on you an answer to the second part of your question.

Q: Okay.

A: Legislators in the General Assembly are pretty much finished with their bills. [This interview occurred on Wednesday, April 10, 2013. Governor Dannel Malloy signed into law on Thursday, April 4, 2013 a bill containing, according to a New York Times report,“… sweeping new restrictions on weapons and ammunition magazines similar to the ones used by the man who fatally shot 20 children and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.”] Remarking on the missing data that should have driven their efforts, I said in one of the columns, all of which may be found on a site called “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State,” [Here sorted by date] that the bills were premature because the criminal investigation report was not due to be completed until June. The General Assembly produced its bill – a bipartisan measure, we are reminded often enough by its architects – in the first week of April, about a month before the criminal investigation report was due to be completed. I think I quoted the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carol’s “Through the Looking Glass” in the course of that blog and column: “First the verdict,” said the imperious Queen, “then the trial.”

Q: Well yes, but people were impatient to get something done.

A: And their impatience had been stoked by politicians and others interested mostly in bum-rushing legislation before the data upon which that legislation should have rested was available. Why is that?

Q: You had the families of the 26 victims in Sandy Hook waiting patiently for legislation that would…

A: … insure that the slaughter at Sandy Hook would not be repeated. There are so many assurances on this point from state and national politicians, Democrats mostly, that it would be unnecessarily tedious to repeat them here. The two U.S. Senators in Connecticut most voluble on this point are Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.

Q: Okay.

A: And how can you write such bills if you do not know what happened at Sandy Hook? To be sure, there were reports in the media, many of which relied upon heavily edited information from sources that may or may not have been accurate. Some of the information in the polluted media stream was partial or inaccurate enough to give credence to absurd conspiracy theories. Very little of the information could be described as authoritative -- because much of the information was in the custody of criminal investigators who were determined to draw about the data an impenetrable iron curtain. Every time you approached a data master with a question, you were told, “Sorry Bud, that information is not available because of an ongoing criminal investigation.” To some commentators, myself among them, the criminal investigation seemed overblown, since the two people who might have been charged criminally, Adam Lanza and the mother he murdered, were both dead, as were most of the witnesses to the mass murder. Finally, as the General Assembly was on the point of emitting bills, the carefully guarded bucket sprung a leak. A New York Daily News reporter loosed upon the public some quarantined details that came to him from a source who had attended a police convention in New Orleans, after which it was decided to release police arrest warrants – be it noted, a full month or more before the final criminal report was due.

Q: Which means what?

A: It means that the data in the arrest warrant could have been release long before to legislators charged with shaping bills. Now, I may say – without, I hope, drifting into the bog of conspiracy theory – that, as a general rule, a political sequence occurs because politicians want things to happen in a certain sequence. Even the data included in the arrest warrant was by no means complete and definitive. Arrest warrants reveal only what police are looking for and what they have found at the beginning of an investigation. The General Assembly should have insisted, right from the get go, that all information in the custody of investigators pertinent to the bill or bills the legislators were constructing be made available to the relevant heads of legislative committees – in camera, if necessary. That did not happen. Connecticut’s very robust Freedom of Information [FOI] law means, if it means anything at all, that the only thing the general public need fear about the release of information is that information necessary to a well ordered Republic will NOT be released. But what happened in this instance goes far beyond FOI laws.

Q: You are not saying that people intentionally edited the data you think necessary so that bills could be constructed as they wished, are you?

A: Well, I do think there is a well-documented tendency among politicians to use available laws and processes to advance a preferred end. That’s politics. If the end they have in view is defective, or if the process leads ineluctably to an end the consequences of which are destructive, you must adjust the laws and processes. Politics, at its best, is the legislative art that conveys us to an end result that increases liberty and justice for all.

Q: But how much of what happened was purposeful?

A: All of it -- I hope. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that our legislators are either stupid or mad. You would have to go to a different planet to find a convocation of reporters and commentators who did NOT think that Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans wanted gun restrictions, whatever the data suggested. The data trap in Connecticut eased their way. But bad data – or, worse, sequestered data – makes for bad laws. If Republicans in Connecticut were not a bunch of spineless go-alongs hanging by their torn fingernails to increasingly disappearing legislative seats, they would insist on bills that break down Berlin Walls intended to prevent the liberating and free flow of data. But look what is happening: As a result of Sandy Hook, we now have before the General Assembly a bill that would restrict information on death certificates. Why? Because we wish to spare the stricken parents of young children murdered in Sandy Hook the resulting publicity that might occur should FOI laws be rigorously enforced. Really? Death certificates, available for centuries to the public, contain only general information. The certificate requires a review of the cause of death by a medical examiner to determine the presence or absence of foul play indicating that a murder may have been committed. How can the general public know that authorities responsible for apprehending and convicting murderers are doing a proper job if information of this kind is not made available to them? Who are the political beneficiaries of such a bill? Why, dear me, can’t we say it plainly? The bill would largely benefit propagandist politicians whose efforts would be furthered any restriction that data-traps inconvenient truths and prevents the free flow of information. You control the messenger – there are still in Connecticut some alert reporters, a few brave Jonahs who have managed to escape the maw of Leviathan – by controlling data. In history, the upward progress of politicians has always been paved by the careful editing of information. In constitutional republics, some subtlety that veils naked political purposes may be necessary to sell such anti-democratic measures to an increasingly apathetic public. Do we wish to further wound stricken victims? How could we be so heartless? This is how the liberties of free men disappear, not through honest battles waged on an open field but with a flick of the serpent’s tongue.

Q: Are you satisfied with the final bill [recently signed into law by Mr. Malloy]?

A: No. the legislative product was shamelessly oversold by demagogues. The passage of the bill here in Connecticut marked the boundary of overheated rhetoric. Before passage, Connecticut politicians, mostly Democrats driven by a script that bore the watermark of Washington D.C., were telling us that the measures they preferred would make school children across the state safe from the Adam Lanzas of the world. Suffering parents in Sandy Hook, perhaps traumatized by the slaughter of their children, were used to prop up an improbable theory: namely, that restrictions imposed on certain weapons –indeed, the most popular and bestselling long rifle in the United States, the AR15 – would render schoolchildren safe from attack. Even town administrators in Newtown dramatically spurned that theory when the town fathers voted to appropriate money to place armed guards in all their schools, including the three private schools in town [Sandy Hook is a section of Newtown]. They knew from direct experience that unarmed interveners, however brave, could not stop a determined shooter. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School stopped when armed first responders appeared in the school. After the bill in Connecticut had passed, U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and Governor Dannel Malloy took their show to Washington D.C., where a national gun bill, much more pallid that the Connecticut version, was up for consideration. Here at home, legislators who had championed “the toughest gun laws in the nation,”perhaps with a cautious eye focused on reality, began a tactical retreat from their overblown rhetoric: True, the bill wasn’t perfect, but we should never allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Vice President Joe Biden said at one point that if national gun legislation saved but one life, it would be worth it, which is simply another way of saying that Mr. Biden regards human life as precious. Well, of course he does. All the old canards were trotted out and dangled before an aroused but doubtful public. A rhetorical mountain had been made of a mole hill, and now politicians were concerned with reducing their overinflated mountain of promises so that, when lives once again were lost in what should properly be regarded for purposes of punishment as a terrorist act, politicians who had overpromised in their legislation would not be held to account. Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy both come from a state that had recently abolished a death penalty following a horrific multiple murder in Cheshire committed by two newly released prisoners on parole. Their crime was spectacularly heinous. They broke into a house, beat the male householder with a bat, tied him up in the basement, assaulted three women in the house upstairs, forced a mother to go to a bank and withdraw money, raped two daughters and set fire to the house, killing all the women. That incident sparked massive purchases of guns in Connecticut, especially in rural areas, where the response time from police is necessarily longer. Now, if Adam Lanza had survived his attack on Sandy Hook Elementary school, he could not have been executed in Connecticut for having murdered his mother, 20 children and 6 brave faculty members of the school because – largely owing to politicians like Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy – the state, for humane reasons, had deprived itself of a punishment tool. Had Mr. Lanza survived, the political play we are now witnessing would not be the same. We have to begin to focus on the criminal misuse of weapons. In the week prior to passage of the gun restriction law in Connecticut, Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell noted in one of his columns, there were three handgun murders in Hartford alone. “Some of the shots fired there,” Mr. Powell wrote, “may have been audible from the Capitol grounds, at least with those with ears to hear. No one in authority seems to know what to do about such murders, and over the course of a year, such murders in Connecticut’s disintegrating cities will be far more numerous than the murders in Newtown, but nobody has to know or even pretendto know because that part of Connecticut – the part where mayhem is ordinary and daily, not a freak event such as Newtown – can be written off politically. Murder victims in the cities long ago ceased being cute.” Unfortunately, not as many people are like to have read Mr. Powell’s column as those who read Mr. Murphy’s maiden speech in the U.S. Senate on gun violence in the course of which Mr. Murphy pointed out, quite correctly, that guns in the hands of criminals are more lethal than knives. He might have done a valuable service for his constituents had he read Mr. Powell’s column into the legislative record.

 

Ideological Prisoners

Democrats, far more than Republicans in Connecticut, have shown themselves to be prisoners of their ideological convictions.

Some of these persuasions are mentioned in a recent column by Chris Powell, Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and a political columnist for the paper, who is often mistaken by politicians he has gored over the years as a conservative, an error Linda McMahon is not likely to make.

Mr. Powell begins his column by noting Governor Malloy’s colossal “‘shortfall’ of $365 million in the current year's state budget,”attributed by the governor to a poorly performing economy and increases in the Medicaid program, also springs from other more controllable causes.

Mr. Malloy has insisted that the state is suffering from a“shortfall” rather than a deficit. The chief difference between a “shortfall”and a “deficit” is this: A “shortfall” is a minor hole in the budget bucket caused by others, principally unforeseen circumstances; a “deficit” is a major hole in a budget that right thinking people attribute to imprudent policies.

Mr. Powell, who has an addiction for calling things by their right names, is very polite about Malloy’s rhetorical evasions. Hey, recessions happen. However, “the Malloy administration has never tried hard to economize. It just reduced the state budget's rate of increase a little. Indeed, the Malloy administration is most notable for a great expansion of the scope of state government, and its expansion of eligibility for Medicaid is just part of it.”

And the rest of the story?

It was the Malloy administration that “created a state version of the federal earned-income tax credit, cash payments to people who don't earn enough to pay state income tax,” and also “increased state grants to municipal education, which are mainly just subsidies for raises for teacher unions,” and also “created a program of corporate welfare dressed up as economic development, paying hundreds of millions of dollars to profitable businesses to stay or expand in Connecticut, including $115 million for the biggest hedge fund to relocate a few miles from Westport to Stamford, the governor's hometown,”and also undertook imprudent and “expensive public works projects for which there was no demand and little need, the bus highway between Hartford and New Britain and the high-speed railroad between New Haven and Springfield.”

And perhaps most strikingly, “The administration failed to obtain substantial concessions from the state employee unions [during its first budget], which gave up some but not all raises and received a four-year guarantee of job security. Amid the record tax increases he imposed, the governor described the union concessions as ‘shared sacrifice,’ but the taxpayers sacrificed far more than the unions did and municipal employee unions lost nothing -- and now the state employees will be exempt from any sacrifice at all for a few years no matter how much worse the economy gets.”

Mr. Malloy has pledged not to raise taxes or rely on layoffs to cover the deficit projected by State Comptroller Kevin Lembo. In view of the automatic salary and benefit raises for unionized state workers plugged into his first budget, the options available to the governor and the legislature to close the state deficit in a special session are varied: He could, as Mr. Powell points out, reduce the state income tax credit against residential property taxes; he might reduce educational financial grants, thus passing along to municipalities the state’s growing deficit and forcing towns to increase taxes for their employees, mostly teachers. No one expects the governor, who has appeared along with Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman on union picket lines, to give his internal assent to serious sacrifices made by union affiliated workers.

Now, the political theory driving this mad method revolves around a highly exaggerated and fantastical notion of the power and efficiency of government. No one who has a realistic operational understanding of government and the private economy would expect Mr. Malloy, or for that matter Mr. Obama, to micromanage free markets, which are far more efficient allocators of resources than government bureaucracies. Mr. Malloy’s “First Five” program is rooted in the perception that the governor can more reasonably direct the economic fate of Connecticut than the once invisible hand of the free market. Governments that seek to do everything – Mr. Malloy has several times said that he wishes to“re-invent” Connecticut -- do nothing well, which is why in a constitutional democracy the perimeters and powers of the three branches of government are carefully prescribed.

The real problem with defective ideologies is that they serve as blinders, preventing a view of reality that will bite your nose the longer you avoid recognizing it. Reality is a snarling tiger. Times of economic stress require maintenance chief executives, prudent cost conscious legislatures and independent appellate courts faithful to their mission, which includes preventing the executive and legislative departments from overrunning their constitutional banks.

Whether Connecticut has – or indeed wants – a government of prudent and modest means is a matter finally to be decided by what the founders used to call a “virtuous” public. When Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention that had imposed a form on the government of the fledgling United States, he was asked by a woman what kind of government he had given us. “A Republic, madam,” said Franklin, “if you can keep it.” Implicit in Franklin’s reply is the unsettling notion that future less vigorous generations may not be able to KEEP the Republic at all.

The State Of Malloy

There is no question that Governor Malloy shakes things up. But when the fizz settles, you find yourself holding the same old bottle of beer – only now it’s flat.

“The budget is everything to Malloy,” former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry told a New York Times reporter, after which Mr. Curry issued a timely warning: “The last thing you want is a sequel to a fiscal crisis.”

National Democrats could not produce a budget, even though they controlled both houses of the U.S. Congress and the White House. The day that President Barack Obama delivered his “State of the Union” address marked the thousandth day the nation had hobbled along without a budget.

The budget situation in Connecticut is not quite that bad. Both houses of the General Assembly have been controlled by Democrats for decades. During the last election, state Democrats captured the governor’s office for the first time in more than twenty years. Taking a page from former “Maverick” Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, Governor Malloy inaugurated the largest tax increase in state history, a record previously held by Mr. Weicker. The Malloyalists have said the budget is balanced, but voices in other rooms say “No.”

The expected “savings” in Mr. Malloy’s budget could not be verified by the state’ non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis on the day it was submitted for approval to the General Assembly. News outlets recently have reported that Connecticut is running a deficit following the largest tax increase in its history, but the prospective red ink has not tamed the inclination of Democrats to recklessly spend other people’s money. Even drunken sailors stop spending when they pass out on the curb; not so with the Democratic controlled General Assembly. Mr. Malloy’s budget prospectus includes more unaffordable Big Think spending.

Persistent critics of Mr. Malloy point out that he tied at least one of his busy hands behind his back in concluding a deal with unions in which current state workers agreed to a wage freeze for two years followed by three percent increases for nine years and a no-layoff pledge for four years, a sweetheart union deal that, given a faltering economy, easily could prompt Mr. Curry’s feared “sequel to Connecticut’s budget crisis.” Should Mr. Malloy feel the itch to cut spending on state employees’ salaries or woefully underfunded pension benefits, he will not be able to scratch it for nine years out. Indeed, Mr. Malloy’s revised Plan A budget deal is one of the reasons why Edith Prague – other than Speaker of the House and announced Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Chris Donovan, perhaps the most ardent union supporter in the known universe – said during the unions-Malloy Kabuki contract negotiations that SEBAC union negotiators would be insane to reject Mr. Malloy’s more than generous offer.

Mr. Malloy’s first budget, pre-approved by the General Assembly before negotiations with unions had been completed, was deconstructed and reconstructed after contentious negotiations between the governor and SEBAC, a coalition of unions authorized to negotiate contracts with the administrations’ budget handlers. In his “State of the State” address, Mr. Malloy mentioned his first budget as an instrument that had “bridged a $3.5 billion deficit, implemented Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and reached an agreement with our state’s public employees that will save taxpayers twenty one and a half billion dollars over the next 20 years.” Every proposition in that statement has been hotly disputed, but there was no mention of disputed budget figures in Mr. Malloy’s presentation the real subject of which was “me,” “myself” and “I”.

A current Office of Fiscal Analysis’ Overview of Governor Malloy’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget shows an increase in spending, an increase in taxes, a disappearing surplus, consolidations that produce no savings, a savings decrease and some confusing motion in the bottom line of the budget – none of which is uplifting. Here’s hoping the relevant legislative committees read the report.

Just for the record, Mr. Malloy mentioned the word “I” eighty nine times in his “State of the State” address. His more modest predecessor, former Governor Jodi Rell, mentioned the word “I” in her 2006 “State of the State” address 46 times. Former Governor John Rowland used the “I” word 14 times during his 2004 State of the State address. Former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, made use of the word 18 times in his 1993 State of the State address. No stranger to the word “I” -- Mr. Weicker auto-biography “Maverick” was reviewed by columnist and Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell under the title “Mr. Bluster Saves The World" -- has been known to overuse the first person singular in his philippics. It is no mean solipsistic accomplishment that Mr. Malloy has outstripped his most energetic predecessor by a perhaps unsurpassable margin.

The Trouble With Plan A

There were several things wrong with Plan B, the most important of which was that it was not proposed by the Malloy administration as a serious effort to control spending, the pink elephant in budget room. But Plan A as currently constructed does not control spending either, because spending in Connecticut is driven by entitlements, long term union contracts and binding arbitration, cost escalators left untouched by Plan A.

Plan B was never more than a pistol held to the temples of union negotiators who had resisted the gubernatorial dictates of Plan A.

Conceived as a threat, Plan B was presented to the general public as a threat, and its conception and presentation were received by the general public in the same spirit. Indeed, Governor Dannel Malloy and both leaders of the Democratic dominated General Assembly, President of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, repeatedly and roundly condemned Plan B even as it was presented, as a cruel default budget plan. Plan B was not Mr. Malloy’s preferred option, the governor said repeatedly.

State Senator Edith Prague, during her 28 years in the General Assembly a devoted union supporter, fairly fainted when she got a gander at Plan B, every Democrat’s mock-up of what they think a Republican budget might have looked like if union operatives had failed to turn out a sufficient number of votes in two of Connecticut’s principal cities during the gubernatorial election, which votes drove the election in Mr. Malloy’s favor by the slimmest of margins and prevented a Republican victory.

"This Plan B takes my breath away,'' said the vice chairwoman of the budget-writing appropriations committee.”It's so unbelievable what it would do to the state of Connecticut. I can't believe these cuts. This is the worst I have seen.''

Plan B passed along Mr. Malloy’s “shared sacrifice” to municipalities by threatening to cut state grants to towns. Among Democrats, it has been supposed that such cuts would result in higher property taxes. But, in fact, such cuts, accompanied by reductions in state mandates, easily could have resulted in cost saving measures within municipalities that might have rolled back than Plan A the tsunami of spending that threatens to beggar the state. Towns, through budget referendums, have been much more successful in reducing costs than have legislators in the Democratic dominated General Assembly.

When Republican leader John McKinney rose in the state senate to protest the Democratic hegemon that had produced a budget without a single Republican fingerprint on it, he touched very lightly on the recent strange doings within the Massachusetts legislature, dominated even more heavily by Democrats, “if one could believe such a thing,” than the General Assembly in Connecticut.

Perhaps to spare the fidgeting Mr. Williams seated beside him, Mr. McKinney did not let the words “repeal binding arbitration” fall from his lips. He spoke in general terms of the Massachusetts legislature having done things that would astonish and appall Democrats in Connecticut. In fact, the Massachusetts legislature, fitfully attempting to regain control of spending, had produced bill abolishing binding arbitration.

Binding arbitration, entitlements and long term union contracts have this in common: They all bind future governors and legislators and are, for that reason, profoundly anti-republican. At the center of republican government lies the notion that a legislature should not be able to bind its successor. The republican ideal is that the people, through their elected representatives, should be able to shape the future. Costly entitlements frustrate republican government. By way of example, the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security amount to $75 trillion, five times the Gross Domestic Product. The national debt is pegged upwards of $14 trillion; but toss in state and municipal debt and the figure balloons to $140 trillion. These are chains that bind. In attempting to repeal binding arbitration, the Democratic dominated Massachusetts legislature is seeking to throw off a few links of the chain to clear the future of roadblocks that prevent a profitable forward movement.

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell, who also writes a column in the paper, is one of the best budget commentators in the state. Mr. Powell has been calling upon the Democratic dominated General Assembly to abolish binding arbitration for years, to no avail. Recently his admonitions have had some success – in Wisconsin. And now in Massachussetts. The whirlpool of common sense is edging closer.

In a recent column the very title of which may cause Mrs. Prague to swoon -- “On to Plan B where we should have started” -- Mr. Powell greeted Plan B as a feint in the right direction. With some modifications favorable to unions – the Democratic legislature shaved nearly half a billion off state worker’s “shared sacrifice,” saved municipalities the trouble of pairing down union contracts and pushed effective reform beyond the governors first term -- the General Assembly has now installed Plan A, a much less serious reform package than Plan B. Because tax payers in Connecticut have no union, there were no negotiations that might have affected the tax increases – which includes a budget surplus -- Democrats have thrown like a yoke over the citizens of the state.

THIS BLOG WAS UPDATED SATURDAY, MAY 14

Is Malloy Serious?

How do you know when a politician is serious about what he says? You watch what he does. The assessing requires a careful attention to words measured, as a tailor measures cloth to a pattern, against actions.

Just now, prior to his taking office, most people who write about politics are weighing words and asking themselves important questions concerning Governor-elect Dan Malloy. If campaigns are a theatre of words, holding office is a theatre of action. It will not – because it cannot – be long before Mr. Malloy presents his budget. A budget is not a speech; it is an action plan that will set the future of Connecticut for Mr. Malloy’s first term and beyond, and it is very likely that his budget, after its particulars are finalized by Connecticut’s dominant Democratic legislature, will determine both the fate of Connecticut, now knee deep in red ink, as well as the future of individual legislators. Voters tend to be somewhat impatient with politicians responsible for the failure of states, and Connecticut, by any reasonable measure, is a failing state.

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell took the measure of Mr. Malloy in one of his recent columns. “Facing a state budget gap of nearly 20 percent between planned expenditures and likely revenue,” Mr. Powell wrote, “Connecticut state government needs ‘systemic’ changes, Gov.-elect Dan Malloy told a business group breakfast in Hartford this week. What does that mean?

“Does it mean the sort of ‘systemic’ change Connecticut got when the state income tax was enacted in 1991 -- higher taxes and bigger government serving only to diminish Connecticut's quality of life? Probably.”

Mr. Powell wants Mr. Malloy to move Connecticut’s so called “fixed costs” -- “collective bargaining for public employees, binding arbitration of public employee union contracts, public employee pensions, ‘prevailing wage’ requirements for government construction projects” – out of the “fixed” column into the fixable column, because these costs, presently safe from meddling interference from legislators and governors alike, are the most costly costs. Any attempt in the future to cut spending without pruning “fixed costs” necessarily must be an exercise in futility. Bringing such costs into the arena of legislative action would empower the governor and the state legislature to fix such holes in the state’s bucket as its stratospheric pension obligations.

Consider: The pension fund has $9 billion in assets and $21 billion in liabilities, which represents 45% of coverage. But, Mr. Powell writes, “instead of fixing the problem, state government lately has been diverting pension fund contributions and spending them. Fixing the problem -- depositing another $8 billion into the pension fund to reach the actuarial standard of 80 percent coverage -- would consume 42 percent of the current state budget of $19 billion if done in a single year. Even done over four years, a fix would consume 10 percent of the budget.”

Connecticut’s debt, the largest per capita debt in the nation, is so deeply rooted that one might reasonably conclude the state no longer has the luxury of protecting large areas of spending by removing them from ordinary legislative action. The present system of governance, in which huge swaths of spending are designated untouchable as “fixed costs,” is part of the architecture of government-by-special-interests. It is becoming increasingly apparent that professions of special interests are conspiracies against the general interest and the common good. Removing areas of spending from cuts made by elected representatives is a recipe for accelerated spending and tax increases. If 75% of the state’s fixed costs are untouchable, only 25% of state debt may be reduced through spending cuts; or, to put it another way, 75% of increased costs MUST be resolved through tax increases, which is why, come to think of it, spending in Connecticut has increased so dramatically since the institution of the income tax. Last year, the Democratic legislature made the tax more progressive. The Promethian hill we climb, only to have the rock roll down to the bottom once we reach the top, IS the fixed costs structure. Tax increase are permissions to spend; it does not take long for a government that has forbidden itself to cut “fixed costs” to rise to the occasion.

Preparing to attack some of these problems, Mr. Malloy recently addressed two seemingly antagonistic groups. The MetroHartford Alliance is a group devoted to spurring business activity. Hearing Mr. Malloy lament that Connecticut ranks 35th among states in a pro business environment, members of the group no doubt were encouraged to think that the speaker was prepared to offer painful but effective remedial action. The members of the second group, the Working Families Party, a union scheme to elect friendly politicians, were as delighted to hear from a politician they helped to elect to office the soothing message that he was committed to maintain an ever broadening safety that would secure the interests of unionized workers.

No one should doubt Mr. Malloy’s ability to turn heads and hearts with words; in this, he bears a striking resemblance to the nation’s sweet tongued president, Barack Obama, whose political agenda Mr. Malloy enthusiastically embraces. Beyond words lie actions. It is by their actions that political actors will be judged – not by the intent of the actors, but rather by the practical consequences of their actions.

Mr. Dodd's Valedictory Speech

“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."

So said Mark Anthony in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Cesar” during Cesar’s funeral oration. Anthony, who took no part in the assassination of Cesar, the bloody work of Brutus and others, all honorable men, was determined that the good Cesar did should not be buried with his bones and that the evil done by his assassins should not outlive them.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s farewell speech before the senate serves a like purpose. Farewell speeches by senators of long standing and exit interviews recorded in newspapers are like brief autobiographies, and there never yet was an autobiographer who was not the hero of his own reminiscences. Eventually, the encomiums are overwritten by sober historians far removed from the partisan atmosphere that colors all the deeds, evil and good, of their subjects.

Mr. Dodd’s errors in office lie just beneath memory’s skin. His three decades in the senate are hardly ancient history. It may be recalled – though not of course by Mr. Dodd, and especially not in a farewell address to his colleagues in the U.S. Senate -- that Mr. Dodd was the senator who, to speak metaphorically, assassinated the Roosevelt era Glass Steagall Act, a measure that prevented rapacious financial institutions from meddling with the bankbooks of Mr. Dodd’s constituents, as noted by Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell:

“I suspect,” Mr. Powell noted in an interview a little over a year ago, “that Connecticut's Senate election will be determined more by doubts about Dodd's personal integrity than by doubts about his record, particularly his long subservience to Wall Street. That will be too bad, since, in providing what turned out to be the crucial support for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and thereby letting commercial banks and investment houses merge, Dodd bears as much responsibility as anyone for the collapse of the world financial system. His Irish "cottage" and the terms of his mortgages are trivial by comparison, not that those things don't imply his having lost touch with Connecticut, a sense of entitlement as part of the ruling class.”

The crushing Dodd-Frank regulatory bill  may be Mr. Dodd’s feeble attempt at repentance.

It will not be long before the regulations in that bill are offset by exceptions awarded by the commanders of the nation’s new command economy in Washington. Companies too big to fail – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for instance, both Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) responsible for the swelling housing bubble the bursting of which preceded the collapse of the mortgage industry in the United States – always have been able to purchase the ears of congressmen prepared to dole out tax dollars to favored failing enterprises.

Before Mr. Mr. Dodd decided not to run for re-election, the Chairman of the Banking committee, always attentive to opportunities, was hauling in campaign dough from major financial institutions, among them Countrywide, the now bankrupt GSE whose CEO, the odious Angelo Mozillo, regarded Mr. Dodd as a “Friend Of Angelo.” Mr. Dodd recently pointed to a lack of reform in Fannie and Freddie as one of the biggest gaps in the new legislation.

In his Senate Swan Song, Mr. Dodd also lamented that “Powerful financial interests, free to throw money about with little transparency, have corrupted the basic principles underlying our representative democracy. And, as a result, our political system at the federal level is completely dysfunctional."

He signed off by quoting from 2 Timothy 4:1 – “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

The author of those words, concerned that Christians following him in later years would “turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths,” earned his crown of suffering and kept the faith by dying for it. St. Paul suffered martyrdom near Rome at a place called Aquae Salviae (now Tre Fontane), somewhat east of the Ostian Way, about two miles from the splendid Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, which marks his burial place.

Mr. Dodd, no doubt, will enjoy a more pleasant end. It has been rumored that Mr. Dodd has been offered a job as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. Should Mr. Dodd accept the position, he will earn a handsome salary of a little over a million a year. Should he decline the offer, his future still promises to be more remunerative than that of St. Paul -- and his final years less agonizing.

Blumenthal, Bysiewicz And The First Amendment

The person who has written most sensibly about Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz and a recent Connecticut Supreme Court decision that did not allow Bysiewicz to run for attorney general in a Democratic primary, largely because Bysiewicz ran afoul of a statute requiring a candidate for the office to have completed a certain number of years in the active practice of law, is Chris Powell, the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer.

Powell pointed out that the statute itself contravenes a constitutional provision that sets only an age requirement for the office. The constitutional provision cannot by definition be unconstitutional. Therefore, the contravening statute must be unconstitutional.

This political hand grenade was tossed to the Supreme Court by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, and the court, Powell reasoned, had got it wrong.

By setting other requirements not demanded by the state constitutional, the court, practically speaking, may have invalidated the constitutional provision, which was intended to open a wide door of liberty to attorney general candidates. Bysiewicz remarked wryly after the court’s decision that, under the auspices of Connecticut’s Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan could not have been appointed to the highest court in the land. Kagan, who came out of academia, had no practical experience at the bar.

Left undebated as the Bysiewicz decision wended its way through the court was the question: Why is practical legal experience at the bar more important than administrative experience in the attorney general’s office?

It might have been interesting to ask Blumenthal after the court decision had come down whether he thought Connecticut’s Supreme Court had got this one right. But the moment passed, and the hand grenade blue up Bysiewicz’s restless ambition, for the moment.

Now, once again, Bysiewicz finds herself in the pickle jar – this time on a matter of First Amendment rights.

Linda McMahon, Blumenthal’s Republican opponent vying for U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s seat, is the former CEO of World Wide Wrestling (WWE). Under protest from Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy and others, a spokesman for Bysiewicz, Av Harris, has issued a press release on behalf of Bysiewicz denying that the secretary of state issued a formal ban on the wearing of WWE gear at polling places.

According to a Hartford Courant report, while Bysiewicz has not issued a “formal ban” on the gear, “the issue has been discussed informally with local registrars. Harris said it will be left to the discretion of local poll workers whether to ask voters to remove their wrestling gear when they are inside the polling place.”

Through informal discussions, the First Amendment grenade has been placed in the hands of poll workers, according to Bysiewicz’s spokesman:

"If the poll workers feel like the wearing of WWE paraphernalia is in any way interfering with the voting [process], they can ask the individual to cover it up or leave and come back with something else on. We're aware that this is may be an issue and were prepared to evaluate every case on an individual basis.”

At this point, one would like the attorney general – who has sent out to the media a number of press releases on First Amendment issues recently, two of which would restrain advertisers from running material on social service sites the attorney general considers repugnant – to man up and retrieve the grenade from the poor poll workers.

Do voters have a First Amendment right to wear wrestling gear to the polls?

Some First Amendment scholars, very possibly a U.S. Supreme Court justice who has no practical experience at the bar, may believe they might. Some in Connecticut’s media may believe they do. Cynics who may think the secretary of state is in this instance carrying water for the Democratic Party and in particular for Blumenthal, who stands to benefit from intimidated McMahon voters, would be instantly disabused of their corrosive cynicism should the ambitious, lean and hungry attorney general put a quick stop to the abuse of the First Amendment by issuing one of his frequent advisories instantly reproduced by all the First Amendment lovers in the media.

Someone surely will put the question to Blumenthal, hopefully before voters compelled to strip by poll watchers enter voting areas to exercise their franchise and their First Amendment rights in November.

The Consultant Campaign

Christine Stuart of CTNewsJunkie continues to turn out prose that is readable and pertinent.

In “Lamont’s Latest Ad: Risky Or Smart?” she lifts the covers on some Democratic gubernatorial supporters, which include some old Democratic political hands: Jonathan Pelto, now in the consulting business; Bill Curry, slowly working his way out of the closet as a Ned Lamont groupie; and Roy Occhiogrosso, attached to the Dan Malloy campaign as a consultant.

The boys are cutting the cards on a new Ned Lamont ad in which Ned claims the independent mantle and even – the man’s courage knows no bounds – appropriates for himself in the ad a signature adage that once belonged to ex-senator, governor and self described “turd in the Republican Party punch bowl” Lowell Weicker.

One of the pledges Ned is making to the people of Connecticut is – “I’m going to be no man but yours.”

Not to be overly subtle, the ad is titled “Independent.” It worked for Sen. Joe Lieberman.



Good ad? Bad ad? What?

Good, says Curry: “It’s a smart ad. He’s doing the insider, outsider thing with Malloy.”

Drawing upon his own political experience – what else? -- Curry termed Weicker slogan one of the best in Connecticut history. “Do not overestimate party loyalty,” said Curry, “who lost the Democratic Party’s endorsement for governor in 1994, then won the nomination in a primary, with a similar independence theme,” Stuart notes.

It was, in fact, a politically opportune slogan for Weicker, since Democrats, then and now, far outnumbered Republicans in a state awash in Blue minded journalists. Chris Powell, one of the most “independent” newsmen in the business, then and now, was among the first to recognized that a post Watergate Weicker, while senator, had long been using his own party as a foil to curry (no pun intended) votes and favors from majority Democrats. When the Weicker-Democratic romance went a little too far, domesticated and abused Republicans revolted and put an end to their quarrelsome marriage. Democrats such as Chris Dodd – now about to exit the U.S. Senate before he turns into congressional dust – mourned the loss, but state Republicans were quite cheery about it.

The political calculus in Lamont’s case is a bit different. Unlike Weicker, Lamont is not a minority Republican but a Democratic insurgent, more independent of party politics than his primary opponent Dan Malloy. However, in order effectively to address a budget hole that has made even Weicker gag, Lamont will have to be more than independent: He will have to put himself in opposition to the spending machine that has created the largest per capita debt in the nation. And that will entail, at a minimum, a life and death struggle with unions, in Connecticut a third rail of politics that even “no man but yours” Weicker shrank from touching.

Powell, by the way, is convinced that none of the Democratic gubernatorial contenders are interested in cutting spending; certainly, party leaders in the legislature, notorious among them Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, once a union steward, are singularly uninterested in calling unions to heel. If Powell is right -- and he has been wrong far less often than Curry -- all the chatter among Democrats concerning responsible deficit reductions and permanent curbs on spending is not worth a bucket full of spit.

But the independent feint may profitably be used campaign fodder to beguile increasingly indigent taxpayers, many of whom, even establishment Democrats might agree, are in open rebellion against party power brokers.

The most amusing line on the new Lamont ad comes from Occhiogrosso, who makes no attempt to conceal his affection for Malloy: “Ned Lamont still apparently doesn’t know who he is. Now he’s trying to be Lowell Weicker. He’s fundamentally wrong in his belief the state should be run like a business. And no 60-second ad is going to change that.”

But of course!

Gubernatorial hopefuls such as Tom Foley, presently leading the Republican primary field, may think that the business of government is business, to quote President Cal Coolidge. But most Democrats in the state – quite unaware that Will Rogers was grinding his teeth when he said “The business of government is to keep government out of business, unless business needs government aid” – have long operated on the principle that the business of Democratic government is politics.

And they are very good at it.

Dump Dick?

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and columnist Chris Powell says the provenance of the story in the New York Time concerning Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s non-service in Vietnam is unimportant:

“Blumenthal's defenders also argue that the Times' reporting about his misrepresentations is compromised because it originated with information provided by the campaign of a Republican candidate for senator, wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon. But of course everyone in public life feeds and tries to spin the press, the attorney general himself most of all -- which may explain some of the excuses being made for him in the press.

“McMahon's campaign and that of her rival for the Republican Senate nomination, former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, long have been feeding the press uncomplimentary information about the other, and now that Blumenthal has lost his big lead and no longer can ignore the opposition, his campaign soon will be doing the same to whoever runs closest to him. A good story will remain a good story no matter where it came from.”

And then he drops the 800 pound gorilla on Blumenthal:

“But the big issue on the eve of the Democratic state convention is not whether the Times story was perfectly fair or whether the enormous damage it has done to Blumenthal's candidacy can be mitigated but rather whether Blumenthal and his party will put at grave risk what ordinarily would be a safe Democratic seat in the Senate by continuing with his candidacy.”