Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Reading the campaign flyers, postcards, and handbills that have been flooding Connecticut’s mailboxes on the eve of a state election, people might think that personalities are the only reasons for voting.

Almost all candidates for the General Assembly profess to care, to support good schools, to want to reduce crime and restrain taxes, and so forth down the list of trivial generalities. Indeed, most of the text in any candidate’s flyer could be exchanged with the text in his rival’s flyer without misleading anyone.

It’s as if there are no policy issues to consider, except, with certain Democrats, abortion, though few if any candidates propose to change the state’s liberal abortion law, which follows the policy articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recently reversed decision in Roe v. Wade. In Connecticut abortion is just a much-needed distraction from inflation, open borders, corruption, failing schools, and transgenderism.

Even the legislative candidates of the minority party, the Republicans, seem unable to find anything meaningful to say and fail to specify any faults of the Democratic state administration. Apart from generating hysteria about abortion, mere name recognition seems to be the only objective of the campaign publicity of the legislative candidates. Issues of policy are left to the candidates for governor, an omission that might seem moronic.

Maybe policy issues are omitted because many candidates, particularly but not exclusively the newcomers, know little about issues. But issues also may be omitted because even the newcomers may know that to discuss issues risks alienating voters as much as it may gain their favor.

Connecticut is full of special interests, and a candidate’s taking a position on a serious issue may evoke indignation from one interest group or another and prompt it to run its own campaign against the candidate.

So in this respect even the newcomers with nothing to say and the candidates who talk only about abortion may be politically savvy after all, figuring that what you don’t say won’t hurt you, though saying nothing leaves voters no wiser about the challenges facing the state.

Even so, practically every day generates what [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] be an issue for state legislative candidates.

For example, no governor in modern times has bestowed more financial patronage on interest groups and individual voters during a re-election campaign than Governor Lamont has done.

Last week the governor announced $47 million in state grants ranging from $2.2 million to $9.8 million to 10 groups that are supposed to assist small businesses. Some of these groups have little record of performance, and what they achieve with the money other than employ Democrats almost surely will never be audited.

Even most of what state government does directly at greater expense is never audited for results. Two weeks ago it was reported that the state Public Health Department had failed to determine whether COVID-19 test providers that were paid millions of dollars by state government also collected insurance payments for the same tests, payments that should have been refunded to the state. Nothing is likely to come of this either.

Also two weeks ago state government mailed 248,000 checks totaling $42 million and averaging $170 as a bonus in the state’s earned income tax credit for low-income households. When a Republican governor, John G. Rowland, mailed special tax rebate checks to voters as he sought re-election in 1998, Democrats denounced the gimmick as bribery. Today the bribes are a Democratic idea.

And the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has just ordered Connecticut’s two largest electric companies to give low-income households discounts ranging from 10 to 50% on their electric bills. State government won’t be reimbursing the utilities for the money. No, the discounts will be financed by higher rates for everyone else. Everyone else will blame the utilities, not state government, but the utilities won’t complain, lest the regulators hit them again in revenge.

This discount scheme is essentially a sneaky state tax increase to pay for welfare benefits, a tax increase on which state legislators did not have to vote. This too might be a good campaign issue for any legislative candidates who aspire to relevance.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Another state election campaign has prompted candidates to pander to parents and teachers about the wonderfulness of Connecticut’s public schools. Of course neither parents nor teachers want to hear that their schools are not really so wonderful. Instead parents want to believe that, as in Lake Wobegon, all students are above average. While teachers know different, they don’t want parents to know, lest questions be raised.

But this week a rude blast about education in Connecticut was delivered by the new test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, “the nation’s report card.”

According to the NAEP report, which measures the performance of fourth- and eighth-graders, only 35% of Connecticut’s students in those two grades are proficient in English, and only 37% of fourth-graders and 30% of eighth-graders are proficient in math. Compared to the results of the most recent previous NAEP tests, taken in 2019, Connecticut’s new scores for English are down 6% for both fourth- and eighth-graders, and for math down 8% for fourth-graders and 9% for eighth-graders — sharp declines.

Of course everyone will think these declines were caused mostly by the interruption to schooling during the virus epidemic of the last two years. But no — for Connecticut’s scores were [ITALICS] much [END ITALICS] higher in 2011 and had fallen sharply by 2019. That is, educational performance in Connecticut, as measured by the NAEP, began a sharp fall [ITALICS] nine years before [END ITALICS] the epidemic.

Worse, the decline in the state’s new math scores as students advance from fourth to eighth grade — dropping from 37% proficiency to 30% — suggests that the performance of Connecticut students actually [ITALICS] deteriorates [END ITALICS] with their advancement.

Why? Maybe because after a few years in school students realize that, under the state’s only absolute educational policy — social promotion — their effort has no bearing on their advancement.

The NAEP report also finds that the performance of Connecticut students has fallen relative to students in other states.

Education experts and elected officials boast about Connecticut’s slowly rising high school graduation rate. But the rising graduation rate correlates with falling proficiency. Indeed, graduation rates may be rising precisely [ITALICS] because [END ITALICS] proficiency is falling. For social promotion has made graduation much easier, almost effortless, requiring no learning, just some attendance.

The state’s infamous racial and ethnic gaps in student performance endure in the new NAEP results, but so does another gap disclosed in the data but overlooked — the gap between the performance of students eligible for free lunches and students not eligible. This gap is almost unchanged since 1998, indicating that the racial and ethnic performance gaps result mainly from household poverty.

Since household poverty is largely a matter of a lack of parents and attention given to children at home, and since that failure cannot be discussed in polite company in Connecticut, presumably the gaps can never be closed.

Education experts and elected officials will construe the new NAEP report to mean only that Connecticut should keep increasing spending on schools. Since he got to Washington, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly Connecticut’s education commissioner, has been little more than a shill for the teacher unions, often calling for raising teacher salaries. But that is where most increases in education spending long have been going, teacher unions being so influential politically. Connecticut teachers have obtained nearly the highest salaries in the country.

Ironically, because of the reflexive impulse to spend more in the face of educational failure, teacher unions profit more from failure than success. But spending more on education is what Connecticut has been doing since enacting the Education Enhancement Act in 1986, which began 35 years of raising spending and tinkering with financial aid formulas with little effect on student performance and the racial and ethnic achievement gaps.

Since the NAEP data shows that student performance in Connecticut was declining steadily long before the virus epidemic, is there any [ITALICS] educational [END ITALICS] rationale for spending more on education, or just a political rationale?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut’s government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

As a stalwart of the Democratic left, where much politically correct demagoguery originates, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal may deserve the P.C. demagoguery hurled at him last week by Fox News and his Republican challenger, Leora Levy. But it was demagoguery all the same.

Levy touted a Fox News report asserting that as a leader of his high school class in 1963 Blumenthal organized a community fundraising event called “Slave Day” in which students donated their labor to charity, and that, three years later, when he wrote for the Harvard University student newspaper, Blumenthal used the word “negroes.”

This, Fox and Levy maintain, was racist — as if “slave” isn’t a perfectly good word, as if it signified something worse than the work of students for a good cause, as if some harm had been meant or done, and as if “negro” then wasn’t also a perfectly good word being used even by civil rights leaders — 15 times in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address in 1963. Even now, while “negro” has lost favor to “Black,” it still means the same thing.

Whatever Blumenthal’s faults, racism is not among them. And even if anything racist could be found in his conduct as a student more than 50 years ago, it is already political precedent that possible misconduct as a juvenile is relevant only for Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.

The attack on Blumenthal by Fox News and Levy couldn’t have been dumber. But maybe that’s what happens when complaints of racism are made so recklessly and opportunistically by the political left and easily intimidate so many.

* * *

Television commercials for Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign contend that Connecticut is thriving under his administration and even is gaining much middle-class housing.

But the official data shows that the state’s economy is weak relative to the rest of the country, and opinion polls show that people don’t feel so prosperous as they worry about inflation soaring and the prices of necessities rising or remaining much higher than they were a year ago.

As for housing, Connecticut’s shortage is widely conceded and is most complained about by the governor’s own supporters.

Indeed, if the economy is doing so well, why is government so busy creating more programs to subsidize people who are struggling? Those subsidies don’t suggest prosperity but impoverishment, with people less able to support themselves and more dependent on government.

Much more than the new and scattershot subsidy programs, the country needs to strengthen the program that provides the basic social safety net for everyone, and does so as a matter of right rather than political patronage: Social Security. U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, long has been pressing legislation to do just that, to increase benefits and finance them by making the Social Security tax more progressive with a 2% tax on incomes above $400,000.

Unfortunately, despite their majority in Congress and control of the White House, the Democrats have failed to enact Larson’s bill, and Republicans in Congress have shown no interest in strengthening Social Security.

The loss of Larson’s bill may be the worst consequence of the likely Republican majority in the next Congress.

* * *

SO CUT YOUR OWN PAY: Projecting annual deficits of more than $100 million, the State Colleges and Universities system is raising tuition by 3% at the four regional universities, Central, Eastern, Southern, and Western.

The system’s president, Terrence Cheng, insists that there’s no other way. “Contractual obligations are real,” he says. “We’re not going to cut our way out of this.”

That is, no state agency dares to economize with payroll. No, payroll is inviolable, and presumably this principle starts with Cheng himself, whose annual salary is more than $350,000. The three other college system executives whose questionable conduct recently cost the system $750,000 in a lawsuit charging sex discrimination are paid between $228,000 and $256,000 annually.

So yes, let the students pay more, even as the college system’s enrollment keeps declining because higher education costs more than it’s worth.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Another front has opened in Connecticut’s flag war, this time in Stonington, where, responding to a complaint and acting on legal advice, the school superintendent determined that the “rainbow” or gay pride flags teachers had placed in their classrooms are political and told teachers to remove them.

Whereupon students and others complained that the flags are necessary to show the school system’s egalitarianism, and the teacher union asked for a private meeting with the Board of Education’s labor committee to discuss “inclusion.” Maybe only a teacher union and a school board would miss the irony of excluding the public from a meeting about “inclusion,” but then Connecticut has seen many other indications that public education actually despises the public and much prefers to make and implement policy in secret.

After being subjected to this political pressure, the superintendent reversed herself on the rainbow flags, decided that they are not political after all, and withdrew her order to remove them from classrooms.

But of course the rainbow flag [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] political and propagandistic, lending itself to various uses and interpretations, and so doesn’t belong in government settings. If the flag signifies the acceptance and equality of people regardless of sexual orientation, so do the national and Connecticut flags, insofar as federal and state law prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

But the rainbow flag goes farther. To some it also means the right of biologically male students to use women’s restrooms and participate in women’s sports, thereby nullifying Title IX of federal civil rights law. To others it means the right of school systems to treat the gender dysphoria of students and even facilitate their gender transition without the knowledge of their parents. The flag is used in various controversial contexts. There is and can be no official interpretation of it.

Municipal governments lately have been discovering that their endorsement is being sought for many flags, and that allowing some to fly on government property but not others raises a First Amendment issue. Some municipalities have decided, wisely, to stay out of the flag wars and confine themselves to government’s own flags.

Of course every school system and government agency should follow the laws against discrimination by sexual orientation. But a rainbow flag is not necessary to establish and publicize such a policy. Schools can act just as employers act at government direction and post notices of the policies required by law. If students of minority sexual orientation are really as timid as claimed by the advocates of putting the rainbow flag in classrooms and can’t be comfortable in school without the flag being displayed, notices of non-discrimination policy can be posted in every classroom, even on every student’s desk.

But neither such notices nor rainbow flags themselves are any defense against bullying, abuse, and other misconduct. The only defense is strong public administration, and Connecticut’s schools are notorious for their lack of standards and discipline for students and employees alike.

Stonington’s school administration has just shown itself to be another pushover.

* * *

CHILDISH NAME CALLING: Campaign commercials are often nasty and sometimes brutal and even deceitful. But Connecticut has seen few as disgraceful as one being aired by Governor Lamont, a Democrat seeking re-election.

The Lamont commercial depicts a bunch of people making fun of the name of the governor’s Republican opponent, Bob Stefanowski. They call him “Stefa-nasty,” though the Republican has maintained a softer and more informed tone than when he ran four years ago.

Name calling used to be considered childish and stupid, but apparently no longer at the highest level of state government.

Commercials for the re-election of 5th District Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes have been attacking her Republican challenger, former state Sen. George Logan, signifying that the Democrats consider that race unusually competitive. But now commercials for the re-election of Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal are attacking his Republican opponent, Donald Trump devotee Leora Levy, implying that Democrats think even Blumenthal, who has been in elective office for 38 years, may be in trouble too. Could it be?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

What happens in Connecticut when a 15-year-old lives in a home with abusive and neglectful parents, drug abuse, and violence, ends up on the street, joins his friends in car thefts, gets high on marijuana, steals another car, leads police on a chase, drives the wrong way on a one-way street, strikes other cars, is cornered in a parking lot, puts the car into reverse to escape, knocks over an officer, and is fatally shot by him?

In Connecticut what happens is that the boy’s family, who messed him up, gets $500,000 from the city of Bridgeport to settle a lawsuit claiming that his death was actually a federal civil rights violation.

This presumably will be the final chapter of the story of Jayson Negron, whose life ended in a fairly predictable way in 2017 and reflected the widespread neglect of Connecticut’s children and the failure of government to do much about it.

Ironically the settlement was approved by the Bridgeport City Council this week just as Connecticut, mourning two police officers murdered by a drunken madman in Bristol, sought to show support for police generally. Though the settlement falsely implied that the Bridgeport officer was in the wrong in the case of the young car thief, it did not provoke much comment around the state.

Neither side in the lawsuit wants to talk about the award. The City Council may have treated it as a nuisance settlement recommended by the city’s insurer to avoid the risk that a judge or jury, sympathizing with the boy’s survivors despite the facts, might produce an adverse verdict and a larger award.

But the officer who shot the boy had been fully vindicated by a state’s attorney’s investigation that, incidentally, showed that the boy’s supporters, trying to provoke outrage, repeatedly lied when they claimed that the car the boy was driving was not stolen as police said it was.

Until recently Connecticut had been failing to exact the necessary accountability from its police officers. New law establishes the office of inspector general to investigate police use of force, curtails the immunity of officers from lawsuits, and prevents the state police from concealing complaints of misconduct. The new law is said to be demoralizing police, but then any greater accountability would. Accountability in government is a necessity and must take precedence over employee morale.

But the settlement of the lawsuit in Bridgeport was not a necessity but a convenience, an excuse for the city not to support its police when they are in the right and an excuse for government not to demand accountability from wrongdoers.

Jayson Negron became a danger to the public because his family catastrophically failed him. Now they’re getting rich at public expense, some people will call it justice, and, in this age of political correctness, no one in authority will dare to contradict them.

The “justice for Jayson” for which the boy’s defenders clamor would have been decent parents.

* * *

WHITHER COLUMBUS?: But there is also plenty of lawlessness on the official level in Bridgeport.

For two years Mayor Joe Ganim has been expropriating the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood at Seaside Park in the city, though, according to the city’s legal department, the city’s Parks Commission, which has been protesting the expropriation, is the statue’s exclusive custodian.

It’s not clear what the mayor wants to do with the statue. First he had it placed in a barn at the park and lately had it moved to an Italian social club.

Of course the mayor may worry that the statue risks vandalism if it remains in a public place, just as Columbus statues in Waterbury and elsewhere have been vandalized by people who consider him an agent of brutal Spanish imperialism more than a daring and world-changing explorer. (Strange that the people who are so upset with Columbus that they vandalize his statues don’t seem to have vandalized anything, or even protested, in regard to their own country’s recent imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

In any case the Columbus statue in Bridgeport is for the Parks Commission to dispose. Expropriating and hiding it just avoids the decision that needs to be made in the open by the responsible agency.

The statue’s expropriation also adds to Mayor Ganim’s sorry record of lawbreaking.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Since the government of Saudi Arabia is repressive, should people care that the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, has been doing consulting work for a Saudi company in which the Saudi government is invested?

Maybe people should care, but not before they decide whether they care that so many of the consumer goods they buy come from China, whose government is even more repressive than Saudi Arabia’s.

Leading Connecticut Democrats criticizing Stefanowski for his Saudi business, including Governor Lamont, are missing the irony of their criticism.

Stefanowski says his Saudi business involves a hydrogen-based “green” energy project that would cut use of oil-based fuels that produce pollution and are believed to accelerate climate change.

Meanwhile President Biden, a Democrat, having pledged to ruin the U.S. oil industry, lately has asked not just Saudi Arabia but also Venezuela, another government with a repressive regime, to increase oil production so the United States doesn’t have to. The president’s appeal to those repressive regimes in pursuit of more oil hasn’t bothered Connecticut Democrats at all.

Apparently Saudi Arabia is bad when a Republican pursues “green” energy there but not when a Democratic president goes there for oil.

* * *

GUNS AREN’T THE PROBLEM: A few weeks ago a statement from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign promised “four more years of gun safety.” But Connecticut hasn’t had even one year of gun safety, no more than the rest of the country has had one.

For too many guns are already in private hands and the underlying problem isn’t guns at all.

Last week two Bristol police officers were shot to death and a third wounded by a drunken madman who set an ambush for them. Also last week four people were shot in separate incidents in a 36-hour period in Hartford, and three people were shot, one fatally, in downtown Bridgeport.

On top of that, police throughout the state told the Meriden Record-Journal that Connecticut’s new juvenile crime law isn’t reducing juvenile crime, particularly the epidemic of car thefts.

The law allows police to keep arrested juveniles in custody for eight hours, an increase of two, while police seek a detention order from a court. But Meriden Police Chief Roberto Rosado says this only consumes more police resources, forcing officers to spend more time watching the juveniles in custody.

The courts, the governor, and the General Assembly don’t want juveniles confined but instead referred to “the help they need.” But young troublemakers laugh at this, and the “help” they actually [ITALICS] get [END ITALICS] is often ineffectual. Locking them up longer may be the only way to deter them.

“Sometimes,” Chief Rosado says, “we’re seeing juveniles arrested multiple times on stolen motor vehicle charges and they continually get released from our custody to their parents.” That is, of course, if the juveniles even have parents in the normal sense, which they often don’t.

State law also prohibits police from chasing a juvenile offender in a car unless a violent felony has been committed. That may be sensible for public safety but Wallingford police Sgt. Stephen Jaques says juvenile offenders now know the police can’t chase them when they speed off in a stolen car.

From the shootings to the car thefts to the rise in reckless driving and bad behavior generally, these problems indicate social disintegration, hastened by government’s crippling response to the recent virus epidemic. Ordinary legislation isn’t likely to fix them.

Nor are the problems likely to be fixed by the hundreds of millions of dollars recently appropriated by government in the name of mental health care and training for people to become counselors.

Amid the “great resignation,” government’s paying people not to work, and the growing desire of people to work from home rather than at an office or factory, there is not enough labor. There are many job openings but the labor participation rate remains low.

The country seems increasingly zombified, with people suddenly going nuts. Legislation attempts remediation but is not succeeding, so where is the investigation into the problem’s cause? And without an investigation into the cause, how can there be confidence that any policy response will be relevant?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

For years environmental extremists and animal lovers have been telling Connecticut residents that they must learn to live with the state’s growing population of bears. But live with them as roommates?

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection reports that as of last month bears have broken into homes in the state 65 times this year, the largest number of bear burglaries since 2004.

According to the environmental agency, so far this year bears in Connecticut have caused structural damage 286 times, injured livestock 146 times, injured pets 24 times, damaged vehicles 24 times, damaged agriculture 77 times, and damaged trash cans and birdfeeders more than 2,000 times, an increase over previous years. This year some houses have been broken into by bears more than once.

The increase is blamed mainly on the increase in the state’s bear population, now estimated at more than 1,200, and the increase in population may be blamed on the animals’ having begun to sense that they are a protected species in Connecticut. The official advice about dealing with bears on your property is only to shoo them over to your neighbor’s property.

While bears are not equally distributed throughout the state, in the last year they have been spotted in many towns and even cities. A “fair share” bear policy would allocate seven bears to each of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities. That’s where protected species policy for bears will take the state.

Connecticut’s bears are seldom aggressive toward people, but they are still a danger and nuisance, just like coyotes and bobcats. But while state law allows hunting of most animals, including rabbits, woodchucks, and squirrels, as well as some birds, bears and bobcats are protected. This makes no practical sense, only political sense, since for some reason the environmental extremists and animal lovers have made bears and bobcats their favorites and have scared state legislators out of protecting the public.

Bears and bobcats won’t go extinct if Connecticut authorizes a hunting season to push them back toward the north woods, and the state will be better for their departure. Besides, extinctions are not always regrettable. Few in Connecticut miss wolves, which were hunted out of the state a couple of centuries ago. Who wants great white sharks prowling Long Island Sound? Who isn’t glad that the dinosaurs are long gone?

Better to start shooting bears in the northwest hills than to have to start shooting them when they are nearly everywhere every day.

* * *

What is meant by the proposed state constitutional amendment on early voting, which voters will be asked to approve on Election Day next month?

The amendment means mainly that the General Assembly and the governor will be authorized to make big changes in election procedures, changes that have not yet even been formally proposed.

The general idea is to allow people to vote ahead of Election Day. But how far ahead? A week? A month? The amendment doesn’t say, leaving the issue to ordinary legislation.

What would the manner of voting be? Would it be in-person voting at town halls and other designated polling places? Or would it be a vast expansion of the absentee ballot system, which puts intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes? Ordinary legislation would decide that too.

Both these issues easily could have been settled by the amendment itself.

The amendment’s vagueness and broad grant of authority prompt skepticism from two Republican legislators from Wolcott, Rep. Gale L. Mastrofrancesco and Sen. Rob Sampson.

Mastrofrancesco notes that the liberalized rules for absentee balloting that were enacted during the recent virus epidemic essentially allow anyone to vote ahead of Election Day, so “we already have early voting.”

Sampson calls the proposed amendment a “blank check” for the legislature to change the state Constitution on a sensitive subject.

Early voting might be progress if it required voting in person and the early voting period was short. But the more absentee balloting there is, the more potential for corruption. Connecticut should have been warned by the recent absentee ballot scandals in Bridgeport and Stamford. Imagine them extended to the whole state.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Are Republican candidates in Connecticut helping or hurting themselves with the lawn signs for their campaigns?

Most lawn signs for Democratic candidates in the state identify the candidates with their party, but few if any Republican signs do. If a candidate’s sign fails to identify his party, you can be pretty sure he or she is a Republican.

This long has been so, and the rationale for it has been that Republicans are such a small share of Connecticut’s electorate — only about 20%, outnumbered by Democrats by almost two to one and outnumbered again by unaffiliated voters by slightly more than two to one — that the Republican label is a drag and that candidates won’t be given a second look if they are known to be Republicans.

This rationale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For when the signs imply that candidates are ashamed of the party that has endorsed them, why [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] they be given a second look?

Of course the Republican Party in Connecticut and nationally is horribly tainted by the antics of former President Donald Trump. Yet Trump’s taint is more a matter of personality and character than the policies of his late administration, while the Democratic Party is now horribly tainted by both the policies [ITALICS] and [END ITALICS] personal characteristics of President Biden, including his ever more embarrassing episodes of dementia on stage.

Indeed, more Democratic candidates seem to be avoiding Biden than Republican candidates are avoiding Trump.

While party registration in Connecticut has been so imbalanced for decades, during that time the state nevertheless has elected two Republican governors, a Republican senator, and three Republican U.S. representatives, giving them long tenure, indicating that moderate Republicanism can appeal to a majority here. But moderate Republicans are not likely to be elected in Connecticut unless they plainly identify themselves as such.

That’s why the most effective television commercial of the current campaign in the state may be that of former state Sen. George Logan, the Republican nominee in the 5th U.S. House District. In the commercial Logan touts his moderation and faults the Democrats for trying to put him in a box marked “typical Republican.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Logan is the Republican congressional candidate Democrats worry about most. (It doesn’t hurt that is he Black.) The Republican ticket in Connecticut has more than a few other moderates but they don’t make the point as well.

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 30 years after he left the presidency, and it often worked. They may be running against Trump for another 30 years. Connecticut Republicans should draw the necessary conclusion or else change the party’s name to something they dare to put on their lawn signs.

* * *

SLANT BEATS ENDORSEMENT: Many newspapers around the country are forswearing endorsements of candidates, as the Hartford Courant announced it would do the other day. This is being dressed up as an improvement in civic virtue but is really more a cynical financial calculation.

That is, as civic engagement and literacy decline, editorial pages are often found to be the least read sections of newspapers, and as the newspaper industry itself declines, many newspapers no longer staff their editorial pages seriously and so can’t produce meaningful endorsements anyway.

This doesn’t mean that newspapers are no longer political. To the contrary, most major papers are more partisan now than they have been in 50 years as they move their partisanship from their editorial pages to their news pages.

The selection of every news story always has been a political act in the broadest sense. But not so long ago fairness was considered the highest virtue in journalism after accuracy. The favorable and unfavorable things about candidates were both to be reported. Not so much today. For example, many newspapers and broadcast networks eagerly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax about Trump while they dismissed as a hoax the genuine and grossly incriminating material on Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop.

Slanting and spinning news coverage for or against candidates can be far more effective than devising reasoned arguments for or against them. Today it requires more work than ever for voters to keep themselves reliably informed.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Election officials throughout Connecticut are properly worried by the sharp increase in absentee ballot applications being requested by political campaigns and distributed to voters who have not requested them. The practice will cause confusion and facilitate fraud.

Anyone can request an absentee ballot application for himself or others, and applications can be downloaded from the secretary of the state’s internet site or obtained from a municipal clerk’s office. Applications are to be signed by the voter and delivered to the municipal clerk’s office, which will hand the voter an absentee ballot or mail one to him. The voter is to complete it, put it in a secure envelope, sign the envelope, place the ballot envelope inside a mailing envelope, and mail or deliver the ballot package to the municipal clerk.

It’s a good system for protecting ballot confidentiality. But an absentee voter never has to appear in person before any election official. Nor, as a practical matter, does an absentee voter even have to live in the municipality in which he would vote, nor even still be alive. Of course the law requires that much but seldom does anyone check. As long as a voter’s name remains on the voter rolls, an absentee ballot can be cast in his name.

That’s why the mass collection and distribution of absentee ballot applications by political campaigns is so risky. Campaign workers familiar with their towns are able to discern which people on the rolls pay attention and vote regularly and which don’t, and the latter become the target for voting fraud.

Indeed, most election fraud and controversy involve absentee ballots, since the absentee ballot process inevitably separates a voter from the casting of his vote. The ongoing litigation over the Democratic primary for state representative in the 127th House District has revealed one absentee-ballot fraud and screw-up after another. But in-person voting at polling places, where voters must produce identification and complete and cast their ballots in the presence of election officials, is almost impossible to corrupt.

Increasing the security of absentee ballots would be difficult. Being posted on the internet, the absentee ballot form is available to anyone at any time and can be printed and distributed in infinite numbers.

To confirm that absentee ballot requests are genuine, election officials could be required to make personal contact with applicants, by telephone or face-to-face interview, but the expense would be great. As a practical matter probably the most that can be done is to minimize causes for use of absentee ballots and minimize the handling of ballots and applications.

State law authorizes the use of absentee ballots in six circumstances, all of them sensible. But it might be good for the law to restrict any person from distributing more than two absentee ballot applications, thus taking candidates and campaign workers out of the absentee ballot business.

Of course it would be difficult to police such a restriction, but candidates and campaign workers still could encourage voters to obtain absentee ballot applications on their own, since it could hardly be easier.

In any case, the less in-person voting, the more election fraud.

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For many years society and the federal government, as codified in Title IX of civil rights law, presumed that there were two sexes, male and female; that in general males were physically stronger; and, as a result, that fairness required publicly financed institutions operating competitive sports programs to maintain programs exclusively for women, programs that were equal to those provided for men, for otherwise athletic opportunity for women would tend to be diminished.

Not any more. Lately government, under the pressure of a bizarre new ideology, sustained by political correctness, is presuming that there is [ITALICS] no [END ITALICS] physical difference between the sexes, that men can become women and women can become men just by [ITALICS] thinking [ITALICS] it [END ITALICS], and that men who think themselves women must be permitted to compete against women in athletic events.

In a case arising from Connecticut, the issue of men participating in women’s sports — the nullification of Title IX and the progress achieved thereunder — has reached a federal appellate court. The law may change but biology won’t.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign rally last week in New Britain for the re-election of U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes may be considered a success, since the vice president didn’t perform as she has done elsewhere recently, as by declaring the southern border “secure” and proclaiming an alliance with [ITALICS] North [END ITALICS] Korea.

But Harris would not have come if Hayes wasn’t vulnerable to the Republican nominee, George Logan, a former state senator who is making a good impression in the 5th District, the state’s least liberal congressional district.

Reinforcing the impression of Hayes’ vulnerability was the rally’s obsession with the abortion issue, which seems like the only issue Connecticut Democrats want to discuss amid soaring inflation, uncontrolled immigration, and deteriorating social conditions under the national Democratic administration.

Yes, some Republicans in Congress say they would outlaw or sharply restrict abortion nationally with federal legislation. But with many Republican congressmen and nearly all Democratic congressmen opposed, there is no chance of that happening even if Republicans win majorities in both houses. Besides, since Logan supports abortion rights, the election in the 5th District will have little impact on the issue.

Indeed, in Connecticut the abortion issue serves only to excite the Democratic left, which may be why it is being pressed — to keep those partisans enthused.

While the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, Leora Levy, purports to want to legislate against abortion (after having supported abortion rights and having changed her position to win the sparsely attended Republican primary), she is already waffling and evading on the issue, has little campaign money, and is hard to take seriously.

Ironically, the prevailing position on abortion among Connecticut Republicans, including the opinion of the party’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, is actually what polls say is the majority opinion in the state and nationally, the moderate position. That is the policy articulated by the Supreme Court’s now-overthrown decision in Roe v. Wade and by the policy established by Connecticut law — unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability and government regulation afterward. Connecticut Republicans also tend to support requiring parental notification for abortions for minors.

While Connecticut news organizations, most leaning Democratic, don’t pursue the irony, in Connecticut the prevailing Democratic position on abortion is the extreme position: all abortion all the time. That is, unrestricted abortion right up to the moment of birth, including the abortion of viable fetuses, even babies emerging crying from the womb. The Democrats also oppose requiring parental notification of abortion for minors, so that sex offenses against minors can be hidden.

Governor Lamont and all members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, profess to support the Democratic congressional legislation called the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would require states to allow late-term abortion. That legislation is the Democratic Party’s own overthrow of Roe v. Wade.

But while they take the moderate and majority position on abortion, Connecticut Republicans fear Democratic demagoguery so much that they don’t want to talk about the issue at all. The Republicans seem to think that voters are not smart enough to make distinctions, and they may be cowed by the political maxim that if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

But if, as polls in the race for governor suggest, the Republicans are losing anyway, there may be nothing to lose by trying to turn the tables. For in supporting late-term abortion and opposing parental notification, the Democrats are the extremists and the Republicans are letting them get away with it.

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TOO LATE ON BANKS: Last week Governor Lamont and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal followed Attorney General William Tong in pledging to hold M&T Bank accountable for the malfunctions and layoffs resulting from its acquisition of People’s United Bank. It’s as if nobody could have imagined that combining two big banks would slash competition and employment.

Enforcement of antitrust law might have prevented the disaster, but the governor, senator, and attorney general didn’t protect Connecticut when the state most needed it. [ITALICS] They [END ITALICS] should be held accountable too.

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Chris Powell has been writing about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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