Author Archives: cxpowell

By Chris Powell Government cannot use union contracts with its employees to nullify its basic obligations to the public, a federal appeals court ruled last week in a case about the Connecticut state police union contract. The contract has allowed troopers to prevent disclosure of misconduct accusations against them, thereby facilitating the state police department’sContinue reading “Stop letting union contracts override right-to-know law”

By Chris Powell With gasoline prices soaring along with inflation generally, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly have suspended Connecticut’s gasoline tax until November 30, when the state election will have safely passed and voters won’t be able to do anything about the tax’s reinstatement. But the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf reports that two bigContinue reading “More tax increases coming to contradict Governor Lamont”

By Chris Powell Could Connecticut be tiring of its senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal? That’s the implication of last week’s Quinnipiac University poll, which found the senator’s job performance approved by only 45% of respondents and disapproved by 43%. (Connecticut’s junior senator, Chris Murphy, didn’t do so much better, winning approval by 45-37.) Blumenthal hasContinue reading “Blumenthal might be beaten by a foe with something to say”

By Chris Powell As with the school massacre in Newtown and the supermarket massacre in Buffalo, the school massacre in Uvalde has brought forth the usual legislative prescriptions to prevent a recurrence, prescriptions often delivered by bloviating politicians pretending to virtue. But the prescriptions seldom have much application to the atrocities that prompt them. TheContinue reading “To diminish mass shootings, try ‘a well-regulated militia”

By Chris Powell Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, encompassing the northwest part of the state, running from Danbury north to Waterbury with eastward extensions to New Britain and Meriden, is generally considered the state’s most politically competitive. So one might think that it would generate the most intelligent and issue-oriented campaigns. That isn’t happening yet thisContinue reading “Carpetbagger charge in 5th just diminishes the campaign”

Remarks by Chris PowellAcademy of New England JournalistsBoston, MassachusettsThursday, November 16, 2006 (Presented by James H. Smith) Please forgive me for not being with you to thank you in person for the Yankee Quill Award and my election to the Academy of New England Journalists. I had a longstanding commitment to be far away fromContinue reading “Yankee Quill Award remarks, November 16, 2006”

By Chris Powell As recently as 50 years ago Connecticut politics still had traces of the old ethnic, racial, and religious resentments and rivalries that had arisen through the state’s long history, resentments and rivalries that political party state tickets tried to assuage. Yankee Protestant Republicans scorned immigrant Catholics. While the Irish and Italians bothContinue reading “Democrats’ silly obsessions bring back ticket balancing”

By Chris Powell Republicans, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy charges, are partly to blame for the May 14 massacre in Buffalo because many of them espouse the “Great Replacement Theory” that the murderer says motivated him. This is the belief that powerful people are conspiring to change the country’s racial composition, replacing whites with BlacksContinue reading “There’s more to ‘replacement’ than Sen. Murphy acknowledges”

By Chris Powell Legislation sponsored by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal — supported by Connecticut’s other senator, Chris Murphy, and Governor Lamont, Democrats all — which was narrowly defeated in the Senate on May 11, titled the Women’s Health Protection Act, isn’t nutty just because it would authorize all abortions all the time, right up toContinue reading “In Connecticut, Democrats are the abortion extremists”

By Chris Powell Four months after the now internationally infamous “pizza sex” assignment was given to eighth-graders at Kennedy Middle School in Enfield, the town’s Board of Education has not yet figured out how it happened. Instead the board purportedly is stuck contemplating just [ITALICS] how [END ITALICS] to figure out how it happened. TheContinue reading “Enfield school chief conceals source of ‘pizza sex’ lesson”