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

Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

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)

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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.

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

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. 

Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

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

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)

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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.

Why can’t people support their own children anymore?

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

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

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.

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

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

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.

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

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.

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

Voter fraud may be rare, so Connecticut Democrats want more

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)

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

By Chris Powell

Full of enthusiasm for the prospect, a Torrington resident writes to the Waterbury Republican-American that the forthcoming presidential election “is a chance to end the plague of Donald Trump.” Indeed, since Trump, the Republican presidential nominee for a third time, is 78, if he loses next month he almost surely won’t run again.

But for many people who deplore Trump’s character and demeanor, the problem with getting rid of his “plague” on Nov. 5 is that it will produce four more years of the current plague, the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

What are voters to do if they deplore not only Trump personally but also the policies of the current administration, policies the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris, probably will continue?

Ordinarily someone of Trump’s character and demeanor would have no chance of election. But his adversaries still don’t realize that his support is largely a reaction to them.  

There are many causes of this reaction. Among them are ruinous inflation; worsening poverty and crime; open borders and unfettered illegal immigration; the proxy war in Ukraine; the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; government censorship; the promotion of transgenderism; lies told about the virus epidemic, President Biden’s mental competence, and economic and crime data; a Supreme Court nominee who purported not to know what a woman is; the official culture of victimhood; racial preferences; and so on — all of it supported, excused, or concealed by propagandistic news organizations.

Such complaints aren’t Republican contrivance. Polls show that most people think the country was better off when Trump was president and that even most Democrats think the country is going in the wrong direction. Republicans would win the election overwhelmingly if they had not nominated such a troublesome personality and the election was decided on policy instead. 

Even Harris seems to recognize the great desire to repudiate her administration, for her campaign slogan is “a new way forward,” her administration’s way having failed.

With his grotesque faults, recklessness, crudeness, and buffoonery, Trump embodies and gives voice to the contempt of government and politics felt by many and maybe most Americans. That is, Trump is a product not just of his foes but of democracy itself.

Yes, the country needs to get rid of Trump. But more urgently it also needs to repudiate the Biden-Harris administration. Unfortunately this will take at least four years, since it can be accomplished only by electing Trump and then letting the Constitution and age disqualify him from a third term.  

BEYOND THE FRINGE: Even as its capture by its nutty leftist fringe is threatening to take the Democratic Party down nationally, Connecticut’s own nutty leftist fringe is trying to push the party over the edge.

That fringe is the Working Families Party, created to blackmail Democrats out of appealing to the political center. The party provides a second line on the ballot to Democrats pursuing a leftist agenda, and it threatens to run its own candidates against Democrats who aren’t leftist enough, thereby taking votes from them and giving Republicans a better chance to win.

The WFP’s questionnaire for state legislative candidates seeking the party’s endorsement is a treat. It asks candidates to identify their socio-economic class (“poor, working class, middle class, upper-middle class, upper class”); gender (“agender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, man, non-binary, woman, questioning, two-spirit, other”); and race (“Asian-American, Pacific islander, Black, African-American, African descent, Latino/Latina/Latine/Hispanic/Mestizo, Middle Eastern, Native American/Alaskan native/indigenous person”).

At least the questionnaire doesn’t ask candidates to disclose their religion, favorite sports team, and biggest regret in life.

The rest of the questionnaire seeks assurances that a candidate will raise taxes and spending, give unemployment benefits to strikers, preserve government employee union control over public finance, prevent competition with public schools, extend government medical insurance to illegal immigrants, continue to forbid police from cooperating with immigration authorities, weaken the private sector, and promise not to join the Moderate Caucus.

Any Democrat in Connecticut who gets on the Working Families Party’s line may be assumed to have enlisted for most of this. 

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

-END-

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

By Chris Powell

Connecticut can be glad that it has at least one seriously competitive campaign for a major office in November’s election — the campaign for U.S. representative in the 5th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat, is being challenged by former state Sen. George Logan, a Republican who almost defeated her two years ago.

But these days competitive campaigns are usually accompanied by ugly television commercials almost totalitarian in their lies or half-truths. The worst of them are usually sponsored by a national political action committee so the candidates they are trying to help don’t get quite as tainted as they should be.

In Connecticut Republicans have been broadcasting a commercial denouncing Hayes for being the only member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation who voted against legislation to classify fentanyl as a most dangerous drug. The commercial has video of Hayes smiling and laughing as if she is thinking about deadly drugs.

The commercial means to give the impression that Hayes is indifferent to the drug problem or maybe even a drug dealer herself. It presumes, probably correctly, that most viewers won’t stop a moment to think that the congresswoman must have had a better reason for opposing the bill.

So the Hartford Courant inquired of Hayes and found that better reason. 

The legislation, Hayes said, imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possession of any amount of fentanyl, not distinguishing between traffickers and teenagers possessing small amounts or some substance containing fentanyl. According to Hayes, the bill also allowed judges no discretion in sentencing and lacked appropriations for drug treatment or law enforcement. While she was indeed the only member of Congress from Connecticut to oppose the bill, 130 Democrats from other states did.

Agree with it or not, this was a reasonable explanation.

Meanwhile Hayes and the Democrats are doing the same kind of thing to Logan, only worse.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is broadcasting a commercial noting that Logan has said he would not vote to put into federal law the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade. The commercial construes this to mean that Logan will vote with “Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA movement … to outlaw all abortions, even here in Connecticut.”

The commercial concludes: “A vote for George Logan is a vote to ban abortion.”

While the Republican anti-Hayes commercial is only misleading, the Democratic anti-Logan commercial is complete misrepresentation. Logan repeatedly has committed himself to defending Connecticut’s abortion law, which incorporates Roe v. Wade policy, and Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t support outlawing abortion federally but favors leaving the issue to the states. 

In any case, even a Congress with a Republican majority would not have the votes to outlaw abortion nationally.

Ironically, when it comes to abortion, Hayes and most Democrats in Congress are the extremists, not Logan, Trump, and the Republicans. The Democrats support what they call the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit any government regulation of abortion. 

That is, a vote for Hayes is a vote for the abortion of viable fetuses and even for leaving born-alive children, bleeding and gasping for breath, to die on surgical tables. 

Hayes, most other Democrats in Congress, and many elsewhere don’t really want to restore Roe v. Wade. That case held that abortion prior to fetal viability was an individual right but that after viability government properly could regulate or even prohibit abortion. As constitutional law this was questionable but as politics and policy it balanced the interests at stake and gave protection to the developed fetus. 

Over the next decade or so even most anti-abortion states may incorporate Roe v. Wade policy into their law as Connecticut has done. But as the Women’s Health Protection Act shows and as the more candid among them acknowledge, Democrats want to “go beyond Roe” and give the country all abortions all the time. Strangely, the only moderates left in congressional politics on the abortion issue are Republicans.   

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

Voter fraud may be rare, so Connecticut Democrats want more

By Chris Powell

Fourteen days of early voting began this week in Connecticut for the Nov. 5 federal and state elections, and since this early voting must be done in person, there’s nothing really objectionable about it. Early voters risk being unable to respond to late developments in election campaigns, but they may avoid long lines at their regular polling places on Election Day — if municipalities adequately staff their early-voting places and don’t cause long lines there too.

While early voting was used for primary elections a few weeks ago, participation was minimal and so the procedure remains experimental. So election officials will adjust it as seems appropriate.

But early voting could be the preface to much greater risk, a risk that voters are being asked to approve in this election: a proposed state constitutional amendment that is on the ballot. The amendment would empower the General Assembly to authorize everyone to vote by absentee ballot, eliminating current restrictions, which allow absentee balloting only for people who on Election Day are on active military duty or expect to be out of town or confined by sickness, disability, or religion.

That is, the absentee ballot amendment will invite the legislature to tell voters that there is no compelling reason for them to vote in person. 

This couldn’t be more mistaken.

Of course many people will be glad to accept the convenience of voting without having to appear anywhere. But Connecticut’s Constitution has had a good reason for restricting absentee ballots: election security. 

Elections are most secure when voters appear in person, show identification, and cast their vote directly. Their completed ballot never leaves their hands before it is cast. Absentee voting — which is mostly voting by U.S. mail or insecure drop boxes — separates voters from the casting of their ballots and potentially puts those ballots in the hands of any number of intermediaries. Absentee voting also allows political people to solicit and cajole ballots from the frail, indifferent, and politically vulnerable.

Practically every recent election in impoverished and corrupt Bridgeport has had absentee ballot fraud or improprieties. In the city’s most recent mayoral election there was evidence that the campaign of Mayor Joe Ganim sought to get a list of residents of city-subsidized housing for use in obtaining absentee ballot applications — a list of people who could be told that voting for the mayor would help them keep their apartments.

Sure enough, though Ganim served seven years in federal prison for corruption committed during his first stint as mayor, his second stint has been achieved repeatedly by big pluralities in absentee ballots.

The danger isn’t just in Bridgeport. In 2022 the former chairman of Stamford’s Democratic City Committee was convicted on 14 counts of forgery and making a false statement involving absentee ballot fraud in a city election.

An opponent of the constitutional amendment, Southington state Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, the ranking House Republican member of the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, notes that the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications during the recent virus epidemic showed that Connecticut’s voter rolls are poorly maintained and excessively vulnerable to fraud. That’s because 184,000 applications were undeliverable through the mail and more than 50,000 absentee ballots that were sent were never returned. 

“Our voter rolls are a mess,” Mastrofranceso says. “Our voter rolls are not updated.”

Most advocacy of the amendment for unrestricted absentee voting comes from Democrats, who contend that voter fraud is rare. Maybe it is, but Democrats seem to want it to become common. For Democrats are the party of massive illegal immigration, open borders, and “sanctuary cities” that nullify federal immigration law — cities including New Haven and Hartford, which, like Bridgeport, provide huge Democratic pluralities. 

The Democrats are also the party that opposes requiring voters to show identification, and many urban Democrats want to allow non-citizens to vote. 

The Democrats are against election security. 

Connecticut’s early voting provides more than enough additional convenience in voting. The proposed constitutional amendment risks corruption and should be defeated.

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

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