Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

As gasoline prices kept soaring last week, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal campaigned for re-election by declaring that oil companies are making too much money and the government should seize half their profits and give the money back to gas buyers.

Through most of his 37 years in elective office, 20 of them as Connecticut’s attorney general, Blumenthal has been railing at Big Oil without much result, perhaps because most of his railing has been demagogic scapegoating. Last week’s episode was the worst, because the real culprit is the national administration of which the senator is a part.

Big Oil is not a charitable operation but then neither does it control the price of its product, which trades in a sometimes volatile international market. In his scapegoating last week Blumenthal failed to note that two years ago, amid the virus epidemic, the industry was in disarray and oil futures contracts actually fell to negative value.

Last week Blumenthal accused the oil companies of “unconscionable profiteering” by paying dividends and bonuses and purchasing their own shares instead of investing in new production. But why would anyone in the United States invest in new oil production when, since the day he took office, President Biden has been trying to destroy the industry in the name of climate policy, discouraging oil production long before alternative energy sources can replace oil at a price most people can afford?

Instead of reviving domestic production the president is begging OPEC countries to produce more, which would increase this country’s dependence on foreign sources for the most strategic commodity.

Any administration concerned about national security and prosperity might have noticed by now that U.S. oil refining capacity is in decline and might have done something about it. No major refinery has been built in the country for almost 50 years.

Instead Biden administration policy, supported by Blumenthal, is essentially an invitation to oil companies to settle for making their money from government-induced scarcity.

Government policy of curtailing oil production isn’t the only reason for the frightening spike in gas prices. Of course inflation has been pushing nearly all prices way up, and inflation is caused mainly by another federal government policy — grossly excessive money creation, which is outpacing not just the production of the U.S. economy but the production of the whole world, for which the dollar serves as the main reserve currency.

The goodies being distributed by elected officials at all levels are being financed not by direct taxes but by inflation — currency devaluation — an indirect and dishonest but still heavy tax. As he travels Connecticut with other Democratic officeholders claiming credit for these goodies, Blumenthal has not drawn their connection with inflation, and journalism obligingly has failed to hold him and his colleagues to account for it.

Aspiring to advance himself by imitating Blumenthal’s scapegoating, state Attorney General William Tong noted in April the suspension of Connecticut’s gas tax and with great fanfare urged state residents to contact his office with complaints about “price gouging” at gas stations.

But last week, without fanfare, Tong’s office admitted that while more than 200 complaints had been received, it had discovered no “gouging.”

No matter. For Tong, who also is seeking re-election this year, had already given people the strong impression that business is to blame for rising prices and distracted them from government’s own responsibility.

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ARROGANCE WITH RAISES: At the last minute during its session this spring and without a proper public hearing, the General Assembly voted to raise the base salary of state legislators by $12,000, from $28,000 to $40,000 per year, and to give big raises to the top state constitutional officers as well.

Legislative pay had not increased for 21 years and the low salaries have discouraged many people from seeking election, so raises were in order.

But in addition to minimizing public participation in the issue, the legislature got too arrogant. The raise legislation provides for regular raises arising from an inflation index, which, as a practical matter, will remove the salary issue from politics forever, reducing accountability in state government.

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

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By Chris Powell

Eighteen months later the political left is still stewing about and running a congressional investigation into what it calls a “coup attempt” and “insurrection” instigated by President Trump and supported by many Republicans to steal the 2020 presidential election under the pretext that it was stolen from Trump because of widespread vote fraud.

“Coup” or “insurrection” or not, Trump’s attempt to interfere with the normal counting of the electoral votes in the Senate was reprehensible, even if four years earlier many leading Democrats had claimed, also without much evidence, that the presidential election had been stolen from them.

But amid the agitation about the recent mass shootings, the left has failed to learn a lesson of the “coup” or “insurrection.” That is — to borrow from the old cautionary slogan of supporters of the Second Amendment — if guns had been outlawed on Jan. 6, 2021, only Trump would have had guns, at least if the military continued to take orders from him.

Trump isn’t the first president to have provoked fears of a coup. As he resisted impeachment in 1974, President Richard Nixon so frightened his defense secretary, James Schlesinger, that Schlesinger issued instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that no force-deployment order from the White House was to be obeyed if it did not come through his office. That is, Nixon’s own defense secretary thought him capable of trying to overthrow the Constitution to remain in office.

But even as much of the political left remains obsessed with Trump’s “coup,” it also proposes to disarm the population by outlawing and confiscating semiautomatic rifles. Meanwhile the government of embattled Ukraine is distributing such rifles to civilians to combat the Russian invasion and coup attempt in the country’s east.

Of course this irony does not diminish this country’s catastrophic problem with gun violence. While mass shootings with scary-looking rifles like the recent ones in Buffalo and Uvalde work people up, on average more than 40 people are murdered with handguns in the country every day without generating much concern.

Handgun violence in Chicago has become overwhelming but it is a rare day when there aren’t shootings in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven — all accepted as routine events of city life in Connecticut.

Tighter regulation of gun sales and possession — comprehensive background checks, waiting periods, “red flag” procedures, increased screening for young people seeking guns, including a higher age of eligibility for purchases — along with long sentences for repeat offenders, probably could reduce gun crime generally.

Soft targets like schools can be protected better. Maybe someday government and society will be willing to examine even the epidemic of child neglect that produces so many disturbed teenagers and young men.

But a disarmed population will always be more susceptible to coups and totalitarianism. President Biden is so awful that Trump well may become president again, and there always could be another Nixon, a president corrupted by power into lawbreaking. The people getting hysterical about guns might do well to keep this in mind.

Former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Gary Franks notes that reducing gun violence requires healing “hearts, minds, and souls.” But his prescription is silly: Bring prayer back to public schools, from which it supposedly was banished by the Supreme Court in 1962.

Actually the court found unconstitutional only government-sponsored prayer in public schools. Students always have been and remain free to pray in school without being disruptive. But it is fundamental to liberty that government cannot compel expression of religious or political belief.

This principle was affirmed by the court in 1943, in the middle of World War II, when the court exempted schoolchildren from being required to salute the flag. “Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest,” Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas wrote.

This precious liberty is exactly what makes the country worth supporting and the flag worth saluting.

Besides, the prayers of old in public schools were usually so superficial and designed only for appearances as to be meaningless and even mocking of the very exercise.

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

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By Chris Powell

Government cannot use union contracts with its employees to nullify its basic obligations to the public, a federal appeals court ruled last week in a case about the Connecticut state police union contract.

The contract has allowed troopers to prevent disclosure of misconduct accusations against them, thereby facilitating the state police department’s own concealment of misconduct on the job generally. But two years ago the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis called critical attention to police misconduct, prompting Connecticut’s Black state legislators to break free of the General Assembly’s usual subservience to the state employee unions, the mercenaries of the state’s Democratic Party.

Thanks to the Black legislators, a law was enacted to nullify the misconduct concealment provision in the state police contract and restore the public’s right of access to misconduct complaints. Whereupon the troopers union sued, and plausibly so, since the U.S. Constitution prohibits government from impairing the obligations of contracts.

But the courts also have found that contracts with the government are unenforceable when they impair the public’s rights to basic government functions, and the two federal courts that have considered the Connecticut trooper contract issue have decided that letting contracts supersede the public’s right-to-know law so misconduct can be concealed indeed goes too far.

The court decisions may be arguable law but their policy result is welcome. For the misconduct concealment provision in the state police contract is grotesquely subversive of democracy.

After all, laws ordinarily are made after deliberation in public that involves the public at hearings and conversations with legislators. But state government’s labor contracts are negotiated in secret by the governor’s aides and submitted for the legislature’s approval on an all-or-nothing basis, and sometimes the contracts take effect automatically, without the legislature’s approval and without any public deliberation by the legislature at all.

Of course that is exactly how the government employee unions like it. For the unions, the less that is known about what they are extracting from the government, the better. The unions want the public kept ignorant.

The two court decisions don’t fully resolve the troopers union’s lawsuit. While the union may keep pressing the case, even if it continues, the new law nullifying the misconduct concealment provision should discourage the state administration from agreeing to future contracts with similar provisions.

But amazingly state law [ITALICS] still [END ITALICS] allows Connecticut’s government employee union contracts to supersede and nullify the right-to-know law in other respects. So the federal court decisions in the trooper union case suggest that other union contracts with concealment provisions might be fairly challenged in court by advocates of accountability.

The situation shouldn’t have to get so complicated. Accountability in government is basic and there should be no obstructions to it. Connecticut’s law letting union contracts trump the right-to-know law should be repealed and the unions should be reminded that they work for the public and not the other way around.

Unfortunately the public’s control over its own institutions is about to be curtailed again in Connecticut and throughout the country because of a loophole in federal military law.

While federal law prohibits unionizing by federal military personnel on active duty, the prohibition doesn’t apply to members of state units of the National Guard that have not been called to federal service. So last month the U.S. Justice Department conceded to a lawsuit brought in Connecticut on behalf of National Guard members seeking to unionize.

This settlement is being construed as an invitation to unionization by National Guard members in every state.

Unionization may devastate the chain of command in state militias. It’s bad enough that police agencies are unionized, impairing civilian authority over officers authorized to use force on behalf of the government. With so much misconduct in the military and police, more accountability is needed, not less.

So Congress should extend to state National Guard units the ban on unionization and Governor Lamont and the General Assembly should enact such a prohibition for Connecticut.

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

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By Chris Powell

With gasoline prices soaring along with inflation generally, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly have suspended Connecticut’s gasoline tax until November 30, when the state election will have safely passed and voters won’t be able to do anything about the tax’s reinstatement. But the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf reports that two big transportation-related tax increases are still on the way.

The state’s diesel fuel tax, which is automatically adjusted every year to reflect changes in wholesale diesel fuel prices, is expected to rise sharply July 1, since wholesale prices have more than doubled in the last year. The current tax, 40 cents per gallon, may rise by 10 cents or more.

Additionally, on Jan. 1 a new tax on large commercial trucks will take effect and raise about $90 million per year.

Of course both tax increases will be immediately passed along to purchasers of whatever comes into the state by truck — that is, most things — causing still more inflation, though for most people the taxes will be hidden in the general cost of living.

Since state government has a huge cash position, largely because of billions of dollars in emergency federal aid, should the governor call the legislature into special session to postpone the diesel and truck tax increases too? The governor likes to say that he hasn’t raised taxes but the forthcoming tax increases more or less contradict him.

Meanwhile the governor and Connecticut’s members of Congress are scurrying around the state bestowing and claiming credit for various goodies that are being financed by inflation, the federal government’s excessive money creation. Since inflation is the public’s biggest problem, these goodies may not confer the expected political benefit. While it seldom hurts politically to cut taxes, Democrats hate doing it because of the pressure this imposes on spending in the future.

So there probably won’t be action on the diesel and truck taxes unless Republicans have the wit to make them a campaign issue.

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UNRULY STUDENTS: Their union complains that Hartford’s teachers are unhappy in their jobs, and not just because they consider their compensation inadequate — of course it could never be high enough for them — but also because of the disrespect and even violence the teachers suffer from students.

In the old days in Connecticut a student who attacked a teacher or was otherwise incorrigible would be expelled. But education policy now is to accept such disruptions and keep incorrigible kids around to impair everyone else’s education, in the belief that this is less costly than putting the incorrigibles on the street and risk introducing them to the criminal justice system.

Of course when kids realize that there is no punishment for misconduct in school, they happily keep at it, demoralizing everyone.

Just as violence by students in Hartford’s schools is largely overlooked, it’s forgotten now that in January a 13-year-old student stashed 40 bags of deadly fentanyl around his middle school in Hartford before suffering a fatal seizure from contact with the drug. It’s a miracle that there were no other deaths.

Being taken for granted, this misconduct degrades city schools and, increasingly, schools in suburbs and rural towns too. Equipping schools with mental health clinics, as state government plans to do, is at best only remedial. No one in authority dares to ask the crucial question: Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

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EXCUSING CORRUPTION: New London Day columnist David Collins writes that while Connecticut’s Democratic state administration is corrupt and incompetent, especially in regard to its State Pier project in the city, he couldn’t ever vote Republican because the party harbors people who advocate voter suppression and gun rights and might like to outlaw abortion and interracial and same-sex marriage.

Nationally the Republicans do include such people, but by national standards Connecticut’s Republican Party is quite liberal and long has been timid to the point of irrelevance. There is little if any desire among Connecticut Republicans to support the potential policy changes worrying Collins.

So if Republican extremism in other states is to preclude regime change in Connecticut, the Democratic corruption and incompetence Collins complains about can’t really bother him much.

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

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By Chris Powell

Could Connecticut be tiring of its senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal? That’s the implication of last week’s Quinnipiac University poll, which found the senator’s job performance approved by only 45% of respondents and disapproved by 43%. (Connecticut’s junior senator, Chris Murphy, didn’t do so much better, winning approval by 45-37.)

Blumenthal has held elective office in Connecticut for 37 years, ever since 1985, when Stamford sent him to the state House of Representatives and then the state Senate, whereupon he leapt to five elections for 20 years as state government’s top lawyer, where one of his young children understood him to be the “eternal general.” Now, at 76, older than Donald Trump if not Joe Biden, Blumenthal is nearing the end of his second six-year term in the Senate and seeking a third in this November’s election.

The phenomenon implied by the Q poll is hardly new. The ancient Athenian statesman Aristides, who was exiled from the city he long had faithfully served, is said to have encountered an illiterate constituent who did not recognize him and so sought help in writing Aristides’ name on a ballot for banishment. Aristides asked: Had the man somehow been offended by Aristides? No, the man replied. He was just tired of hearing people speak about “Aristides the Just.” As requested and just to the last, Aristides wrote his name on the man’s banishment ballot and was sent into exile.

Blumenthal was hardly the first state attorney general to make a show of bringing suit against every supposed fraud or mistake in the state or national marketplace. As “eternal general” he just carried on with it longer than most as he waited and waited and waited for the Democratic nomination he prized to open up. He twice could have had his party’s nomination for governor, but governors have to do actual work and can’t always choose their issues, while being a senator is mainly posturing.

Indeed, for more than a decade as senator Blumenthal has waxed indignant almost every day about all sorts of little things without taking much notice of stupid imperial wars, the decline of the family and education, roaring inflation, and the conglomeration of the economy. He had political reasons to avoid the more important issues.

Those stupid wars sustain Connecticut’s big military contractors. The decline of the family and education sustains the Democratic Party’s army, the government employee unions, many of whose members minister expensively to family and education failure. Inflation is how government’s new extraordinary patronage is being financed without explicit taxes. And no one who has married into a fabulously wealthy family and thereby become the fifth richest senator can get too upset about the worsening concentration of wealth. (Blumenthal says his strange participation last December in a Communist Party testimonial dinner in New Haven arose from a misunderstanding.)

Lately Blumenthal may be best known as the most vehement advocate of unrestricted abortion. In this he has benefited greatly from journalism’s refusal to ask critical questions about late-term abortion and parental notification, letting the senator appeal to abortion fanatics while obscuring that his positions are contrary to the views of most of his constituents.

There are many potential issues for a campaign against Blumenthal, including his support for a president whose own approval rating in Connecticut, according to the Q poll, is negative 40-56. But can a Republican challenger press these issues?

The candidate endorsed by the Republican State Convention, former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, has a moderate record and in a poll two weeks ago trailed Blumenthal by only 10 points, 50-40. But Klarides still has to win a primary election, has little campaign funding, can be as shrill as Blumenthal himself, and, maybe most important, despite her shrillness has not had much of substance to say.

For the moment the zinger of the Senate campaign belongs to Republican primary challenger Leora Levy, a member of the party’s national committee, whose radio commercial notes that the Democrats “closed the schools and opened the borders.”

But Levy poses as a fan of Donald Trump, which, while it may profit her in the primary, may disqualify her in the election and thereby help Blumenthal become the eternal senator.

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

By Chris Powell

As with the school massacre in Newtown and the supermarket massacre in Buffalo, the school massacre in Uvalde has brought forth the usual legislative prescriptions to prevent a recurrence, prescriptions often delivered by bloviating politicians pretending to virtue. But the prescriptions seldom have much application to the atrocities that prompt them.

The private sale exemption in the federal law requiring background checks for gun purchases should have been closed long ago. Even most supporters of Second Amendment rights favor ending it, and no sense can be made of the opposition of Republicans in Congress. But the purchases of the guns used in the Newtown, Buffalo, and Uvalde massacres cleared background checks. The gun used in the Newtown massacre was stolen by the young perpetrator from his mother, who became his first victim.

That perpetrator was known to be disturbed but no “red flag” law would have had any effect on him, since the gun wasn’t his.

The perpetrators of the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres seem to have been mentally ill but not ill enough to have been reported to authorities, so a “red flag” law would not have impeded their purchases.

While “red flag” laws sound good, and Connecticut has one, they raise civil rights and due process complications even as not all mass murderers give actionable warnings.

“Safe storage” requirements make sense too but would have meant nothing with the Buffalo and Uvalde cases. “Safe storage” might have been preventive in Newtown but the perpetrator lived with his mother and was her companion on the shooting range and likely knew where the keys were kept.

Yes, “ghost guns” should be banned too but were not used in the massacres.

Then there is outlawing “assault rifles” — that is, scary-looking rifles. The real objection to them is their semi-automatic properties — that they automatically reload the firing chamber. But then most guns manufactured in the last century automatically reload and most rifles and handguns in the United States are semi-automatic.

Should civilian possession of semi-automatic rifles be banned? If so, it will be hard to ban one model without banning them all. Americans own tens of millions of them and few are registered, so confiscating them might not be terribly successful or effective.

Banning the sale and possession of semi-automatic rifles also might run afoul of the Second Amendment, since such rifles are so common and basic. But at least advocates of outlawing semi-automatics — essentially national gun confiscation — get far more relevant than other advocates of more gun restrictions.

Of course there are also many mass shootings with mere handguns, like the one in Manchester in 2010 in which eight people were murdered. So should handguns be banned too?

Who in politics wants to get relevant enough to propose repealing the Second Amendment?

But like immigration and abortion, guns are an issue the political parties seem to prefer sustaining rather than resolving.

Democrats blame the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers for blocking more gun regulations just as they blame misogynistic men for limits on abortion. But there are heavily pro-gun and anti-abortion states and heavily anti-gun and pro-abortion states not because of the NRA, gun manufacturers, or Planned Parenthood but simply because many people feel strongly about the issues one way or the other.

Members of Congress are reflecting the views of their constituents.

So what might be politically possible to prevent mass shootings in a country with hundreds of millions of guns among a population with tens of millions of mentally ill or unstable people, including millions of boys growing up in broken homes without much parenting, like the killer in Uvalde?

The Second Amendment itself makes a suggestion: “a well-regulated militia.” That is, what about a carefully trained, uniformed, and armed volunteer national police auxiliary to help guard soft targets like schools and hospitals and to be visible everywhere in ordinary life?

After all, if guns aren’t going to be confiscated, why not put some where they might provide a little protection?

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, encompassing the northwest part of the state, running from Danbury north to Waterbury with eastward extensions to New Britain and Meriden, is generally considered the state’s most politically competitive. So one might think that it would generate the most intelligent and issue-oriented campaigns.

That isn’t happening yet this year.

Inflation is raging, living standards are falling, students have lost a year or two of education because of the virus epidemic, society is disintegrating generally, the country is waging a blank-check proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and what are the big issues in the 5th District?

First was the discovery that the Democratic incumbent, former national teacher of the year Jahana Hayes, has put her two children on her campaign’s payroll doing small jobs at small salaries. This was nepotism but it was in Hayes’ campaign, not her congressional office, it was legal, and it was properly reported.

Then the Democrats charged that the Republican nominee, former state Sen. George Logan, is a carpetbagger for moving from Ansonia, which is in the 3rd Congressional District, to Meriden, where he is renting a house and has registered to vote so he can be living in the district from which he would be elected.

In their attack on Logan, the Democrats likened him to Curious George, the monkey in the children’s book series. This was amazingly obtuse as well as ironic coming from the political party that strives to take offense at everything, for Logan is Black and likening Black people to monkeys is old racist disparagement.

So [ITALICS] voila! [END ITALICS] Another scandal, right?

Except that Hayes is Black too, and what’s bad for the goose is bad for the gander, thereby signifying that stupid as the form of the Democratic attack on Logan was, it wasn’t [ITALICS] meant [ITALICS] to be racist, even if the worst is always assumed of Republican motives in [ITALICS] their [END ITALICS] campaign gaffes.

The carpetbagger issue [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] worth arguing because there seldom is much substance to it.

Candidates from both parties often have moved around in search of more congenial jurisdictions.

The now-sainted Bobby Kennedy, a Democrat, attorney general for his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was raised in Massachusetts and was living in Virginia when, in 1964, his brother having been assassinated, he decided to run for the U.S. Senate in New York, Virginia then being too conservative to elect a Kennedy.

Today Republican Mitt Romney is U.S. senator from Utah but he first gained national prominence as governor of Massachusetts, a Democratic state that is not sending Republicans to Congress. Romney is a Mormon and Utah, being the Mormon state, easily got over his Northeastern taint.

As for Connecticut, it is a small and generally cosmopolitan state where few people are completely out of place — so small that several times in its history it was happy to elect all its members of Congress on an at-large basis and had no congressional districts at all. All Connecticut’s members of Congress then were presumed to be prepared to represent the whole state.

Indeed, even today there is no requirement for a member of Congress to reside in the district from which he is elected. That is just a political tradition. The Constitution requires only that members of Congress live in [ITALICS] the state [END ITALICS] from which they are elected. (Oddly, the speaker of the House of Representatives doesn’t even have to be a member of the House, which can choose anyone in the country to be its presiding officer.)

Connecticut’s returning to a system of at-large election to Congress might facilitate better candidates by broadening their practical eligibility and giving voters more choices.

The 5th District has more rural areas than the 3rd but the districts are not so different. Ansonia, where Logan lived when he was serving as state senator, is only 25 miles from Meriden, and both are gritty old mill towns with similar challenges.

As with the rest of the country, Connecticut generally and the Republican Party especially will benefit from much more participation by Black people. Logan’s crossing the district line is a small price to pay for that.

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

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Remarks by Chris Powell
Academy of New England Journalists
Boston, Massachusetts
Thursday, November 16, 2006

(Presented by James H. Smith)

Please forgive me for not being with you to thank you in person for the Yankee Quill Award and my election to the Academy of New England Journalists. I had a longstanding commitment to be far away from Boston this week on behalf of a non-profit group of which I’m an officer and for which a lot is at stake. Where I am I will not be getting any awards and will not be able to eat and drink as much as I would with you tonight. I’ll just have to make up for it when I get home.

The Yankee Quill seems to be a sort of lifetime achievement award for New England journalists, something meant to prompt a little reflection. So it reminds me of what Groucho Marx said toward the end of his life, in 1972, when Roger Ebert asked him to reflect on his career on stage and in the movies, radio, and television.

Groucho replied simply: “I’d trade it all for an erection.”

In those days such an observation might have been considered distasteful by almost any audience except an audience of journalists. But of course today Groucho could parlay that observation into another career in television, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry and its advertising agencies, and hardly anyone would be offended. Indeed, since half the country now is close to what was Groucho’s age then, most people today probably would share his point of view..

Like many of you I cannot look forward to another career; it’s too late. There’s not much else we can do. Whether journalism remains in large part a matter of newsprint or becomes entirely electronic, we will be stuck with it. But maybe that’s not so bad, since, as Woody Allen suggested, most of success is just a matter of showing up, and in journalism if you stick around long enough you’re almost sure to get an award — maybe even a few awards every year. At least I have been hiring people for my newspaper for more than 30 years and I’ve yet to find even the greenest applicant just out of college who wasn’t already an “award-winning journalist.”

OK, the Yankee Quill isn’t just any journalism award. Unlike other awards, it seems that you can get it only once, and then you’re one of the elect. This year’s recipients even get to be mentioned in the same breath with William Lloyd Garrison of the early abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, who made it into “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” for declaring that, in his opposition to slavery, he was in earnest, he would not equivocate, he would not excuse, he would not retreat a single inch, and he would be heard.

Even before founding The Liberator, Garrison had already done prison time in Maryland for denouncing slavery, which was considered libel there, so he was very much in earnest. And if Garrison thought Boston would be much safer and more enlightened than Maryland, he was wrong. After he founded The Liberator here, a mob put a rope on him and dragged him through the streets of the city — and he wasn’t even a Republican yet.

If tonight’s posthumous award for Garrison is the academy’s way of coming out against slavery, better late than never. Let’s just hope it’s not noticed by the busybodies over at the Labor Department’s wage and hour division; let’s not give our young award-winning colleagues any ideas. In journalism one should be able to survive on one’s awards.

But seriously, folks. … Well, I am being serious, as serious as anyone should be about something that, as much as we may love it, is just a means to a much greater end, not an end in itself.

In college I took a poetry course that introduced me to some fine things, like W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of William Butler Yeats,” as well as to the work of Yeats himself. Yeats had been the literary giant of Ireland, and when he died Auden wrote:

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen. …

So much for poetry, I thought back then; Yeats and Auden should know. But maybe, I thought, journalism could make something happen, and it didn’t even have to rhyme. So I left college early for the newspaper job.

I still think journalism can make something happen, or prevent something from happening, which may be just as good, and that’s a reason for sticking with it, but it’s not so much my reason anymore. No, I stick with it more out of spite. I just couldn’t stand for certain people to think that nobody is on to them.

Now maybe this is not much to offer for such a big award presented so generously at the instigation of friends, but after sticking around so long it’s the best I can do. If the academy wants to impeach me over it, be sure to hold a public hearing first. I promise to show up for that.

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By Chris Powell

As recently as 50 years ago Connecticut politics still had traces of the old ethnic, racial, and religious resentments and rivalries that had arisen through the state’s long history, resentments and rivalries that political party state tickets tried to assuage.

Yankee Protestant Republicans scorned immigrant Catholics. While the Irish and Italians both were mostly Catholic, they were also tribal and often found something to dislike about each other, so much so that many Italians became Republicans just because the Irish, having arrived first and been scored by the Yankee Protestant Republicans, had come to dominate the Democratic Party.

The state’s Blacks started leaning Democratic during the New Deal years but race remained the state’s biggest prejudice so they didn’t get much patronage for their political involvement, and for a long time they were glad just not to be actively oppressed.

Jews were an afterthought in Connecticut politics until Abraham Ribicoff got elected to Congress as a Democrat from the Hartford district in 1948 and came back from defeat for re-election in the Republican landslide of 1952 to run for governor in 1954. Ribicoff ran into what was said to be a whispering campaign targeting him for his religion, so he went on television near Election Day to extol the American dream and his right to aspire to it despite his modest Jewish origins in New Britain. The tactic worked, gaining Ribicoff a small plurality, and it may have been the moment when Connecticut began to grow up a little politically, to start looking past the ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices and irrelevancies.

Still, ticket balancing along ethnic, racial, and religious lines continued in both parties for a few decades.

For some reason back then both parties tended to reserve their congressman-at-large nominations for a Pole, and when, at the Democratic State Convention in 1962, the Democratic incumbent, Frank Kowalski, stomped out in resentment over being denied a primary for the U.S. Senate nomination, party power broker John M. Bailey, who was both state and national Democratic chairman, urgently sought another candidate with a Polish name.

Bailey found a prospect in the Bristol delegation, a little-known municipal official and war veteran, Bernard F. Grabowski. The legend is that Bailey asked Grabowski three questions:

Are you Polish? Are you Catholic? Can you speak Polish?

When Grabowski answered affirmatively, the Democrats had their nominee and Connecticut its next congressman-at-large.

But amid the national political turmoil of the late 1960s, ticket balancing was getting in the way of the ambitions of too many state politicians, and when Bailey, the master of machine politics, died in 1975, there was no one skilled and inclined enough to keep ticket balancing going as ethnicity and race were fading as focal points of life.

Indeed, in the following several decades Connecticut began to think itself somewhat more enlightened for its growing indifference to the ancestry and religion of political candidates and its increasing concern for positions, skills, and character.

But now the state may be regressing, at least to judge by the recent Democratic State Convention, where the party’s silly renewed obsession with race and other characteristics irrelevant to the performance of public office targeted nominations for two spots on the state ticket where no incumbents were seeking re-election.

Connecticut Democrats still seem to think the state Constitution requires the treasurer’s office to be filled by a Black person and the secretary of the state’s office by a woman. The party’s nominee for secretary this time is not just female but Black as well. Both nominees may do a good job if elected but they are little known and almost certainly would not have been chosen if they did not provide the racial composition the convention sought.

Of course few voters may care much about who fills the treasurer and secretary positions, and even with Connecticut Democrats diversity goes only so far. For their ticket’s top positions, the ones with the greatest power over policy and patronage — governor and lieutenant governor — have gone again to whites, and somehow the ticket apparently lacks a transgender candidate, an oversight that may embarrass the party’s most hysteric members.

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

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By Chris Powell

Republicans, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy charges, are partly to blame for the May 14 massacre in Buffalo because many of them espouse the “Great Replacement Theory” that the murderer says motivated him. This is the belief that powerful people are conspiring to change the country’s racial composition, replacing whites with Blacks and members of other races.

Of course in 2017 when a Democratic activist shot up the Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, after expressing on social media hatred for President Trump and all Republicans, Democrats like Murphy were perfectly able to separate the perpetrator’s politics from his psychosis. No Democrats blamed their party’s hateful anti-Republican rhetoric for inspiring the crime, and few Republicans exploited it politically.

But now the “great replacement theory” is supposed to be a scandal, another club to beat Republicans with — and, it seems, to distract the country from a Democratic scandal.

For paranoid and hateful as promoters of the “great replacement theory” may be, it touches something real — the federal government’s long failure to enforce immigration law and the nullification of immigration law by state and local governments, a situation worsening under the Biden administration. This may not be a scheme to replace whites with Blacks, but what about replacing Republicans with Democrats?

After all, for years many Democratic academics and political analysts — including pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, husband of Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro — have concluded that increasing immigration, bringing into the country more impoverished people from around the world, many of them likely to become dependent on government, will improve the Democratic Party’s prospects. Some of these academics and analysts have celebrated this.

In any case Senator Murphy and other prominent Democrats in Connecticut are not at all troubled by the failure to enforce immigration law.

So when he is done indicting Republicans for the massacre in Buffalo, Murphy might explain why he approves of open borders. His explaining might best be done in New Haven, Connecticut’s leading “sanctuary city” — and the state’s top producer of Democratic pluralities.

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WEST HAVEN ISN’T ALONE: With the assent of Governor Lamont, West Haven has just been subjected to the highest level of supervision by state government’s Municipal Accountability Review Board, “Tier 4,” a move prompted largely by the theft from the city of more than a million dollars of federal emergency aid right under the noses of the mayor and City Council.

While West Haven has been under some degree of supervision by the accountability board for five years, it hasn’t done much good. The board’s own competence should have been questioned by now. At least the governor acknowledges that the “mess” in the city “has gone on too long.”

But when “Tier 4” was imposed, the board showed why West Haven is not solely to blame for its shaky finances.

The board rejected the city’s proposed budget because it did not assure long-term financing for raises promised by the city’s new contract with its police union. But if the city’s financial condition is so dire, why is collective bargaining with city employee unions still in force? The ultimate sanction for municipal financial disaster should come with bankruptcy-like provisions, erasing the city’s commitments amid reorganization, liberating the city from expensive state mandates.

Even so, too much can be made of West Haven’s trouble. Hartford and New Haven also would be busted this year without their vast new state and federal aid. New Haven especially remains technically insolvent because of huge unfunded pension liabilities. Hartford and New Haven may belong in “Tier 4” as much as West Haven does.

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GANIM REBUKED: Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim got a much-deserved rebuke last week from a labor relations arbiter, who found that the mayor wrongly suspended a police officer on a complaint that he had failed to properly notify a city family about the untimely death of a young woman.

The mayor had no evidence of the officer’s neglect. He responded only to the complaint of family members and the protests they called, thereby betraying due process to assuage the mob.

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

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