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. 

*

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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Vermont rivals Connecticut in ‘climate change’ craziness

By Chris Powell

While it may be hard to believe, Vermont seems to have gotten ahead of Connecticut in “climate change” craziness.

The Green Mountain State has just passed a law allowing itself to charge big oil and gas companies for the cost to the state of the “greenhouse gases” emitted by use of the fuel sold by the companies between 1995 and 2024. The state itself will choose the criteria for calculating the cost. Mainly Vermont wants to blame the oil and gas companies for the extensive damage done in the state last year by terrible flooding.

Under the new law it won’t matter that the fuel products on which “climate change” is being blamed were and remain not just perfectly legal but also crucial to modern civilization. No matter also that nearly everyone in Vermont has been using those products ever since they became available. Vermont wants to blame the manufacturers of the fuel products, not their users, the people for whom those products were made — the people without whose demand the products wouldn’t have been made at all.


Indeed, the mere manufacture of fuel didn’t emit the “greenhouse gases” Vermont is complaining about. The use of them did.

Like all other states, Vermont already has a fuel tax. If the state wants to recover what it believes are its costs of the “climate change” caused by using fuel, it can raise that tax and get the money from the parties responsible for their use: its own residents. And if the state really believes that “climate change” disasters are being caused by the use of oil and gas, Vermont already should have outlawed those fuels.

Of course the legislators who passed the law don’t really believe its premises. The new law is just a money grab that, if ever implemented, will be nullified in one court or another after years of expensive litigation. But until then legislators who voted for the law will pose as saviors of the environment.


Meanwhile Connecticut’s climate alarmists want Governor Lamont and leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly to put “climate crisis” legislation on the agenda of a special legislative session that is to be called to make a fix in motor vehicle assessment law, a special session that was supposed to be brief.

The “climate crisis” bill at issue passed the House of Representatives during the recent regular session but was stalled by some of the majority Democrats in the Senate who thought that it was more important to guard against climate change by modifying municipal zoning. (The Senate’s Republican minority almost certainly would have opposed the “climate crisis” bill, as the Republican minority in the House did.)

After declaring a “climate crisis,” the bill would just specify options for reducing “greenhouse gases” by 2050 — safely beyond the political lifespans of most current legislators. Actual sacrifices would await another day.

Whatever one thinks of “climate change” and its causes — natural phenomena operating for millions of years, or manmade phenomena arising only in recent decades — the “climate crisis” legislation is silly. For even if “climate change” is substantially the result of the use of oil, gas, and coal as fuel, as the climate alarmists maintain, Connecticut can do nothing meaningful about it.

The state could outlaw those fuels and shut down all its industry requiring a smokestack and all its transportation requiring a tailpipe and the rest of the country and the rest of the world would continue to use those fuels. Since Connecticut’s contribution to the world’s “greenhouse gases” is tiny, the state would only disadvantage itself without achieving any measurable reduction in those gases. 

Even a national policy of eliminating oil, gas, and coal as fuel would have little impact on “greenhouse gases” worldwide, since the developing world, including industrial giant China, will continue to use those fuels until something better comes along. Only a worldwide solution is worth pursuing — if there really is a problem to solve.

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

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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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