‘Creative’ thinking isn’t answer to youth crime; standards are

By Chris Powell

What should Connecticut do with juvenile criminal offenders, who are increasingly a problem? 

By legislation this year the General Assembly and Governor Lamont required the Judicial Department to develop a plan for removing minors from adult prisons. That the Judicial Department has anything to do with administering prisons is a gross violation of the constitutional principle of separation of executive and judicial powers. Juvenile prisons or detention facilities or whatever they are to be called should be operated by an Executive Department agency like the Correction Department or Department of Children and Families, not courts.

But the Judicial Department appointed a committee as instructed, and this month it made a recommendation: that the former Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown, closed five years ago on the premise that there is too much imprisonment, be renovated at a cost of $24 million to become more “nurturing” and that imprisoned minors be transferred there.

The social work industry, euphemized as “juvenile justice advocates,” immediately objected to the idea. One such advocate scorned the idea for lacking “creativity.” Others would like to see smaller facilities for juvenile offenders, like group homes with a psychiatric focus, in which juvenile offenders might get the humane-sounding but imaginary cure — “the help they need” — though by the time a minor works his way into prison in Connecticut, his offenses have to be numerous and serious enough to show that his character is already permanently damaged.

Prison may not rehabilitate much but it prevents people from committing more crime until they are released, and Connecticut is overrun with repeat offenders, with 43% of its parolees returning to prison within three years of their release and many more committing crimes without getting caught again.

Indeed, even as the social work industry was objecting to continued imprisonment of repeat juvenile offenders, police in Branford reported that in one night they had just arrested 10 juveniles from New Haven and West Haven in connection with an assault and two attempted car thefts.

The police said the arrested youths are between 12 and 16, six already had criminal records, and four were wearing global position system ankle bracelets — that is, they were being tracked electronically as a condition of their release, to deter them from committing more crimes. Still, despite their youth and criminal records they were out at night two or three towns away from home stealing cars. 

For there is little deterrence when young offenders know that society’s behavioral standards are weak and “juvenile justice advocates” will ensure that there is no meaningful punishment for them for anything short of murder. Similarly there is little education when students know, as most in Connecticut do, that since their schools no longer have academic standards they will be promoted from grade to grade and given high school diplomas even if they learn nothing. 

Students who pay attention may even realize that political cover for their lack of effort is being provided by teacher unions, which blame proficiency testing for poor academic performance. But proficiency testing doesn’t cause poor student performance; proficiency testing just measures it, and if proficiency testing can be eliminated, the collapse of public education may be concealed.

The social work industry wants “creative” thinking about juvenile justice, but nothing “creative” is necessary, for a return to the old ways may do fine. Children are only as good as their parents, just as schools are only as good as their students. To address juvenile crime and the collapse of public education, state government might inquire into why so many children in Connecticut today have no parents, or at least none to speak of. What has caused the crash in parenting? How is it related to public policy?

If no standards are enforced at home, in juvenile justice, and in school, what is to deter anarchy in society? Pursuing that question would be creative enough, especially in light of the courage it would require from feckless elected officials who prattle about the “help” young offenders need.  

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

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Only one Connecticut news organization gets special government aid

By Chris Powell

Government in Connecticut now may have more publicists than there are independent journalists keeping watch over it. Indeed, it’s starting to seem as if government in Connecticut has a more or less official news media organization on top of all those publicists.

For the Hartford Business Journal reported last week that Connecticut Public, the left-wing nonprofit organization that operates radio and television networks in the state and is affiliated with the left-leaning Public Broadcasting System, is getting a grant of $3.1 million from state government.

The grant is to pay for extensive renovation and expansion of the organization’s building in Hartford, including a community meeting space for as many as 125 people, a 200-seat theater, a kitchen, and 20,000 feet of office space for renting — that is, a government-financed income stream.

Connecticut Public already has gotten other state grants as well as money from the tax-funded national Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

Connecticut Public has an annual budget of $22 million and a hundred or so employees. With its federal broadcast licenses and meeting space in the state’s capital city, it has the broadest reach of any news organization in Connecticut even as it competes with every news organization that gets no financial support from government. 

But with its $3.1 million state government grant in hand, Connecticut Public can’t be expected to focus its journalism on any failings of the Lamont administration and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly, nor on the scores of other recipients of state government funding approved by the administration and legislature — the journalism Connecticut may need most.

It might be a bit different if Connecticut had enough right-leaning or moderate news organizations to balance the reach of Connecticut Public and if state government supported them financially as well. 

The Yankee Institute, a free-market advocacy and research nonprofit based in Hartford, does much critical journalism through its Connecticut Inside Investigator news service and might do more with the sort of money state government is bestowing on Connecticut Public. 

While the Connecticut Mirror, a nonprofit state news bureau, mainly bleats for the same causes pushed by Connecticut Public, it provides excellent state Capitol and budget coverage and, if it wanted to and had more money, could do much more auditing of government operations. 

All newspapers in the state are struggling financially but some still do occasional reporting critical of government and might do more with more money. 

But all of Connecticut Public’s competitors might be reluctant to risk being compromised by taking government money, even if it was awarded in the name of fairness and balance.

So that leaves Connecticut with a preliminary form of what is called “state media” — the form perfected in totalitarian countries.  

OBSESSED WITH TRIVIA: Connecticut news organizations lately are obsessed with vandalism, with some TV and radio stations even leading their newscasts with reports about swastikas spray-painted on buildings and stolen gay-pride flags. Is this really, as such reporting suggests, an epidemic of “hate”?

Swastikas were being painted on buildings and flags were being stolen long before the latest war against Israel and before same-sex marriage was legalized. Such vandalism may have a political tinge today, but some also may be “false flag” trickery. The perpetrators are seldom discovered. 

It won’t be worth worrying about until the perpetrators dare to do it openly. But covering it requires far less effort for diminished news organizations than covering anything serious.

NO JOKE: Speaking to the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce last week, Governor Lamont made a joke about the fake ticket scandal in the state police. So many drivers are speeding in Connecticut these days, the governor said, because “that’s what happens when you get the police to stop issuing those fake tickets.”

But nobody can be sure what the fake ticket scandal is, since there has been no definitive report on it even though the audit that identified thousands of potentially fraudulent tickets was published six months ago. The inability of government to provide any accountability after all this time isn’t so funny.

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

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‘See something, say something’? Better not try it in New Haven

By Chris Powell

For 22 years, ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans have been urged by various government agencies: “If you see something, say something.” Having done just that may cost New Haven’s registrar of vital statistics her job.

The registrar, Patricia Clark, had been alerting federal immigration authorities to dozens of marriage licenses involving immigrants — licenses that struck her as questionable — just as guidance from the state Public Health Department recommended she do, independent of the national policy of reporting things that don’t seem right. When her superiors discovered this in November, they suspended Clark with pay pending investigation.

Why? Because New Haven has declared itself a “sanctuary city” and its policy long has been to nullify federal immigration law. 

Mayor Justin Elicker says, “New Haven is a welcoming and safe city for everyone, regardless of background or document status.” That is, immigration lawbreakers are welcome in the city. New Haven has gone so far as to issue city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their remaining in the country illegally.

State government doesn’t go quite as far but issues special driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants for the same purpose.

The premise of these nullification policies is that the desire of anyone anywhere, whatever his motive, to live in the United States trumps the interest of the United States in remaining a sovereign nation by controlling its borders and judging the admissibility of foreigners and what they intend to do here.

Connecticut and New Haven persist in these policies despite the turmoil lately on display just over the state line in New York City, where, as in other “sanctuary cities,” the Biden administration’s open-borders policy is bankrupting city government, causing reductions in services to legal residents, driving down the local wage base, driving up housing costs, and worsening the shortage of housing.

The New Haven registrar is in trouble for being a good citizen and public official in trying to uphold federal law against a city policy that, while dressed up in political correctness and humanitarianism, is essentially treasonous. 

Most illegal immigrants mean no harm. But there must be rules to keep immigration orderly and assimilable and ensure that the country remains democratic, secular, and safe from religious and ethnic fanaticism. Letting people enter or remain in the country illegally, unvetted, in the age of international terrorism is crazy. 

Some illegal immigrants do mean harm. Some have been deported many times and still sneak back in and commit crimes. The hapless immigration system has many repeat offenders, just like Connecticut’s criminal-justice system.

At least six of the terrorists in the September 11, 2001, attacks violated U.S. immigration law, either by overstaying their visas or falsifying their visa applications. If New Haven and other “sanctuary cities” keep having their way — indeed, if the Biden administration stays in power — nothing like that may ever be caught before the damage is done.

LEARNING VS. RACIAL BALANCE: Another contradiction of a premise of Connecticut education policy was broadcast throughout the state the other day but wasn’t noticed. The study and advocacy group Education Reform Now CT reported that while Connecticut has racially diversified its public school teaching staff in recent years, the increase in teachers from racial minorities has not matched the increase in students from minority races.

Competition for good minority teachers is intense even as state government can’t control the racial composition of its student body. So any increase in minority staff is a credit to school administration. Integration and diversity are important objectives.

But learning is a higher objective than racial integration, and ever since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill in 1996, Connecticut policy has presumed that minority students learn better in a racially integrated environment. So what’s the big deal if teaching staffs are, on average, whiter than their classrooms? 

If, as the complaint from Education Reform Now CT suggests, minority kids will learn best in a segregated environment, education in Connecticut has a lot of rethinking to do.      

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

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What does Rosa DeLauro think about husband’s rap on Biden?

By Chris Powell

Married couples are entitled to differences of opinion and separate careers. But when married couples are in politics, such differences may be of public interest.

Such is the case with Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, and her husband, Stanley Greenberg, perhaps the most prominent poll taker, political analyst, and liberal policy strategist in the Democratic Party. Though his wife the congresswoman is a hard-left party loyalist and supporter of President Biden, last week Greenberg wrote an essay for the Financial Times arguing from his firm’s own polling that the president is a disaster politically.

Greenberg’s essay was framed as a prescription for the recovery of Biden’s campaign for re-election. But the essay was just as much an indictment of Biden’s performance on inflation, the economy, and immigration and his political obliviousness. Biden, Greenberg wrote, “hasn’t realized yet the rules of the next presidential election.” 

Greenberg continued: “Citizens have lived with more than two years of wages not keeping up with prices. That is why the percentage rating the economy as ‘poor’ is rising to its highest level this year.

“Consider anger about profiteering and the public’s growing distrust of big corporations and their influence over the political class. As people struggle financially, they ask why the oil companies or big retail chains are not helping with lower prices. They watched in the last few years as four companies gained more than 75% market share for infant formula, baby food, beef processing, pasta, cereal, and soda.”

Greenberg wrote that his poll asked voters what would concern them about Biden’s re-election. “Soaring to the top of the list were images of ‘the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants,'” many of them “criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.”

By contrast, Greenberg wrote, “Trump gets it,” having “promised to launch the ‘largest domestic deportation operation in American history’ and to secure the border.”

Of course Trump didn’t solve the border problem during his first term and was lazier than persistent on that issue and most others, but Biden now is the face of the awful status quo.

Greenberg concluded that Trump will win “as long as almost 60% of voters choose him and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats on ‘your wages and salary keeping up with the cost of living’ and handling ‘crime’ and the ‘border.'”

So what does Greenberg’s wife, the congresswoman, think about her husband’s analysis? 

If DeLauro finds any fault with Biden, she hasn’t expressed it publicly, though polls have found that most Democrats want their party to nominate someone else for president, a sentiment DeLauro and the rest of Connecticut’s members of Congress, all Democrats, have ignored — and get away with ignoring because no one in journalism in Connecticut seems to have asked them.

Indeed, Connecticut’s members of Congress seldom get any critical questions from journalists back home. Journalism back home just reports what they say and what they want their constituents to hear.

Greenberg’s polling and essay omitted two Biden failings that may weigh on his standing as much as inflation, the economy, and uncontrolled immigration: his corrupt influence-peddling business with his relatives and his sinking mental and physical condition, which is often on display even though major news organizations strive to conceal it. 

The president is simply not presentable. He is often incoherent, makes up stories easily disproven, loses track of where he is and who he is with, and spends a suspiciously large amount of time at home in Delaware. (Trump is not aging so well himself and has mental lapses too but not so many.)

In the last two years of his second term President Ronald Reagan also was much weakened by age but the country was in good shape and he wasn’t seeking re-election. Now the country is a mess and if Democrats keep enabling Trump by sticking with Biden, they will be to blame if the mess gets worse.

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

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Compassion for Palestinians comes easy in West Hartford

By Chris Powell

Some Jews in Connecticut and around the country are upset with the extent of the destruction Israel is committing in Gaza to uproot the territory’s rulers, the terrorist group Hamas. Participants in a rally in West Hartford last week called for a “ceasefire” and chanted, “Not in my name!”

But Israel isn’t retaliating against Gaza in anyone’s name but its own, and no one in West Hartford has been under rocket fire from Gaza as Israelis have been for years. West Hartford’s compassion for Gazans is easier to come by. 

Yes, the United States provides military assistance to Israel, for which the participants in the West Hartford rally may feel responsible. But then the United States also long has provided “humanitarian” aid to Gaza, which, like the “humanitarian” aid long provided by the United Nations, has enabled the Hamas government to divert Gaza’s resources away from the territory’s people and toward constant war. This aid also has let Gazans think they are not responsible for their government and its longstanding pledge to destroy Israel.

Connecticut columnist Red Jahncke minimizes that pledge. The Hamas platform, he writes, “has never been tested against a reality of Palestinian civilians achieving and enjoying genuine freedom.”

Jahncke is right if he means that no Arab country has ever been free as Americans understand freedom. But he’s wrong if he means that Palestinians living adjacent to Israel have never been free of Israeli occupation. They were free of Israeli occupation prior to 1967, living under Egyptian and Jordanian government until Israel’s Arab neighbors went to war against the Jews again. And Gazans were free of all occupation in 2005 when Israel withdrew from the territory and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization took over.

A year later Gazans had an election in which they rejected the PLO’s Fatah faction and installed Hamas, despite or maybe because of its genocidal pledge. That was the last election held in Gaza. In the West Bank, where the corrupt Fatah faction still holds local authority, the first and last election was held in 2005. It is not Israel that is preventing another election there but Fatah, and if there was another election, Hamas almost certainly would win it despite the destruction it has brought on Gaza.

Indeed, a recent poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza found three-quarters of them opposed to accepting Israel. 

That’s why the “two-state solution” has become ridiculous. Through the years Israel repeatedly accepted it just as the Palestinians repeatedly rejected it and still do. President Clinton got Israel to accept a settlement plan that gave Arafat and the PLO nearly everything they demanded, yet they refused — probably because they knew that any Palestinian leaders who settle with Israel will be assassinated by Palestinian irreconcilables just as the peace-favoring Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish irreconcilable.

Yet prior to last October 7 most Israelis still favored a “two-state solution.” Now few do, and most may not care how heavy-handed their military gets in Gaza nor how badly Israeli settlers abuse Palestinians in the West Bank. Why bother being decent with an adversary pledged to destroy you no matter what?

The peace advocates in West Hartford and elsewhere are evasive and dishonest in calling for a “ceasefire.” Israel has had many “ceasefires” with Gaza over the years and they all ended with more rockets being fired into Israel. No one among the peace advocates in West Hartford called for a ceasefire when Israel was being attacked. A ceasefire has become desirable only now that Israel is defending itself with the overwhelming force and destruction always necessary to win a war.

Why not demand peace itself? That is, why not demand that Gaza raise up a government repudiating Hamas and committing itself to the “two-state solution” most Palestinians still reject? The response to such a call might be illuminating. 

Even now Israel might have trouble rejecting such an offer. But while Gazans are suffering, they are not yet suffering enough to make it. 

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

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Will governor dare to make UConn Health Center solvent?

By CHRIS POWELL

When government officials face a problem of administration whose solution will cause great controversy, they typically appoint a study committee or hire a consultant to provide political cover for whatever will have to be at least proposed. That’s what Governor Lamont and University of Connecticut President Radenka Maric have agreed to do in anticipation of more big deficits at the UConn Health Center in Farmington.

Though the announcement made by the governor’s office about the plan was full of jolly enthusiasm for helping the UConn Health Center “thrive,” political blogger and Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie disclosed that the university first strongly opposed it in a letter to the governor.

Maric, UConn trustees Chairman Daniel Toscano, health center board Chairman Sanford Cloud, and medical school Dean Bruce T. Liang wrote: “We fear this will cause significant damage to UConn Health, including its schools, its reputation, and most importantly, retention and recruitment of the best and brightest faculty, staff, and students.”

So the idea of getting serious about the UConn Health Center’s chronic insolvency is the governor’s alone, and while people on UConn’s payroll may resent him for that, ordinary taxpayers may approve.

For the university long has been full of excess, especially with its highest paid staffers, as a report by the state auditors reiterated in August. The auditors said UConn had overpaid two professors on sabbatical by a total of more than $450,000. The UConn Health Center still hasn’t overcome the damage to its reputation done in 2018 when it was found to have paid a professor for five months after he had stopped showing up for work, having been murdered at home, apparently by his wife.

Indeed, state legislators long have attributed the health center’s insolvency to employee compensation that is far greater than compensation paid to comparable staff at other hospitals.

Likely to compound the health center’s financial challenges is the governor’s warning to all the state’s institutions of higher education that the many millions of dollars they have been receiving in federal “emergency” money appropriated during the recent virus epidemic will be ending next year. The good old days of the epidemic — good financially, anyway — are over, state budget surpluses are diminishing, and the economy is weakening amid severe inflation.

So the wailing from higher education has begun — led by administrators who are paid salaries of $200,000, $300,000, and more.

Even if the UConn Health Center gets employee compensation under control, achieving solvency may be difficult, as it is for most hospitals that serve many patients on Medicare and Medicaid, government insurance systems that typically pay less for their patients than what other patients are charged. Additionally, there is always the danger of losing well-regarded staff members to institutions that are even less concerned about efficiency than UConn is.

But the tell is in the contradiction between the private position of the UConn administrators, as expressed in their letter to the governor, and their public position, as expressed in the governor’s upbeat press release. Hardly anyone in state government ever wants to economize, but UConn especially doesn’t, as its record suggests.

The governor does want to economize, or at least would like to, or he wouldn’t be pressing the health center issue.

How much does the governor want to economize with the health center and the rest of higher education? This involves many unionized government employees, a group that constitutes the biggest part of the army of the governor’s political party and so can bring enormous pressure on state legislators, whose votes might be needed to accomplish serious reforms with UConn.

The governor probably won’t get far with UConn, which is considered the fourth branch of government. He hasn’t remade the Board of Trustees, which would seem to be the prerequisite of reform. If he had remade the board, its chairman wouldn’t have signed the letter objecting to the review the governor wanted made of the health center’s operations.

Besides, governors come and go while tenure in public higher education and state government generally is virtually forever.

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

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Goodbye to school integration; and college is way overpriced

By CHRIS POWELL

For decades, even before the state Supreme Court decision in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill 27 years ago, educators in Connecticut have been telling the state that racial integration in education is crucial to better student performance, especially for children from minority groups. In response Connecticut built and operated dozens of regional schools at a cost of billions of dollars to induce minority students from the cities and white students from the suburbs to mix voluntarily.  

While the regional schools have moved thousands of students around, they have produced little integration, particularly in Hartford, which was the center of the Sheff case. Student performance throughout the state has continued to decline. But the political correctness of it all has produced high-paying jobs for many educators and has made them feel better about themselves.

Whereupon last week the state community college system repudiated racial integration in education without anyone noticing it.

The system announced a partnership with Morehouse College in Atlanta through which students of color who graduate from Capital Community College in Hartford in two years with an academic average of at least 2.7 will be guaranteed admission to Morehouse as juniors on their way to a four-year degree.

Morehouse is a prestigious “historically Black” institution, and according to Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, state community college officials said “studies have shown that Black students who enroll in historically Black colleges and universities are more likely to earn their degrees and have more income than those who attend non-HBCU institutions.”

Surprise! Racial integration is not such a boon in education after all.  

“HBCUs like Morehouse College inherently believe in the success of their students,” community college system President John Maduko said, implying that other schools couldn’t care less about how their students do.

So having long strived to integrate its students in primary education, Connecticut now will strive to resegregate them when they get to higher education.

The irony passed without comment from the state’s education bureaucracy and the rest of state government. Have those billions spent on regional schools been wasted? Who cares? Now let’s cost people billions more by making them all buy electric cars.    

Meanwhile the even more expensive failure of higher education is getting less notice than the failure of lower education.

Bloomberg News reported last month that changes to the federal college student loan program made since President Biden took office have facilitated forgiveness of more than $127 billion in debt, which has been transferred to taxpayers.

The problem of student loan debt is presented as a matter of the heavy burden that prevents borrowers from advancing to homeownership and family formation.

But this is only a subsidiary scandal. The bigger scandal is the grotesque overpricing of higher education. If higher education was worth what is charged for it, millions of young people wouldn’t be stuck with heavy debt for so long. They would get jobs paying them enough so that they easily could discharge their debt soon after graduating.

The loan system itself is largely responsible for inflating the cost of higher education. The more money is available, the more colleges and universities will absorb it, as by establishing courses and degrees that bestow few job skills. 

A 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that many college graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college education. A study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46% more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than jobs requiring a college degree.

College grads often earn more than other people. But is this because of greater knowledge and skills or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with?

Nothing has been done about this problem, since college loans are less of a benefit to students than to educators and college administrators, the ultimate recipients of the money and a pernicious influence on politics. 

——

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

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Plenty of room at the inn but who’ll unlock the door?

By Chris Powell

Congratulations to Danbury. A Superior Court judge has ruled that the city was within its rights and zoning law to prevent a social-service organization, Stamford-based Pacific House, from operating a vacant motel as a shelter for the homeless. 

Pacific House was operating the motel under one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders during the recent virus epidemic. The organization’s idea was to convert the motel to contain 66 double-occupancy rooms so that the hundred or so people estimated to be homeless in Danbury in the winter would have somewhere to sleep safely and be nudged toward rehabilitation. But the order has expired, zoning law is back in force, and the people living in Pacific House’s former motel have been evicted.

The city has opened a much smaller shelter downtown but it isn’t likely to come close to bringing all local homeless people inside during the winter. 

Opponents of the motel’s conversion to a shelter argue that other towns in the Danbury area should open shelters to do their share. Suburbs do like confining social problems in the cities. But the homeless typically need more help than a roof over their heads. They usually need medical, psychiatric, and other services not readily available outside cities, and they don’t have transportation.

Besides, even if a suburb was willing to do its share, it would not likely have a vacant residential facility like the one now wasting away in Danbury. Housing in Connecticut is scarcer than ever and homelessness is rising again. 

Worse, in 2021 state government gave Pacific House $4.6 million precisely to purchase the motel for use as a shelter. Danbury now has thwarted the state’s expensively manifested interest.

Will the governor and General Assembly preside haplessly over this disaster?

Being unable to use the former motel, Pacific House might be willing to give it to state government. Indeed, state government should insist on taking ownership of the property it paid for, and if state government owned the property directly, it presumably could trump municipal zoning by leasing it back to Pacific House for use as a shelter. Or state government might seek bids for converting the former hotel to regular housing and then leasing the building to a developer. After all, the property was built to provide housing and originally was zoned for that purpose.

Of course returning the former motel to use as any kind of housing might upset some neighbors and cause controversy. But state government long has been under the administration of a party that prattles about helping the poor even as poverty in the state worsens, and after many years of Republican rule Danbury just elected its own Democratic administration. So the city now provides a test of Democratic sincerity.

It’s Christmas and this time, in Connecticut, there is plenty of room at the inn. But where is the political will to unlock the door?

AN EPIDEMIC OF SELF-PITY: Now that the virus epidemic is over, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy says the country is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. He wants the federal government to look into it, starting by establishing in the White House an office of social connection policy.

Certainly the country is coming apart in many ways. But loneliness? Other elected officials, including Murphy’s Senate colleague from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, say the country is suffering an epidemic of social media. Simple privacy is becoming a luxury.

The country’s worsening despair and alienation are more likely matters of declining living standards as real incomes fall under the pressure of the inflation Murphy and the rest of Congress long have been voting for.

In any case does the country really need the government to try to cure loneliness when civic groups and government itself are crying out for volunteers, hospitals and nursing homes are full of patients who would welcome a visitor, bars remain open until 1 and sometimes 2 in the morning, and internet chat rooms are open around the clock?

Anyone lonely in such a world may be suffering most from self-pity — and in the richest country in the world.

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

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Enough ethnic pandering already, and enough stereotyping as well

By Chris Powell

Has Connecticut been more Balkanized or less so by Groton’s decision to replace its observance of Columbus Day with a holiday that will be both Italian Heritage Day and Indigenous Peoples Day?

Columbus now is considered politically incorrect for having helped to open the Western Hemisphere to the European exploration and colonization that displaced the hemisphere’s original inhabitants, who had spent hundreds of years displacing each other without European interference. Political correctness lately has elevated them to the “noble savages” of old romantic literature. 

But a century ago Columbus was a worldwide hero, and since he was Italian he was appropriated for a national holiday apologizing for the scorn that had been heaped on the Italian immigrants of recent decades, as scorn had been heaped on the Irish immigrants before them and even then was being heaped on Jews. 

So in Groton and other places Italian Heritage Day will be what Columbus Day was meant to be all along, more a sop to people of Italian descent than a tribute to the great navigator. Meanwhile the descendants of the inhabitants displaced long ago by the Europeans are getting Indigenous Peoples Day, also as an apology for the abuse their ancestors took, as if most people in the United States now aren’t just as “indigenous” as anyone with “indigenous” ancestors.

Why must the country keep patronizing ethnicity? While people may gain much identity from their ethnicity, no one has earned anything by it. It is simply bequeathed to them and they deserve no credit for it any more than anyone should be disparaged for it. But politicians love to pander on the basis of ethnicity, especially when they have little to say about anything that matters. 

It is 2½ centuries since the national charter declared that all men are created equal. Lately the charter seems to have been amended to add that, as George Orwell wrote, some are more equal than others.

The pandering to people of Italian and “indigenous” descent as if they deserve an apology or special recognition of their acceptance is especially silly in Connecticut. The state has the country’s largest percentage of people of Italian descent and two of its three largest Indian casinos, which enjoy lucrative monopolies bestowed on the premise that today’s reconstituted tribes are owed tribute for the wars lost by their ancestors nearly four centuries ago. Apparently the fantastic wealth given to the tribes by the state, much of that wealth being extracted from people who are far more oppressed than the proprietors of the casinos ever were, isn’t apology enough. Supposedly a special holiday is needed too.

But there is already a holiday that celebrates everyone in the country: Independence Day, July 4. It marks the supreme principle of equality under the law. When will that ever be enough?

For that matter, when will high school sports teams and their followers acknowledge that mascots drawn from an ethnic group — particularly those drawn from Indians — constitute stereotyping and that stereotyping ethnic groups is offensive?

That has yet to dawn on school systems in Windsor, Canton, Killingly, and Derby, though most towns have replaced their Indian mascots and state law penalizes use of such mascots by withholding financial aid drawn from the Indian casinos. 

Windsor and Canton remain the “Warriors,” which may sound ambiguous but is not, since the teams formerly used Indian imagery with the name. Killingly’s teams are the “Redmen” and “Red Gals,” a reference to skin color, also confirmed by past use of Indian imagery. Derby still gets away with “Red Raiders” because it has the endorsement of a minor tribe, the Schaghticokes, which long has been trying to curry favor with palefaces in hope of winning casino rights.

The stereotype here is undeniable — that of ferocity and brutality. No team calls itself the Fighting Bunnies. 

State government’s financial incentives to replace Indian mascots haven’t finished the job. Such mascots should be forthrightly outlawed by the next session of the General Assembly.

——

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

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‘Gun safety’ is camouflage for going easy on crime in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Connecticut doesn’t do “gun control” anymore. Elected officials have euphemized it into “gun safety,” but it’s the same old thing: laws that make it harder for law-abiding and responsible people to exercise their federal and state constitutional rights to own and carry guns.

Ironically, Connecticut’s Constitution is even more emphatic about gun rights than the U.S. Constitution is.

The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights famously declares in its Second Amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” A U.S. Supreme Court decision has been required to make plain that this right belongs to individuals, regardless of whether they are formally members of a militia.

Connecticut’s Constitution requires no interpretation with Section 17 of Article 1, its Declaration of Rights: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

More ironic still is that even as government in Connecticut discourages gun ownership by the law-abiding, it goes easy on lawbreakers, especially those using guns to commit crimes.

In May the state Office of Legislative Research reported that two-thirds of gun charges brought in Connecticut between 2013 and 2022 had been dropped, usually in plea bargaining for convictions on other charges. That is, the state’s criminal-justice system considers most gun crimes dispensable, much less serious than other crimes.

Meanwhile 43% of offenders released from prisons in Connecticut are convicted and imprisoned again within three years, and many serious crimes are committed by repeat offenders. Indeed, the biggest cliche in journalism in Connecticut is “long criminal record.” Most journalists keep the cliche handy without ever pondering what it means about criminal justice.

Two recent national opinion polls undertaken by respectable and even politically correct sources suggest that the public may be catching on faster than elected officials and journalists in Connecticut are.

A poll by NBC News found 52% of respondents saying they own a gun or someone in their household does, the highest degree of gun ownership found by the poll since it began asking the question in 1999.

A Harris poll found 60% of respondents saying having a gun is necessary to defend themselves against criminals, with 55% saying that rising crime is the fault of “woke” politicians — elected officials reluctant to enforce criminal law.

Being national, those polls may not fully reflect opinion in Connecticut. But it would be strange if opinion here was not moving in the direction indicated by the polls. 

Even people in Connecticut who are inclined to believe the claims that crime is down in the state and that it’s good to be reducing the prison population may have had second thoughts when they heard about an especially atrocious crime in October, the murder of a visiting nurse at a “transitional” home for sex offenders in Windham’s Willimantic section.

News reports said the suspect in the nurse’s murder was on probation after serving a sentence for rape and assault, adding that soon after being released from prison in 2021 he was found to be mentally ill and drug-addicted. But still he was free, while the nurse coming to visit him was neither armed nor escorted by someone who was.

State legislators say that when the General Assembly reconvenes in February they will consider providing security for visiting nurses who deal with dangerous patients. But legislators have given no hint that they will investigate why a mentally ill and drug-addicted rapist was free in the first place, though if accountability was the objective, such investigation might be done easily enough by reviewing court records and questioning prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and probation officers.

In their next session legislators almost surely will attempt more “gun safety” legislation, because that makes them look busy about crime when in fact they are irrelevant. For to pursue “gun safety” is really to give up on reducing crime and poverty and its pathologies and arresting the social disintegration that is making more people think they should have guns.

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

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