Gun Control, The Malloyalist Molotov Cocktail, Detroit Or Bust

The premise of Connecticut’s new gun control legislation is that crimes committed illegally with guns may be controlled by such measures as requiring once licit gun owners to register their guns. That premise is doubtful, to say the least.

Connecticut’s new gun control legislation felonizes the ownership of a gun that has not been reported to the state police. According to recent stories, the state is awash in new felons, none of whom have committed violent crimes with their weapons. Among the new felons are some who have failed to register their guns from inadvertence, others who have failed to register for reasons of principle, and still others who are determined to treat the new law in the same way as those who drive cars with expired licenses. This last group is willing to spin the roulette wheel, knowing in advance that they are not likely to commit crimes and so come to the notice of an arresting authority.

The number of gun owners in Connecticut who have not registered their guns within the time allotted by the new bill is astonishing. State police, a Hartford paper reported, had received nearly 50,000 applications for assault weapons certificates by the end of 2013, a figure that represents as little as 15 percent of those who own guns classified as “assault weapons” under the new law. The “assault weapons” classification itself has been questioned by gun groups. If an “assault weapon” is any weapon used in an assault, the list of prohibited weapons in the new bill is much too short.

Frankie “The Razor” Resto, recently sentenced following a plea bargain, obtained the weapon he used in a deadly assault in Meriden from an illegal weapons black-market that will survive any law written by Connecticut’s General Assembly proscribing the use of specific guns, especially rifles. Laws proscribing the use rifles are not likely to put much of a dent in the commission of crimes. FBI statistics show that the number of murders committed with rifles in 2011 was 323, while handguns accounted for 12,664 homicides.

Mr. Resto came by his prison title “The Razor” because his assault weapon of choice, when he wished to shake down a drug dealer, was an assault razor. But “The Razor,” once released from prison, easily managed to acquire a gun obtained illegally, as well as hollow nosed bullets, also illegal, to murder Ibraham Ghazal, a store keeper in Median. Mr. Resto, a graduate of prison czar Mike Lawlor’s Orwellian titled Earned Risk Reduction Credits program, agreed to a plea bargain in which five more years might have been added to his sentence of fifty three years because he had used an illegally acquired assault weapon to murder Mr. Ghazal – but the weapons charge was not a part of Mr. Resto’s plea agreement. It is unclear why or at whose insistence the weapons charge was dropped from the final agreement. It is highly curious, however, that a state seemingly interested in protecting its citizens from law abiding gun owners who have no intention of committing violent crimes should have dropped from a plea agreement a weapons charge that could have added five years to the sentence of a violent murderer. A plea agreement that did not expunge the weapons charge might have convinced some recently felonized gun owners that the state of Connecticut truly was interested in prosecuting the illegal, violent and criminal use of guns.

Violent criminals such as Mr. Resto – who burned his mattress while in prison and gave other indications that he was an incorrigible gang-banger upon whom Mr. Lawlor’s ill-conceived get out of jail early program would have no effect at all – can acquire banned weapons as easily as they acquired Mr. Lawlor’s UNEARNED Risk Reduction Credits, which were distributed retroactively to thousands of prisoners. Mr. Lawlor’s program was not vetted by relevant legislative committees. Instead, the former co-chair of the Judiciary Committee attached his program to an omnibus implementer bill at the end of a legislative session. Attempts by Republicans to exempt violent criminals from the program have been rebuffed by Mr. Malloy, Mr. Lawlor and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, most of whom will be claiming implausibly during the upcoming elections that Republicans are waging a fictitious war on women. Mr. Lawlor’s program awards “Risk Reduction Credits” to violent criminals convicted of sexual assault in the first degree, assault on a pregnant woman, kidnapping in the first degree, and other violent crimes committed against women. For whom, it should be asked, do Mr. Lawlor’s credits reduce risks?

These are the festering lilies of the one-party state: A poorly constructed bill is smuggled through the General Assembly by an arrogant and unresponsive former co-chair of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee; Mr. Lawlor’s judiciary co-chair in the state senate, Andrew McDonald, is awarded a seat on Connecticut’s Supreme Court (Mr. Lawlor and Mr. McDonald, it may be recalled, were largely responsible for the passage of a bill abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty -- shortly after a mass murder in Cheshire and months before another mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School); productive Connecticut citizens are over taxed by a spendthrift Democratic dominated General Assembly after the first Democratic governor since William O’Neill declines to invite elected Republican leaders to a budget negotiation process conducted largely in secret by Mr. Malloy and tax hungry leaders of SEBAC, a politically connected union group; a criminal report that should have been made available in camera to legislators writing a bill on assault weapons is unaccountably delayed; Freedom of Information regulations are under unremitting attack. And what is done and left undone by Mr. Malloy’s administration, acting always in concert with other Malloyalists in the General Assembly, remains hidden behind an iron wall of secrecy and dissimulation.

A media alive to the baleful effects of the one-party state would allow none of this – ever, ever, ever. But Connecticut’s largely somnolent media awakens only when the Malloyalist Molotov cocktail penetrates their usually safe corner of the political barracks. And so Connecticut progresses ever forward, its progressive pennants flapping in the wind -- Detroit or Bust!

How You Know When an Election Is Over

You know when an election in Connecticut is over when virtually all incumbent Democrats are re-elected to office, after having been fulsomely endorsed by much of the state’s left of center media, and when, several days after the election, bad news headlines begin to appear in Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper:“State’s Medicaid Costs Soar, Projected Budget Deficit Attributed In Part to Expanded Coverage.” That headline appeared in a Hartford paper as a front page above the fold story a little less than two weeks after the election.

According to the story, we discover that the state’s $365 million budget deficit “dates, in part, to two years ago when Connecticut became the first state to expand medical coverage to low-income adults as an early adopter of federal health care reform.” The federal health care reform program is Obamacare. The architects of Obamacare were careful to front load the program with alluring benefits; payments for the alluring benefits were deferred until after the election.

That would be – now.

Two years ago, Connecticut was plowing the field in preparation for Obamacare. In 2010, we discover from the story: “Connecticut had the largest percentage increase of any state in Medicaid enrollment among low-income adults — a 32 percent jump, not an insignificant bump on the spending Richter scale.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget hawk Ben Barnes, secretary of the state's Office of Policy and Management, must have felt the tremors long ago. Asked to account for the Malloy $365 million budget deficit – the governor prefers to think of it as an easily backfilled “shortfall” – Mr. Barnes said, “The number of people enrolled in that program has shot up.” He also notes, “One, the economy has been poor. More people have been impoverished as a result of high unemployment, things of that nature."

How long ago did Mr. Barnes sense the economy was underperforming? Long, long ago. The economy was underperforming, President Barack Obama never tires of reminding us, since the Bush recession; that would be more than four years ago.

Under the enlightened leadership of Mr. Malloy, Connecticut had been stuffing the state’s revenue sock since the governor presented his first SEBAC inspired budget, which included a massive boost in taxes – the largest increase, in fact, in the state’s history. And a new healthcare exchange was inaugurated in the state long ago to prepare for Obamacare, promoted by Democrats during their campaigns as a more prudent less expensive health care instrument.

Tilling the field for Obamacare, Connecticut shelved its old heath care system, State Administered General Assistance (SAGA), and instituted a new Medicaid Low Income Adult program (HUSKY Part D) in 2010. Under the old system, SAGA serviced people from ages 21 to 64; under the new Medicaid Low Income Adult program the eligibility age was lowered two years to19, thus increasing the number of health care consumers. Under SAGA, benefits were extended only to people who held less than $1,000 in assets, though beneficiaries were permitted to own a home and a car worth $4,500 or less. As Mr. Barnes put it, “You could essentially have one crummy, old car and no money in the bank, or a couple hundred dollars in the bank, and still qualify. But if you had any assets at all [apart from the crummy old car and a house] then you didn't qualify. You had to spend down those assets on medical services before you were eligible. So, that ruled some people out of eligibility."

Under the Obama-Malloy-Barnes new health care system, limits on assets were eliminated – would Linda McMahon qualify? – benefits are more“robust” (translation: more expensive) and the program kicks in at an earlier age. These “improvements” necessarily increase the cost of the program. Connecticut has not yet received from Washington a waiver filed last summer that would impose a $10,000 asset eligibility test for the Medicaid program for low-income adults, and the federal government, currently reimbursing Connecticut for 50 percent of the program, will not reimburse the state fully under the Affordable Care Act until 2014.

Why then, should anyone be surprised that the new Medicaid Low Income Adult program has kicked a hole in Connecticut’s budget bucket?

The post-election story in the Hartford paper helpfully provided the relevant statistics: “In two years, Medicaid enrollment by low-income adults has grown from fewer than 50,000 to more than 83,000, greatly outpacing the state's expectations, according to state figures. Total Medicaid enrollment was 588,488 at the end of the last fiscal year in June, up 13,676 in a year.”

Surely the state figures were available to both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Barnes. Two years is 730 days, a little less than 105 weeks, 8,760 hours in which to ponder projected costs, Mr. Barnes’ specialty.

Here is the truth: Everybody knew, much before the elections, that Obamacare would cost the states millions of dollars. Mr. Obama knew, Mr. Malloy knew, Mr. Barnes knew, all the Democrats in both national and state legislatures knew, publishers of newspapers knew, newspaper editors who endorsed here in Connecticut every single incumbent Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation knew. Everyone but voters -- prior to the election -- knew that Connecticut was marching lemming-like towards the edge of a fiscal cliff, piped in that direction by sweet talking politicians with more curves in their courses than a slinky.

And now -- after all Connecticut incumbent Democrats have been tucked into their comfortable sinecures -- the rest of us are, at long last, permitted to know.

Should a media that allows itself to be so misused any longer be permitted to call itself free – or even useful?

The First Murphy-McMahon Debate

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. McMahon went on to answer her own question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions Remain Unanswered by Murphy

In a recent Hartford Courant story concerning Representative Chris Murphy’s mortgage issue, Courant columnist Jon Lender writes there are details of the loan still shrouded in mystery.

Mr. Murphy, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat soon to be relinquished by Joe Lieberman, has claimed he missed “several” payments on his mortgage. The lapses of memory did not prevent him from receiving favorable credit from a Webster Bank, although Mr. Murphy, a lawyer, had been sued for non-payment of his mortgage.

One of the more important detail yet unknown is how many payments Mr. Murphy missed. The term “several” is non-specific.

“Among the details still unknown,” Mr. Lender writes, “publicly are: the number of monthly payments Murphy missed leading to the 2007 foreclosure action; how much money he was in arrears by; and whether he was keeping up with payments on a concurrent Webster Bank second mortgage.”

The rate given Mr. Murphy was high for someone who had missed “several” mortgage payments, and the favorable rate given to Mr. Murphy required “a top credit score, and total loans and credit lines that did not exceed 80 percent of the value of the house…

“But whatever marks were on Murphy's credit from the missed payments and lawsuits, a Webster official said that at the time of the loan, the bank's underwriting policy when considering joint applications from married couples was to consider the credit score for the more-creditworthy spouse.

“Without being more specific, Robert Guenther, Webster's senior vice president for public affairs, said Cathy Murphy had good credit —and a higher credit score than her husband.”

Mr. Murphy’s campaign appears to be unwilling to furnish the missing details. Even so, he received from the Courant’s editorial department a review at least as favorable as that of the bank in question.

The Murphy Pass and the Zen Gap

One could only imagine what might have happened at the Hartford Courant’s editorial board offices if one of their investigative journalists had discovered that former Governor John Rowland, now a radio talk show host, had failed to pay his mortgage “several times,” having been sued by a bank anxious to recover mortgage payments from a dead-beat politician.

Brains would have exploded.

A Bad Editorial Worsened

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again” – Alexander Pope

The following paragraph, which appeared in a Hartford Courant editorial, “A Bad Bill Worsened,” a day after April Fool’s Day, is itself more shallow than most of the assertions made by the paper in a previous thoughtless editorial:

“The state is forgoing much-needed revenue — about $27 million a year at the current price level —that most drivers won't miss. This is money that could be used to balance the budget or to repair bridges and roads — an area the state is short on by $1.4 billion. Research indicates that poor roads increase maintenance costs. So pennies' worth of savings for drivers could mean millions of dollars in repair costs for the state.”

The state -- by which we are to understand Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic dominated General Assembly but not, pointedly, the people of the state – instituted the largest broad based tax increase in Connecticut’s history days after the elevation to the governorship of the first Democratic chief executive in more than twenty years

The notion that such a tax increase, levied to pay for the improvident spending of previous Republican governors and the Democratic dominated General Assembly, is GOOD for those people in the state who pay taxes is a matter much open to dispute, since progressive taxation generally moves money from productive citizens to rarely satisfied, ever demanding tax consumers. The vehicle by which such taxes are distributed is, of course, state government.

In view of the largest tax increase in state history, one might quarrel with the editorial writers of the Courant on a few points.

Is the $27 million in tax revenue the state will “forego” as a result of the tax relief provided by the bill to which the paper objects so vehemently in two editorials really needed by the state? Is it not possible, for instance, for such a tax pinched governing authority to move into road maintenance all the money it gives as gifts to profit rich crony capitalist companies?

The paper argues in its editorial that tax payers will not miss the tax relief provided by the bill capping the gross receipts tax because it is so small as to be almost negligable, little more than a pea under the princess’ massive tax mattress.

If this is true, will not the loss of revenue to the state be even more negligible? State appropriations, after the largest increase in Connecticut history, are cresting at about $21 billion each fiscal year, a figure that would have horrified former Governor William O’Neill, the last Democratic governor to hold office before the advent of Mr. Malloy, whose last budget was a modest $7.5 billion. So insignificant is the tax relief provided by the Len Suzio inspired gross receipts cap bill, Courant editorialists argue in their brief for higher taxes and increased spending, that “most drivers won’t miss” the savings they will realize when the tax is capped, an objection to tax relief that parallels that of Queen Marie Antoinette. If taxes were so high as to cause the well plucked pre-revolutionary citizens of France to forgo meat, said the soon to beheaded Queen, “Let them eat cake.”

Somewhat like the editors of the Courant, the aristocracy of France in months and years before the storming of the Bastille failed to identify the state with the people of France, a lapse in judgment noticed by Danton and Robespierre, preferring instead to conflate the state with the king and state administrators in the manner of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” who is reputed to have said, “L'Etat c'est Moi” -- I am the state. The Sun King’s death bed confession to his successors, however, is generally forgotten by those who conflate the administrative and taxing power of the state with the people: “Do not follow the bad example which I have set you. I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects” –chiefly the extravagant taxes imposed on the people by the sovereign state.

Not only will the tax cap savings fail to resister with gas consumers but, the Courant adds ominously, the taxes lost “could be used to balance the budget or to repair bridges and roads — an area the state is short on by $1.4 billion. Research indicates that poor roads increase maintenance costs. So pennies' worth of savings for drivers could mean millions of dollars in repair costs for the state.”

Somehow, the Courant fails to note in its editorial that about half of the tax on gas the state collects – about fifty cents per gallon-- is dumped into the general fund, which perhaps would explain why the Malloy administration is short on its bridge and road repair obligations by about $1.4 billion; deferred obligations do add up quickly.

Nor does the Courant note that “the state” – by which the paper means the state’s governing apparatus -- has improvidently given away tax dollars it otherwise might have used for bridge and road repairs to large and prosperous too-big-to-fail Connecticut corporations in order to bribe such companies to remain in the state rather than seek out more low tax, low regulation environments elsewhere in what is becoming the United States Of Crony Capitalism.

It is always best for those who favor increasing spending and taxes not to drink too deeply of the economic Pierian Spring.

Courant On Tax Relief

The canned response to any attempt to lower taxes in Connecticut goes something like this: In the grand scheme of things, savings from the proposed tax reduction will be insignificant. And the computed savings, in any case, will deplete money made available to the state that is used for noble and necessary purposes such as, not to be too bitterly sardonic, miss-educating urban school children for several decades.

Thus does the Hartford Courant vociferously object in an editorial to a decision made by Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly to cap the state’s gross receipt tax on gas for one year only.

The title of the paper’s March 24 editorial is “Gas Tax Cap Is Showboating.” Apparently, political showboating in the future is to be frowned upon by editorial editors and writers at the Courant.

A few days before the editorial appeared, Democrats in the General Assembly had devised a TEMPORARY ONE YEAR ONLY cap on the state’s gross receipts tax, a charge placed by the General Assembly on gas upon its arrival in the port of New Haven. The aptly named “gross receipt tax,” in addition to the excise tax on gas at the pump, increases the dollar price of a gallon of gas in Connecticut by about 50 cents, 25 cents for the gross receipt tax and 25 cents for the excise tax at the pump – the highest gas tax in the nation

Connecticut is one of the few states that charge a gross receipt tax, initially levied to pay for upkeep on the state’s transportation infrastructure. Over the years, as so often happens with “dedicated” funds in the tax and spend state, the gross receipts tax revenue stream was partly diverted into the General Fund. The Courant notes in its editorial that last year only half of the $334.5 million generated by the receipts tax, about $165.3, tricked down from the taxing authority into the state’s transportation fund, although the Federal Highway Administration last year ranked 75 percent of Connecticut’s road in “less than good” repair. The state adds its 7.53% Gross Receipts Tax to each wholesale gasoline sale.

The gross receipts tax is especially pernicious because the tax rises automatically with increases in the price of gas and is, unlike the excise tax shown at the pump, hidden from the consumers’ view, an ideal tax for politicians wary of voter’s disapproval at a time when citizens in the state already have been harshly punished by the largest General Assembly sanctioned tax increase in state history.

The super-tax increase, larger even than the massive increase in taxes and consequent spending following the Courant supported Lowell Weicker income tax in 1991, was levied by the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years on sales and service transactions that conscientious editorial writers at the paper doubtless consider, viewing each separately, far more insignificant than the “cost” to state government incurred by a temporary cap on the gross receipts tax. A partial list of new taxes imposed by Mr. Malloy, with the concurrence of the Democratic dominated General Assembly, may be found at the Connecticut Commentary site.

The Courant in its editorial does not oppose the temporary tax relief that would follow upon passage of the Democratic bill because the bill itself, which caps the tax only for one year, is a preposterous fraud.

Pushed over the edge by Len Suzio, a populist Republican who has called for the elimination of the gross receipts tax, Democrats in the General Assembly up for re-election produced a bill that would cap the tax temporarily, a measure designed to fool all of the people some of the time, just long enough to secure the elections of Democratic legislators who favor permanent tax increases and temporary tax relief.

No, the Courant objects, here and always, to ANY tax relief – permanent or temporary – a shameless and reckless position when the ever-rising tide of spending in Connecticut is fatally lowering the level of business activity that former President John Kennedy once said would lift all the boats. The demand-siders on the editorial board of the paper further insist that only a reduction in demand – and not an increase in supply – can reduce the price of gas at the pump, a notion that any economist worth his salt would consider juvenile and anti-historical.

There is not a single economist, living or dead, who does not believe that the price of a product can be lowered by an increase in its supply. When President John Kennedy said that a rising would lift all the boats – a, phrase borrowed by his speechwriter from the regional New England Council chamber of commerce – the president was announcing his intention to spur business activity by reducing tax rates. This is what Mr. Kennedy said:

“It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."

When thought itself has been replaced by the seeming irresistible urge of left of center environmental purists at Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper to array one’s unexamined prejudices in print, legislative policy – disastrously – will follow suit.

The Courant And Connecticut’s Death Penalty

The editorial board of the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, waited patiently until a penalty hearing jury brought in a finding that Joshua Komisarjevsky must die by lethal injection before getting into print, only hours later, an editorial demanding the abolition of the state’s death penalty.

The editorial is only incidentally related to the case at hand, and very likely portions of it were written long before a jury of his peers decided that Mr. Komisarjevsky should be executed. It is an all-purpose declaration, suitable in every death penalty case, a suit of argumentation that will fit any body of evidence.

For instance, the editorial points to “endless reviews and appeals,” not at all uncommon in death penalty cases, and laments that both Mr. Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, earlier condemned to death by a different jury for the same crime, the murder of three women in Cheshire, “are more likely to die of old age before they are executed.”

This is true enough. There are a number of people on Connecticut’s death row whose seemingly endless appeals have so far have forestalled their execution. The gap between the commission of a murder in Connecticut, a trial, a second penalty phase trial and the execution of a death sentence is uncommonly long, bridged by seemingly endless appeals. The paper asks whether these “agonizing and expensive trials accomplish anything?”

The answer the paper is angling for is – No. Since the capital felony process in Connecticut can be subverted by seemingly endless appeals, the state should throw up its hands, concede that its death penalty is unworkable, and abolish a procedure that is unworkable, expensive, immoral and inherently unjust. The death penalty is unjust, according the editors of the Hartford Courant, because it is rooted in revenge and subject to misapplication.

Most of these objections are all purpose caveats. Each one of them begins to collapse once they are applied to the Komisarjevsky-Hayes case.

There is no question of a misapplication of the death penalty in the Komisarjevsky-Hayes multiple murder case. There is not a single member of the editorial board of the Hartford Courant who could argue persuasively before a jury of third graders that either Mr. Komisarjevsky or Mr. Hayes did not commit the crimes of which they have been accused. And while it may be argued that somewhere in the world the death penalty is even now being misapplied, that datum simply has no bearing on the Cheshire murder case.

The notion that the Komisarjevsky jury, which returned a verdict of guilty and later found in a separate penalty hearing trial that the multiple murderer should suffer execution, was motivated by vengeance is a howler that even a shameless comic would hesitate to drag on stage; this kind of special pleading, bordering on demagoguery, just ain’t funny. Vengeance, as a general, rule is swift and inexpensive; it dispenses with costly trials and retrials. Vengeance does not empanel juries to decide questions of innocence or guilty. It does not resort to penalty hearing trials. It is emotional and not deliberative. It occurs most often out of the presence of juries, judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors. These processes bear no relation to murder, and people who argue that the death penalty appropriately applied is “judicial murder,” some of them lawyers, do not understand the meaning of the word “murder” or the word “judicial” or the word “is.”

“When the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, it was with the hope that it could be administered impartially,” Courant editors write. “There is much evidence that this hope has not been met.”

No kidding?

Connecticut has executed two people in the last fifty years. Where is the evidence in either case that the death penalty in Connecticut has been administered in a partial, unjust manner? There is no such evidence.

Once the baby is thrown out with the wash water, the baby is irrecoverable. We are to abolish the death penalty because opponents of the death penalty have been successful in so prolonging the gap between non-vengeful conviction and the application of death sentences as to make capital punishment expensive and harrowing for the family victims of multiple murderers such as Komisarjevsky and Hayes. This is the real argument against capital punishment in Connecticut.

Abolition proponents who are legislators have yet to tell their constituents what punishment they would recommend in the case of a convicted murder serving a life sentence who commits a second murder in prison, or whether they think a terrorist who successfully kills hundreds of people should be spared the indignity of a non-vengeful and just public execution.

Someone should ask them.

Malloy on Taxes: So What?

Tom Dudchik’s popular site, Capitol Report, featured a picture of Democratic Connecticut Govern Dannel Malloy side by side with an accompanying picture of Republican Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman. Mr. Malloy looks a little stern and sour, lips pursed, jaw jutted forward, rather as if he had just told the leaders of SEBAC that they would have to wait on their Cost of Living Increases for a couple of years, while fighting off as he did so an army of benighted tax resistors still smarting from the largest tax increase in Connecticut’s history. Mr. Heineman, on the other hand, appears relaxed and expansive. The title below the pics reads, in an assertive font:

CAPITOL REPORT

RAISE’EM; CUT’EM

The lede on another report was not cheery:

“In Nebraska, Republican Gov. Dave Heineman enacted the biggest tax cut in state history, and the state's unemployment rate of 4.2 percent is now the second lowest in the nation.

“In Connecticut, Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy enacted the largest tax increase in state history this year, and the state's unemployment rate of 9.1 percent ranks in the bottom half in the nation.”

Ditto in the case of a dozen other media reports.

Mr. Heinman chairs the National Governors Association. In that capacity he came to Hartford to boast about the advances his state has made in perilous economic times.

The tax cuts and the consequent economic growth in his state have propelled Nebraska into the top 10 “most business friendly” states:

"It made a real difference in our tax-competitive climate, our business-friendly climate. We know we need to do more. It's all of these things combined. It's not just one. It's taxes. It's regulation. It's workforce development. It's education.''

Mr. Malloy, it need hardly be said, is big on all three -- education, taxes and regulation – though Mr. Heinman was at pains not to point fingers, governors being a bit more collegial than, say, tempestuous congressmen. Republicans as a general rule tend to regulate government whenever possible, leaving Democrats to regulate everything else. Both nationally and stateside, Democrats have been much in the habit recently of transferring tax monies from have-not hard pressed taxpayers to large businesses too big to fail or flee.

The fear nationally is that large failed companies will increase unemployment if they are permitted to go belly-up; therefore they must be propped up by so called millionaires, defined by tax-hungry congressmen in Washington as anyone making more than $200,000 per year. The states fear that large companies, few of them in danger of bolting, may, if they are not supported by hairdresser taxes, scoot across the border into more tax friendly states, giving an advantage to tax cutting governors – almost everyone but Mr. Malloy. And so the large financially secure are bribed to stay, for the time being.

Mr. Malloy responded that Connecticut was also business friendly. The governor first had to kill the Hydra before he could begin to straighten out the state. He raised taxes on hairdressers he said “… so that I could look business in the face and say, 'Listen, I believe we've got the bulk of our problem behind us. We've balanced a budget. We've taken the steps necessary to wrestle a structural deficit to the ground and we move forward…I think we are a tax haven. Although our personal taxes may be high, primarily driven by our over-reliance on property taxes, if you look at our corporate tax structure, we have one of the lowest effective rates on the corporate level.''

Given the large opening in Mr. Malloy’s tent, a critical camel rushed in. Said Republican leader John McKinney:

"So Governor Malloy thinks this is a tax haven? I had no idea. I think the governor's comments that we’re a tax haven show that the governor doesn't get it. Maybe the multi-national large corporations are attracted by a lower corporate tax rate, but our economy is driven by small business owners. ... The way to tell business that you have your house in order is to get spending under control. He doesn't cut spending. He increases spending. I'm almost left speechless at the fact that here's the governor of Nebraska talking about cutting taxes and our governor is believing that increasing taxes improved our business climate. Every small business owner pays the personal taxes that Governor Malloy thinks are too high.''

The Governor’s conference will be a ten day affair. It’s flu season. Perhaps Mr. Malloy can arrange to catch something.

The Vozhd

The budget submitted by Governor Dannel Malloy to the Democratic dominated General Assembly and approved by the legislature – although a pending deal between Mr. Malloy and state union workers requiring union givebacks of $1.6 billion had not been affirmed by the unions at its passage – is best seen as the inevitable political end piece of the first Weicker budget.

The presumptions underlying Governor Lowell Weicker’s 1991 budget parallel Mr. Malloy’s. Indeed, the two budgets, as well as the political maneuvering involved in passing them, are nearly mirror images.

Mr. Weicker’s campaign for governor featured rather dramatic suggestions that he would not resort to an income tax to liquidate a large state debt. Similarly, Mr. Malloy several times during his campaign with Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley suggested that an increase in taxes would be a last resort for him.

Instituting an income tax, Mr. Weicker said at the time, “would be like pouring gas on a fire.”

Upon being elected governor, Mr. Weicker chose as his Office of Policy Management chief Bill Cibes, a pro-income tax proponent who had run for governor on an income tax platform. Mr. Cibes had been soundly defeated. Before anyone could cry “Fire” in Connecticut’s crowded political theatre, Mr. Weicker, breaking arms and shoving pencils into the eyes of wavering anti-income tax legislators, set Connecticut ablaze with a new, relatively flat income tax. Mr. Malloy did not deign to allow Republicans to shape his budget, and his tax increase was larger than Weicker’s.

Spendthrifts in the General Assembly, most but not all of them Democrats, then and there pledged to make Mr. Weicker’s income tax more progressive. A progressive feature, finally added in the waning days of the Rell administration, has been improved by the Malloy administration. Governor Jodi Rell, the last Republican governor before the advent of Mr. Malloy, lampooned as “Snow White” by her Democratic opponents and the usual cheering section of Connecticut’s left of center media, was never a match for Machiavellian Democrats in the General Assembly. Looking backward from the vantage point of the Malloy administration, Mrs. Rell may be viewed as the last Republican cork in the bottle of a once fissiparous but now united Democratic Party. Mr. Malloy is the first Democratic governor elected in the Connecticut since former Governor William O’Neill departed the state more than 20 years ago, leaving in his wake a deficit of about $1 billion. In the post income tax era, the deficit has tripled, the budget has tripled, and the total liability straddling the state is about $68 billion. All of this is the result of the inability of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing to cut spending.

“We all want progress,” C.S. Lewis said. “but of you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”

Asked some time ago whether he feared the consequences of a one party state, Don Williams, the progressive state Senate President, retorted that such fears were overblown; the one party state gets things done.

It is not known whether Mr. Williams is a student of Italian fascism, but he clearly admires the oomph behind it as expressed in Mussolini’s definition of fascism: “Everything in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state. And by “the state,” of course, the guy who made the trains run on time meant a one party governing power.

For all practical purposes, Connecticut is now a one party, progressive state – with a progressive income tax, a means of passing on the tax burden, rather than sharing it, to anyone who makes over $200,000 a year. Republicans this year exercised no influence in shaping Mr. Malloy’s union driven budget.

Following the passage of Connecticut’s budget, the New York Times, the editorial board of which is simpatico with Mr. Malloy, modestly pronounced Connecticut’s budget session “the most activist, liberal legislative session in memory.” As tokens of Mr. Malloy’s abundant liberalism, the Times mentioned that the governor worked with the General Assembly to “enact the largest tax increase in state history and approved the nation’s first law to mandate paid sick leave for some workers. The legislators voted to extend protections for transgender people, to charge in-state college tuition rates to illegal immigrants, to extend an early-release program for prisoners and to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.”

The Sunday following the adoption of Mr. Malloy’s budget by the Democratic controlled General Assembly, The Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state wide newspaper, tooted the governor’s horn in an editorial, “Going The Governor's Way: One-Party Rule Empowers Malloy.”

The paper clearly admires Mr. Malloy’s force and focus, even as it admired, without much attention to the direction of such force and focus, the same qualities in Mr. Weicker. It declares that if unions agree to the rather inconsequential, temporary sacrifices Mr. Malloy has asked of them in his budget plan, the governor will have “fixed the biggest budget deficit the state ever faced,” a doubtful proposition. Connecticut’s continuing budget deficits are the result of overspending, and spending has not been aggressively attacked in the Malloy budget, which freezes the wages of state union members for two years, thereafter increasing wages by three percent for the following four years. The Malloy budget contractually forestalls layoffs for four years and restricts “shared sacrifice” only to state union members. The shared sacrifice of taxpayers under the Malloy budget will be permanent; spending giveback from unions will be temporary. The state’s largest budget deficit in history has been “fixed” mostly by relying upon the state’s biggest tax increase in history, larger even than the increase that followed Mr. Weicker’s imposition of an income tax.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley, who lost to Mr. Malloy, has not entirely disappeared. And, as might be expected, his assessment of Mr. Malloy’s “shared sacrifice,” differs markedly from the state’s left of center media. “The facts are clear and simple,” said Mr. Foley. “Spending in the general fund is budgeted to go up next fiscal year by over $450 million, an increase of 2.5 percent over this year. The governor's ‘deal’ with state workers' unions includes no reduction in either the number of state workers or the overall cost of the state workforce. Gov. Malloy and the Democratic majority are closing this entire budget deficit with increased taxes amounting to more than $2.5 billion.”

The Courant admires Mr. Malloy’s audacity:

“He's rammed through audacious projects, including a nearly $900 million expansion of the University of Connecticut Health Center that could make the state a powerhouse in bioscience research and production.”

The operative word in that last sentence is “could.” Pouring nearly a billion dollars into such a doubtful proposition as the UConn Heath Center could, as easily, be throwing good money after bad, and the health center’s record in this respect suggests that the institution may not be salvageable at any price; its had been bailed out numerous times in the past, and throwing money in its direction has been an exercise in futility.

In a time of scarce tax resources – not even the audacious Mr. Malloy can press water from stones – Mr. Malloy has proposed a budget in which the problems he has temporarily settled by a shared sacrifice that weighs heavily on tax payers and lightly on tax consumers will almost certainly recur in a more virulent form later.

One of the most glaring, unaddressed political problems facing this and preceding governors is centered in the schedules that determine contract negotiations between Connecticut’s governors and bargaining units. Union contracts expire at different dates, which shifts the negotiation advantage from the governor’s office to union negotiators. Like the weather, all Connecticut governors have complained about it, but complaints do not change the weather.

Suppose, just to suppose, that an audacious governor and an enlightened General Assembly were to arrange matters so that all state contracts were to expire on the same date and hour. In that circumstance, contract negotiations between the executive department and unions could conclude in a more timely manner, which would give to the executive and legislative departments an advantage in negotiations they do not presently enjoy. The arrangement would more easily make shared sacrifice politically possible. Under the present arrangement – this year, the Malloy administration, working in concert with Democrats in the General assembly, pre-approved the budget without the certainty of union give backs -- both the governor and the General Assembly are held hostage to a process that gives union negotiators the upper hand in determining the final shape of the state’s budget.

The telling consequences of Mr. Malloy’s focused and forceful approach to government all lie in the future. And the preeminence of legislators and governors in a democracy over union negotiators may merit serious attention as Connecticut drifts effortlessly toward Mr. William’s utopian one party state.

The Unpleasantness At The Bridgeport Club

There has been some mild grumbling from Connecticut’s status quo media over the Bridgeport vote count.

The Day of New London, pointing to “the debacle in Bridgeport,” said it was an inauspicious beginning to the Malloy administration. Malloy’s “rush to Hartford to declare himself the next governor before any official result was inappropriate and smacked of a power grab.”

George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall boss, would have prospered in Connecticut’s modern day Democratic Party. If the old boy, honest to a fault, were writing editorials, he might say, “What’s the beef? The Democrats stole the election fair and square.”

The Day’s editorial answered its own objection: “Yet as votes continued to trickle in from New Haven and Bridgeport on Thursday, it became increasingly apparent that the Democrat would emerge from the process with a narrow lead over Republican opponent Tom Foley.”

What we have here is a political indelicacy, anxious Democrats perhaps too ready to rule, bad manners at worse. It will all disappear after Dan goes to Hartford. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after, we’ll all look back on this unfortunate incident and laugh. And there will be plenty of editorialists in the state, the majority of whom write for papers that endorsed Malloy, to make sure the laugh is on Bridgeport. In any case, the right people got in. And that’s what matters isn’t it?

According to Capitol Report, ex-Republican senator and Independent Governor Lowell Weicker has favored us with a comment:

“Weicker says Bysiewicz, Malloy wrong

'No matter what ensues, it's an affront to our Democratic principles and to the State of Connecticut that a Democratic Secretary of State declared an unofficial winner, only to have that unofficial winner enter the State Capitol announcing his Governorship and staff.

p.s. I did not vote for Tom Foley.'”

P.P.S. Go away.

So distraught was Weicker, who did not vote for Tom Foley (Translation: He voted for Malloy) that he rang up his friend Colin McEnroe, the humorist, and thundered in his ear, “I never thought I'd see the day when a candidate who hadn't been officially elected would show up at the State Capitol and claim he had the job!"

P.P.P.S. Please, go away.

Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, The Hartford Courant, groused, “… there sure has been a lot of uncharacteristic bumbling by officials in the Land of Steady Habits this election season.”

Yup. Sure enough.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz bumbled herself out of a gubernatorial slot because she wanted to be attorney general – which is to Connecticut politics what bling is to high fashion – then she bumbled herself out of that spot into the state supreme court, which ruled she didn’t have enough court experience to be attorney general. But before leaving office, Bysiewicz managed to perform one last service for her party by blinking while some cretin shorted Bridgeport of ballots. On orders from an obliging judge – the same overruled judge, it happens, who found Bysiewicz fit to be attorney general -- the polling doors in Bridgeport were left open in certain sections of the city so that Democratic Party operatives could quickly harvest just enough votes to swing the election to Malloy, who no doubt will be grateful as governor and give Bysiewicz a buss on the cheek and a refrigerated spot in state government until she is ready to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her political life.

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror presented a straight faced account of the Bridgeport bumbles that put Malloy over the top.
 
Dennis House of WFSB has shown a video inside a Bridgeport polling place that captures the chaos, along with a spot featuring Mayor Jason McCoy of Vernon who was present at the polling place.. McCoy detailed several irregularities – multiple ballots given out to voters, bags of ballots left unattended -- every one of which should have triggered a recount and a thorough investigation by authorities unconnected with status quo politics in Connecticut.

In the meantime, some Republicans have compiled an unofficial count of all the commentators in the state of steady Democratic habits who voted in their editorials for Malloy and who, like Weicker, did not vote for Foley.

Foley: 3

Malloy: Everyone else.

These quibbles aside, the main thing is – the right guy stole the election fair and square. The only people who have a problem with that are not in office and not affiliated with members of the state's status quo media, most of whom would not be able to find Al Capone if he were hiding under their beds.

Courant Endorses Blumenthal, Malloy

Unsurprisingly – Connecticut Commentary predicted it nearly two weeks ago – the Hartford Courant has endorsed Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, for the U.S. Senate and Dan Malloy for Governor. The Courant is a left of center paper that generally endorses incumbent Democrats or such Republicans as are indistinguishable from Democrats.

The kinds of politicians generally supported by the paper have given us this year a state deficit that some expect will expand in the near future to $4 billion, the only state in the nation that has lost population, a state and municipal tax burden that ranks 38th in the country, a property tax collection that is number two in the nation, the fourth highest gas tax in the country and a return on every dollar sent to Washington in taxes of 69 cents.

In the gubernatorial race, the paper is willing to wing it with Mr. Malloy. Voting for Mr. Malloy, the paper avers, “requires a leap of faith that he is not, as Mr. Foley charges, in the pocket of the public employees unions… Engaging the unions is not being rolled by them…” except when engaging the unions is being rolled by them. The Courant should sit down and have a candid chat with the outgoing much rolled Republican governor, a moderate, the only kind of Republican the paper is willing to tolerate.

Actually, Malloy, despite his credentials as a union conciliator, very likely will have the same problem as Rell with liberal Democrats tied to unions through sympathetic leaders in the legislature and campaign contributions, more about which later.

Courant Prepares To Endorse Malloy-Blumenthal

The editors of the Hartford Courant are preparing to endorse Dan Malloy as governor.

As governor, Malloy will sign a death penalty abolition bill earlier passed by the General Assembly, which has been dominated these many years by the Democratic Party. The bill abolishing the death penalty -- vetoed by Gov. Jodi Rell, who asserted that the death penalty was appropriate in some cases -- passed the legislature over heated Republican opposition during the assembly’s last session. Incumbent Democrats who signed off on the death penalty abolition bill likely do not expect their numbers in the legislature to be so depleted in the November elections as to make it impossible for a Democratic dominated assembly to pass the bill with Governor Malloy at the helm.

In an editorial printed in the Courant three weeks before Election Day, “Repeal The Death Penalty,” the paper asserts that the trials of Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky should not be an impediment to the abolition legislation the paper approves.

The “horrific” Cheshire murder trials likely will but should not “have a definitive impact on whether death by lethal injection continues to be a punishment option in this state,” according to the editorial. “We hope that it does not — that lawmakers and the next governor can summon the courage to substitute life in prison without parole as the ultimate penalty for capital crimes.”

The paper notes that a bill abolishing the death penalty would not affect capital felony prisoners convicted before the bill had been passed. An ex post facto rule of law, according to which laws cannot be retroactively applied to people whose actions were legal before laws prohibiting them were passed, still is observed broadly in the United States by most lawyers and jurists willing to bind themselves with adamantine Constitutional strictures. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal appears to have flouted that rule, binding on all lesser mortals, in the Pricilla Dickman case.

The editorial notes, “In last Tuesday's gubernatorial debate, Democrat Dan Malloy said he would, if elected, sign a bill that repeals the death penalty, but only going forward. That is, repeal would not apply to death sentences that stem from legal proceedings already underway.”

Abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut is being driven forward entirely by moral considerations. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions, as well as a secular media that considers execution for capital crimes to be morally repugnant, are in the vanguard of the abolition movement. No one seriously pretends that in the modern period criminals executed in Connecticut have been unjustly punished. The claim that capital felony punishment had been unjustly visited upon Michael Ross, one of two offenders executed in the state in the last 50 years, was always absurd.

In states like Texas, of course, things are different. Capital punishment opponents who often employ the canard that an accused might be unjustly convicted in Connecticut generally point to cases outside the state. No one, least of all the Courant, mentions that in Texas the governor is permitted to commute a capital felony sentence to life in prison if files a timely petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that is signed by the governor.

The Courant has not yet asked Malloy whether as governor he would seek a like authority from a Democratic dominated legislature that had sent him a death penalty abolition bill he has promised to sign.

It is morally deracinated to seek abolition of the death penalty on moral grounds without also seeking some way to avert capital punishment in cases in which it has been imposed. It is impossible to conceive of a moral opposition to, say, slavery that would emancipate no slave currently held in bondage under a, emancipation declaration. After the legislature has found a way to abolish the death penalty, it will find a way to emancipate those convicted of capital punishment under a discarded law, perhaps by giving the new Democratic governor an commutation option like one that may be invoked by the governor of Texas.

In the meantime, Hayes, awaiting his just punishment under a law that will be abolished by a Democratic legislature allied with a Democratic governor, is preparing for his penalty phase trial.

Having been convicted of murdering a mother and two daughters in a fashion that even the most conscience stricken editors and columnists at the Courant consider heinous and depraved, Hayes’ lawyer, borrowing an leaf from Attorney General Blumenthal’s playbook, is preparing to argue to the jury that convicted his client that the capital felony charge should be overthrown because it would be too expensive to carry the cumbersome capital felony process through to its just end.

In May, 1990, arguing against Bill H.B. 5542, which when passed made death penalty convictions less burdensome for prosecutors by requiring courts to issue a death penalty when aggravating factors outweighed mitigating factors, Blumenthal advised:

“The death penalty not only lacks any deterrent affect. It is also been proven to be more expensive to impose than any kind of prison term. It is more expensive to house and continue the convictions, maintain the convictions of those who have been convicted and sentenced to death. That is a fact that has been proven again, and again, throughout the country. And it is the reason along with all the others, that most countries in Western Europe do not have the death penalty. Most New England States do not have it. We are one of the few in the region that does.

“So I urge my fellow members in this Circle, for all those reasons, to reject this amendment. Once again, we have a measure, a proposed statute with surface appeal, seductive on its face. But in reality it will not accomplish the purposes that its proponents say it will.”

The Courant also believes that it is too expensive in Connecticut to execute Hayes and Komisarjevsy: “As we have for decades, The Courant continues to oppose the death penalty because it has been unworkable and is expensive, unfair, risky and morally compromising.”

Especially, morally compromising: “Finally, the death penalty puts the state in a morally compromised position. As horrible as some crimes are and as evil as many of the perpetrators may be, the state should not be in their same business, the business of death.”

One supposes it would compromise the morals of the Courant to endorse as governor a candidate who approves the death penalty. That would be Republican candidate Tom Folly. The flip-flopable Blumenthal, by reversing himself on the death penalty -- as a senatorial candidate, he now approves it – has introduced a new wrinkle into Courant editorial processing: How can the paper justify itself morally by supporting both Malloy and Blumenthal?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And the Courant is adept at finding ways out of moral swamps.

The Budget Reviews Are In

Courant: Bad Deal

The Hartford Courant turned up its collective nose at Connecticut’s budget, a compromise deal hammered out between the dominant veto proof Democratic legislature and Gov. Jodi Rell, a lame duck Republican.

Once the state’s tax and spend plan had been inked, Democratic legislative leaders labeled it a “bi-partisan” budget, seemingly unaware that one robin doth not a summer make. The Republicans, minus Rell, firmly denounced the budget for all the right reasons and then took a very visible hike.

The short legislative session was “a big letdown,” said the Courant:

“The pact, however, avoids most of the tough choices that would put the state on sounder financial footing as it braces for a budget shortfall projected at $3.8 billion in fiscal 2012, which starts in just 14 months.

“The budget agreement reached this week would cover half the fiscal 2011 deficit with federal stimulus funds — which won't be there this time next year.

“The state would also raid funds for energy conservation and other worthy causes — and borrow $955 million, to be paid off by extending part of a surcharge on monthly electric bills that was to expire soon. Connecticut's electric rates are already among the highest in the nation. Businesses, particularly manufacturers, will take note.”

The paper closed its editorial with a wistful glace back at balmier days: “Connecticut needed at least one strong leader to make tough and unpopular choices — someone with the backbone of former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. That leader was missing this session.”

Weicker, it will be recalled, gave us the income tax, which produced repeated budget surpluses, aggravated spending and made Connecticut’s government too big to fail. It failed anyway, and now those responsible for the failure are looking for bailouts from wealthy millionaires like the guy with the backbone.

Journal Inquirer: Same Deal

Chris Powell is the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and the paper’s chief political columnist.

Unlike some in Connecticut’s migratory press, Powell has been with the paper for many years. A thoughtful commentator, over a period of time he has worked out for himself several state saving measures, chief among them ending binding arbitration for state employees, a notion that operates on the collective unconscious of union owned legislators the way water affected the Wicked Witch Of The West in the Wizard Of Oz.

Torpedoes away:

“Maybe what's most remarkable about the new state budget is that it took so long, three months, to put together so little. The budget spends a bit more than the last budget, makes no serious changes in spending policy, and covers the awful decline in state revenue by borrowing more than 5 percent of expenditures, raiding the state pension fund again, emptying dedicated funds, taxing electricity, and covering hundreds of millions of dollars of recurring costs with one-time federal "stimulus" funds.

“The budget is thus a colossal abdication, something any drug addict could have accomplished in 10 minutes before shooting up and nodding off…

“The failure to try to economize by questioning a few premises amid a near-depression is the responsibility of everyone at the Capitol, but it is mostly the governor's responsibility. Rather than agreeing with the Democrats to borrow 5 percent of spending and to take budget gimmickry to new lows, the governor could have used her veto to insist that the legislature face reality and require some sacrifice from the government class so that things might get better. Instead they now are certain to get worse.

“Since it would take a long time for the legislature's Democratic majority, in thrall to special interests, to begin to perceive a public interest, the governor would have had to be ready to govern indefinitely by executive order without a budget. That would have been work. Instead she joined the Democrats in default, leaving her successor a legacy of disaster.”

Waterbury Republican American: Raw Deal

The Waterbury Republican American is a small but far reaching epicenter of conservative thought and opinion in a state that warmly embraces Jacob Javitts Republicans like Weicker while strangling promising conservative babes in their cribs.

No fair deal, the paper intoned:

“Ignoring the coming catastrophe, they produced a "balanced budget" for 2011 that wishes, pretty-please, for $366 million more from the federal "stimulus" and $270 million in revenue growth; relies on a quarter-billion in unspecified spending reductions; loots $100 million from the dangerously underfunded pension fund; runs through this year's bogus $140 million "surplus"; and deficit-spends nearly $1 billion more. They even purloined $6 million from programs for the mentally retarded so they could show a $4.9 million "surplus."

“If you ran your household this way, you'd be bankrupt. If you ran a business this way, you'd be imprisoned.”

If there are any Fair Deal editorials out there praising the highly partisan Democrats and the governor for their courage, sagacity and economic acumen, we have not been able to locate them.