Climate change fanatics practice totalitarianism

By Chris Powell

When, in 1955, Rosa Parks, a courageous Black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested, and sparked the modern U.S. civil rights movement, the connection between her protest and her objective was clear: to end the racial segregation maintained by the bus service.

When, in 1960, courageous Black college students sat down at the white sections of racially segregated lunch counters throughout the segregated South and refused to leave until they were served, the connection between their protest and their objective was clear again: to end the racial segregation maintained at lunch counters.

In those protests and many others during that era, the demands of the protesters could be easily granted by the targets of the protest without any loss or harm to anyone.

But what is to be construed from the sort of protest that is erupting in Western Europe and now the United States, like the protest that disrupted the final minutes of play at the Travelers Championship golf tournament in Cromwell two weekends ago? The protesters, wearing shirts with the legend “No golf on a dead planet,” ran onto the putting green and sprayed colored powder on it before police intercepted them, took them away, and charged them with criminal mischief.

The protesters in Cromwell want to eliminate oil and natural gas fuels, in the belief that those fuels are causing devastating “climate change.” In other venues such protesters are defacing paintings and statues. But the golf tournament, a major money-raiser for charity, and the defaced paintings and statues have no special connection to fuel use and their operators and custodians have no special responsibility for fuel policy. They don’t use oil and gas any more than everyone else does. 

Sometimes fuel protesters block roadways, halting traffic. Of course most vehicles use fuel, but most of the operators of the vehicles being blocked use fuel no more than everyone else does. 

The fuel issue is a society-wide issue but the targets selected by the fuel protesters are not objectionable by the protesters’ own standards, and hindering them won’t affect fuel policy. The protesters have selected the targets instead for their capacity to cause annoyance when impaired and thus generate publicity.

But the fuel issue long has been getting plenty of publicity quite apart from the efforts of the protesters. It is a major political controversy in the United States and Western Europe, where it is politically correct to imagine that there are readily available and adequate alternatives to oil and natural gas. But fuel is not a political controversy in most of the rest of the world, and especially not in the developing world, which will be needing not just oil and natural gas but also coal, the dirtiest conventional fuel, for decades to come.

Calculating the benefits and harms of conventional fuels and striking a balance between them is a task for democratic politics. But the fuel protesters are so sure they are right, and so self-righteous, that they claim the right to nullify the rights of all people who disagree with them or don’t heed them. 

These protests go far beyond civil disobedience. They go far beyond criminal mischief as well. They are totalitarian. and any prosecutor who pursues the criminal charges from the golf tournament, and any court that tries them, should keep this in mind.

MORE SCHOOLS CRASH: Add Stamford to the list of Connecticut cities whose schools are getting out of control.

Teachers at Stamford’s Turn of River Middle School say they are being abused, bullied, threatened, and even assaulted by students, adding that the school administration has failed to report the assaults to the police.

The administration says it will make changes, including adding a third security officer to the school. That officer is needed not to protect the school against outsiders but against its own students, since under Connecticut law even the most disruptive students are almost impossible to expel, lest their feelings be hurt and the public notice social disintegration.   

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

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Logan and other Republicans in Connecticut can explain backing Trump

By Chris Powell

Why is former state Sen. George Logan, who is sure to get the Republican nomination for U.S. representative from Connecticut’s 5th District again, dancing around the question of whether and how much he supports his party’s presumptive nominee for president, former President Donald Trump?

According to the Waterbury Republican-American, at a campaign event in Kent the other day Logan told participants to turn off their mobile telephones and cameras before declaring that he twice had voted for Trump and planned to do so again.

Does Logan really think anyone imagines he had done and would do otherwise? Does Logan really think he can get through a campaign evading the Trump question without looking like a horse’s hindquarters?

For there is little danger to Logan in being candid. Renomination is his. Trump partisans won’t try to deny it to him, since two years ago he lost to Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes by only 2,000 votes. On Election Day no Trump supporters are likely to cut Logan and thereby help Hayes, who is practically a member of the far-left Democratic “squad” in the House.

Yes, Logan and other Connecticut Republicans need to explain how they stand on Trump, but there is a good explanation. It’s that there are many objectionable things about Trump but most involve his personality, his alternately disgraceful and ridiculous demeanor, and his personal and business activities, even as there are also many objectionable personal things about the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Biden, especially the corrupt influence-peddling business of his family over which he has presided and from which he almost surely has profited, and his senility. 

Biden can be said to be even more objectionable than Trump for his administration’s policies: open borders and the costly flood of illegal and unvetted immigration; the proxy war with Ukraine against Russia and the risk that it will become nuclear; keeping a terrorist movement in power in Gaza with American hostages; rampant inflation; the financial bailout of overpriced higher education through forgiveness of student loans; transgenderism; and the assault on free speech. 

That is, issues may be much weightier than character this time. 

Polls suggest that this is what half the country already believes. Of course Connecticut is more Democratic-inclined than the nation, but even many people who usually vote Democratic here are troubled by Biden’s failings and might be persuaded that the country needs more moderate Republicans in Congress to check them.

Conceding Trump’s failings while explaining why he is still the better choice for president might make Logan seem courageous, candid, and independent even if he was only going along with the obvious. 

For independent beats evasive every time, and neither Hayes nor any other Democrat in Congress from Connecticut will strike an independent pose though they all should have worked to get their party to nominate someone else for president.

At their debate Thursday night President Biden lapsed in and out of coherence and Donald Trump lapsed in and out of demagoguery. But the debate may have been settled after 12 minutes when Biden fell apart in the middle of an answer. Biden later was incoherent on other issues, including illegal immigration, where he most needs a strong defense, and he evaded the crucial question about his age and mental competence.

By contrast Trump was vigorous and aggressive, though by the count of debate sponsor CNN’s fact checker he surpassed Biden on lies, misstatements, and exaggerations by about 30 to nine.

Trump repeatedly ignored questions, instead attacking Biden on illegal immigration, the Afghanistan debacle, and foreign policy. Trump’s attacks may have been effective but only at the expense of what he also needed to do: show himself careful and statesmanlike now rather than still angry, reckless, and vain.

It was as if Trump if had never heard that one should never try to murder a man who’s committing suicide, as Biden was doing on stage with him. 

In their awfulness Biden and Trump remain each other’s main rationale for support. So maybe the debate’s winner will turn out to have been third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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

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Murder in a state prison but who really cares?

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s top elected officials and members of Congress, all Democrats, excel at criticizing the private sector and the state’s regulated utilities. Indeed, there is always much to criticize, as last week state Attorney General William Tong criticized Connecticut Natural Gas for earning more money than authorized by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. The attorney general asked the regulators to order the gas company to reduce its rates.

But those top elected officials and members of Congress are not good at spotting and seeking redress for excesses in government itself, though there are many and they are often more costly to society. To the contrary, the theme of these officials is always that government should do and spend more. 

Presumably this is because the Democrats strive to be the party of government and particularly the party of government’s unionized employees, who, when mobilized, are nearly unbeatable in the state’s elections even as government begins to crowd out the private sector, which pays for government.

For example, what should be a scandal in state government has gone without political comment for weeks now — the May 25 strangulation murder of a prisoner at the Bridgeport Correctional Center, Steven Bailey, 43, of New Haven. According to the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, a warrant charging Bailey’s cellmate, Cecil Mills, with murder says other prisoners report that the victim called for help, banged on the wall of his cell, and screamed, “He’s gonna kill me,” but wasn’t attended to until hours after he was killed.      

The warrant says prison guards claim to have heard nothing unusual at the time of the murder, and a prison nurse who stopped at Bailey’s cell to give him medicine, apparently after he was killed, thought he was asleep and so walked away.

A lawyer who represents the families of inmates who died in Connecticut prisons, Alexander Taubes, says the Correction Department “has a culture of ignoring inmates’ cries for help and then the state refuses to take any responsibility. The state is 100% responsible for this incident.” 

The murdered prisoner’s public defender, Kenneth Bunker, adds, “I don’t fully understand how this could happen while he was in the custody of the Correction Department.”

It will be remarkable if the department’s investigation reaches a conclusion that pins fault on any particular employees, especially remarkable if the investigation attributes fault to particular employees and disciplines them, and shocking if such discipline is not canceled or diminished by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which seems to have been created to relieve state government management of authority and accountability.

Even short of a final investigative report, there is plenty of room for official comment on a murder in prison. For there is no getting around state government’s responsibility. But even state legislators from the cities from which so many of Connecticut’s criminal offenders and prisoners are drawn have been silent on this case. After all, the victim was nobody special, and why risk aggravating the guards union?

The murder raises something else that should become a political issue. That is, the prisoner accused of murder, Mills, is reported to have a long criminal record including robberies and sexual assault. Any prisoner with a long record and long sentence may figure he has little to lose by killing in prison, since Connecticut has repealed capital punishment. Without capital punishment, how can murder in prison be much deterred?

Solitary confinement could be considered a deterrent but two years ago Connecticut essentially repealed that too with a law that forbids holding anyone in solitary for more than 15 consecutive days or more than 30 days in a 60-day period.

On top of that, Governor Lamont and the few state legislators who acknowledge caring about prisoners are at odds over who should be appointed to the new position of prison “ombuds,” which is to investigate the Correction Department on behalf of prisoners. Bailey’s murder shows how much the new position is needed — but it’s still vacant.

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

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State Education Department belatedly notices Hartford school disaster

By Chris Powell

At last the state Education Department seems to have noticed that long after Hartford’s school system was designated an “alliance district” and given extra state money to execute a special plan to improve student performance, performance has not improved and the school system itself is falling apart, with a $40 million budget deficit causing hundreds of layoffs.

So the Education Department has decided to audit the school system.

Most likely this will take a few months, cite some minor failings, and arrange a state grant of tens of millions of dollars to close the deficit and rehire the laid-off employees. The nominal hope will be that student performance will start improving this time. The real hope will be that student performance will go back to being overlooked.

While the Education Department was deciding to audit Hartford’s schools, the Hartford Courant reported that in 1989 74% of the city’s eighth-graders could not read at grade level and today the eighth-grade reading failure rate is five points worse, 79%. So what has the Education Department been doing about Hartford in the intervening 35 years? Nothing that made any more difference than what the school system did.  

And why should the Education Department now be so concerned about Hartford particularly? Student performance is terrible in all Connecticut’s cities and some of them have big school budget deficits too. In most other municipalities student performance is not much better.

Also as the Education Department was deciding to audit Hartford, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which advocates for children, reported that only 35% of Connecticut’s fourth-graders perform at grade level in reading and only 30% of eighth-graders perform at grade level in math.

Twenty percent of the state’s students are chronically absent — missing 10% or more of their school days.

The Education Department knows all this. It also knows that student performance was worsening even before the recent virus epidemic, which has become everyone’s excuse now.

Since Connecticut’s schools have greatly increased their spending in the last four decades, it seems that the disaster of student performance has little to do with school spending.

Chronic absenteeism provides a hint. Schools can’t teach students who don’t show up. But educators in Connecticut have yet to ask themselves: Where is the incentive for students to show up and learn, and for parents to ensure that they do?

In Connecticut there is no longer discipline against students or parents for chronic absence. Indeed, there is no longer any penalty for failure to learn. The main policy of education in Connecticut is social promotion — that is, the abandonment of standards. All students are advanced from grade to grade and graduated from high school no matter what, as if simple graduation equates to education. 

Remarkably, there are proficiency tests in the lower grades in Connecticut but none for graduation from high school. For educators are terrified that there might be a comprehensive and final measure of the performance of their schools. The eighth-grade test results are scary enough. Do the failing students ever catch up? Nobody in authority wants to know, at least not if the public is to know too — not that the public necessarily wants to know. 

Awful results on a graduation test might prompt people to question the ever-increasing amounts spent in the name of education, most of which goes for salaries. Indeed, graduation test results might shatter the longstanding but mistaken premise of public education in Connecticut, the premise put into law by the Education Enhancement Act of 1986 — that teacher salaries determine student performance.

What if people realized that teacher salaries correlate only with the job satisfaction of teacher union members and their willingness to serve in the majority political party’s army?

In addition to policy that has destroyed the incentive for students to show up and learn, student performance has been sunk by the country’s worsening poverty, its burgeoning underclass, the collapse of the family, and the resulting child neglect. Schools can’t cope with it and politics won’t even acknowledge it.

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

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Despite fawning lawyers, courts can be corrupt

By Chris Powell

According to the Connecticut Bar Association, criticism of the courts has gone too far, particularly criticism of the New York State court that convicted former President Donald J. Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

In a letter sent this month to the association’s members, its top three officers, including its president, Maggie Castinado, complain that certain public officials — that is, Republicans — have called Trump’s trial a sham, a hoax, and rigged, the trial judge corrupt and unethical, and the jury partisan. Such criticism, the letter says, is “unsubstantiated and reckless” and can provoke violence against court officials and sow public distrust for the courts.

Yes, some criticism of Trump’s trial and conviction has been reckless. After all, this is the “age of rage” on both the political left and right. But much of the criticism of the Trump case also has been careful, expert, and well-explained, including criticism of the Democratic partisanship of the judge and prosecutor. According to many legal analysts, the charges were contrived, the trial lacked due process of law, and the verdict may be overturned on appeal. 

Careful, expert, and well-explained criticism may “sow distrust” too. Indeed, sometimes distrust of the courts may be deserved. 

“It is up to us, as lawyers, to defend the courts and our judges,” the bar association’s letter says piously, as if courts and judges are always right and bar association members don’t have a selfish interest in providing such defense. For to make their livings all bar association members rely on the favor of judges, and many members aspire to become judges themselves and avoid criticism.

Besides, the bar association is not the first place anyone should look for well-informed criticism of the courts generally or judges particularly. Fawning is much easier to find there.

Just a few days after the bar association’s letter was reported, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy contradicted it. In a television interview he said the U.S. Supreme Court “is becoming brazenly corrupt and brazenly political,” in part because flags associated with claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump had been displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito.

Of course six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are Republican appointees, so the bar association may not mind that Murphy, a Democrat, is calling them corrupt and thus “sowing distrust.”

Even so, Murphy and nearly everyone else familiar with courts know that many judges on lower courts, most judges on appellate courts, and all judges on the U.S. Supreme Court are appointed not so much for their legal expertise as for their politics. This goes for Democratic appointees just as much as Republican appointees. 

Such politics was never more brazen than in 2022 when President Biden, a Democrat, nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, having pledged to nominate a Black woman since Black people are a crucial constituency of Biden’s party. Whereupon Jackson, to signal her support for the party’s transgenderism cult, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that because she wasn’t a biologist she didn’t know what a woman is.

The Senate went along with the charade and appointed Jackson on a largely party-line vote of 53-47.

All judges — even those chosen entirely for their legal expertise — have their politics in the broadest sense, a world view, if not necessarily partisan politics. So the highest quality of judges may be their capacity for impartiality, which may sometimes be tested since, as Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote with charming understatement, “The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”

Right now the country seems full of not very nice people, two of whom are running for president, and it may be harder than ever for judges and prosecutors to put aside their political biases as they do their jobs. When they fail, to point it out, even intemperately, may not be the sedition feared by the Connecticut Bar Association but respect for due process.

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

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Coach’s loyalty comes easy; and a one-man crime wave

By Chris Powell

Connecticut is not just thrilled that UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley has declined a lucrative offer from the Los Angeles Lakers. People are also moved by the expressions of loyalty from the coach and his wife, Andrea — not just loyalty to the state but, as Mrs. Hurley noted in a television interview, loyalty to the players the coach had recruited and who expected to be playing for him next year.

Of course this loyalty was not exactly reciprocated by some of the players on this year’s championship UConn team. They are leaving college early for what will be their own lucrative contracts with the pros.

But there’s a big difference between the situations of the players and the coach. The players aren’t making much if any money and may suddenly earn millions of dollars for each year of early departure. But the coach already is making millions each year, and for having won consecutive national tournaments he is likely to make millions more from UConn with a big raise that will bring his annual compensation close to what the Lakers were offering him.

When one is already earning big money, loyalty isn’t the sacrifice lately imagined and cheered by UConn basketball fans, people for whom a night out with the family for dinner and a game is a substantial expense. Indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the very rich are different from you and me.” 

But then there are differences among the rich too.

A recent essay recounted that two financially comfortable guys were discussing a billionaire who had just undertaken a business plan he expected would bring him even greater wealth.  One guy boasted to the other: “I have what he’ll never have.” The other guy asked: “What’s that?” The answer: “Enough.”

If Hurley has enough for staying put at UConn — even if “enough” includes a huge raise — it still may be considered relative loyalty, and Connecticut may be glad of it all the same, but just shouldn’t overdo it.

*

That wasn’t a parody of criminal justice in Connecticut on the front page of the Hartford Courant the other day. It was reality that should have been shocking, except that repeat offenders on the loose are now so numerous in the state that few people — and apparently none in authority — are shocked.

State police say a 35-year-old Bozrah man with a long criminal record sped through a stop sign in Griswold, ramming another car and killing one of its passengers, Charlotte Degrado, 96, of Branford. The Courant says the offending driver has at least a dozen criminal convictions, has 10 more criminal cases pending against him, and was free because, after being arrested six times since January, he had managed to post $275,000 in bonds.

State police say the driver and his companions in the speeding car ran away after the crash but the driver was apprehended while hiding in nearby woods with a bag of fentanyl pills and $4,693 in cash.

The driver’s convictions, according to the Courant, include larceny, burglary, narcotics possession, and engaging police in pursuit, and he has served three prison sentences since 2016 — 18 months, a year, 90 days. He repeatedly has violated his probations.

If elected officials in Connecticut were more concerned about public safety than in reducing the state’s prison population, they might investigate this situation urgently, interviewing every prosecutor and judge involved with the repeat offender’s cases. While individually some of his crimes may seem minor, cumulatively they scream incorrigibility. 

Could no one in the criminal-justice system perceive this before the fatality? Could no one note the chronic offender’s 10 pending cases and realize that speedy trials and maximum sentences would be necessary to halt his crime wave?

Since Governor Lamont and state legislators don’t seem to be taking note of the atrocity, will anyone in journalism confront them about it?

Or will the always dim prospect of reform be left to any efforts made by the dead woman’s grieving family?

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

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‘Fair share’ won’t persuade suburbs on more housing

By Chris Powell

As much as Connecticut badly needs more housing to reduce the cost of living in the state, it’s not surprising that the state law that was enacted last year to spur housing construction is accomplishing nothing.

The law requires only that a study be made of how much more housing each municipality should have, and the state Office of Policy and Management was slow to hire a consultant to undertake the study. The consultant was hired only a few weeks ago and the study is not expected to be ready for the legislature’s consideration until after the legislature’s session next year.

Additionally, the law is afflicted with an off-putting name. It’s called the “fair share” law, which indicates that from a municipal perspective more housing is an awful burden even if it is good for the state as a whole.

Yes, wherever it goes more housing means more traffic, more children to educate, more strain on municipal facilities, more municipal expense, and potentially more people who cause trouble or can’t or won’t support themselves. Decades of failed poverty and urban policies have turned most of Connecticut’s cities into concentration camps for the poor and profit centers for the government class, thereby prompting the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. 

Suburban residents are not really bigoted for wanting protection from what failed policy has done to the cities.

The “fair share” allocations to be recommended by the housing law’s study probably won’t be well received unless concerns about the pathologies of urban poverty are addressed. A government under which those pathologies have only worsened for a long time is not likely to have much credibility even if it purports to address them anew.

But maybe attitudes would be different if, instead of just imposing “fair shares” on municipalities, state government used housing law to award municipalities substantial bonuses. In that case there would be all sorts of things state government could do to get housing built and received with good grace.

Indeed, if state government really thought that increasing the housing supply was crucial, it long ago would have lifted all “special education” costs off municipalities and assumed them itself. Those costs are huge and disproportionately involve the neglected children of poor households. Those costs are just some of those imagined by suburban officials and residents when they hear pleas for “affordable housing.”

In the recent session of the General Assembly it was argued that $80 million more in state financing would greatly reduce the “special education” burden on municipalities. But the legislature and the governor couldn’t find the money. Instead they spent far more on raises for unionized state government employees, the majority political party’s army.

Municipalities might be enthusiastic about more housing if state government stopped housing intended particularly for the poor and instead assisted only market-rate housing. For eventually any substantial amount of new housing will reduce the cost of all other housing. Some people will always object to any new housing nearby, but market-rate housing prompts much less objection.

To address the ordinary school costs of new housing, state government could pay municipalities that achieved their housing goals a big and perpetual bonus on their per-pupil education aid. Such a bonus would relieve municipalities of the pressure to develop commercially and industrially to gain property tax revenue to pay for a larger school population.

Similarly, municipalities achieving housing goals could be rewarded by state government with perpetual exemption from binding arbitration for municipal employee union contracts and from other state mandates.

Of course a policy of making housing construction highly profitable for municipalities would shift the social costs of housing from municipal government to state government, and then state government would have to find the money somewhere — from different taxpayers or different beneficiaries of state government spending. 

But if housing is really a compelling state issue and not just another excuse for politically correct posturing, state government is where financial responsibility should rest.

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

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Easier jobs make Dan, Geno better liked than legislators

By Chris Powell

Celebrating Dan Hurley’s decision this week to keep coaching the men’s basketball team at the University of Connecticut, state House Speaker Matt Ritter confirmed a thought previously reserved for cynics.

That is, UConn’s success with basketball is state government’s great rationalization for giving the university whatever it wants financially year after year.

Ritter said: “I think there are times when legislators wonder, ‘Why UConn? Why higher education?’ There were comments about how we were giving so much money to UConn even this year. But Dan Hurley and [women’s basketball coach] Geno Auriemma are four million more times popular than the most popular state legislator.”

True. But then in a crucial respect the coaching jobs are much easier than those of state legislators — at least the jobs of legislators who aspire to serve the public interest.

All the coaches have to do to please their constituents is win basketball games. Their players are united on this objective.

The coaches have luxurious contracts that indemnify themselves against failure, as was recently demonstrated by UConn’s embarrassing and spectacularly expensive experience with former men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie. 

There are no luxurious contracts for state legislators. They are elected for two-year terms with part-time salaries for what is often full-time work or close to it. 

Their teams aren’t unified. No, their constituents have a thousand objectives, many of them contradictory. 

While UConn always gets plenty of money despite its many management failures and financial excesses, state legislators have to find money themselves, first to pay for government and then for their own campaigns. 

But most of a legislator’s constituents want someone else to pay for the goodies government gives them. As the economist Frederic Bastiat put it long ago, “Government is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”

And even when the public interest is clear, there is usually a venal special interest with enough politically active adherents to get their way amid the public’s obliviousness.

The popularity of Hurley and Auriemma might crash as soon as they had to assemble a state budget or take a position on a controversial policy issue — say, having 6-foot-4, 240-pound transgender players on high school and college women’s basketball teams.

If many state legislators are the tools of special interests, it’s because so few of their constituents pay attention that making any friends requires being a tool.

MONEY WON’T FIX SCHOOLS: What exactly does it mean that the state Education Department has instructed its commissioner to look into improving the finances of Hartford’s ever-struggling school system?

Certainly there is much to improve. The academic performance of the city’s students long has been terrible. Hartford’s schools are facing a $40 million budget deficit and laying off hundreds of employees even as the system has tens of millions of dollars of emergency federal aid waiting to be spent. 

Republicans in the state Senate have good questions about the state’s intervention: Will state money be spent? Will Education Department employees be embedded in the Hartford school administration? Who will make decisions? Will labor contracts be reviewed? Will other struggling school systems in the state get similar evaluations? (They should.)

The most important question here may be whether schools can accomplish much of anything when most of their students lack parents and are largely neglected. Since this may be the most important question, it has never been asked officially.

In any case there is a small indication of progress. Hartford school officials lately have been openly complaining that their schools are being drained financially by tuition transfers required by the regional “magnet” schools craze prompted in the Hartford area by the long-running Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation case. The magnets are also draining the city’s neighborhood schools of their better students. Measured by educational and integrational results, the Sheff case has been a billion-dollar disaster. Maybe — just maybe — results will be measured one of these years.

Money will never solve the education problem. It’s a matter of far bigger issues that politics isn’t ready to face.

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

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Flagpole propaganda; and hate on her sleeve

By Chris Powell

Wethersfield last week gave Connecticut the defining lesson about why only government’s own flags should fly over government buildings and on government property.

A member of the Republican minority on Wethersfield’s Town Council proposed to raise the “thin blue line” flag at Town Hall to honor state Trooper Aaron Pelletier, who had just been killed in a hit-and-run crash during a traffic stop on Interstate 84 in Southington. The Democratic majority on the council objected, most of its members seeming to concur with the claim by Democratic Councilwoman Emily Zambrello that the “thin blue line” flag is construed to represent not just support for police officers but racism as well.

The “pride” flag, representing sexual minorities, was already flying at Town Hall to honor “Pride Month.”

Yes, some people may equate the “thin blue line” flag with racism, but most of them hate all police officers because of the misconduct of a few. Meanwhile some people contend that even the United States flag itself represents hateful things. Wethersfield’s council Democrats seem to have forgotten that even as the U.S. flag flies over Town Hall, someone, somewhere is always burning it to protest something.

Are flags necessarily defined by the craziest people who wave or burn them? Wethersfield’s council Democrats seem to think so.

But the Democrats don’t seem to have given much thought to what the “pride” flag represents or how it is construed. Many people who wave it construe it to represent the most extreme claims of transgenderism: the right of males who think themselves female to participate in female sports, to use female restrooms, and, when denied their liberty, to be confined in women’s prisons.

Is Wethersfield endorsing those claims by flying the “pride” flag? What exactly does Wethersfield mean by flying it?

A more basic question about the “pride” flag seems not to have been asked in Wethersfield or anywhere else in Connecticut where that flag is being flown. That is, if, as state and federal law now presume, sexual orientation is largely a matter of innate human nature, why should anyone be proud of it any more than one should be ashamed of it? Do people earn their sexual orientation? Or, as Connecticut law long has maintained, do people simply have a right to their sexual orientation and it’s nobody’s business but their own?

The biggest point in the Wethersfield flag controversy seems to have been missed by everyone there even as it was staring them in the face.

That is, the U.S. flag at Town Hall was already flying especially to honor Trooper Pelletier, since Governor Lamont had ordered all U.S., Connecticut, and municipal flags to fly at half staff in mourning. Additionally, by virtue of state and federal law forbidding discrimination by sexual orientation, the U.S. and Connecticut flags were already flying for sexual minorities.

Only government flags fly for everyone. Other flags do not and are subject to interpretation, fair or unfair. People who lately have been striving to get government to endorse other flags are often seeking to have the government propagandize for a political cause so they can disparage its opponents. This should not become the American way.

*

State Rep. Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire, claims she was just wearing her heart on her sleeve the other day as she had herself photographed prancing in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan and making what in more civil times was called an obscene gesture. Linehan posted the photos on social media and when challenged about it said it was OK because she had meant the photos to be seen only by close friends and because most people in Connecticut feel as she does about former President Donald Trump.

But Linehan wasn’t just wearing her heart on her sleeve. She was reveling in her hate. That others share Linehan’s hate doesn’t make it less hateful.

Ironically Linehan is House chairman of the General Assembly’s Committee on Children. Acting like a bratty child herself and then making lame excuses, Linehan has set quite an example for kids. 

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

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Firing restores accountability; and governor boosts ‘ranked choice’

By Chris Powell

By firing TaShun Bowden-Lewis, the state’s chief public defender and the first Black one, Connecticut’s formerly obscure Public Defender Services Commission has struck a belated blow for the public’s sovereignty over its own institutions. But it almost didn’t happen. 

Last year the commission was upset by Bowden-Lewis’ insubordination, whereupon she accused the commissioners of racism, accusations of racism having replaced patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. But instead of standing up to this additional insubordination, four of the five commissioners, two of them Superior Court judges, resigned, leaving the public defender office without supervision. 

Eventually new commissioners were appointed and Bowden-Lewis’ insubordination and accusations continued. She even broke into a commissioner’s e-mail. An outside law firm’s investigation confirmed that she had retaliated against employees for disagreeing with her. The commission’s unionized staff overwhelmingly voted no confidence in her. (Of course Bowden-Lewis saw racism in that too.) 

So last week, having concluded that Bowden-Lewis could never accept accountability and couldn’t get along with her staff, the commission dismissed her. Now she will negotiate a hefty severance payment using as leverage a lawsuit charging that her dismissal was improper. Her presumption all along has been that, because she is Black, she doesn’t have to answer to anyone. 

The commission and the governor may be tempted to throw $100,000 or more at Bowden-Lewis to make her go away quietly, but that will only compound the bad precedent that already has been set with her and will invite more opportunistic accusations of racism to distract from incompetence or misconduct in state employment. 

The Bowden-Lewis case has reiterated the lack of accountability in state government. Indeed, the resignations of four of the five original members of the Public Defender Services Commission proclaimed that state government is generally terrified of accountability. Now that a modicum of accountability is back, Bowden-Lewis should be told to peddle her race mongering in the private sector from now on. It often works there too. 

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Most legislators seem unable to see the danger to democracy in elections where the winner does not receive a majority, but Governor Lamont sees it. He has appointed a politically balanced committee to study how Connecticut might adopt “ranked-choice voting,” a mechanism that provides an “instant runoff” election when no candidate has received more than 50% of the vote.

Ranked-choice voting invites voters to signify how they would change their vote if their preferred candidate does not finish first. Votes are transferred in accordance with a voter’s preferences until a candidate receives a majority and is elected.

There are two main arguments against ranked-choice voting.

First is that it’s complicated. Yes, it requires some explaining but essentially it is the equivalent of having a second election without incurring the expense of a second day of voting.

The second complaint is that ranked-choice voting gives people more than one vote. But it really doesn’t. It just gives people the option of changing their vote in a runoff.

Ranked-choice voting would take some getting used to. But getting used to ranked-choice voting is better than getting used to elections in which the plurality winner doesn’t really reflect the views of the majority. In recent decades Connecticut has elected governors and U.S. senators who received less than a majority of the vote and well might have lost a runoff.

Ranked-choice voting will diminish the ability of minor-party candidates to function as blackmailers and spoilers. In Connecticut that means diminishing the ability of the far-left Working Families Party to push Democratic candidates farther left by threatening to nominate the WFP’s own candidates instead of cross-endorsing the Democrats as is typically done. Splitting WFP votes away from Democrats in the first round of voting wouldn’t be such a threat since WFP voters would make moderate Democrats their second choice.

Encouraging elections by majority vote rather than just plurality vote will strengthen the political center against left and right extremes — another reason to welcome the governor’s initiative.

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

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