Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Long ago a Sunday installment of the newspaper comic strip “B.C.” depicted a caveman mischievously watching a sleeping dinosaur from behind a boulder. The caveman pulled a thorn off a bush, crept up to the dinosaur, jammed the thorn into its foot, and rushed back behind the boulder. The dinosaur awakened in terrible pain and hopped around on its other feet. Whereupon the caveman reappeared, calmed the dinosaur, and removed the thorn, earning the dinosaur’s everlasting gratitude and devotion.

Another caveman, watching from behind another boulder, called out: “My boy, you’re ready for politics.”

That comic strip should have been Exhibit A at last week’s hearing of the state Insurance Department on the application of two medical insurance companies to raise rates by about 20%.

Politicians denounced the increases as unfair and unaffordable, as if nearly everything isn’t exploding in price and as if the real inflation rate isn’t at least twice the heavily doctored official rate of 9% amid the U.S. government’s wildly excessive money creation.

The inflation irony is even bigger with medical insurance in Connecticut. That’s because for 10 years state government has imposed on hospitals a tax that has extracted from them hundreds of millions of dollars more than state government has reimbursed them for care of the indigent. The extra hospital tax revenue has been used for state government’s general purposes.

To recover the losses imposed by state government, hospitals have raised prices to paying patients, most of whose bills are paid by insurers, which in turn have raised their premiums.

Unlike the state’s sales tax, the hospital tax never shows up on patient or insurance bills. People wrongly assume that all the money they pay goes to those awful hospitals and insurance companies. The tax burden is hidden in prices.

That is, state government has used the hospital tax to divert to hospitals and insurance companies the political blame for government’s own costs, the same way state government long has used its “gross receipts tax” on oil products. While state and federal taxes on the retail sale of gasoline are known and publicized, the “gross receipts tax” is not. People have no idea it’s there and wrongly assume that the awful big oil companies are getting all the money they spend at the pump apart from the retail tax. Again, the “gross receipts tax” is hidden in prices.

To Governor Lamont’s credit, to settle a potentially expensive lawsuit by the hospitals, two years ago state government acknowledged that its hospital tax racket had gone too far, and the state began reducing the tax and increasing hospital reimbursements for welfare patients, just as this year state government temporarily cut retail gasoline taxes when gas prices took off.

But state government is still using the hospital tax to raise money for general purposes — estimated this year at $49 million more than state reimbursements to hospitals for indigent patients — and thus to divert to hospitals and insurers the blame for government’s own costs.

Though most Connecticut hospitals are nonprofit, they remain a big source of state tax revenue. Recently Yale-New Haven Hospital has claimed to be the state’s largest taxpayer. But it is a fair question whether nonprofit hospitals should be taxed at all, except for the ease of hiding the tax burden there.

Connecticut’s hospitals have another financial complaint against state government. It is that their reimbursements for welfare patients — people on Medicaid — are only about half of what Medicare pays and much less than the actual cost of treatment. The hospitals estimate that the underpayment for Medicaid patients last year was more than $900 million. This underpayment is essentially another hidden tax, eventually paid largely by medical insurers.

Yes, insurance company and hospital executives are often extravagantly paid. But when they are, they pay high income taxes, and the extravagance of their salaries is small compared to state government’s hidden taxes on hospitals and medical insurers.

State government’s shifting to hospitals what should be its own costs should be part of the discussion of medical insurance rates, even if the insurers won’t raise the issue, being too frightened of retaliation from elected officials if the secret of their hidden taxes ever gets out.

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

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By Chris Powell

Languages belong to those who use them. Dictionaries standardize language on the basis of prevailing usage. If users want to be clearly understood, they will follow those standards pretty closely.

But the transgenderism craze that is sweeping politically correct circles, which include many news organizations, is upending and mangling the English language here and there, especially in regard to pronouns.

People who don’t want to be recognized by their biological genders, some of whom claim that there are many other genders, are clamoring for new pronouns and have devised more than 70. But it is hard to imagine that many people will take the time to learn them all, much less abase themselves by trying to use them when hardly anyone else will understand them either and when using them will imply that the user believes that there really are more than two biological genders.

The recently invented pronouns hamper rather than facilitate understanding. That may be why some gender deniers or concealers want to scrap the individual gender-specific pronouns “he” and “she” and be cited with the plural pronoun “they,” English lacking a gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since “they” signifies plural, its use in regard to an individual is silly and can only cause confusion.

In a free country people are free to invent words and euphemize to advance their politics. Already in politically correct circles “illegal immigrants” have become “undocumented people,” as if they inadvertently left their passports and visas at home before heading to the border. People undergoing sex-change surgery or therapy are said to be getting “gender-affirming care,” as if they had no gender at birth. Homosexuals are now “men who have sex with men.”

Maybe heterosexuals will become “people who have sex with people of a different gender.”

But in a free country people also are free to reject euphemizing perfectly good words and phrases and to reject denial of biology.

Besides, it’s simple to avoid mangling the language when dealing with people who don’t want their gender presumed upon by pronouns. That is: Just avoid pronouns where people don’t want “he” or “she” and, instead, use names repeatedly, making them possessive as necessary. It will sound awkward but will preserve clarity without offending anyone, even though people increasingly [ITALICS] want [END ITALICS] to be offended, since it confers power over the easily intimidated.

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Lawyer jokes may be the funniest, most cynical, and most accurate about the human condition, and the material for another one is gathering in Connecticut’s courts.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim is trying again to recover his license to practice law, which he lost in 2003 upon his conviction for 16 federal corruption felonies committed during his first term as mayor, for which he served seven years in prison before persuading the voters of Bridgeport to return him to the scene of the crimes.

Ganim’s first request to get his law license back was approved by a court committee of lawyers in 2012 but rejected by a three-judge court, which disapproved because it felt that Ganim had not shown enough remorse.

At a hearing last week before another court committee of lawyers, Ganim was more contrite, if not necessarily sincere. So presumably his next committee of judges will reinstate him, as other felonious lawyers have been reinstated in recent decades.

But the previous practice of Connecticut’s courts was better. In the old days a felony conviction was enough to disbar a lawyer for life, so as to maintain the honor of the courts and the honor of the office every lawyer holds, commissioner of the Superior Court.

After all, lawyers who commit crimes, especially crimes of corruption, know better, having taken the lawyer’s oath to “do nothing dishonest.”

The honor of Connecticut’s courts and those who would practice law here is no longer so rigorously defended. As a result, corruption is increasingly suspected about courts and lawyers. So maybe it will be better if Ganim returns as a commissioner of the Superior Court and confirms the suspicion, the public’s remaining illusions are shattered, the law and the legal business are covered with more shame, and some of those who continue in the business may be more motivated to try cleaning it up.

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

By Chris Powell

Less partisan observers of Donald Trump might have been able to warn the Biden administration against harrying him over the official documents he took with him to his home in Florida after resentfully departing the White House. There was no urgency for the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, since efforts to recover the documents were already underway.

It seems not to have occurred to Democrats that a raid would only rebuild support for Trump, which had been waning. Their fear and hatred of the man blind them to the nature of his support. But Trump has perfectly understood his support from the beginning of his entry into presidential politics. Campaigning in Iowa in January 2016 he famously observed: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s incredible.”

Trump can be vulgar and intemperate, and, worse, reckless, unstable, cruel, and indifferent to his ignorance. He embodies contempt for politics, government, and even democratic norms, as well as contempt for the political correctness, elitism, and hypocrisy of news organizations, academia, and the rest of the political left.

Tens of millions of Americans shared his contempt six years ago and still do, since the political correctness, elitism, and hypocrisy of the ruling class have only intensified since Hillary Clinton dismissed Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.”

For what was said of Grover Cleveland’s supporters long ago may be said of Trump’s as well: “They love him most for the enemies he has made.”

Even some people appalled by Trump’s character will acknowledge the hypocrisy and unfairness of his adversaries, resentment of which increasingly motivates his supporters. The Russian “collusion” scandal went on for years only to turn out to have been an invention of the Clinton campaign and FBI. Any impropriety committed by Trump with the documents taken to Mar-a-Lago is likely small compared to the improprieties committed by Clinton with her official email while secretary of state, for which she got a pass.

While news organizations are obsessed with the Mar-a-Lago documents, they continue to suppress the growing evidence of Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling business and its many connections to his father, whose denials of involvement have been lies. Indeed, his son’s dealings may have left the president vulnerable to blackmail by China.

Democrats seem to think that they will be rid of Trump if they can put him in prison or at least convict him criminally. While the Biden Justice Department was plotting its raid on Mar-a-Lago, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, was continuing her investigation of Trump’s businesses, having campaigned for her office on a pledge to get Trump one way or another. This recalled the infamous boast of the Soviet secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Yes, no one should be above the law. But as was seen with Hillary Clinton, the law leaves plenty of room for political and prosecutorial discretion, and driving a stake through the heart of the Trumpian vampire may require much more than a conviction. After all, even putting Trump in prison wouldn’t prevent him from running for president again. In 1920 while held in federal prison for sedition, having opposed the draft during World War I, labor leader Eugene V. Debs was the Socialist Party candidate for president and got 3.4% of the vote. He said that if elected he would pardon himself.

Trump already may have that idea.

So what can be done to prevent Trump’s return to the presidency?

First, of course, is to end the disaster of Joe Biden’s presidency. Second is to stop making government and politics so contemptible. Third is to stifle the brazen hypocrisy and unfairness. Fourth is to replace hyperbole and invective with reason and a desire to [ITALICS] persuade [END ITALICS] the other side rather than demonize it and rile up one’s own, as Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, seeking re-election, did again last weekend at a state Democratic Party rally.

Ever more extreme and demagogic, Blumenthal declared: “No woman will be safe in America if Mitch McConnell is elected majority leader.”

If taken seriously such Trump-like talk could incite civil war.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut state government is about to spend another $30 million pursuing another mistaken premise. The money will go for “hero pay,” grants of as much as $1,000 to people in “essential” occupations in the private sector who stayed on the job during the worst of the recent virus epidemic when much of the state’s economy was closed by government order or a decline in business.

People who are eligible for “hero pay” were indeed essential, and many were unsung — especially supermarket employees, none of whom are close to as well-compensated as the many government employees who worked (or didn’t work much) from home and never lost a cent from their paychecks.

But these essential workers needed their jobs just as much as the people who were thrown out of work by the epidemic. So the essential workers were already fortunate to be allowed to stay at work — already rewarded by government policy when so many others suffered from it. There is no special justice in paying people bonuses because they were able to stay at work. They would have suffered more if, like many others, they had lost work.

The “hero pay” program is mainly another mechanism of political patronage in an election year, facilitated by the billions of dollars in emergency federal aid given to state government. Indeed, “hero pay” is a part of where the country’s catastrophic inflation is coming from.

But as the Babylon Bee jokes, the government will keep sending money to everyone until inflation is beaten.

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VINDICATION FROM KANSAS: Advocates of abortion rights are jubilant over the result of the recent referendum in Kansas, where voters handily defeated a state constitutional amendment that might have led to prohibiting abortion in the state. The amendment would have nullified a Kansas Supreme Court decision that construed the state constitution to contain a right to abortion.

Since Kansas is a conservative Republican state, the result of the referendum surprised many. But it should have heartened not only supporters of abortion rights but also supporters of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade and returning abortion policy to the states. For the results of the referendum refute the claim that the Supreme Court was abrogating abortion rights.

If Kansas wants to construe its constitution to allow abortion, it is free to do so, even as its legislature now may try to regulate abortion much along the policy lines set forth in the Roe decision back in 1973 — unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability, and state regulation and restriction afterward.

What most critics of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe fail to acknowledge is that abortion policy long has been and remains largely in the hands of women themselves. States have anti-abortion laws only because many if not most of their own women support or consent to them. When most women want their state to recognize abortion rights and when they mobilize politically for that purpose, their legislature will act accordingly.

That’s democracy, not rule by the courts — and exactly what the Supreme Court just prescribed.

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POVERTY ISN’T ‘AFFORDABLE’: Opponents of “affordable” housing are “sinking” Connecticut,according to Hearst Connecticut Media columnist Hugh Bailey. But as much as Connecticut needs much more low-cost housing, Bailey is not quite right.

What’s sinking Connecticut is what causes many people to oppose “affordable” housing. That is, people fear that more such housing will give them impoverished neighbors and make pleasant and peaceful suburbs more like the state’s dysfunctional and chaotic cities with schools full of neglected, incorrigible, and expensive children.

Of course Connecticut’s restrictive zoning regulations shrink housing supply and thereby drive up housing costs and impoverish still more people. But restrictive zoning is part of Connecticut’s longstanding social contract.

That is, people will let the Democratic Party keep operating the cities as factories of poverty, dependence, and political patronage as long as suburbs can use exclusive zoning to provide an escape for people who don’t want to live in the middle of poverty, dependence, and political patronage.

Solving urban poverty would solve suburban exclusivity. But solving urban poverty also would undermine Democratic rule, so it can’t be permitted.

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

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By Chris Powell

Late-developing enthusiasm among devotees of former President Donald Trump is being given as the cause of Leora Levy’s unexpected victory in the primary for Connecticut’s Republican U.S. Senate nomination over Themis Klarides, the former state representative who had the endorsement of the party’s state convention.

Trump endorsed Levy just a few days before the primary and on the day before the primary the FBI raided Trump’s home in Florida, deepening the impression that the Democratic national administration is determined to destroy him personally, thus restoring the sympathy he gradually had been losing among Republicans.

Primaries are usually decided by enthusiasm, since voter participation tends to be low, and the Republican Senate primary appears to have drawn fewer than 19% of the party’s 500,000 members in the state. Of course that lack of participation also can be construed to mean that 81% of Connecticut Republicans don’t care much for Trump — or for anyone.

But enthusiasm for Trump may not explain Klarides’ defeat as well as that lack of enthusiasm for her. Klarides got about 37,000 votes, Levy not quite 47,000. About 400,000 Connecticut Republicans didn’t vote. What did Klarides have to say to them?

Not much, it seemed.

Yes, Klarides had 22 years in the General Assembly, six of them as House Republican leader, while Levy has no practical experience in government. Klarides was acknowledged as the sort of fiscally conservative and socially moderate Republican that has had some success in heavily Democratic Connecticut. She fairly claimed to be the most electable of the Republican Senate candidates. Her broadcast commercials touted her working-class origins in the gritty Naugatuck Valley.

But where did she stand on controversial federal issues or on any issues that would rouse Republicans?

Exactly how would she hammer the Democratic nominee, two-term U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal? How would she make Republicans want to slog through the heat and humidity of the summer’s worst day to vote for her?

She was light on that stuff. She didn’t give enough Republicans a reason. Indeed, she seemed to lack enthusiasm for her own campaign.

As for Levy, now that the primary is over, her association with Trump flips from asset to liability, Trump being so unpopular in the state as a whole.

Levy’s character is a liability too — that of a clumsy opportunist. Before Trump came to power she denounced him for his vulgarity, but once he gained power she sidled up to him with campaign contributions and bought a nomination for ambassador. She pledged support for abortion rights before calculating that such a position wouldn’t help her gain a Republican nomination, and so reversed herself. While she mocked Klarides as a Republican in name only, Levy herself had donated to an earlier Blumenthal campaign, working both sides of the street for business reasons.

Levy knows where she stands — wherever it benefits her politically.

Levy’s character failings don’t mean that a compelling campaign can’t be waged against Blumenthal. But the senator is not likely to be defeated in Connecticut by support for Trump and outlawing abortion.

A challenger to Blumenthal [ITALICS] might [END ITALICS] become competitive by showing that even as he denounces Republicans as radicals, the senator is far more radical in many respects.

That is, re-electing Blumenthal and strengthening the Democratic majority in Congress likely means nationalizing late-term abortion; prohibiting parental notification of abortions for minors and thus protecting their rapists; continuing the Biden administration’s policy of open borders; giving voting rights to illegal immigrants; gun confiscation; and the full range of transgenderism — federal funding for sex-change surgery and drugs for minors and a federal right for biological males to compete in women’s sports, effectively the repeal of equal opportunity for women.

Weeks ago the Republicans were favored to take both the House and the Senate. But now chances are good that the Democrats will hold the Senate, because Republicans are nominating such awful candidates. To avoid that trend, Levy has three months to become a political wizard who can make people overlook who she is.

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

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By Chris Powell

How did the infamous “pizza sex” assignment get into a middle school classroom in Enfield in January? And was a Hartford school nurse, suspended in March, telling the truth when she wrote on social media that the school system conceals from parents the gender dysphoria suffered by their children?

The school systems resolutely refuse to answer those questions and are defying Connecticut’s freedom-of-information law by refusing to release documents that might provide answers.

Under the law such documents are plainly public and this writer has asked the state Freedom of Information Commission to order their disclosure.

Responding to this writer’s formal request, Enfield Superintendent Christopher J. Drezek provided copies of complaints from parents about the “pizza sex” assignment but nothing about how it came into the school system, the focus of the request. Pressed on the point, Drezek refused to say whether there are any documents addressing the assignment’s origin, even as he asked that the complaint to the FOI Commission be withdrawn.

So it may be assumed that there [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] such documents and that they are embarrassing. While the superintendent has admitted that giving the “pizza sex” assignment to students was a mistake, he won’t come clean about it.

A publicist for Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez acknowledged receipt of this writer’s request for access to the personnel file of the nurse but the superintendent’s office has not responded to it. In earlier correspondence the publicist refused to say whether the nurse had told the truth. So the nurse probably did.

The superintendent claims that the nurse was suspended for identifying in her social media posts a young student receiving puberty-blocking drugs, but the post that was made public identified no one. In any case whether Hartford school policy is to conceal the gender dysphoria of students from their parents is a fair question quite apart from the nurse’s suspension, and the school system refuses to answer it.

Such profound unaccountability and subversion of parents seems to be spreading rapidly through Connecticut school systems. Last week the Connecticut Health I-Team reported that New Haven’s Board of Education unanimously has approved a policy that “grants students the right to change their name and gender identity on school records without parental permission, the right to be called by their preferred name and pronoun in school,” and “the right to keep this information private without school staff telling parents or peers.”

Enfield’s Board of Education has purported to be investigating the “pizza sex” assignment for seven months but has disclosed nothing about it. The board needs only to ask the superintendent at a public meeting to explain how the assignment got into the school system. That the board has not done so suggests that it already knows and doesn’t want its constituents to know.

Hartford’s school board appears not to be curious about the assertions of the suspended nurse. Hartford’s newspaper, the Courant, shows no curiosity either.

The FOI Commission presumably will call a hearing on the complaints eventually. But the commission has a backlog and both school systems may be counting on delaying disclosure until after the election in November to prevent the unaccountability of school systems and their subversion of parents from becoming an issue in the gubernatorial and state legislative campaigns.

It might be a pretty good issue if any candidates ever began to wonder aloud whether public education is really public at all.

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WHAT SAFETY?: Last week his campaign for re-election issued a statement headlined: “Governor Lamont Joins Advocates to Outline Four More Years of Gun Safety in Connecticut.” Meanwhile last week there were more than the usual shootings in the cities, seven in Hartford alone.

The governor isn’t particularly to blame for the worsening social disintegration in the state. But he [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] to blame for asserting that more gun laws will bring the state “four more years of gun safety” — and that Connecticut already has had four such years.

Gun violence is a mere symptom of social disintegration, not a cause, and more gun laws, like the ones already in force, will be effective only against people who obey laws. Connecticut has many other people.

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

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By Chris Powell

Many criminal defendants, the Connecticut Mirror reported the other day, can’t “claw their way out” of pre-trial detention because they can’t afford even the small cash bails required of them. It’s easy to see cash bail as a problem since, according to the Mirror, more than 40% of the people held in Connecticut’s prisons are not yet convicted but being held pending trial or other resolution of the charges against them.

But a close reading of the Mirror’s report suggests that cash bail may not be the problem at all. At least the particular defendant chosen by the Mirror as proof that cash bail is unfair and even racist makes the claim laughable.

For the defendant has been spending so much time in prison prior to conviction not because the cash bail required of him is unfair but because he has been and remains a chronic offender.

The defendant has been convicted of threatening and, many times, for violating probation, leniency given to him in the hope that he would start behaving. Now he is charged with domestic violence, breach of peace, and violating a protective order and is under investigation for road rage. On top of that, he long has suffered from mental illness.

While he is only 34, the defendant already has spent seven years in prison. He told the Mirror he has been in criminal trouble since he was 14 for, among other things, selling and using drugs and stealing cars and car parts.

The judge who set the cash bail challenged by the Mirror’s report, $45,000, quite reasonably attributed it to the defendant’s chronic misbehavior even while on probation.

The defendant says he has been trying to go straight but he plainly keeps failing. So should he remain free, with no consequences for violating probations and a protective order while he amasses new charges? That would make a mockery of the law, though of course the defendant already has made a mockery of it just as the criminal-justice system itself has done by failing to put away for good another chronic offender. Connecticut is swarming in chronic offenders even as elected officials lately have boasted about the decline in the state’s prison population.

Part of the problem here is that the recent virus epidemic stalled most court cases for two years and catching up won’t be quick. But as the decline in the prison population shows, the courts, the General Assembly, and the governor aren’t seeking to lock up more people. The courts are seeking to maintain some plausibility for the law, and chronic offenders make that much harder.

Outside of religious orders, poverty is not much of a virtue. With many people, including the defendant laughably lionized by the Mirror, poverty is largely self-inflicted. Could the Mirror really not find a defendant with a bail problem who isn’t still causing trouble even after seven years in prison?

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BETTER KEEP PUNCHING: The political left lately has been using various mechanisms to prevent contrary expression, as by shouting down speakers and demanding the dismissal of politically incorrect college professors. Such tactics are beginning to be seen as totalitarian and counterproductive.

So now the left is backing off a little and instead is trying to shame contrarians by accusing them of “punching down” — that is, criticizing or bullying people with less power in society.

This shaming tactic is no more persuasive. For while certain movements may seem to have less power at the moment, they also may have momentum and may heartily deserve some “punching down” to keep them down.

When the 1900s began the Bolshevik faction of the Communist Party in Imperial Russia had to operate underground and abroad to avoid capture and imprisonment by the czar’s secret police. But by 1917 the Bolsheviks had taken over the government and were operating their own secret police.

In the 1920s the Nazi Party operated on the crazy fringe of German politics. By the 1930s it had become the largest party in the country’s parliament and was assaulting its rivals in the streets. Then it took over the government and imposed bloody gangsterism.

In the 1930s the Chinese Communist Party was a small group of totalitarians hiding in the mountains of a remote province. By 1949 they had imposed tyranny on the most populous country in the world.

All three once-powerless movements killed millions of people because sometimes there isn’t nearly enough “punching down.”

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

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By Chris Powell

What are the qualifications of Erick Russell, the Democratic state convention’s nominee for state treasurer in next week’s primary election?

Russell’s record in public life is slim. His campaign’s internet site says he is a lawyer with a “prestigious” firm in New Haven, where he has done legal work for the treasurer’s office. That’s something even if it provides little to evaluate him by.

But a few days ago Russell’s campaign publicist solicited news organizations to interview the candidate for another reason: “Not only would Erick make LGBTQ history in Connecticut; he would make national LGBTQ history as the first Black LGBTQ statewide elected official in U.S. history!”

That is, people should vote for Russell because of his sexual orientation and race.

Should those characteristics really be such a big deal? After all, until his resignation for health reasons last December a gay man had been Connecticut’s state comptroller for 10 years and was generally considered as conscientious, competent, and decent as any elected state official. Nobody seemed to care about his sexual orientation. But he was white. Should anyone care more about Russell’s sexual orientation because he is Black?

Since it is promoting Russell’s sexual orientation and race, his campaign seems to think that they are a political [ITALICS] advantage [END ITALICS] — that far from expressing prejudice, voters want to show their good nature by elevating members of sexual as well as members of racial minorities. But this promotion implicitly admits that, at least in Connecticut, being the first member of one minority or another in any office isn’t really much of an accomplishment at all.

Russell seems to have gotten the Democratic convention’s endorsement for treasurer as an elaboration on the party’s tradition of ethnic ticket balancing, whereby the treasurer nomination has been reserved for a Black candidate. Now the convention’s treasurer candidate is Black and gay. With luck he also may turn out to be left-handed.

But Russell’s silly appeal for votes may not be as much of a stretch as that of a rival in the Democratic primary for treasurer, Dita Bhargava, an investment fund manager. In her television commercials Bhargava pledges to refuse to invest state pension funds in companies that don’t sufficiently support abortion and aren’t accountable enough, criteria she conveniently fails to define.

In her commercial about corporate accountability Bhargava blames Stamford-based Purdue Pharma for the death of her son from a fentanyl overdose. But Purdue Pharma doesn’t make fentanyl. Instead it has been denounced for making the painkiller OxyContin, which is blamed for being addictive and causing users to turn to street drugs like fentanyl when their prescriptions run out. In the name of benefiting victims of opioid addiction, the company is being liquidated in bankruptcy.

Purdue Pharma’s responsibility here is actually secondary. For the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin for public use in 1995 and thousands of doctors have prescribed it since and [ITALICS] still do. [END ITALICS] For the FDA has not revoked its approval. Indeed, the World Health Organization classifies the generic version of OxyContin as an essential medicine.

So while primary responsibility for the trouble with OxyContin lies with the FDA and the prescribing doctors, Bhargava seems to understand that it would be too hard to demand accountability from them even as it is always easy to demagogue against a drug company, since few people want to take any responsibility for their addictions.

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MONKEY BUSINESS: Hooray! A new example of racism supposedly has been discovered. It’s the name of a viral disease that causes fever, headache, and a blistering rash and is spreading around the world: monkeypox. Fortunately monkeypox usually resolves in a month and causes few fatalities.

But the disease appears to be highly associated with homosexuality and “monkey” has been not just a disparaging term generally but one used against Black people particularly. So public health officials want to sanitize the disease by renaming it.

That would be fine, but then “chicken” long has been a term of disparagement too, so what is to be done about chickenpox?

Maybe the whole medical lexicon needs an urgent review for political correctness. Or maybe public health authorities just need to lighten up.

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

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By Chris Powell

While Governor Lamont and Connecticut’s members of Congress seek re-election by touring the state distributing money for supposedly wonderful new projects and programs, what was already a catastrophe is getting worse and hardly being noticed.

It’s the failure of education in the cities and especially New Haven, whose Board of Education last week reviewed appalling new student proficiency test and attendance data.

Only 12% of New Haven students are performing at grade level in math and only 28% in English.

The city’s schools also have a 54% rate of chronic absenteeism, students who miss more than 10% of their classes. It is the highest rate of absenteeism ever recorded by the city’s schools.

As for what to do about it, the school board seemed unable to get past the local controversy over the best way of teaching reading. But others in the city keep clamoring for more spending on education and higher salaries for teachers, as if Connecticut hasn’t pursued such policies since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill in 1977, 45 years ago. Decades of spending more on schools and raising teacher salaries have made teachers happy but not improved student performance.

The cause of the problem is elsewhere: not teaching methods or money but more than a half century of social disintegration, child neglect resulting from the policy-induced destruction of the family among poor people.

Of course New Haven’s elected officials aren’t eager to acknowledge that the problem is their own constituents. Nor are the state’s top elected officials. They are all Democrats and long have farmed New Haven for their party’s biggest pluralities in state elections.

Even so, a student’s educational performance is mostly a matter of parenting. Teachers and school administrators often try heroically and sometimes inspire students enough to overcome their handicaps at home. But for most children the prerequisite of a decent education is conscientious parents. At bottom the educational catastrophe in New Haven and other cities and inner suburbs is the lack of conscientious parenting — and it can’t even be acknowledged and discussed officially in Connecticut, much less solved.

As a result many children are being doomed to lives of menial labor, poverty, crime, unhappiness, and dependence on handouts from government — which sometimes seems to be the idea. At least the perpetual poverty of the cities long has sustained those Democratic pluralities. So it is never questioned.

But perpetual poverty will not sustain democracy and liberty. Only a self-supporting and well-educated middle class will.

As the governor and members of Congress pass out the goodies in pursuit of re-election, it’s as if they are shopping for new curtains while the house burns down.

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NEW PARTY TIME: Polls suggest that most Americans are dissatisfied enough with both the Democrats and the Republicans that they would like the country to have a third major political party, especially if the Democrats are to renominate President Biden or substitute Vice President Kamala Harris for him and the Republicans are to renominate former President Donald Trump. So last week a few dozen prominent former Democrats and Republicans announced they are forming a party that is to be called Forward.

Forward is being led by businessman Andrew Yang, a very liberal Democrat who recently ran unsuccessfully for president and mayor of New York City, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate Republican. Both seem more competent and suitable for leadership than the president and the former president.

Third parties did surprisingly well in the presidential elections in 1980 and 1992. In 1980 U.S. Rep. John Anderson got 6.6% of the vote against President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, while in 1992 zillionaire Ross Perot got 19% against President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

But Anderson and Perot clearly stood for something — Anderson for moderate opposition to Carter’s liberal haplessness and Reagan’s conservatism, Perot for slashing the national debt.

What will Forward stand for? Even its organizers don’t know yet, but just not being Biden and crazy left and not being Trump and plain crazy may be enough for getting started.

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

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By Chris Powell

Guilt tripping through American history has become almost as popular for vacationers as Florida. It’s a vacation from current political reality.

In Connecticut the latest guilt trip involves the executions carried out here in the 1600s by the earliest European colonists against 11 of their number accused of witchcraft. The first known witchcraft execution in North America was that of a Windsor woman who was hanged in Hartford in 1647. This was just eight years after the Connecticut colony had distinguished itself more favorably by adopting the Fundamental Orders, a constitution establishing a government and taking more small steps toward democracy.

Until recently Connecticut preferred to remember the heroic virtues of its founders — their setting out on their own, crossing the ocean, and starting up all over again from nothing. But their failings, even their witchcraft hysteria, are not really cause for the everlasting shame pursued by today’s guilt tripping, which takes people and events out of the context of their time and ignores what used to be called the ascent of man, the long and bumpy journey from primitiveness to civilization.

For [ITALICS] of course [END ITALICS] hundreds of years ago people saw the world in a more primitive way, without the understanding provided by modern science and communications. The fear arising from their lack of understanding, combined with the severity of their Puritan religion, made witchcraft seem a plausible explanation for the frequent calamities they suffered, and an accusation of witchcraft quickly became a convenient mechanism for intimidating or expropriating others — much as accusations of racism are exploited today.

A group called the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project has been clamoring for a formal acquittal of the victims of the witchcraft hysteria. The state’s pardon law can’t help because it can be applied only to the living, so maybe it could be amended. Or maybe the General Assembly could pass a resolution of apology.

But why bother? Is there anyone in the state or even the country who has heard of the old witchcraft hysteria and who doesn’t know that it was all a horrible misapprehension and injustice and who doesn’t either shudder or laugh at it? Could anyone unaware of it come upon it without instantly recognizing it as such?

Meanwhile there are many criminal convictions throughout the country about which serious doubts have arisen, and a far more relevant project, the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence and other investigation to exonerate hundreds of wrongly convicted people, including some in Connecticut — people who are still alive and thus in infinitely more need of exoneration than the supposed witches of old. The Innocence Project estimates that as many as 10% of prisoners held in the United States are innocent. (Also unjustly, many repeat criminal offenders stalk society because the criminal-justice system fails to put them away for good no matter how much harm they keep doing.)

Many wrongly accused people have been convicted on the basis of false confessions, extracted from them by intimidation and threats by police and prosecutors, just as false confessions were sweated or even beaten out of people accused of witchcraft.

That’s why any formal exoneration of the victims of the witchcraft hysteria won’t do much more than make people feel guilty about a wrong done long ago for which they bear no responsibility even as it distracts them from current wrongs for which [ITALICS] everyone [END ITALICS] remains responsible.

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OUTRAGEOUS INEPTNESS: Connecticut has all sorts of outrages that should be addressed before bothering with the flaws of ancient ancestors. Another such outrage arose two weeks ago in Stonington, where, according to The Day of New London, two municipal public works employees were caught on surveillance video planting drug syringes in a gazebo in a town park, and doing it on the job, no less.

Police said the employees aimed to create the false impression that the park is overrun by drug addicts and crime.

But Stonington First Selectwoman Danielle Chesebrough says the employees will not be disciplined because their dangerous and deceitful stunt violated no town government policy.

Indeed, all Connecticut often seems to lack a policy ensuring that government serves the public rather than its own employees.

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

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