Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Connecticut is missing the most important point about the recent assault of state Rep. Maryam Khan as she departed a Muslim religious service at the XL Center in downtown Hartford.

Khan contends that the big issues here are whether the Hartford police and emergency responders treated her sensitively enough and whether there should have been more police protection at the service. (The police say there were three officers at the XL Center throughout the service and the attack happened a few minutes after it ended.)

But the most important aspect of the incident is something else — the background of the man charged in the attack, who was quickly seized and detained by brave bystanders.

That is, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers have reported, the man is a chronic offender who was convicted of assault in 2016, for which he received only a suspended sentence and probation, and convicted of larceny and breach of peace a decade ago, for which he served two months in jail then. He also has been charged with robbery and assault in New York and Washington, D.C. According to his lawyer, he is mentally ill.

Records like that are behind the boasts made by Governor Lamont and state legislators about having reduced the prison population. About half of prisoners released in Connecticut are convicted of more crimes within three years, half the state’s parolees have a serious drug problem, 60% are mentally ill, most have little work experience and so are not well prepared to support themselves honestly, and 18% lack housing, a problem sure to increase stress and worsen mental illness.

There is nothing new in the data, for “recidivism” is an old problem. Khan, a Democrat from Windsor, has been a member of the General Assembly for only a year, having won a special election in March 2022 and then election to a full term last November. But as a member of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, she is well positioned to try to do something about the problem that violently confronted her the other day.

Since it is full of crime by repeat offenders, including gun crime, Connecticut needs an incorrigibility law, a law that keeps chronic offenders locked up, especially chronic offenders who are mentally ill. Khan could introduce such legislation and be a compelling witness for it — or she can just complain about the police who have to deal with chronic offenders.

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BLUMENTHAL BLUSTERS: As if the United States hasn’t been pursuing enough military adventurism lately, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, has joined South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in proposing a Senate resolution declaring that any use by Russia of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would mean war with the United States.

Of course that in turn would mean world war.

Blumenthal says the resolution is meant as a deterrent, but Russia has far more at stake in Ukraine than the United States does, since Ukraine is on Russia’s border and long had been part of Russia itself. As much as Americans would like Ukraine to preserve its independence and are consenting to enormous military aid there, few think that Ukraine is worth a world war, any more than Russians thought that their country’s installing missiles in Cuba in 1962 was worth a world war.

Buffer zones between great powers are crucial to peace, and the United States, not Russia, has violated this principle recently, first by expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Russia’s border after Russia withdrew from its eastern European satellite states, and then by helping to overthrow the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, leading to the current war.

The United States can’t even adequately staff its military right now and couldn’t fight a war on Russia’s border without going nuclear. So Blumenthal should quit the tough-guy blustering and pursue what the world needs — a compromise for peace.

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

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By Chris Powell

Student performance continues to crash in schools in Connecticut and throughout the country. The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress tests showed steep declines in the reading and math proficiency of 13-year-olds. Students are doing worse than a decade ago.

But as usual there is much clamor to increase compensation for teachers, to hire more teaching assistants, and to keep increasing spending on schools even as enrollment keeps falling.

The enduring gap between school spending and student performance should have destroyed by now Connecticut’s longstanding presumption that spending equals education. But the presumption is sustained by the influence of the presumption’s main beneficiaries — members of teacher unions — and by the public’s not wanting to acknowledge education’s decline. For doing so might lead to other troubling realizations.

One such troubling realization would be that teacher pay has to keep being raised not because teachers are successful but because students are making their jobs insufferable.

Teachers are leaving the profession and recruiting good candidates for teaching jobs is a struggle because many more students arrive in school ignorant of the basics they once learned at home and because many others seriously misbehave, even violently, or are chronically absent.

In these circumstances even the best teachers can’t get good results, and even the worst teachers may be considered essential because there are no replacements.

For similar reasons police work in Connecticut also faces a staffing problem, especially in the cities. Who wants to “serve and protect” when the work is less appreciated and more dangerous?

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Everywhere more people are behaving badly and seem full of rage — not just on the road and in politics but in ordinary life as well. Hence, for example, Connecticut state government’s decision to allow municipalities to install “red light cameras” where motorist misconduct is worst.

Few people in authority acknowledge what is going on. Those who do sense that something is seriously wrong attribute it to the disruptions of the recent virus epidemic. While government’s main responses to the epidemic were indeed mistaken and damaging — school and commercial shutdowns and near-compulsory submission to inadequately tested vaccines — the bad trends, including educational decline, were in place long before the epidemic. Signs of social disintegration are almost everywhere.

Everything starts with children. So where are all the messed-up kids coming from? Government isn’t asking.

Throwing more money at teachers and police, as Connecticut is doing, may keep them on the job a while longer but it doesn’t answer the question and won’t make their jobs easier.

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Maybe there is a hint about social disintegration in a recent study by the state Office of Legislative Research, analyzed last month by Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator.

The study tends to confirm complaints made in February by city mayors and police officials that since gun crime in Connecticut is committed disproportionately by repeat offenders, prosecutors and courts aren’t taking gun crime seriously enough.

The OLR study found that from 2013 through 2022 two-thirds of gun-related criminal charges brought by police in Connecticut were dropped, usually as part of plea bargains gaining convictions on charges considered more serious.

The criminal-justice system runs on plea bargaining, so when most crimes get to court they are “discounted.” While some arrests may involve “overcharging” by police — adding charges that are more or less redundant — a gun charge can be redundant only if the state thinks, for example, that it doesn’t matter much if an assault or a robbery was committed with a gun as long as a conviction for assault or robbery can be achieved.

Of course if state policy considered a gun offense to be just as serious as an assault or robbery, or even more so, and demanded that it be prosecuted just as seriously, and if conviction on a gun charge carried a mandatory long prison sentence, gun crime might diminish substantially.

Instead state legislators keep passing laws to impede gun ownership by the law-abiding and then boast about reducing the prison population even as repeat offenders, including gun criminals, remain free.

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

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By Chris Powell

Due process of law always hangs by a thread, dangling in the winds generated by mob instincts to which elected officials often pander. More resentment of due process has been generated by a decision last month by the state Supreme Court in a case involving students at Yale University.

A female student accused a male student of rape. He denied it. The university held a disciplinary proceeding, found the man guilty, and expelled him. The man was also charged criminally but a state court acquitted him. Whereupon he sued his accuser for defamation. She sought to dismiss the lawsuit, as if the university’s decision against the man she accused could not be questioned.

But the Supreme Court decided unanimously to let the man’s defamation suit continue, concluding that Yale’s disciplinary proceeding was inadequate because it had not granted all the ordinary rights of criminal defendants.

Women’s rights groups are alarmed. They complain that requiring colleges to provide full due process of law to students accused of rape will make it harder to convict them and discourage accusers.

Well, of course.

Yes, accusations are so much easier to make and convictions so much easier to obtain where due process of law is waived. Totalitarian countries don’t bother much with the rights of the accused and have spectacular conviction rates.

Yes, accusations and convictions are so much easier when accusers can escape accountability, as when their identities are concealed in official proceedings, as even Connecticut conceals them.

Yes, due process makes things more difficult for an accuser, especially when the accusation is sexual in nature. Accountability can be stressful.

But the principles of due process apply and their consequences are the same in all criminal prosecutions, not just those involving sexual assault. The right of due process is in the U.S. Constitution twice – in the Fifth and 14th Amendments. It’s in the Connecticut Constitution’s Declaration of Rights as well.

Both constitutions add the right of people to confront their accusers — the U.S. Constitution in its Sixth Amendment, the Connecticut Constitution in its Declaration of Rights.

So should due process be waived in sexual assault cases but not in other criminal cases? If so, due process is not a principle at all.

*

Liberals used to be the great defenders of due process. Conservatives were the ones who sometimes maintained that certain crimes were so awful as to justify waiving due process and who vilified defenders of due process as soft on crime.

But that was before the age of political correctness, wherein it is now held that accusations of sexual assault — often being difficult to prove because of the lack of evidence beyond the accounts of accuser and accused — should be advantaged by a lower standard.

The Trump administration’s Education Department told colleges that their rules for adjudicating claims of sexual assault should guarantee the accused the right to confront and cross-examine their accusers. The Biden Education Department, whose secretary is Connecticut’s former education commissioner, Miguel Cardona, is revoking that requirement, undoing due process.

That is not likely to be the end of the matter. Since political correctness now rules in Connecticut, the next session of the General Assembly may see legislation to undo or evade the state Supreme Court’s decision in favor of due process, and once again those who defend due process may be vilified.

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BIDEN CAN’T CAMPAIGN: Apart from the unhappiness about President Biden being expressed by both people generally and Democrats particularly, there’s another reason he might be defeated for renomination more easily than many people think.

That is, the president was hardly presentable in his campaign three years ago, spending much of it at his home in Delaware, and he is even less presentable now. He seldom can think on his feet and answer unscripted questions. He often seems not to know where he is. He needs so much time to rest. Even a couple of days of campaigning probably would exhaust him into incoherence.

Donald Trump doesn’t tire so easily. If only he did.

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

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By Chris Powell

Exclusive zoning in the suburbs is getting all the blame for Connecticut’s severe shortage of housing, and Governor Lamont and the General Assembly are being bitterly criticized for not doing much about it during the recent legislative session.

But troublesome as exclusive zoning is for driving up the cost of housing and perpetuating economic, racial, and ethnic segregation, it is not the only part of the housing problem — not even the bigger part of it.

Exclusive zoning in Connecticut goes back to colonial times, when life was hard and fragile and towns could not afford to take care of residents who could not support themselves. Society had little surplus to share and no welfare system. So the early towns required aspiring residents to apply to become an “admitted inhabitant.” Those who moved into the town without official approval were officially “warned out.”

The ancient fear of expense endures in zoning today, and with good reason. “Affordable” housing typically means multifamily housing; multifamily housing typically means housing for the poor; and housing for the poor typically means negligent single parents with children who are far behind in their intellectual development and suffering behavioral problems, making them difficult and expensive to educate. They put strain on municipal property taxes, diminish school performance, and increase crime.

Of course “affordable” housing also means housing for young people just starting out in life, the children of some of the very people who support exclusive zoning. But the mess this country has made of its cities in the last half century tips opinion against “affordable” housing in the suburbs. Indeed, the suburbs have grown precisely because people aspiring to the middle class wanted to get away from the pathologies of urban poverty.

Some critics of exclusive zoning call this phenomenon racist. That seems to exempt them from addressing the failure of poverty policy.

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The situation reflects what is essentially Connecticut’s social contract. Most people will let the Democratic Party operate the cities as poverty and patronage factories as long as pleasant suburbs are available to people who want to escape. Critics of the failure of the governor and the legislature to do much about the housing problem don’t seem to notice that the decisive political impediment to eliminating exclusive zoning is Democratic legislators from the suburbs.

Suburban Democratic legislators are glad for their party to reap its statewide election pluralities from people perpetually dependent on government income supports in the cities. But these legislators know that importing a lot of poor people and neglected children into their own towns would be unpopular and might induce their constituents to consider voting Republican.

*

Other factors quite apart from zoning are making housing scarce and expensive in Connecticut.

The state is said to need a minimum of 90,000 more housing units even as an estimated 120,000 immigrants are living in the state illegally. Any state that facilitates illegal immigration as Connecticut does and has “sanctuary” cities has little right to complain about a shortage of housing.

The ruinous inflation of recent years has made housing and other necessities unaffordable for many people and is a function of the federal government’s excessive money creation and distribution. Connecticut’s vaunted state budget surplus and the many goodies being distributed by elected officials here arise from that money creation. But those elected officials don’t explain how the surplus and those goodies are the flip side of soaring prices.

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The housing problem would diminish greatly — along with many other problems — if more people were able to support themselves financially. But that won’t happen while public education continues to collapse. Not surprisingly, student performance has fallen with the abandonment of academic standards.

The state Education Department and the teacher unions have yet to explain how social promotion and the awarding of high school diplomas to students who have not earned them prepare them for anything more than a life of menial work, poverty, and housing insecurity.

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

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By Chris Powell

Despite the hysteria it has provoked, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision purportedly prohibiting racial favoritism in college admissions — euphemized as “affirmative action” — probably will make little practical difference.

From the beginning of its consideration of racial favoritism in admissions, in the case of California v. Bakke in 1978, the court had been ambivalent. Its position was essentially that race could be a factor but not too much and not too explicit. Since no college needs clear quotas to manipulate its admissions, racial favoritism endured, usually behind some subtlety.

Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the case decided last week, messed things up for everybody by not being subtle enough — by rejecting too many applicants of Asian descent with high academic achievement. Asians have become what Jews were in discriminatory college admissions systems a century ago: overachievers who would dominate any student population that was based entirely on academic achievement.

A century ago colleges didn’t care much about racial and ethnic diversity. Today diversity is practically a religion.

As a matter of law the Supreme Court’s decision makes perfect sense. The Constitution promises equal protection of the law and racial favoritism is unequal and what the country long has pledged to eradicate.

But if academic achievement determines admissions (along with prowess in the sports that draw big television audiences), there goes diversity (except maybe in football and basketball), though diversity is vital to education, even if the diversity sought by most colleges is only skin-deep, not intellectual or political.

Fortunately for colleges, they retain the many fuzzy admissions criteria they have used to disadvantage Asian applicants and disguise racial favoritism in admissions, criteria like character, personality, and non-academic accomplishments. Asian applicants with excellent academics get marked way down on the fuzzy criteria. This practice may have to diminish and become less obvious.

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Unfortunately higher education will need some pretenses to sustain racial diversity in admissions as long as academic performance remains so unequal racially in lower education. Continuing to fudge college admissions criteria for racial diversity will seem necessary until the country closes the racial achievement gap in elementary and high schools and produces more minority students who are qualified for college more by academic achievement than race.

But an effort to increase diversity in higher education by improving lower education would impugn the welfare system and upset not just its many direct dependents but also its many government employees and the political structure of the cities from which the Democratic Party draws its pluralities.

Any such effort also would raise the uncomfortable question of why Asian students succeed so disproportionately anyway, outperforming everybody else academically, though Asians also long have suffered discrimination in this country.

What’s their trick? It can’t be inherently racial. So is it a matter of differences in culture and family life, wherein people shrug off disadvantages and work harder than they complain?

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Whatever it is, as was suggested by the student loan debt forgiveness case also decided last week by the Supreme Court, college is overrated, overpriced, and increasingly a matter of mere credentialism rather than education. President Biden claimed the power to cancel student loan debt by executive decree but the court found he lacked the authority.

If college was really so valuable, the many thousands of former college students would not be complaining about the student loan debt burden they incurred, and the president and other Democrats would not be striving to transfer that debt to taxpayers generally, penalizing those who worked their way through college or didn’t go at all.

Besides, most student loan debt appears to be carried by people who are or will be able to repay it, and college loans aren’t really a subsidy to students at all but to educators. That is where all the money has gone, more than a trillion dollars: to a group that is the biggest component of the Democratic Party’s army.

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

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By Chris Powell

Few people will complain about the new contract just awarded by the University of Connecticut to its men’s basketball coach, Dan Hurley, who is fresh off a national championship. With a six-year package worth $32.1 million in salary, or about $5.33 million a year, Hurley will become Connecticut’s highest-paid state government employee ever.

But Hurley’s new salary is in line with the salaries commanded by national champion coaches in college basketball and football. The revenue and prestige brought to colleges by successful football and basketball teams are immense. For many years UConn’s men’s and women’s basketball teams have brought the university and indeed the whole state to national attention. If a UConn football team could ever win a tournament, or even sustain a winning record for a few years, the state might be glad to pay its coach even more than Hurley.

It doesn’t matter that UConn, along with the rest of public higher education in the state, lately has been pleading poverty. Successful college football and basketball programs are exempt from financial restraint nearly everywhere.

What deserves sharp questioning is another salary just awarded at UConn. The university has hired a new police chief, Gene Labonte, lately police chief at Salem State University in Massachusetts and formerly a Connecticut state police commander. He is to be paid $235,000 annually.

Perhaps because of its extravagance, the new chief’s salary was not included in the university’s announcement of his hiring. Pressed about it, a university spokeswoman said the salary is what the departing chief would have been paid had he remained on the job.

This was an admission that unlike private enterprises and even a few government agencies, UConn did not use the personnel turnover as an opportunity to save some money, despite all the poverty pleading done lately by the university.

Far worse than this, the new police chief’s salary is grossly disproportionate to other police chief salaries in Connecticut.

The Hartford police department has about 380 officers and its chief is paid $159,000 a year. The Bridgeport police department has about 300 officers and its chief is paid about the same as Hartford’s.

UConn’s police department has about 86 officers. So UConn’s new chief will be paid $76,000 more than the Hartford and Bridgeport chiefs for supervising 294 fewer officers than Hartford has and 214 fewer officers than Bridgeport has.

In addition, of course, the volume and severity of police work in Hartford, Bridgeport, and Connecticut’s other cities and larger suburbs are far beyond what UConn’s police deal with. City police face frequent murders, shootings, robberies, assaults, rapes, and the endless dysfunction and misery of compacted poverty. City police officers are frequently attacked and sometimes even killed.

By comparison with police work in the cities, police work at UConn is a vacation.

So could UConn not have found a competent police chief for a salary closer to what is paid where the most difficult police work in the state is done? Will Connecticut have to wait for a losing basketball season before someone in authority at the state Capitol begins putting critical questions to the university?

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HYPOCRISY ABOUT MINORS: More incongruity in Connecticut law popped up the other day. The state began prohibiting marriage by minors — people under 18. Previously minors could marry in the state if they got a court’s approval.

The premise of the new law is correct — that minors are not fit to make big decisions because they lack judgment and are too easily influenced and exploited. On the same premise Connecticut forbids not just minors but everyone under 21 from purchasing alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. Tattooing minors without parental permission is also outlawed.

Meanwhile state law allows minors to get abortions without the permission or even knowledge of their parents. State law also allows schools to conceal the gender dysphoria of students from their parents.

It’s not that minors are competent on some days and incompetent on others. It’s that some things in Connecticut are politically correct and others aren’t, and pursuing political correctness is more important than protecting kids.

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

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By Chris Powell

Since Lowell P. Weicker Jr. won five out of six major elections in Connecticut as a Republican or former Republican while the state drifted more Democratic, his political talent can’t be denied. But with his death this week at age 92, it may be argued how much better the state and the country are on account of him.

Few will disparage Weicker’s advocacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act and greater federal support for the mentally handicapped and other people in need. But is Connecticut better off for its state income tax and the duopoly two of its Indian tribes enjoy on casino gambling in the state, things for which Weicker was responsible as governor? Even if the state is better off for them, how they were arranged may remain cause for resentment.

Part of Weicker’s talent in his three terms as U.S. senator was his ability to get away with reversing his positions. He was elected to the Senate in 1970 as a supporter of the Vietnam War endorsed by President Nixon, and his campaign touted a photo of the two conferring at the White House. But as the war was being lost and support for it fell, Weicker began portraying himself as having been its opponent, and most liberals gave him a pass because he increasingly was voting with the Democrats.

During his term in the U.S. House of Representatives, Weicker supported government-sponsored prayer in public schools and impeaching liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Running for the Senate, Weicker discarded those positions.

During his campaign for governor in 1990 Weicker declared himself opposed to a state income tax and was elected in large part because voters saw him as a tough and independent guy who would force state government to straighten up and economize. In office he quickly figured that economizing would be too much work and political trouble, as it would have enraged the government class, which always has more staying power than mere taxpayers, and so instead he insisted on enacting an income tax after all.

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In a ghost-written autobiography flawed by contradictions and omissions, Weicker acknowledged having sometimes reversed himself on big issues. His explanation: “I matured and changed.”

That is, like some politicians who were not as self-righteous, Weicker blew with the wind.

Indeed, that was one way to construe his stand on the issue that made him a national figure — Watergate, the burglary of Democratic National Headquarters undertaken by Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972. Weicker could be credited for courage for condemning the Nixon administration’s corruption during the Senate’s famous hearings in 1973. But perhaps more than courage he had foresight. Nixon would not last in office another year, the 1974 election would be a Democratic sweep, and Connecticut would remain in its Democratic trend in 1976, when the senator would be up for re-election and could run on his integrity.

More of that integrity had worn off by 1988 when Weicker, seeking election to a fourth term in the Senate, was exposed as having taken lucrative “honoraria” — speaking fees — from special interests involved in legislation before the Senate, and even missing Senate votes so he could collect the money. Weicker’s Democratic challenger, then-Attorney General Joseph I. Lieberman, made an issue of the practice and it may have been decisive in Weicker’s narrow defeat.

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Weicker’s integrity came into question again in 1994 when he conferred the casino duopoly on the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan tribes. The Pequots showed their gratitude by making a $2 million contribution to a charity the governor chaired and controlled, the Special Olympics, which in turn provided jobs to some members of the governor’s administration as it drew to an end.

Years after he left office and it was seen that, contrary to what had been promised, the income tax had not stabilized its finances and state government was still incurring big deficits and craving higher taxes, Weicker deplored his successors for having unleashed state spending — as if that hadn’t been the idea of the income tax all along.

His biggest legacy to Connecticut is that he rescued the government class.

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

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By Chris Powell

Like the rest of the country, Connecticut is full of people who can’t afford their bills from hospitals. These people may have medical insurance with high deductibles or have exhausted their coverage because of chronic ailments. While nobody is going to prison for medical debt, it can impair credit records and hold people back in life, especially people who were poor to begin with.

Hospitals are often ready to sell the least collectible of their patient debts for a tiny fraction of their nominal value. So with its new budget state government is joining a movement to extinguish the medical debts of people who probably will never be able to repay them. The budget includes $6.5 million for distribution to nonprofit organizations that buy medical debt from hospitals and then cancel it. Advocates of the appropriation, including Governor Lamont, think it might eliminate as much as $650 million in medical debt to hospitals in Connecticut.

While this undertaking is well worth a try, journalism about it has been superficial to the point of misleading. For the debt involved here isn’t really being eliminated at all, merely transferred. Indeed, in effect the debt already has been transferred back to the hospitals that have been carrying it. It has been built into hospital operating costs and is being recovered either through efficiencies at the hospitals or higher charges to medical insurers and patients who pay for themselves.

Like nearly everything in medicine, medical debt elimination programs are mechanisms of cost shifting. Medical insurers negotiate lower rates with hospitals, causing them to reduce costs or shift them to the less insured. The government medical insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, pay less than what hospitals consider the full cost of treatment, so hospitals must economize again or recover the government discounts with higher charges elsewhere.

Hospitals cannot operate at a loss for long, and if government wants them to stay in business, it has to subsidize them directly or indirectly, as by increasing government insurance payments. If government pays, then all taxpayers do, along with countries that buy the federal government’s apparently infinite debt.

Medical care isn’t ever really free and medical debt can’t simply be written off. Someone always will be paying for the people who don’t pay. Such cost shifting is inevitable in any jurisdiction that won’t let people die in the street, but it’s not a magic wand.

Medical debt elimination will be a boon to hard-luck cases and the poor, but it won’t reduce the cost of medical care. It won’t improve medical insurance coverage. It won’t lift anyone out of poverty. It will only recognize that many people remain poor.

While medical debt elimination will repair some credit records, it won’t prevent the same people from getting stuck with medical debt again. It also will make medicine a little more complicated and may even give people the idea that hospital bills are easily evaded if they hold out long enough. It will validate the principle articulated by the French economist Frederic Bastiat, who two centuries ago anticipated the modern world. Government, Bastiat wrote, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

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GRAFFITI DISPLACES NEWS: One reason the General Assembly entertains many questionable proposals is the decline in journalism about the legislative process. Questionable proposals would die faster if local news organizations strove to do frequent surveys of legislators about their positions. As local news coverage has weakened, that kind of political journalism has disappeared.

Instead every other bit of graffiti and vandalism in Connecticut now is causing hysteria, being treated as the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan or Nazi Party and a tidal wave of “hate” sweeping the state. Such was the case with the recent defacement of the Hartford street mural that celebrates the Black Lives Matter movement.

Perhaps glad to be distracted from murder investigations, Hartford police quickly found the culprit — a local vagrant with a long criminal record and many pending charges. Since he’s not Donald Trump, reporters didn’t ask why he wasn’t already in jail.

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

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By Chris Powell

As they descended toward their target 2½ miles under the North Atlantic, the five people aboard the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel Titan were, at least superficially, aware of the risks they were taking for a close look at the wreck of RMS Titanic. They apparently had been compelled to provide a waiver of the company’s liability, a waiver that repeatedly noted that the journey could be fatal.

But no one had been killed yet on such expeditions, and the five could consider themselves heroic explorers.

Since the wreck of the Titanic already had been discovered and extensively photographed, there was no necessity for the trip. To the vessel’s pilot, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, it was a way of making a lot of money — $250,000 per passenger. For his passengers the trip was more than a bit of arrogance and wretched excess.

Because the vessel imploded at great depth, there is little chance that its occupants suffered or even knew they were being killed. As many in the submarine service and industry in Connecticut know, death by implosion in the deep is instantaneous, a matter of milliseconds, too fast for the human brain to perceive.

In exchange for this mercy there will be no bodies to recover.

Many prayers sought the rescue of the occupants of the Titan, and their loss has been felt throughout the world. Instead of the granting of those prayers, the world has gotten two valuable reminders: first, of the limits imposed on mankind by the natural world, and second, of the incredibly precious smallness of the environment in which humans can survive. Despite many science-fiction movies to the contrary, the environmentalists are right in one respect: There is no Planet B.

While the ocean bottom holds many secrets, as the infinity of the universe does, mankind hardly needs to learn them as much as how to get along with itself and improve life where it can be lived: on the surface of the planet. Lives can be expended far better than in pursuit of another look at a shipwreck, and while the deep will always have to be challenged now and then, the poet George Gordon Byron saw long ago that it would remain master.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin. His control
Stops with the shore. Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

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How should the country remember Daniel Ellsberg, who died the other day?

As secretary of state in 1971 Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America” for copying classified documents about the Vietnam war — the Pentagon Papers — and distributing them to news organizations.

Ellsberg was charged with espionage. But the Pentagon Papers revealed nothing of battlefield use to the enemy. Instead they showed that the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had been lying to the country about the war. Ellsberg was dangerous only to dishonest and criminal government officials.

Ellsberg might have been convicted except for the crimes the Nixon administration committed in pursuit of him, illegally wiretapping him and burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office. So the charges against him were dismissed.

The Ellsberg affair may have been understood best by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, a criminal himself. He was taped telling Nixon: “To the ordinary guy, all this is gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. …. You can’t trust the government. You can’t believe what they say. And you can’t rely on their judgment. The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.”

Has anything changed in 50 years?

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

By Chris Powell

Democrats seem more afraid than Republicans of the potential third-party presidential ticket being contemplated by former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman’s No Labels organization. The Democrats apparently believe that people who three years ago supported their nominee, President Biden, are more susceptible to a third-party candidate than people who supported former President Donald Trump three years ago. It is thought that Trump’s supporters from three years ago remain more enthusiastic than Biden’s and are less likely to be drawn away by an independent.

Some evidence for such Democratic fears came this week in a Rasmussen poll showing that despite Trump’s indictment for misappropriating classified government documents, he still led Biden in a rematch by 45% to 39%. Things might be worse for the Democrats now, since the poll was taken before Biden’s son, Hunter, accepted a lenient plea bargain on federal tax and gun charges, a deal fairly dubbed “the wrist slap heard ’round the world.” Meanwhile Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives claim to have documents showing the Bidens ran a lucrative foreign influence-peddling business while Joe was vice president.

Additionally, people in Connecticut may have noticed the irony that Hunter Biden’s plea bargain came just hours after his father spoke at a “gun safety” conference in Hartford. People in Connecticut and around the country did notice the president’s odd behavior at the conference, his bidding goodbye with “God save the queen, man,” a valediction for which there was no persuasive explanation.

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So strange as it may seem, by Election Day next year Biden could be the more tainted candidate for president. After all, in recent years misappropriating sensitive government documents and otherwise compromising national security also has been the practice of leading Democrats who nevertheless escaped indictment. The leniency of Hunter Biden’s plea bargain has reinforced the impression that the Democrats have brazenly politicized justice at the federal level.

If Democrats are right in thinking that Biden’s potential supporters are much less enthusiastic than Trump’s and more likely to be drawn away to a third-party candidate, it strengthens the case for No Labels to run a presidential candidate if neither party replaces its awful frontrunner. Indeed, either party probably could clinch the election early just by nominating a sane and sentient candidate of relatively good character. No Labels could save the Democrats.

Polls show Democrats overwhelmingly want their party to nominate someone other than Biden. The party’s supposed experts say there’s no chance of that if the president wants the nomination again. But without much renown or campaign spending, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy for president already draws 20% support among Democrats, some of whom may remember that “impossible” was also said about Eugene J. McCarthy’s challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. That challenge quickly pushed the president into retirement.

Back then presidential primary elections were unusual. Today most states have them and there is plenty of room for insurgency, something on which Trump has thrived. The Democrats might do well to try it.

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Failing insurgency in either party, the country may be left to sulk with H.L. Mencken’s definition from a century ago.

“Democracy,” Mencken wrote, “is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult white men to choose from, including many who are handsome and thousands who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of the state. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”

Could someone else really be worse than Trump or Biden?

Comparisons with contemporaneous presidents eventually prompted Mencken to retreat from his definition’s disparagement. “Coolidge,” Mencken reflected in his eulogy, “was preceded by one world saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? … He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”

No ideas and not a nuisance? Today that could be high praise.

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

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