The Egg On Malloy's Face

Chris Mathews, the host of Hardball known as the guy with the tingly leg, interviewed Governor Dannel Malloy, and Mr. Malloy managed to unload a quiver of zingers at benighted Republicans who were dawdling over gun legislation.

The Hartford Courant’s Dan Haar summarized the zinger fest in his column:

“On the NRA and other gun control opponents appealing directly to Republicans with their strategy: ‘These are real profiles in courage, aren’t they?’

“On Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, having it out with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., over a weapons ban on Thursday: ‘They have no shame…It plays well for his constituency and I think he might even believe some of this.’

“On a Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows only a bare majority of 57 percent of Americans favoring an assault weapons ban: ‘There’s a lot of people in Texas, I guess.””

It was all in good fun, and Mr. Mathews reported no unusual tingles coursing up and down his leg.

Days later, Jon Lender of the Courant uncovered a newsworthy story: “Eight days before Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to kill 26 children and women on Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, state officials offered the manufacturer of the gun a development deal to move its corporate headquarters to Connecticut.

“On Dec. 6, a top state economic development official sent the Freedom Group an offer for a $1 million loan at the low annual interest rate of 2 percent for 10 years — plus other incentives for the company to move its headquarters, with 25 top executives, from Madison, N.C., to Stamford.”

Unfortunately, the information provided in Mr. Lender’s story was not available to Mr. Mathews when he interviewed Mr. Malloy on“Hardball,” otherwise Mr. Mathews certainly would have asked the governor at least one hardball question: Why did Mr. Malloy offer the AR15 gun maker a deal to move its corporate headquarters to Connecticut days before he dramatically leapfrogged over three separate investigations to announce breathlessly that he would favor a bill banning the sale in Connecticut of the AR-15?

Maybe next time Mr. Malloy appears on Hardball Mr. Mathews will pop the question. He might also ask Mr. Malloy whether he thinks that Harry Reid, the powerful leader in the U.S. Senate who killed the assault weapons ban “has no shame.”

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy on Energy: Who needs it?

U.S Senator Chris Murphy has made a contribution “to the German Marshall Fund think-tank's Brussels Forum event in the Belgian capital,”according to Public Service Europe.

The discovery and utilization of shale natural gas in the United States, according to the newly elected progressive senator, has given lawmakers a" lazy way out" of making commitments to green technology. "It provides a very convenient excuse for half of the US Congress to sit on the sidelines when it talks about real investment in green energy. I think that's a tragedy."

An “absolute political logjam” on green energy has been produced, according to Mr. Murphy, by the "immense power of global warming deniers and this created a political barrier.

"You already had an enormous political barrier to a major investment in green technology, which is this debate that only happens in the US about the science of global warming. And then on top of it, you've got the convenience of a new enormous stability with respect to shale gas production.

"Many of us believe that the only way that you really incentivize a true green energy revolution in the US is to do what many countries in Europe have done, which is create a real domestic marketplace for it. And you do that either through capping the amount of carbon and allowing people to trade or by putting a new price on carbon with a tax. That can't happen in our political context today."

Let’s take it bit by bit.

The reason energy costs are high in the United States is that there is a product deficit, largely owing to efforts made by legislators such as Mr. Murphy to artificially hike the cost of energy by depriving the market of present resources such as energy from shale extraction. The relatively new technology of fracking is not so much a “lazy way out of making commitments to green technology” as it is an effort to supply a necessary product that is, Mr. Murphy may have noticed, very much in demand. If you increase the product, you reduce the price. Mr. Murphy favors high energy costs because the high cost of energy is a political spook-on-a-stick that can be used to force people to demand so called green energy.

The political logjam in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere has not been caused by an anti-green war on an undeveloped technology. The struggle for low product pricing has been around much longer than green technology. In a competitive free market, product pricing is determined by what Adam Smithy used to call “the invisible hand,” the sum of purchases made by citizens who are not bullied into choosing products by government economic overseers.

The cost of energy in Mr. Murphy’s own state is a drain on business. Among the 10 most expensive states in combined energy costs,Connecticut ranks second, just behind Hawaii, according to some reports the cultural and political nursery bed of President Barack Obama.

Should a bill slowly making its way through the General Assembly pass into law, Connecticut may leap ahead of Hawaii in the national race to cripple the energy sector. As an incentive to encourage forms of energy acceptable to progressives and environmentalists, the state legislature is proposing a bill that would tax oil 1.5 cents per gallon in the first year following passage, increasing by one percent a year until the tax reaches 3.5 cents per gallon in 2015. The tax haul would then be placed in an Energy Efficiency Fund that homeowners may draw upon to underwrite the cost of weatherization, clean burning furnaces and solar panels. Of course, every dedicated fund in the state – including pensions – are either under financed during hard times or raided by legislators before election to reduce deficits arising from their improvident spending. Mr. Obama has recently announced the formation of a similar fund, an Energy SecurityTrust (EST) that would fund clean energy research and development.

Connecticut is a small state that could be energy independent were it to rely on a variety of forms of energy production, including nuclear. But alas, the progressives and the greens in Connecticut are nuclear averse. When Dominion chose Virginia rather than Connecticut as a site for a new nuclear plant, no tears were shed in the governor’s mansion. So long as the price of energy in Mr. Murphy’s state remains high, other low energy cost states will continue to poach Connecticut businesses, established entrepreneurs and recent graduates of the state’s high cost educational establishments.

Shale gas is a natural gas found trapped within shale formations. The governor of Mr. Murphy’s state, not an anti-green, has announced his love affair with this form of energy. So ardent are Governor Dannel Malloy affections that he recently proposed to provide tax credits to home owners in Mr. Murphy’s state who are prudent enough to switch to a lower cost, less polluting form of energy. The tax credits presumably are an effort on the part of Mr. Malloy to tickle the fancy of energy consumers in Connecticut, many of whom will be marching to the polls in a couple of years to vote either for or against Mr. Murphy’s continuance in office, always assuming that voters in Mr. Murphy’s state have not fled to other states that rate much lower than Connecticut on a list of high energy cost states.

It is always possible that Mr. Murphy, a new arrival in the beltway, is very busy mastering protocol in the U.S. Senate. He may have missed the messaging from Mr. Malloy. Or possibly he has not yet had an opportunity to put out feelers to Mr. Obama, whose administration believes that increased shale gas development WILL HELP REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS, an eventuality that may not grievously disappoint the folks who received Mr. Murphy’s pro-green missive at the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Belgium.

The Spending Problem

A number of conclusions may be drawn from the presidential campaign. Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, lost, and Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, won. That datum you can take to the bank.

Republican Party internecine quarrels arise over the “why”questions. Why did Mitt Romney lose? Why did Mr. Obama win? What are Republicans doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

Within the Republican Party, there are two schools of thought. The schools are as old and venerable as the modern Republican Party, which sprang, pretty much full-blown, from the brain of the late Bill Buckley.

One school holds that Republicans are not moderate enough to appeal to moderate Republicans and Democrats. This premise founders on the following datum: In Connecticut, centrist Democrats have been routed by progressives, a progressive being a liberal raised to the 10^thpower. There is no longer a live and effective middle to Connecticut’s state Democratic Party. Most of the Democrats enjoying power positions in their party have abandoned the liberal ship for the progressive dinghy.

Some few commentators who continue to speak reverently of“the vital center” are simply remembering with great affection a political order that has vanished in Connecticut and, perhaps more broadly, in New England.

An opposing school holds that Republicans are not conservative enough. Moderate Republicans in the Northeast, they point out, are a vanishing species. In Connecticut alone, moderate Republicans have fallen to Democratic opponents in numbers too astonishing to ignore. U.S. Representatives Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chis Shays all were defeated in office by purportedly moderate Democrats who now style themselves progressives. Indeed, Chris Shays was the last moderate Republican U.S. House member in New England.

The fallen Republican bodies seem to cinch the argument of those on the right who say that moderatism – if one may invent a word – is responsible for Republican losses in the Northeast. A robust conservatism elsewhere in the country continues to produce congressional and gubernatorial winners. In Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic and progressive. Both houses of the General Assembly are dominated by Democrats. And in 2011, Dannel Malloy, for many years mayor of Stamford, became the first Democratic governor in the state since former Governor William O’Neill hung up his spurs more than 20 years earlier.

Running on a “shared sacrifice” slogan, according to which everyone in the state should bear their fair share of misery, Mr. Malloy was able, by cutting Republicans out of budget negotiations, to push through the Democratic dominated General Assembly the largest tax increase in state history. Some Republicans quipped at the time that Mr. Malloy, always an aggressive political competitor, may have felt himself in competition with former Governor Lowell Weicker, a self-styled “maverick” Republican who had imposed upon Connecticut the state’s secondlargest tax increase. The Weicker income tax had been resisted vigorously by previous Democratic governors William O’Neill and Ella Grasso.

Mr. Malloy’s promised savings were largely amorphous, which hardly seems a fair shared sacrifice. Even after he had imposed the largest tax increase in the state’s history, Mr. Malloy has had great difficulty balancing his budgets.

Recently Mr. Malloy has been criticized by Republican state legislators – two of whom, Larry Cafero, a member of the state House for 14 years, and John McKinney, a member of the state Senate for as many years -- as having adopted discreditable budget balancing methods, a charge deployed effectively by Mr. Malloy during his first campaign against his two Republican predecessors, Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland. Like President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy inherited his red ink.

Both Mrs. Rell, often criticized by Connecticut’s left of center media as an indolent governor, and Mr. Rowland, were styled as Republican “firewalls” who thwarted improvident spending. In truth, neither was effective in preventing the Democratic dominated General Assembly from readjusting Republican budgets to accommodate more spending. Taxation and consequent spending have increased under a Democratic regime that regards firewalls as momentary obstacles to be overcome.

Indeed, spending is a problem Republicans, both nationally and in Connecticut, seem powerless to confront. The rhetorical ammo that might be effectively discharged in a campaign against improvident spending is simply absent. The central pillar of the Romney campaign was not improvident spending but rather over taxation and consequent economic anemia.

The last president who put a sizable dent in spending, budget reduction and taxes was Calvin Coolidge, styled by Amity Shlaes, the author of“Coolidge,” as “the Great Refrainer.” Even the sainted Ronald Reagan spent money like a class-warfare intoxicated Democrat; the federal budget rose by over a third during his administration. Connecticut’s Yankee Institute will host Ms. Shlaes, who believes Mr. Coolidge may serve a model for a reinvigorated Republican Party, at the Stamford Sheraton on March 28. Information is available here.

Malloy On The Stump

It should surprise no one that Governor Dannel Malloy is on the road again selling the usual product. This time, because elections are looming, he will be followed by Republican candidates for governor anxious to peddle their own prescriptions for what ails us.

Returning from a Middletown town hall meeting, though some in the audience objected to the format, Mr. Malloy sent around a sermon to the Hartford Courant. He began by noting that “Every budget is about setting priorities. That's true for every family in Connecticut, especially during tough economic times. It is equally true for state government.” Indeed, are we to suppose that President Barack Obama has set no priorities because he had presented no budget to Congress during his first term?

When middle class families in Connecticut encounter hard times, they cut back on spending, a remedy for budgetary red ink unknown in Washington and many states, including Connecticut. That is because workers in the private sector in Connecticut cannot force their employers to raise their wages. In this respect, private enterprise is qualitatively different than government. When a government runs into hard times, it may raise taxes and usually does. That is because governments find it painful to say “no” to those who use and provide their services. Independent Governor Lowell Weicker responded to a pre-income tax deficit by instituting a new income tax. Governor Dannel Malloy’s Democratic forebearers, Governors Ella Grasso and O’Neill resisted the effortless solution to which Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy so easily succumbed. Tax raisers in Connecticut are always careful to sugar their bitter pill with a bit of honey: “We don’t like taxes any more than you do, honey.” But they slather on the taxes anyway, heedless of predictable consequences. Connecticut’s present budget is three times larger than Mr. O’Neill’s last pre-income tax budget, and the bottom line increase in our budgets is a true measure of spending increases.

So then, the precipitous increase in budgets strongly suggests that the priorities of the governors who followed Mr. O’Neill lay in raising taxes rather than in cutting spending. Mr. Malloy’s tax increase was the largest in state history, and his spending cuts, to judge from the massive revenue increase in his first budget, were not commensurate with his tax increases -- which, come to think of it, is the very definition of “shared sacrifice,” Mr. Malloy’s campaign slogan when he first ran for governor.

In his latest sermon, Mr. Malloy notes that he has become an old hand at town hall meetings, having “done more than 30 of these town hall events since taking office.” He values such gatherings not only because they give him an opportunity to peddle his product from a bully pulpit, but more importantly because “they present the best opportunity for me to listen directly to the concerns of my fellow Connecticut residents.” And “Based on what I heard in Middletown, it is clearer to me than ever that many people share some simple, common-sense perspectives on what our state needs.”

Fortunately for Mr. Malloy, what he hears from citizens at these town meetings conforms precisely to his own prescriptions, which he is certain will bring prosperity and good fortune to the middle class in his state: “Connecticut's middle class doesn't need any more burdens. The middle class needs some breaks,” especially in these difficult days following “the worst recession since the Great Depression, and with a national economy that continues to grow too slowly.”

George Will’s definition of a “need” – a want that’s 24 hours old – is especially pertinent in the Malloy administration.

Surely in the course of 30 Connecticut town hall meetings, someone must have whispered in Mr. Malloy's ear that cuts in spending proportional to his tax increases might help middle class tax payers balance their own budgets. God, we are told, whispers to us in the whirlwind because He wishes us to attend to his message and wants us to learn how to listen. Perhaps Mr. Malloy has not been attentive to the whisperings of the state’s middle class: He is a very busy guy, and never busier than when he is telling the middle class to cough up a few more bucks he might distribute to Connecticut’s prosperous insurance companies, one of which is moving its in-state operations to South Carolina.

The simplest and truest way to give the middle class a break is to reduce their taxes – or, at the very least, not to raise their taxes –thus leaving them in command of their own salaries and futures. Mr. Malloy has done quite the opposite.

But never mind honey, here comes the honey: “That's why my budget contains no new taxes and puts us on a path to reinstating the sales tax exemption on clothing valued under $50. And that's why my budget would do away with the single most burdensome, most regressive and most unfair tax in our state — the car tax.”

Ah yes, the car tax. The car tax is a levy imposed by, collected by and spent by town governments. A short time after Mr. Malloy imposed upon Connecticut the largest tax increase in its history, the Yankee Institute, a right of center think tank, published a list of Mr. Malloy’s new taxes, many of which were regressive. Any imposition levied on a taxpayer who cannot comfortably pay the tax without depriving himself of necessary income is a regressive tax. Mr. Malloy’s revenueincreases spanned 25 categories of taxes and eliminated exemptions in about 37 different categories. The elimination of town property taxes on cars worth less than $28,571, which municipalities depend upon to finance their operations, is an invitation to municipal governments to either raise property taxes on middle class owners of houses or to cut town budgets. It takes little political courage for state politicians to eliminate someone else's tax. If Mr. Malloy wants to help the middle class by reducing state taxes, the list produced by the Yankee Institute presents some golden opportunities for him.

How To Pre-Edit A Town Hall Meeting

Real Town Hall meetings can be a bit unruly, a test both for citizens and their representatives -- but not if they are pre-edit by Governor Dannel Malloy’s Malloyalists.

The format in a Middletown Town Hall meeting obliged residents to fill out a sign-up sheet stating their names and the topic of their questions, according to a report in the Middletown Press:“The governor’s staff selected questions based on subject matter, according to Andrew Doba, a spokesman for the governor.”

Five minutes into the meeting, one woman, perhaps more used to uncensored Town Hall meetings than either the governor or his media director, protested, “This is supposed to be a town hall meeting, sir.” Residents, she said, “should be able to voice their opinions.”

If the citizen protesting the curbs on free speech at Town Hall meetingshad submitted her protest to Mr. Doba, her objection likely would never have been raised publicly.

A brief interrogatory between Dave Berry of Glastonbury and the governor surfaced when Mr. Berry, pointing out that police officers were armed, asked the governor whether he thought Mr. Berry’s life was less precious than theirs. He asked the governor, “Do you think that your life is more important than mine?”

Mr. Malloy advised Mr. Berry “if you pass a background check, you get to keep [your gun].”

The motive behind the new firearms restrictions he prefers, Mr. Malloy said, referring in particular to the five-year ban on gun ownership for those convicted of drunk driving, is that “if we find out some reason why you shouldn’t have that gun, then you shouldn’t have that gun.”

Mr. Berry, no doubt imagining he was participating in a real Town Hall meeting, responded “I don’t know what drunk driving has to do with gun ownership,” and the scripted questioning continued.

Mr. Berry and the Middletown non-participants in Mr. Malloy’s road show may be unaware that there is a well-documented connection between the kind of mass-murders that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School and psychotropic drugs.

Perhaps at his next scripted Town Hall meeting Mr. Malloy’s media editor will allow a question on the subject. That one, at Wesleyan University’s Beckham Hall Friday at 11AM, will be devoted to a discussion of mental health issues.

A Citizen’s Case Against The Malloy-Lawlor Early Release Program

When the Democratic dominated General Assembly perhaps unwittingly passed Bill HB 6650 establishing a Risk Reduction Earned Credits program for some prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes, the opposition from Republicans was nearly instantaneous. Then State Senator Len Suzio took the lead in agitating against the program. He was not alone.

In a June 6, 2011 media release,State Senator Joe Markley said that the program “amounts to a jail break.” Mr. Markley went on to list the categories of violent prisoners eligible for early release under the program:

Manslaughter in the first degree (with intent to cause serious injury)

Sexual assault in the first degree (sex with someone under the age of 13)

Kidnapping in the first degree (intent to inflict physical injury)

Arson in the first degree (intent to destroy an inhabited building)

Employing a minor in an obscene performance

Importing child pornography

Contaminating a public water supply or food supply for terrorist purposes

Injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children

Abandonment of child under the age of six years

Firearms trafficking (knowingly giving a firearm to someone barred from firearm possession)

Cruelty to animals (possessing an animal for fighting, intentionally killing a police dog)”

After two credited criminals celebrated their early release by murdering two shopkeepers, one in Meriden and one in Manchester, some media outlets began to take notice of deficiencies in the program. But even so, the drumbeat against early release was hardly ear-shattering. Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy hunkered down and hoped for a reduction in the decibel level.

Connecticut Victims Advocate Michelle Cruz stirred the pot when, representing the interests of victimized families -- her job -- she publically petitioned for an end to the program after the early release of prisoner Kezlyn Mendez, charged with the murder of a store clerk in Manchester. Ms. Cruz’s job was put on the auction block by Mr. Malloy, and she has now been replaced by Garvin Ambrose, a political operative from Cook County, Illinois, murder capital of the United States. Mr. Ambrose was cited by a victims advocate group in Illinois as having been insufficiently concerned with the rights of crime victims.

The early release of Frankie “The Razor” Resto, so called because in freedom he was known for shaking down drug dealers with a razor, proved somewhat difficult to justify.

Mr. Resto was, by all accounts, an incorrigible prisoner. Behind bars he dealt drugs, racked up a disciplinary record that should have made him ineligible for early release and burned his mattress. The Lawlor-Malloy early release program was applied retroactively to the violent prisoners noted above in Mr. Markley’s press release, which means that in many cases accessibility to the program did not depend on good behavior. While serving time for a 2006 robbery conviction, Mr. Resto was allotted 199 days of credits toward early release. In Mr. Resto’s case, a violent prisoner was rewarded with early release credits for behavior that should have extended his sentence. The Lawlor-Malloy program was all carrot and no stick. Once out of jail, Mr. Resto illegally acquired a gun and murdered Ibraham Ghazal, the co-owner of an EZMart store in Meriden, according to arrest records.

The ham-fisted attempt by the Malloy administration to sanitize the predictable effects of its flawed early release program by ridding the political stage of opponents pointing to the blood on the floor may not succeed.

After political operatives in the General Assembly bound by party ties to the governor successfully smothered Republican introduced bills to eliminate the program and bills introduced by Senators Paul Doyle of Wethersfield and John Kissel of Enfield to exclude violent prisoners from the program, Senator Joe Markey forced the Judiciary Committee to draft and schedule legislation for a public hearing by resorting to a petitioning procedure authorized in the General Assembly’s joint rules.

A bill conceived by Mr. Markley and state Representative Alfred Adnolfi of Cheshire that first proposed to prevent the violent convicts categorized above from participating in the early release program has now been redrafted and resubmitted. Mr. Lawlor recently told the Waterbury Republican American that he "had no problem" accepting a bill adding language to the current legislation clarifying that violent offenders cannot earn credits towards early release. On other occasions he has said that that the early release program would not work if his program allowing credits to the categories of crimes listed by Mr. Markley were to be altered. A citizens’ petition designed to catch the eye of those legislators who, perhaps unwittingly, have facilitated two murders in Connecticut communities may be found here.

A citizens’ petition designed to catch the eye of those legislators who, perhaps unwittingly, have facilitated two murders in Connecticut communities may be found here.

Governance in a Constitutional Republic, particularly when it impacts the safety of citizens, is too important to be left to artful politicians. The petition should be widely circulated and signed. The hearing should be well attended. When good citizens are silent, liberty and safety are put on the auction block.

The Devil In Blumenthal’s Details

The expression “the devil is in the details,” first appearing in print in 1975, is a variation of an earlier expression, “The good God is in the detail,”sometimes attributed to Gustave Flaubert. Both expressions point to the importance of detail, what we moderns call verifiable data or facts.

Politicians, to no one’s surprise, sometimes traffic in facts, sometimes not.

In a recent copyrighted story in the Hartford Courant, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is shown expressing his disdain for the devilish details surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre: “Blumenthal dismissed the statistics and legal intricacies and focused on Begg and Heslin sitting at the witness table. He said, ‘Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines.’"

Mr. Blumenthal was speaking to reporters on the record following testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee of one of the parents of the children, 20 in number, who were slain in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As expected, the testimony was heart rending. Only a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the personal testimony of Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old-son, Jesse Lewis, was murdered in the savage attack.

Also present during the testimony was the sister of Victoria Soto, one of the heroic figures in the Sandy Hook mass murderer.

Ms. Soto was the First Grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who managed to save children’s lives by hiding several of them in a closet. When Adam Lanza entered her classroom after having killed fifteen students and two teachers, she told him, with great presence of mind, that the children were in the auditorium. Some students ran from their hiding place and Mr. Lanza shot them, also shooting Ms. Soto who, in an attempt to save their lives, threw herself in death’s path.

“We don’t want our sister to die for no reason,”Jillian Soto told the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Courage runs deep in the Soto family.

“We lost our sister, tragically,” said Jillian, “and we are now honoring her by fighting for her name and for change–in her name, and all the other victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School and all the other school shootings. We don’t just want her to be a statistic. We want her to be known for who she is and the amazing teacher that she was -- the amazing sister she was -- and ask for something, demand that something be done so that nobody else has to go through this.”

“So that nobody else has to go through this…” These words should not be taken as a pointless rhetorical incantation. We should not allow the devil to ease a pathway for us around the details; for, if we do, we cannot arrive at a legislative destination that will assure family members of the innocent children slaughtered in Sandy Hook that other parents will not, like them, weep tears of blood when their innocent children are accosted by gunmen in what used to be considered here in Connecticut a sanctuary of peace and joy -- and this means that legislators must master the details, or the faults in their legislation will ride them like devils.

The architect of the federal bill preferred by Mr. Blumenthal is U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. The Feinstein bill bans future sales of assault weapons, already illegal under Connecticut law, while permitting current owners to retain their weapons and, as such, would not have prevented Adam Lanza from acquiring the weapon he used to slaughter children in Sandy Hook. A confiscation of such weapons legally owned by their purchasers might have prevented Mr. Lanza’s use of the AR15, a semi-automatic long rifle, but then Mr. Lanza arrived at the school armed with two equally lethal handguns, the weapon of choice in urban areas where the preponderance of murders occur. Only a little less than three percent of homicides in 2011 were committed with long rifles. The Feinstein bill also limits easily replaceable magazines to ten bullets. According to a story the details of which have not been verified by the official criminal report, not due until the summer, Mr. Lanza replaced his thirty round magazines after having fired 15 rounds. The shotgun he left in the car and the two hand guns he carried with him into the school would have been as devastating.

When Mr. Blumenthal said, focusing dramatically on Mr. Heslin and dismissing as “unimportant”statistics and legal intricacies, “Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines," he was telling what Mark Twain used to call a stretcher, not that he will ever be reproved for it by the right people. Mr. Blumenthal, formerly an attorney general, did, after all, include the slither word “some” in his stretcher.

Back home, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly were spooking their brother legislators. The president pro tem of the Senate Don Williams and Majority Leader Martin Looney wrote a letter to their colleagues demanding that a legislative committee complete its work on time; and the bill presented to the General Assembly, they said, would be“emergency certified.”

An "emergency certified bill" is one that short circuits the legislative process because an “emergency”requiring short circuiting is at hand. The short circuiting, fortunately for legislators who do not wish to leave unsightly fingerprints on the resulting bill, renders hearings on proposed bills unnecessary. There is no emergency, only a legislative stampede made in Washington. Convenient emergencies of this kind are the enemy of the good and a shameless dereliction of legislative responsibility. If legislators don't want to create effective bills, they should find another means of employment.

The one notable Democratic legislator who appears to be committed to a tried and sure legislative process designed to produce efficacious legislation is Democratic Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey. Mr.Sharkey is reluctant to sign on to emergency legislation the provisions of which have not been approved by the General Assembly appointed bipartisan task force. Apparently, Mr. Sharkey prefers a more comprehensive bill written by Connecticut legislators for citizens of Connecticut. Hearings on proposed legislation allow legislators to shape bills with a view to particular circumstances. The notion that the General Assembly should be stampeded in its deliberations simply to meet a schedule imposed from Washington DC is more than preposterous; it is dangerous because it subverts a republican constitutional order and will likely produce a product useful only to politicians concerned with campaign sound bites.