Many Democrats are crazy too; and ‘on track’ to ignorance

By Chris Powell

Supporters of Donald Trump have a reputation for being crazy. Of course some are, but the reputation is strong mainly because supporters of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris run most news organizations and the U.S. Justice Department and have made sure that Trump crazies are well publicized.

Now maybe the country is starting to see that political craziness is bipartisan. Deranged supporters of Harris’ failed campaign for president are broadcasting their mental breakdowns in videos on social media — screaming, cursing, weeping, gesticulating, and forecasting a Nazi nightmare for America. Some women among them are pledging to withhold sex from their husbands and boyfriends to punish them for voting for Trump, as if Trump didn’t also win the votes of tens of millions of women and as if most demographic groups didn’t increase their support for Trump since the 2020 presidential election.

Immigration racket operates from city halls

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

Stop the doom mongering and the abortion hysteria

Last week news organizations in Connecticut noticed that a special-education teacher in Cheshire posted on social media a video in which she acted deranged and threatened violence against any Trump supporters she might encounter.

Complaints to the Cheshire school administration prompted her suspension with pay, as some townspeople who supported Trump didn’t want their children near her. A few days later the teacher resigned. 

Since the teacher’s freakout occurred off the job and since her threats were not specific enough to be criminal, the school administration might have had much trouble disciplining her if she hadn’t left voluntarily. Because of state law and union contracts, firing teachers is almost impossible in Connecticut. 

The state Education Department can revoke teaching licenses for professional unfitness and “other due and sufficient cause.” But most people who might have had a role in judging the Cheshire teacher’s case — from the town’s school board to the Education Department to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration — probably would have sympathized with her politically. Indeed, don’t be surprised if another school system surreptitiously hires her or even if she wins Cheshire’s next award for “teacher of the year.”

*

Since it didn’t involve hysteria and threatening, a report the other day in the Connecticut Examiner about the state’s high school graduation rates won’t get as much attention as the Cheshire case, but it should.

The Examiner said the percentage of high school freshmen considered “on track” to graduate — that is, having earned the number of class credits appropriate for their grade — remains 3.5% lower than in the 2018-19 school year just before the virus epidemic, when schools were largely closed. That is, since 2018 the percentage of freshmen “on track” has fallen from 88% to 84.5% though the epidemic is long over.

The declines in “on track” students in the state’s cities are disastrous, like 64% to 59% in New Britain, 85% to 70% in Danbury, and 80.7% to 66.4% in New London.

The “on track” rates are even worse than they seem, for they signify mere attendance, not actual learning. In Connecticut no student has to learn anything to be “on track.” Since the state’s only academic policy is social promotion, everybody advances each year and gets a high school diploma no matter what. Then educators and legislators dishonestly equate a high school diploma with education and assure the public that all is well, though Hartford notoriously just graduated a girl who is illiterate.  

In any case the cities have excuses — high illegal immigration and worsening poverty and student transiency. New London Superintendent Cynthia Ritchie says more than half the city’s ninth-grade students last year had only recently enrolled in the school system, many after the school year had already begun, and many were not fluent in English, needed special education, and lacked transcripts from previous schooling.

These children will be a huge burden on New London’s schools, which were already overwhelmed by disadvantaged kids. 

Who in the federal government — besides all Democrats, of course — thought that New London and other cities were prepared for such a burden when the borders were opened? And who in state government has any idea for spreading the burden beyond the cities?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Immigration fraud racket operates from city halls

By Chris Powell

Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket. 

The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

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Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.

How much she has charged for these services is not known.

The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to the Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and Jamaica. 

Geter-Pataky told the Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When the Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.

If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care? 

After all, New Haven is a “sanctuary city,” Connecticut a “sanctuary state,” and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city’s “sanctuary” ordinance. (So much for “If you see something, say something.”) The clerk retired rather than be fired.

After the Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with her former racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.

As the Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump’s election as president.  

“Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just,” the mayor said. “We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive.” 

By “all” the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How “right and just”!

Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Governor Lamont about it too. 

But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.

R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government’s payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y.. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.

Their martyrdom has given the country a metaphor for its government — assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, like immigration and public safety. 

Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

By Chris Powell

Having won the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, Republicans think they have a great mandate to remake the federal government. While there is indeed much to remake, the election’s vote totals, while shocking to many, don’t show anything close to a mandate.

When all votes are counted Donald Trump probably will have won the popular vote by a margin of only 2%. While that is notable because two recent Republican presidents — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump himself in 2016 — were chosen by the Electoral College without winning the popular vote, it’s common for presidents to win both.

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Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

The new Republican margin in the Senate will be only 53-47, on the smaller side of recent Senate margins. Republicans flipped only four of the 34 seats up for election.

The new Republican margin in the House probably will be 222 to 213, also on the small side historically, the Republicans having flipped only two seats more than the Democrats did.

Of course Republicans might have done much better for Congress if the campaign had been waged entirely on a policy agenda and not also on the personal defects of their presidential candidate. But “might have” isn’t a mandate either.

Nevertheless, if they hope to make lasting changes, Trump and congressional Republicans should move fast, acting as if they have a mandate while the Democrats remain stunned.

Deporting the millions of migrants who entered the country illegally under the Biden administration will not be easy or pretty. It will take years, and “sanctuary states” — that is, nullification states, Democratic states like Connecticut — may engage in furious obstruction. Along with the Biden administration these states bet heavily on changing the country’s demographics in time for the next federal census and congressional redistricting so they could create another 20 or 30 permanently Democratic districts, districts full of people ineligible to vote but still counted for districting.

Other urgent Republican objectives may be achieved more easily — like requiring that all voters produce photo identification and evidence of citizenship, and defunding the political left, especially higher education, where the estimated $1.75 trillion in college loan debt is not a subsidy to students but to educators, the indoctrinators who constitute the biggest part of the Democratic army. 

These objectives will become harder to achieve if the new administration doesn’t produce a stronger economy and end inflation in its first year, and that seems unlikely amid Trump’s enthusiasm for deficit spending and tariffs.

Easily re-elected, Connecticut’s big-thinking U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has joined the chorus of Democratic leaders asserting that it’s time to “rebuild the left.” But the left remains strong, supported by the partisan and propagandizing news media, the cultural and business establishment, millions of unionized government employees, and many government-funded entities. What’s weak is the private sector.

Murphy and those other Democratic big thinkers have noticed that Trump built a surprisingly diverse coalition and that the Democratic Party has alienated the working class, as if this is some great insight. Really, what did they think would happen after years of soaring inflation and unchecked illegal immigration, policies that spectacularly drove up the cost of living and drove down wages for less-skilled people?

Murphy had little to say about those things in his campaign but he often broadcast a commercial in which he cited “gun safety” legislation he got passed and said he’d “do anything to keep our kids safe.”

But he didn’t say what his gun law did, and shootings among fatherless and uneducated young men continue daily. Indeed, there are so many guns in circulation in the country that “gun safety” is meaningless, just a political distraction. Only mandatory life sentences for gun crimes would make any difference, and Democrats refuse to put more people in prison. Run by Democrats, Connecticut refuses even to prosecute most gun crimes.

If Murphy really would do anything to keep kids safe, he should examine social disintegration and find them some parents. They get little from the pretend government he conjures for them.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Stop the doom mongering and the abortion hysteria

By Chris Powell

Democrats should knock off the doom mongering in which many are wallowing. 

Yes, in winning the presidency Republican Donald Trump made surprising gains among constituencies long allied with the Democrats, especially Blacks, Hispanics, and union members. But most members of those groups remain inclined toward the Democrats, and the defections resulted largely from dissatisfaction with the economy and illegal immigration. There is no guarantee that the economy will improve or illegal immigration be stopped during a Trump administration; those problems may actually worsen. Of course other problems will develop too.

Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

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National politics is full of abrupt and extreme changes in direction, some of them having occurred in living memory. 

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, won 61% of the popular vote and carried 44 of 50 states. The Republican Party was thought to be finished. Four years later, in 1968, Johnson was so unpopular that he declined to seek re-election and a Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected to succeed him.  

In 1972 Nixon led the Republicans to a sweeping victory, also winning 61% of the popular vote and carrying every state but Massachusetts. Just two years later Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment for corruption and the Democrats won big majorities in Congress.

So politics can turn around quickly, especially if a political party doesn’t keep insisting on being stupid and arrogant.

Democrats should knock off the hysteria about abortion rights, lately euphemized as “reproductive rights.”

Democrats contrived the abortion issue in the recent campaign because they needed a distraction from their national administration’s failures with the economy and illegal immigration.

But since two years ago the Supreme Court reversed its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and returned abortion policy to the states, last week’s election also included 10 state referendums on proposals to liberalize abortion law, and seven of them were approved. One of the three referendums that failed — Florida’s — got a 57% vote in favor, failing only because it was about a state constitutional amendment and Florida’s Constitution requires referendums on amendments to win a 60% majority. 

Liberalization proposals already had passed in referendums in other states, undoing highly restrictive abortion laws. 

With the trend of state law running plainly in favor of more abortion, not less, the Democratic hysteria on the issue is deliberately misleading. If people think their state’s abortion law is too strict, they can change it through the usual democratic procedures. In any case states that have outlawed or tightly restricted abortion have done so only because many of their women have wanted it that way. Democrats should try persuading them to change their minds. 

Democratic campaign commercials that were recently broadcast in Connecticut claimed that if Trump was elected president and Republicans took Congress, they would outlaw abortion. The commercials were aimed at the Republican nominee in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, George Logan, who was defeated by a much greater margin than the margin he lost by two years ago. The commercials said Logan would outlaw abortion. They were lies.

Logan supports Connecticut’s liberal abortion law. Trump supports letting states make abortion law. There is no movement in Congress to outlaw abortion, and many Republicans in Congress are against outlawing it. It’s not going to happen.

When the General Assembly reconvenes in January the Republican minority should tweak the Democratic majority by proposing to withdraw the state from the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which, if it ever took effect, would require the state to award its seven presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote.

When Democratic state legislators put Connecticut into the compact in 2018, they thought it would work in favor of Democratic presidential candidates, since two recent Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Trump, had won the Electoral College without winning a majority of the national popular vote. Trump, supposedly the reincarnation of Hitler, did get a majority this time, vaporizing the partisan rationale for the compact here. But if Connecticut Democrats had their way, the state now would be helping to put Trump back in the White House. Whoops! 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

By Chris Powell

Dawn Wednesday slammed many Democrats with the question: How could this have happened? How could the country have returned to its highest office a man of such terrible character and demeanor as Donald Trump? 

Democrats should look in the mirror.

For the country’s willingness to risk a second Trump administration is just the measure of the disaster of the last four years of Democratic administration, a measure of the country’s desperation for change. All elections for high office are continuation or change elections, and this one was a change election that became grotesque because of the excesses on both sides.

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The country knew perfectly well about Trump’s character and demeanor. But it also sensed that the prosecutions of him were really political persecutions, and that at some point policy outweighs character in politics and government. Jimmy Carter had a sterling character but as president four decades ago he gave the country a disastrous term as president and was overwhelmingly defeated for re-election by a former governor many regarded as a right-wing kook.

This week the country decided that even if, as the Democrats said, Trump was a kook, a crook, a rapist, a fascist, and a Nazi, he was still much better than the Democratic alternative: ruinous inflation and unprecedented and essentially treasonous illegal immigration that has driven the wage base down and housing costs up, thereby devastating the working class, all topped with another stupid imperial war, sanctimonious wokeness, transgenderism, and, in Vice President Kamala Harris, an empty-headed product of the looney left who wouldn’t or couldn’t answer a serious question.

Trump is unlikely to end inflation. As Harris did, he supports the virtually unlimited deficit spending and borrowing that are weakening the dollar and pushing the world away from it. Since the federal government now is incapable of any financial restraint because voters themselves have been falsely taught that everything can be free, the dollar will continue to be inflated away. Thus Democrats eventually may be glad they lost this election. 

But at least Trump may reduce illegal immigration, start deporting people who entered the country unvetted, end the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, discard environmental extremism, and stop government from putting men into women’s sports, restrooms, and prisons.

Will Democrats ever recover enough from their Trump Derangement Syndrome to reflect on their defeat, not just for president but also for the Senate and probably for the House as well?

Having lost the Senate, Democrats shouldn’t need to reflect much on their desire to repeal the filibuster rule, which they dreamed of doing after Harris’ election. Indeed, for the next two years the filibuster may become the last lever of national Democratic power. The Democrats will quickly swallow their hypocrisy and move on.      

Democrats and liberals generally did little reflecting a week ago when 250,000 of them canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post because its publisher, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, prevented publication of an editorial endorsing Harris. Such an endorsement from the Post would have been routine and have changed few if any minds. But by slanting its news coverage the Post has been a major propagandist for the Democrats. Cancelling their subscriptions, the Post’s former readers have weakened their own side.

Though Connecticut went heavily Democratic again, the state embodies much of what the country has just rejected. 

The state nullifies federal immigration law by giving identification documents and medical insurance to illegal immigrants and prohibiting police from cooperating with federal immigration agents. The state promotes and coddles transgenderism in schools, pushing boys into girls’ sports and restrooms and requiring boys’ restrooms to stock feminine hygiene products.

With policy identical to Connecticut’s, Minnesota famously has Gov. “Tampon Tim” Walz. Less famously, Connecticut has Gov. “Napkin Ned” Lamont. 

These “woke” policies almost certainly do not have majority support in Connecticut. But even with such easy targets the state’s Republican Party remains too weak to provide consistent and coherent opposition. So the state keeps lurching left.   

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s cities and towns might do well to take note of Wethersfield’s experience this year with the use of government flagpoles for political propaganda.

At the start of the year the Town Council had a policy of allowing only government flags to be flown on town government flagpoles. But in February the council changed the policy to oblige a request to fly the “pride” flag on the pole at Town Hall to show support for sexual minorities. Some council members foresaw the problem this would cause — that the council soon would have to choose among controversial and politically propagandistic requests. 

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Indeed, in voting to fly the “pride” flag, the council didn’t inquire seriously into what the flag represents. Was it representing only the rights enjoyed by all people under our constitutions and laws? Or did the flag also represent the claims of men to participate in women’s sports, use women’s restrooms, and, if imprisoned, to be held in women’s prisons? The “pride” flag is flown by many advocates of transgenderism.

But the council voted anyway to change the policy so the “pride” flag could be flown, and, sure enough, a another flag request became controversial in June. The family of a Wethersfield native who became a Hartford police officer and was killed there in the line of duty asked the council to fly the “thin blue line” flag at Town Hall in his memory. The “thin blue line” flag is a U.S. flag with its middle white stripe colored blue to honor police officers.

Whereupon a council member complained that the flag would be construed as racist because some police are racist and some people who wave the flag are racist.

The complaint was a wild stretch, but it was made by a Democratic member of the council, the council has a Democratic majority, and Democrats are easily intimidated by complaints of racism, no matter how crazy. So the council’s majority rejected the request to honor the Hartford officer by flying the “thin blue line” flag at Town Hall. 

Dozens of Wethersfield residents were enraged, as were many other people throughout the state. The town got lots of unfavorable publicity for seeming to be advocating transgenderism while disrespecting cops.

So the other day the council decided unanimously to revert to the old policy: Now only government flags are to fly on Wethersfield town government flagpoles.

Council member Emily Zambrello explained her reversal. “This isn’t something I wanted to change back,” she said, “but circumstances have changed, and we can now see that this is way too much to continue to deal with. We can’t keep having ideological discussions on flags. It’s not a good use of anyone’s time, and it’s ultimately not helping people more than it’s hurting them.”

That is, like most municipal councils, many of which also have had to confront the flag issue, Wethersfield’s has plenty of ordinary work to do without enlisting on one side or the other in the culture war. The culture warriors can carry their flags into battle everywhere, parade with them and fly them on their own property, but government flagpoles should remain neutral ground — if not to be fair to all, then at least to spare elected officials from becoming casualties of the culture war.  

* * * 

WHAT ABOUT ABORTION REGS?: In early September the state Public Health Department held a hearing on its strange proposal to repeal three regulations that impose small impediments to abortion, regulations consistent with the principles established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous decision in the case of Roe v. Wade and the principles of Connecticut’s own abortion law. 

The proposal seemed inspired by state legislators who say they want to “go beyond Roe” — that is, to authorize late-term abortion, the abortion of healthy and viable fetuses.

The department has yet to decide on repeal of the regulations, and refused to reply to this writer’s inquiry as to whether it was delaying a decision to avoid renewing the controversy while candidates were campaigning for the General Assembly.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

By Chris Powell

Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, says she’ll investigate the case of the girl who, the Connecticut Mirror reported a few weeks ago, graduated this year from Hartford Public High School without being able to read or write or do more than rudimentary addition and who then somehow was admitted to the University of Connecticut.

No investigations of the girl’s case seem to be forthcoming from the state Education Department and the General Assembly, whose carefree allocations of state money finance most of Hartford’s school system. Such investigations would risk breaking open a scandal: public education’s longstanding failure not just in Hartford but throughout the state.

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Torres-Rodriguez told the Hartford Courant that the school system is “deeply concerned” about the case, will examine its “entire chronology,” and address any mistakes. “We have an expectation that if anyone sees something of concern, you say something,” the superintendent said.

But the president of the Hartford teachers union, Carol Gale, says the girl’s failure to learn wasn’t the fault of union members. “Teachers advocated for this student all along her journey,” Gale says. According to Gale, the problem is — you guessed it — a lack of money.

How tedious the superintendent and the teachers union president are.

Hartford’s schools are full of employees receiving more than $150,000 annually in salary and benefits. In the last 12 years could no money be found for tutoring for the girl?

Could no one have noticed by even seventh or eighth grade that she couldn’t read and write and then do something about it? And if, as the teachers union president says, teachers did notice and were really “advocating” for the girl against an indifferent administration, why did no one start screaming to the school board and press?

Will the superintendent’s investigation identify all staff members who had contact with the girl throughout her years in school, detail what they did or didn’t do about her illiteracy, fix responsibility, and hold staff members to account?

Of course not. For the girl’s case is different only in degree, not principle, from the cases of most public school students in Connecticut, who are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas without ever performing at grade level — a policy of social promotion. 

Connecticut just doesn’t want to know. That’s why the state has no proficiency testing to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation.

Three weeks ago the Danbury News-Times reported that 70% of the city’s students in Grades 3 through 8 are not performing at grade level. The report went unnoticed outside the city, and why not? The student proficiency disaster is similar nearly everywhere else, and deliberately ignored.

That is, even journalism shares responsibility by treating the failure of public education as the natural order of things, along with the especially disgraceful racial performance gap among Connecticut’s students, even as government throws more and more money at education without ever making any difference. 

Even without being formally articulated, the message Connecticut sends throughout schools and society is still powerful: Educational results don’t matter.  Students mustn’t be required to learn anything and will suffer no consequences if they don’t — no consequences in school anyway. There will be consequences when they must start to earn a living, but even then what matters most in public education will be only to keep the people on its payroll happy.

Ending educational failure and the social promotion that guarantees it couldn’t be done overnight. That would empty the upper grades and stuff the lower ones. 

But gradual reform might begin with proficiency tests given in every grade at the end of every school year, with the scores entered on the permanent records of all students and then affixed to their high school diplomas. Potential employers could be encouraged to ask to see an applicant’s diploma with its yearly test scores. 

Eventually word would get around that education was starting to matter again, and maybe after 15 years or so ordinary grade-level proficiency could start to be required for advancement and graduation.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net.)

Why can’t people support their own children anymore?

By Chris Powell

Government, the French economist and parliamentarian Frederic Bastiat wrote two centuries ago, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. Though there wasn’t much of a “social safety net” back then, Bastiat was correct about human selfishness and desire for power and privilege.

Bastiat’s old insight is understatement today. According to a recent study by the Economic Innovation Group, a policy research organization in Washington, Americans have never been more dependent on transfer payments from government — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food subsidies, unemployment and disability stipends, and such. The study says transfer payments now constitute 18% of the national income, up from 8% in 1970, $4.3 trillion annually now compared to $70 billion in 1970.

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Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Nevertheless, the current national election campaign suggests that many if not most people still can’t support themselves, not even in Connecticut, supposedly a rich state. Most Democratic candidates here and throughout the country are clamoring for more income supports from government, especially regarding children. A centerpiece of the Democratic campaign is a federal “child tax credit,” which would send big monthly checks to households with children.  

Connecticut’s only member of Congress facing serious competition, 5th District Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has joined this clamor with a campaign commercial touting her efforts “getting our babies fed.”

So why can’t people support their children anymore? 

While the question is seldom asked by anyone in authority, the other day U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, addressed it in a newspaper essay. Unfortunately she was dishonest about it, acknowledging one cause of the problem, the recent ruinous inflation in the price of necessities — food, fuel, electricity, medicine, and housing — but blaming it on “price gouging by large corporations.” To hear DeLauro tell it, the government’s spectacular recent increase in money creation, deficit spending, and transfer programs has nothing to do with inflation.

“Price gouging” can occur only in uncompetitive markets, and the United States does have some markets that should be more competitive. But that’s what anti-trust law is for, and recent national administrations, including the one DeLauro supports, have failed to enforce it vigorously. DeLauro and other members of Congress from Connecticut might even be glad about this lack of enforcement, since the state depends heavily on industries that could use more competition, like military contracting, insurance, and government itself.

But there is another cause of the inability of people to support their children — their own irresponsibility. Many people have more children than they are prepared to support, though this is the age of virtually free contraception and abortion. It is also the age of self-impoverishment — social promotion in school, childbearing outside marriage, and single-parenting — and the age of government subsidies for self-impoverishment. 

Are people even morally obliged to support their own children anymore? Few elected officials and candidates seem to think so.

A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, the country’s most liberal president up to that time, declared that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Four decades later another liberal president, John F. Kennedy, told Americans not to ask what their country could do for them but to ask what they could do for their country. How quaint that seems now. 

If Roosevelt and Kennedy were around today, surveying the clamor for more transfer payments, might they admit to Bastiat that he was right and they were wrong?

BETTER TO WORRY: As Connecticut entered its 14 days of early voting state leaders and journalists declared that every vote counts and noted some recent elections that were decided by a single vote.

Meanwhile, despite the recent election scandals in Bridgeport and Stamford, the country’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants, Connecticut’s functioning as a “sanctuary state,” and its failure to maintain accuracy in voter rolls, these same people also have been declaring that no one should worry about voter fraud because it’s rare.  

Maybe it is rare but it seems likely to become less so.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

By Chris Powell

Journalists around the country are outraged that the publishers of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times decided at the last minute to prevent their newspapers from publishing editorial-page endorsements of Democrat Kamala Harris for president. A few journalists at the papers have resigned over it.

The writers union at the Post complains that the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, founder of internet retailer Amazon, “interfered” with the editorial page. The union seems not to have heard that, as press critic A.J. Liebling wrote, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. The Post’s writers don’t seem inclined to concede Bezos any discretion even though he is covering the newspaper’s big financial losses, which approach $100 million a year.

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Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

Of course the Post management’s first explanation of the decision against endorsing Harris or anyone was weak — that the newspaper was reverting to its old policy of not endorsing candidates. So it was suspected that Bezos figured that Republican nominee Donald Trump, considered by most journalists to be the incarnation of evil, well may be elected and then could make trouble for Amazon, which, because of its size, is always bumping into legal and regulatory issues. Indeed, if the owner of a news organization has other business interests, they can conflict with providing independent news and commentary.

But then few journalists complained when Bezos bought the Post as it and the rest of the newspaper industry were weakening. Journalists then were glad that the new owner could afford to lose some money. 

In an essay in the Post this week Bezos acknowledged his potential for conflict of interest but offered better justification for avoiding endorsements: that they may reduce confidence in the paper’s fairness even as confidence in journalism generally is collapsing. Besides, Bezos argued, endorsements persuade few people anyway.

The situation is a bit different with the L.A. Times. Its owner, medical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, says the paper’s decision not to endorse for president is for this year only and is based on the belief that endorsing would just worsen the country’s bitter political division. 

This explanation isn’t so persuasive either, since it’s hard to see how that division could be much worse than it is, and since California is so Democratic that no newspaper endorsement can make much difference. Maybe Soon-Shiong also has some business interests that the next president could mess with, though they may not be as obvious as those of Bezos.

In any case no endorsement may be persuasive if it comes from news organizations that are as politically partisan year-round as the Washington Post and most other major news organizations have been lately, and the endorsements from such organizations may serve mainly to make editorialists feel more relevant. 

Indeed, since most major news organizations suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome and have gotten rabidly partisan this year, their constant slanting of the news already has provided de-facto endorsements nearly every day. Most major news organizations have reported in great detail the many scandals involving Trump while ignoring or discounting the many involving President Biden and his administration, starting notoriously with the influence-peddling business long operated by his son Hunter and the incriminating evidence recorded on his laptop computer, which turned out not to be the Russian disinformation major news organizations sought to make it. 

There’s no separating journalism from politics. The selection of every news story and commentary is a political act — not necessarily a partisan one but still an act arising from the world view of journalists, politics in a broad sense. But whatever their political views journalists should strive for fairness. 

Instead last weekend some journalists likened Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to the rally held there in February 1939 by the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, as if many other political events have not also been held there over the years, including the 1992 Democratic National Convention, and as if Trump’s vulgarity isn’t often matched by that of his adversaries, who now are calling him a fascist and another Hitler.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

How is college boss Cheng worth that huge salary and perks?

By Chris Powell

At last Terrence Cheng, chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System — “president” not being pretentious enough — has managed to embarrass Governor Lamont and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly. Cheng did it with his expense-account extravagance reported last week by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers. 

Now journalism should embarrass the governor and legislators a little more.

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The Hearst report told of dozens of luxurious meals charged to the college system by Cheng, along with a chauffeur improperly hired to drive his state-provided car, and a monthly housing allowance of $2,100 on top of his salary of $442,000 and more than $41,000 in fringe benefits. Also exposed were a long delay in releasing some of Cheng’s expense records and his continuing refusal to provide others, though their disclosure is almost certainly required by law. 

All this extravagance was enjoyed while Cheng was pleading the college system’s poverty to the General Assembly, students, and faculty and while the system was raising tuition.

Cheng’s stratospheric salary isn’t new. Neither is his arrogance. They have just been ignored. 

What’s new is Cheng’s mock humility upon receiving criticism from legislative leaders, who resent that a corruption scandal has erupted just a few days before a legislative election.

“This is one of those moments where you learn as you’re doing your job,” Cheng told the Hearst papers. “Just because we’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should do it.” 

Cheng is awfully late to figure this out, since he has held academic and administrative positions in public higher education for many years. But then public higher education doesn’t have much respect for the public.

In any case Governor Lamont and legislative leaders are demanding quick release of the missing expense records and promising an investigation, and the college system’s board has taken Cheng’s credit card away, at least temporarily. 

That’s a start, but journalism now should ask the governor, Cheng’s board, and the legislators why they thought Cheng was worth all that money in the first place and whether they still think he is. What has made someone who is so hypocritical and arrogant so special? 

After answering those questions, the governor and legislators might continue to pursue the public interest by noticing that state government has dozens of administrative positions, many of them with nebulous responsibilities, paying salaries above $200,000, and by wondering whether Connecticut is getting all the value it should get from them.

The Cheng scandal comes just weeks after a report from the state auditors described comprehensive financial mismanagement in the Correction Department, including, sensationally, two years of mistaken double salary payments to a prison lieutenant who declined to report the mistake and now has been guaranteed another five years of employment with the department so she can repay the misappropriated money out of her future salary.

Connecticut state government is not a place of ruthless efficiency. It’s not even a place of ordinary financial controls. Yet years ago the General Assembly eliminated its Program Review and Investigations Committee, thereby virtually proclaiming that it didn’t really want to know too much about wasted money and failing programs and policies. 

Has this lack of interest resulted from the aspiration of legislators to positions like Cheng’s in the executive branch of government once they serve enough time in legislative office to qualify for a state pension that will be boosted enormously by a few years receiving a Cheng-like salary?

WHY RISK MORE FRAUD?: State Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, is being criticized by Democrats for insisting that there is voter fraud in Connecticut. While recent notorious cases in Bridgeport and Stamford show there indeed has been some, Sampson’s critics claim there isn’t enough to worry about.

However much there is, a question is implicitly raised by the state constitutional amendment on the ballot Nov. 5, an amendment that would allow unlimited voting by absentee ballot: Why risk more voter fraud? Early voting in person now provides much more convenience in voting, but the more people vote through intermediaries by absentee ballot rather than directly, in person, the more fraud there will be.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)