Only governor can achieve health center’s solvency

By Chris Powell

For $504,000 Governor Lamont has just purchased a consultant’s report putting in print what nearly everyone involved with public policy already knew about the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington and what anyone else might have deduced on his own. That is, if the place is to stop losing tens of millions of dollars per year, something will have to be done.

Maybe the governor thinks the study will give the issue the urgency that hundreds of millions of dollars in losses over recent years have been unable to do. Or maybe he wants the study as political cover for taking and pressing a position himself. In any case, options for cutting the health center’s losses have been plain for some time. 

The study outlines them. It says the wages and benefits paid to the health center’s employees are high. The health center’s hospital, John Dempsey, is too small to cover expenses well. The health center disproportionately serves the poor covered by Medicaid, whose patient reimbursements are far below actual costs incurred, causing annual losses above $100 million. And the hospital might be made self-sustaining by selling it to or merging it with a private-sector hospital chain.

Nothing has been done mainly because health center and hospital workers are state employees whose unions control the Democratic Party, which long has been in charge of state government. Under Democratic rule taxpayers can be required to economize but not state employees. Selling or merging the hospital as a way of unloading its excessive wage and benefit costs won’t fool the employees. It will be denounced as union busting, which it will be, though nobody in authority in Connecticut — except, on certain days, the governor himself — seems to mind taxpayer busting.

If, as the consultant’s report suggests, more than 70% of the health center hospital’s recent annual loss of $140 million can be attributed to insufficient Medicaid reimbursements, most of the loss could be offset by increasing those reimbursements — which in effect is what state government long has been doing by covering the health center’s deficits. But then formally raising Medicaid reimbursements would require paying them to all other hospitals and medical providers in the state, costing hundreds of millions more each year.

However the report is received, it isn’t likely to prompt any action unless the governor himself proposes one and then risks his political capital to accomplish it. He has been very generous to the unions but they are so friendly to him only because they always get their way.

LENIENCY IS FATAL: Connecticut should be angry that the driver accused in the May 30 hit-and-run crash on Interstate 84 in Southington that killed state Trooper Aaron Pelletier has a long criminal record in Puerto Rico, including two convictions for separate incidents of murder. Not just a Connecticut prosecutor but Governor Lamont himself should ask Puerto Rico to explain why the man was not still in prison there.

But Connecticut has no right to get too worked up about what seems like excessively lenient criminal justice elsewhere. For Connecticut itself is full of its own repeat offenders on the loose, just as it is full of elected officials and big thinkers who congratulate themselves for the steady decline in the state’s prison population even as many serious crimes are committed by people who should have been put away long ago by the state’s criminal-justice system.

While criminal justice is usually a matter of judgment, it doesn’t require much judgment to know that once an offender has two or three serious convictions or a slew of lesser ones he is never likely to reform and shouldn’t be given a chance to do more harm.

Connecticut has a chronic offender law but it is seldom used and it gives prosecutors and judges too much discretion. Would a “three-strikes” law — requiring long imprisonment upon three felony convictions or a slew of misdemeanors and removing discretion from prosecutors and judges — be too severe? Lately it seems that even a “10-strikes” law would help.

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

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Many are above the law, especially in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Responses from leading Connecticut Democrats to Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records were mostly along the lines of “nobody is above the law.” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, both seeking re-election, Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo, and others couldn’t be bothered to examine their tedious cliché, nor could journalists be bothered to challenge them about it.

Meanwhile President Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive candidate again, has been boasting of the college student loan forgiveness he has been bestowing on hundreds of thousands of people in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that he has no such authority. 

Ever since he became president Biden also has been refusing to enforce federal immigration law, creating a class of millions who are above the law.

Biden also has been refusing to enforce federal law against marijuana. While the law is questionable, the failure to enforce it proclaims that everyone is potentially above the law.

As a “sanctuary state” that forbids its police from cooperating with federal immigration officers, Connecticut also has designated tens of thousands of its residents — illegal immigrants — as being above the law. This is nullification, the mechanism used to defend slavery and thwart enforcement of civil rights. Back then nullification was considered treason. Today it is politically correct.

Connecticut has undertaken similar nullification by licensing the sale of marijuana while the drug remains prohibited by federal law.

As a recent state legislative report found, most people who commit gun crimes in Connecticut are above the law, their charges reduced or dismissed in exchange for guilty pleas on other charges.

A few days ago the General Assembly suspended enforcement of the state law requiring racial balance in municipal public schools. West Hartford, Fairfield, Greenwich, and Hamden were in violation but now are above the law.

Reveling in the conviction of demon Trump, Connecticut’s Democrats have lost perspective about law and justice. As a practical matter law and justice are seldom absolutes but rather full of discretion and compromise. The Democratic administrations in Washington and Hartford are compromising the law and justice all over the place in favor of their friends and political causes, but Trump is to be taught a different lesson.

Despite all the logistical trouble his conviction will cause him, Trump may have the last laugh.

For starters, his conviction seems to have prompted a tidal wave of financial contributions to his campaign, and an early poll suggests that public opinion of him has actually improved slightly. Since the prosecutions of Trump are Democratic operations, they are starting to strike some people as persecutions.

In any case Trump’s longstanding bad character, going back to his grifting in the real estate business in New York, may have inoculated him politically against mere criminal convictions.

For could anyone really think worse of Trump as a person just because he falsified business records to conceal a dalliance with a pornography actress?

Few big businesses in the country couldn’t be convicted of falsifying records, and pornography has become a big and very public business, especially, it seems, in Connecticut. A few days ago a survey reported that, on a per-capita basis, the state has more producers of homemade pornography on the OnlyFans internet site than any other state.

Trump himself long has sensed that his disgraceful conduct helps build the support he gets for embodying public resentment and contempt of government and politics.

He marveled at this phenomenon as he campaigned in Iowa in January 2016, remarking famously: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Today he might add: “Or I could get convicted of 34 contrived felonies.”      

Trump has been leading in recent polls not because of good character but because the Biden administration is so bad on the big issues — inflation, illegal immigration, declining living standards, social disintegration, and liberalism’s mental breakdown. If the issues have overwhelmed concerns about character, Trump’s conviction changes nothing.  

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

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Connecticut needs innovation to end poverty and violence

By Chris Powell

Appalled by the shooting of five people in several incidents in Bridgeport over the Memorial Day weekend, Governor Lamont hurried to the city on Tuesday to meet Mayor Joe Ganim and other officials and show moral support.

While Bridgeport’s police department is said to be understaffed and to suffer high turnover — police work may be easier almost anywhere else — the governor didn’t promise any extra help for the city. He thought state initiatives that are already underway with city government are enough for the time being. 

In contrast Mayor Ganim thundered emptily for the television cameras that the city would ensure that the perpetrators of the weekend shootings and other shootings are punished severely. Of course they’ll have to be apprehended first.

Just a few hours later four people were shot in an incident in Waterbury. This one didn’t prompt a visit from the governor, as the daily business of state government had resumed with the governor’s announcement of the allocation of $100 million to the state Economic and Community Development Department for establishing “innovation clusters.” This is the euphemism for more political patronage dressed up as economic growth.  

If only one of those clusters could figure out how to end gun violence in the cities, or, better still, figure out how to reduce poverty in Connecticut. 

Most people in the state — at least most of those who don’t hold elective office — have noticed that violent crime is closely correlated with poverty. So most people won’t be surprised that three of the shootings that appalled the governor took place at the P.T. Barnum Apartments public housing project in Bridgeport and not in exclusive neighborhoods in Darien or Avon. This has been the way of life in Connecticut for many decades. 

Nor have the two major state government policies involving poverty changed over that time. Connecticut long has maintained a welfare system that subsidizes childbearing outside marriage and thus deprives children of fathers and the income, discipline, and guidance they provide. The state also long has promoted children throughout school even if they fail to learn anything, thereby destroying their incentive to learn.

These policies have delivered tens of thousands of young people to adulthood largely demoralized and unable to provide for themselves adequately. They are even less able to provide for themselves now that government-instigated inflation has sharply raised the price of necessities. In such circumstances people get stressed, alienated, angry, disturbed, and predatory.      

Announcing that $100 million for “innovation clusters,” the governor said: “Connecticut has the best-educated and best-trained workforce in the nation. … We are the home of innovation.”

Maybe, but it wasn’t the success of an educated and trained workforce that compelled the governor to rush to Bridgeport the other day. The visit was compelled by another deadly manifestation of the state’s huge and growing underclass, which still gets no innovation from state government no matter how many lives are lost or damaged.

WE’RE NOT THAT BAD: According to Seattle-based survey firm Qualtrics, the services provided by Connecticut state government produce the second-worst customer satisfaction rate among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with Connecticut’s 51% rate leading only that of Illinois with 49%.

Are government services in Connecticut really that bad, or are the state residents who responded to the survey just more demanding and would find themselves even less satisfied if they lived elsewhere?

In any case, a customer satisfaction rate as low as the one reported by the Qualtrics survey would suggest great political dissatisfaction too. But it’s hard to find much evidence of that in Connecticut. For many years the same political party has controlled all major state and federal elective offices and has held comfortable majorities in the General Assembly. 

Political dissatisfaction? It’s hard to find even political competition here.

Of course some state agencies could be friendlier, but next-to-last in the country in customer satisfaction is almost impossible to believe.

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

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Chris Murphy exceeds Trump with demagoguery on guns

By Chris Powell

Suppose Donald Trump, campaigning for president, cited Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s support for federalizing a right to late-term abortion and said the senator’s pandering to the abortion industry was meant “to kill more kids in order to make more profits for Planned Parenthood.”

There would be outrage from the political left, including news organizations in Connecticut. The people expressing outrage would argue that abortion is best left to those whose rights are most affected, pregnant women. (Or make that “pregnant persons,” the politically correct term increasingly in use among state news organizations, which, without being forthright with their audience, seem to have decided that men can bear children.) Those expressing outrage would fairly call Trump a disgraceful demagogue.

But last week Murphy, campaigning for re-election, condemned Trump for telling the National Rifle Association that if he is returned to the presidency he will support repeal of recent federal gun laws. On social media Murphy wrote: “Trump’s goal is to kill more kids in order to make more profits for the gun industry. Plain and simple.”

Murphy’s wild accusation that Trump is pursuing child murder for money elicited no objections in Connecticut that the gun issue should be left to the people whose rights are most affected, gun owners. In any case, gun rights are explicit in the federal and state Constitutions, unlike abortion rights, which even a pro-abortion Supreme Court justice acknowledged could be only inferred, and only by searching the Constitution’s “penumbras” and “emanations.”

Indeed, Murphy’s demagoguery got little notice from Connecticut news organizations. Was it because those news organizations are steadily weakening and less able to criticize those in power, or because they are less inclined to criticize when those holding power are politically correct?

Whichever it is, P.C. demagoguery seems to have a clear field in the state.

SLEEPWALKING TOWARD WW3: Also escaping much notice in Connecticut the other day was the support given by the state’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, to Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons to strike certain targets deep inside Russia. Thus Blumenthal joined the many other members of Congress who are sleepwalking this country toward World War III.

Ukraine’s war with Russia was prompted by U.S. meddling in the politics of a country on Russia’s border. That meddling assisted the overthrow of a regime friendly to Russia, and went on to try to incorporate Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned he would not permit that. The United States disregarded his warnings, though Putin was demanding in Ukraine only a much smaller buffer against powerful military adversaries than the hemispheric buffer the United States has claimed for two centuries under the Monroe Doctrine.

Ukraine is divided ethnically between Ukrainians and Russians. Now Russia has occupied most of the Russian-speaking zone and last week there were reports that Putin is ready to make peace along the current lines of control.

This possibility should be seized via a ceasefire and urgent negotiations, for Russia is not likely to be dislodged from Russian-speaking territory without a much larger war, which the United States and NATO are not prepared to wage and isn’t worth risking.

Blumenthal would serve Connecticut better if he acknowledged that Russia’s tyrannical form of government doesn’t justify the provocation the United States committed in Ukraine, a provocation that long had been advised against by foreign policy experts who understand that neutral buffer zones between great powers help keep the peace.

OLD JOKE, NEW JOKE: Everyone knows the old joke about the man who murdered his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he had become an orphan.

But similar nonsense was taken seriously last week when Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers published an essay by a leader of the campaign to extend state government medical insurance to illegal immigrants. The writer argued that his father in particular deserves such insurance because he recently had a heart attack that may have been caused by the stress of being an illegal immigrant for 34 years.

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

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Push for teacher diversity risks racial bias in hiring

By Chris Powell

Why is student performance so poor among students from racial minorities in Connecticut’s cities? A state law enacted last year suggests it’s because city schools don’t have enough teachers from racial minorities. 

Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported the other day that while the state’s schools have increased their share of minority teachers to 11.7%, up from 7.8% in 2009, that gain has been far outpaced by the increase in students from minority groups, up from 36.2% to 53.8% in the same period.

So the new law requires school boards to devise plans for recruiting, hiring, and keeping minority teachers and, upon the state Education Department’s approval, to implement them.

But it is hard for schools to achieve more racial diversity in staff when the supply of qualified minority candidates falls far short of demand. Worse, neither the law nor the Education Department specifies very well what a school board should do to recruit, hire, and keep minority teachers, perhaps because getting too specific would risk committing illegal racial discrimination.

After all, a school board can’t favor job applicants because of their race, as the law suggests they should do, without also discriminating against other applicants because of their race. An advisory from the Education Department approaches the offensive when it implies that non-minority teachers can’t teach minority students well.

“Students of color,” the advisory says, “benefit from having teachers from their own racial and ethnic group who can serve as successful role models, have the potential to possess a greater knowledge of their heritage and culture, and tend to have higher academic expectations of them.”

Couldn’t school personnel recruiters evaluate non-minority applicants individually about their knowledge of and sympathy for minority students without resorting to such stereotyping and racial discrimination?

White students as well as minority students would benefit from a more racially integrated teaching staff, for social cohesion even if not so much for educational performance. But would hiring some people and not hiring others because of race be fairer than hiring people without regard to race? Rejected applicants won’t think so, and they will be right.  

In any case the racial composition of teaching staffs isn’t a major cause of Connecticut’s infamous racial performance gap among students. The major cause for the underperformance of minority students is the poverty that results in large part from the breakdown of the family under the pressure of the welfare system. 

But the major cause of the racial performance gap is too sensitive politically to address. So emphasizing racial diversity on teaching staffs will serve as a convenient distraction from the big problem — at least until teacher unions start protesting the suggestion that their white members don’t care about and aren’t qualified to teach minority students.

* 

LAYOFFS AMID RAISES: Big layoffs are threatening teachers and other school employees in Hartford and Enfield because of budget shortages. Those employees and many parents complain that students will be cheated out of much of their education. But the complaint is not persuasive, since school spending in both Hartford and Enfield has risen steadily over the years without improving student performance. It’s hard to see that variations in school spending make any difference in educational results.

But layoffs, municipal property tax increases, or extra appropriations of state financial aid should not be the only options for squaring a school system’s financial books. For there may be a better option: getting financial concessions from unionized school employees.

Indeed, even as Enfield’s schools are laying off people, they are also paying raises required under union contracts. The school system is cannibalizing itself. 

Of course addressing government’s financial problems by reducing salaries and benefits for government employees never happens in Connecticut. Economizing with personnel compensation is left to the private sector, where businesses do not have the power to dictate prices to their customers as government does through taxes.

Elected officials in Connecticut would never think about asking for concessions from school employees, only from taxpayers, who are frequently asked for concessions as property taxes rise. Why can’t school employees make the concessions once in a while?

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

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If you chant ‘Trump’ enough, Democrats’ policy failures vanish

By Chris Powell

While Donald Trump can be intemperate, reckless, and megalomaniac, that is not why he has been so damaging to politics in Connecticut. Trump is most damaging to politics here because he has provided an excuse for so many members of the state’s majority party, the Democrats, as well as their allies in the news media, to avoid serious discussion of the many failures public policy essentially just by chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!” 

Connecticut has big problems that have not been addressed seriously: education and the declining skill level of the rising workforce, worsening poverty, prohibitive housing prices, state government’s indebtedness, a lack of economic and population growth, racial segregation, and taxes that are high even though none of these problems has been alleviated much if at all. 

Not that the minority party, the Republicans, necessarily would do much better with these problems. Indeed, the most recent 16 years of Republican state administration (1995-2011) differed from Democratic administration only insofar as taxes didn’t go up as much as they might have under a Democratic administration. Of course that’s something, but under Republican administration Connecticut’s downward trends weren’t halted, much less reversed. Connecticut didn’t get more value from its government.

While Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is leading the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Biden, in the most recent national polls, nobody expects Trump to carry Connecticut. The state is too Democratic, and just chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” here will probably distract enough from the big national issues — rampant inflation, the weakening economy, illegal immigration, and the expensive and unnecessary proxy war in Ukraine and the danger that it will erupt into a European war or even a world war. (A currency war arising in part from the Ukraine war is already being waged.) 

The Democratic chant will help sustain the political status quo in the state but it won’t make Connecticut great again. For that to happen, many mistaken premises of policy will have to be challenged. 

*

WHY GO TO SCHOOL?: Last week Governor Lamont joined a White House conference about chronic absenteeism from school, a problem nationally as well as in Connecticut. Among the participants were U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly Meriden’s school superintendent and Connecticut’s education commissioner. 

They discussed the slight success in getting children to attend school more often by having school employees call or visit the homes of the chronically absent and asking parents what the problem is and if government can help them solve it.

Warning parents that not getting their children to school is neglect is not planned. The politically correct presumption is that parents, especially single parents, really shouldn’t be held responsible for themselves and their children. Many neglectful parents probably sense this presumption and feel excused. 

Connecticut’s elected officials should look deeper into the problem, especially since student proficiency in the state has been declining for years. They should ask: What exactly is the incentive for children to go to school today and for parents to get them there? 

In the old days social pressure helped get children to school and to learn. For failure to learn risked the embarrassment of being held back a grade. 

But no more. For Connecticut’s main educational policy long has been social promotion: All students are promoted regardless of academic failure, in the belief that being held back is too damaging to a child’s self-esteem — as if failure to learn is not more damaging when a child grows up. 

Meanwhile the decline in the skill level of Connecticut students, and thus the decline in their ability to support themselves, is being met with more government subsidies for them as impoverished adults, so neglecting one’s education is less costly to the individual and more costly to taxpayers. 

In the old days most people thought education was crucial to a better life. Today many people seem to think otherwise. So chronic absenteeism may continue until something changes that thinking. Politically correct as it may be, asking negligent parents nicely isn’t likely to help much.  

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

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Why Connecticut will never get tough on gun crime

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s failure to prosecute many gun crimes aggressively isn’t as bad as it seems, prosecutors and a former state legislator told The Day of New London this month. They were responding to a General Assembly report that as many as two-thirds of the gun charges brought by police in Connecticut in recent years had been dropped.

So many gun charges are dropped because they are related to charges considered more serious, like robbery and assault, and, as in most criminal cases, prosecutors drop or reduce what are considered the less serious charges to get guilty pleas on what are considered the more serious charges.

That’s not negligence on the part of prosecutors. Plea bargaining, the comprehensive discounting of crime, is the custom in Connecticut and throughout the country. There are too many crimes and not enough police officers, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges to do a conscientious job with all of them. Priorities must be set and choices made or nothing would get done in court, and prosecutors have vast discretion.

But the politicians and others who clamor about gun crime and demand more “gun control” — that is, more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners while gun criminals often get off easy — fail to grasp the logic of their own position, which is that gun crimes are actually more serious than the crimes on which prosecutors try hardest to get convictions.

After all, what would happen if state law or just prosecutors considered a gun crime to be more serious than a crime of robbery or assault? What if gun crimes carried a mandatory sentence of 25 years or more of imprisonment without parole and prosecutors discounted the accompanying robbery or assault charges to gain conviction on the gun charges?

Of course in those circumstances people contemplating crimes with guns might be powerfully deterred, far more deterred than they now are by the laws against robbery and assault, where convictions seldom keep offenders locked up for long.

But Connecticut’s politically correct liberalism would never permit taking gun crime so seriously. 

In the first place, those who clamor against guns do not seek to end gun crime as much as to disarm society and nullify the Second Amendment without bothering to repeal it. Even as they recognize the risk of demon Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, they fail to recognize the risk to an unarmed citizenry — the risk that when guns are outlawed, only Trump will have guns.

Secondly, having given up on actually solving the country’s worsening problems of poverty and education and choosing instead just to keep throwing money at the government employees who pretend to solve them, those who clamor against guns understand that this failure ensures that crime will always be hugely disproportionate racially and that getting tough on gun crime will mean many more long imprisonments for members of minority groups. So instead of reducing gun crime, they prefer having thousands of repeat offenders running loose, as they do in Connecticut.

Yes, in plea-bargaining gun crimes away prosecutors are mainly following the priorities established by law. But as the persistence of gun crime demonstrates, those priorities are mistaken. The law should change them but unfortunately won’t.

DEMS EXCUSE THEIR OWN: Noting the criminal prosecutions underway against Trump, Day columnist David Collins writes, “It’s really hard to imagine any American would vote to elect a convicted felon.” Collins criticizes Connecticut Republicans who won’t repudiate the once and possibly future president.

Yet national polls suggest that most voters are ready to elect Trump, apparently because they find President Biden and his administration even worse.

Maybe this seeming indifference to misconduct shouldn’t be so surprising even in heavily Democratic Connecticut, where Bridgeport recently re-elected its felonious mayor, Joe Ganim, who, unlike Trump, was already long convicted on 16 federal felony charges of corruption in office and who nevertheless maintained the support of all the state’s leading Democrats.

What’s a few felonies between Democrats?

If Trump returns to the White House, it will be mainly the Democrats’ doing.           

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

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Legislators’ brazen deception should cost them re-election

By Chris Powell

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and with its 24-12 majority the Democratic caucus in Connecticut’s Senate is well on its way there. For recent commentary from the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio shows that the party was even more deceptive than originally reported with its legislation to award unemployment compensation to strikers.

The legislation appropriated $3 million for the state comptroller to use to assist “families and workers,” but the legislation failed to specify how or why. It passed the House with little discussion, the Republican minority strangely withholding criticism, apparently having made a deal with the legislation’s Democratic sponsors about other legislation. 

Portfolio reports that questions were posed in the Senate by two Republicans, Eric Berthel of Watertown and Rob Sampson of Wolcott. Their questions went to Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, Senate chair of the Labor Committee and the bill’s leading advocate. Berthel and Sampson repeatedly asked Kushner what the bill was about. Kushner repeatedly refused to explain. 

Of course many things are always being snuck through the General Assembly but almost always by being hidden and avoiding attention. Here attention was being called to something in plain sight, being discussed, and Senator Kushner, a former labor union official, was determined to cover up though she knew well what the legislation was really about. 

Kushner’s position, while unspoken, was clear: that the public shouldn’t know what was in her legislation. Meanwhile she was letting the special interest from which her political career arose know that she was arranging a big reward for it. 

All the other 23 Democratic senators presumably also knew what was going on but also declined to explain, thereby endorsing Kushner’s position that the public was not to be informed about what the Senate was doing. Many of these senators often righteously pose as protectors of “the people,” whom they actually were striving to fool. 

Eventually the Connecticut Mirror pried the truth out of House Speaker Matt Ritter. 

Fortunately Governor Lamont is inclined to oppose giving unemployment compensation to strikers and seems likely to veto the bill. While the governor is a Democrat, he criticized the legislators from his party for their deception and said they should address the issue forthrightly instead. 

The misconduct by the Democratic legislators here should not be forgotten. What they did — especially Senator Kushner — was a betrayal of their office. While the character bar for public office is getting lower in the era of Biden and Trump, there is no disguising the flagrant dishonesty and bad intent of Kushner and her colleagues. Whatever political competition remains in Connecticut should strive to remove them in November. 

* 

WANT DEFEATS NEED: Some Republicans in the state House of Representatives acknowledged and pressed a crucial point during the last hours of the legislative session. It’s that despite all the whining done by Connecticut’s institutions of higher education, the state’s most urgent challenge in education is lower education.

The state budget adjustments just made by the legislature delivered an extra $160 million to the University of Connecticut and the state university and community college system, but not the $80 million believed to be needed to properly fund state aid to municipalities for “special education.” 

Tolland state Rep. Tammy Nuccio, ranking House Republican on the legislature’s Appropriations Committee, argued that students who have been admitted to college presumably already can read and write even as Connecticut has thousands of young students who are far behind their grade level in reading and writing, especially those students classified as needing “special education.” 

Handicapped students should be a state responsibility, not a local one, but state government still forces municipalities to bear much of their expense, thereby driving up municipal property taxes and increasing inequality among cities and towns. 

Unfortunately higher education has thousands of highly paid employees, almost all supporters of the majority party, while the constituency for “special education” can barely take care of itself. So once again politically connected want has triumphed over basic human need. 

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

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Murphy challenges Trump for biggest demagogue

By Chris Powell

Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump is the country’s biggest demagogue should examine the remarks made by Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy last Saturday as the Democratic State Convention nominated him for a third term. 

Trump, Murphy said, “wants to turn us against each other,” as if Murphy’s party isn’t preaching as much partisanship and hate — and, in Connecticut, a heavily Democratic state, far more. 

Trump, Murphy continued, “wants to make Americans feel like we have something to fear from immigrants or trans kids or Muslims or college students. We believe, as Democrats, that America’s strength is our diversity and that everyone belongs here.” 

So is there really nothing to worry about in seven million or so people who have entered the country illegally and unvetted under the open-borders policy of President Biden, whom Murphy wants re-elected and whose open-borders policy he still supports? Are schools, hospitals, medical and welfare programs, and police really not being overwhelmed or badly stressed by the open-borders policy? Are many immigration lawbreakers really not also ordinary criminals and repeat offenders? 

Indeed, even as Murphy accepted renomination it was reported that more than 600 children who don’t speak English had enrolled in New Haven’s schools just since Oct. 1, most from outside the United States. Even before their arrival New Haven’s schools were performing terribly and couldn’t even get their washrooms repaired. How much more of Central America should New Haven and Connecticut have to educate when the city and the state can’t educate so many of their own children?

Murphy didn’t say, but with “everyone belongs here” he implied that there should be no limits on immigration and that anyone who supports ordinary immigration enforcement is racist. 

As for “trans kids,” contrary to Murphy’s suggestion no one is demonizing them. The question about them is whether males belong in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons. Murphy demonizes those who raise the question.

As for Muslims and college students, some Muslims in the United States are attending Gaza war protests and chanting “Death to America!” while some college students are suppressing free speech on campuses. According to Murphy this is no big deal.

Murphy said: “This fall Donald Trump is going to advertise himself as a president who will destroy our democracy, who will use government to target political enemies, to walk away from the rule of law, legitimize violence as a political tool.” 

Yet Democrats lately have been the ones trying to destroy democracy by preventing Trump from getting on presidential ballots, by prosecuting him criminally and civilly, and by failing to enforce immigration law. 

“We believe that abortion is a right,” Murphy said. “We don’t believe that government should be in your bedroom or your doctor’s office.”

Yet most people, including most Democrats, believe, unlike Murphy, that abortion is a limited right, something to be restricted upon the viability of the fetus. That’s what the U.S. Supreme Court maintained in Roe v. Wade and what Connecticut law continues to maintain. But the senator supports what he and other extremists euphemize as the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would authorize abortion at every stage of pregnancy. 

As for keeping government out of doctor’s offices, Murphy offered no criticism when the federal government, under both Trump and Biden, was striving to prevent doctors from prescribing ivermectin to treat Covid-19. Without complaint from Murphy the government still tells doctors not to do many other things. Somehow only abortion gets libertarian treatment from him. 

Murphy told the Democratic convention that democracy is “under siege.” Is that because Trump’s lead over Biden in the polls lately has been increasing as the economy and Biden’s mental faculties weaken? Democrats certainly don’t think democracy is “under siege” in Connecticut, where Murphy is expected to cruise to re-election against a Republican who won’t have even a tiny fraction of the senator’s campaign money. 

Indeed, Connecticut hardly has enough democracy left to be “under siege,” which is even sadder because Murphy’s demagoguery, hypocrisy, and nonsense will probably go unchallenged. 

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

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Hartford’s new archbishop eyes the poverty factory

By Chris Powell

When he was installed two weeks ago, Hartford’s new Catholic archbishop, Christopher J. Coyne, said he has several big objectives, though he conceded that with two of them he may be dreaming.

Coyne’s most practical objective is simply restoring the local church and regaining parishioners. “In recent years,” Coyne said, “we have given folks no shortage of causes to walk away from the faith — parish closings, the abuse scandal and associated betrayals by leaders who should have known and done better, and pastoral approaches that at times have done more to judge people than serve them.”

The archbishop can’t undo those scandals but he can be candid about them and make sure that the wrath of God quickly falls — publicly — on any agents of the archdiocese who betray their trust. 

As for unhappy judgments on people, archbishops are stuck with church doctrines that many think contradict modernity, like the refusal to ordain women or sanction same-sex relationships. Given the conservative bent of the places where the church is growing, those doctrines are unlikely to be changed soon.

Not that modernity is always right. Indeed, the basic Catholic morality of old is less primitive than today’s morality of anything goes. It wasn’t entirely because of religious doctrine, but Connecticut was better before state government started pushing gambling and marijuana on the public and pretending men can be women and vice-versa.

Sad as Catholic parish closings are, ripping roots out of the community and leaving empty buildings as stark monuments to a vanished era, the decline in church membership requires closings and it has not been caused primarily by the scandals. While spirituality is not dead in the developed world, religious dogma is losing adherents fast. Perceptions of the divine today are much broader. 

Fortunately the church has much to offer beyond dogma, starting with the Sermon on the Mount, and evangelical and non-denominational churches are growing. Catholic leaders might study their appeal.

In his inaugural remarks the new archbishop noted that parish and school closings have left the church with many buildings that might be converted to inexpensive housing, of which Connecticut is desperately short. Of course this is easier said than done. While nearly everyone purports to want the state to have more housing, nearly everyone wants it built somewhere else. The fear of the underclass is real and often justified, as indicated by violent crime and terrible school performance in the cities.

The new archbishop has an idea about his new city, Hartford, a poverty factory where two high school students were shot to death the other day. His dreamiest objective is to restore Catholic schools in the city — there are none left — and make them tuition-free. 

The excellence of Catholic schools is generally acknowledged. The schools have behavioral discipline and academic standards, which now are virtually prohibited in public schools. Unlike public schools, church schools can choose their students, but they use this freedom not to exclude but to pursue the most motivated students and parents. 

Thus church schools can offer students an escape from the demoralization of city life, and with their better environment they can retain good staff while paying less than public schools. 

Regional public “magnet” schools offer some escape as well but are still somewhat impaired in discipline and academic standards. They also impose more transportation burdens on students and parents than neighborhood schools.

In any case, as indicated by the litigation of the past quarter century over school segregation in Hartford, the city and other cities in Connecticut can use much more school choice. The return of Catholic schools could help provide it, but avoiding tuition would require money from somewhere. 

A scholarship program from state government might provide it and educate students better and less expensively than government’s own system, but the teacher unions would never consent, and they run government in Connecticut. They have no interest in improving student performance, reducing poverty, and saving money. Only dreamers care about such stuff. Good for the new archbishop for being one.

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

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