Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

With political journalism the questions that don’t get asked can be more important than the ones that do. Such was the case with the contrived controversy that arose in the last days of Connecticut’s campaign for governor.

In a television interview the Republican nominee, Bob Stefanowski, reiterated for the umpteenth time his support for abortion rights as codified in Connecticut law, a Roe v. Wade policy of unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability and restriction of post-viability abortion to saving the life or health of the pregnant woman. But Stefanowski also remarked that he did not think abortions should be performed beyond the first trimester of pregnancy.

Connecticut law is not that restrictive, since fetal viability is generally believed not to occur until 10 weeks or so after the first trimester.

While in the interview Stefanowski did not advocate tightening the state’s abortion law, his trimester remark invited clarification. But none of the three journalists present asked for one, perhaps because they knew very well that Stefanowski’s oft-repeated position on abortion was Roe v. Wade. So the interview moved on.

The next day Democrats began expressing mock horror. Stefanowski, they shrieked, wanted to repeal abortion rights after all!

No, he didn’t. He quickly admitted having misspoken. But the Democrats continued the hysteria against him, as if there is much sentiment in the state for retreating from the viability standard in Connecticut’s abortion law.

Ironically, Governor Lamont and Connecticut’s members of Congress, all Democrats, [ITALICS] already [END ITALICS] had expressed support for [ITALICS] federal [END ITALICS] legislation that [ITALICS] would [END ITALICS] destroy the viability standard of Connecticut’s abortion law. That is, months ago the governor and the congressmen endorsed Democratic legislation in Congress, the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, that would forbid states from restricting abortion at [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] stage of pregnancy, requiring states to allow abortion right up to the moment of birth, when it is indistinguishable from infanticide.

While Connecticut journalists often have questioned Stefanowski’s position on abortion, they don’t seem ever to have questioned the governor and the congressmen about their support for abortion of viable fetuses even at the moment of birth. Nor has there been much if any questioning of the governor and congressmen about their opposition to requiring parental consent for abortions for minors, though state law requires parental consent for minors getting a tattoo.

Opinion polls in Connecticut and nationally show strong opposition to late-term abortion and strong support for parental notification, suggesting vulnerability for the governor and Connecticut’s congressmen if those issues are ever pressed.

But of course most journalists are liberal Democrats, and during an election campaign journalism in Connecticut can put troublesome questions about abortion only to Republicans. Democrats get a pass.

* * *

More questions that journalism doesn’t ask also may arise from the investigative reports recently published by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers about the use by schools of restraint and seclusion to control disturbed and disruptive students.

The reports say some disturbed students have died after confrontations with school staff, but a new procedure, aiming to calm disturbed students before trying to restrain them, has substantially reduced physical and psychological harm. The procedure includes equipping school staff with foam shields to absorb blows from disturbed students.

So maybe Connecticut’s schools should pursue the new procedure and stock up on those shields. But it might be better to ask a few questions, in journalism and school administration.

For example, where are all the disturbed kids coming from — not just in schools but on the street as well, as with the explosion in car thefts, vandalism, and other offenses by juveniles?

Why are disruptive students allowed to impair everyone else’s education?

And must schools really function as mental hospitals too when, as national proficiency test scores showed again the other day, schools can hardly teach anymore?

Merely remediating social problems doesn’t eliminate them. Mainly it just makes the remediation industry more profitable.

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

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By Chris Powell

Debating this week for the second and final time of the campaign for governor, Democrat Ned Lamont and Republican Bob Stefanowski put on an instructive show. Even the third-party candidate, Rob Hotaling, added something important, if not what he intended.

Aggressive and full of details, Stefanowski prompted Governor Lamont to perform better than usual. But the most telling blow against the governor may have been self-inflicted, for he twice ran away from a question about the huge cost overruns on state government’s New London State Pier project.

The governor also may not have helped himself when asked to identify the best Connecticut governor of his lifetime. Lamont picked Lowell P. Weicker Jr. The candidates were not allowed to explain their choices, but Weicker is famous for instituting the state income tax after pledging during his campaign to oppose such a tax, and the income tax secured what is likely the permanent victory of Connecticut’s government and welfare classes over everyone else.

Hotaling also chose Weicker.

Stefanowski chose Ella Grasso, a Democrat who, while a longtime liberal, was famous for resisting the income tax desired by many in her party decades ago. Stefanowski cited his endorsement in this campaign by Grasso’s son, James, who contends that his mother would find today’s Democratic Party too extreme.

Hotaling’s answer to this and other questions showed that his views are far closer to Lamont’s than Stefanowski’s.

As the nominee of the Independent Party, whose ballot line four years ago provided 25,000 votes to Stefanowski, Hotaling had been expected by many, including Stefanowski himself, to draw votes mainly away from the Republican this time. These votes would come from people who are dissatisfied with the Lamont administration but consider the Republican Party tainted. Hotaling’s performance at the debate demolished this assumption.

While just weeks ago Stefanowski sued Hotaling over irregularities at the Independent Party’s caucus, whose nomination Stefanowski wanted again, he now was glad to argue that the party’s nominee is just another Democrat.

Also revealing was the heated exchange between the governor and Stefanowski about state government’s huge “rainy day fund” surplus, estimated at $6 billion, arising largely from emergency federal grants. Stefanowski wants to use as much as half of the surplus for tax relief to help offset high inflation. The governor wants to keep the money available to state government for use when tax revenue falls in the recession that is widely expected and may already have begun.

That is, Stefanowski would return money to the public generally, while the governor would keep it for those on the government payroll so that, when recession comes, they can be exempted from sacrifice and government can be exempted from economizing generally. The many six-figure salaries in state and municipal government will be safe. Ordinary taxpayers won’t be.

* * *

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is terrified by the growing prospect of Republican control of Congress after next week’s election, calling it “apocalyptic” and “potentially cataclysmic” and likely to result in a default on the national debt, a shutdown of the federal government, and constant impeachments.

Yes, the congressional Republican Party has many crazies and clowns. But then is Murphy unable to see why there seems to be a Republican trend in the country even if not in Connecticut?

For the Democratic congressional party can match the Republicans crazy and clown for crazy and clown, and can top them with a president whose dementia makes a scene nearly every day on top of high inflation, open borders, and failing schools brimming with political indoctrination, transgenderism, and contempt for parents.

Since the Democrats hold the presidency and Congress, are voters not entitled to blame them for these circumstances? For if, as Murphy says, the political alternative to the Democrats is “apocalyptic” and “potentially cataclysmic,” to many people the political present must already seem that way.

Are there any Democratic officeholders without responsibility for inflation, open borders, and declining education? Murphy doesn’t notice that he is part of the present apocalypse himself.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut now may have its equivalent of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, consisting of Central Connecticut State University students and members of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group who, according to news reports, last week pretended to purge racism from the office of the Republican registrar of voters at City Hall in New Britain.

Having gone to the registrar’s office to obtain voter registration cards, the president of Central’s Social Work Club, Taina Manick, sighted a tiny Confederate flag in a stand of four other tiny flags among some knickknacks. She was immediately triggered. She returned the next day with her colleagues and cameras to record them scolding the registrar, Peter Gostin, and asking him if he is a racist.

Gostin denied racism and confessed he had not given much thought to the flags and knickknacks, which had been sitting on a shelf in his office, unremarked, for 14 years. The Red Guards asked Gostin if he would surrender the offending flag and he quickly agreed, whereupon they lifted it in triumph, photographed it, dropped it in a trash can, laughed, and departed.

Afterward Gostin said he was glad to be rid of the source of offense but did not understand why his visitors needed to “make a big show” about it and question his character.

But of course making a big show — displaying self-righteousness — is the point of today’s indignation industry, of which the new Red Guards may be the shock troops, and the smaller the offense, the bigger the show must be to gain attention.

Ironically, as the Red Guards were bullying the hapless registrar, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was announcing that the huge and infamous racial performance gap in Connecticut’s schools has persisted for another three years. The gap is worse in cities like New Britain. So is violent crime, which also affects racial minorities disproportionately.

Indeed, Connecticut suffers many other distressing racial disparities. None has been caused or sustained by the tiny and long-overlooked flag in the New Britain registrar’s office.

But maybe the Red Guards can keep scouring Connecticut for other things from which they can claim to have taken offense. Maybe someday they will find one more relevant to social justice than their comic self-righteousness is.

* * *

A few weeks ago as the campaign of the anti-abortion Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Georgia, former football star Herschel Walker, was rocked by allegations he had paid for the abortions of former girlfriends, Democrats scorned Republicans for sticking with their candidate despite his likely hypocrisy. Republicans, Democrats sneered, cared about nothing beyond gaining a majority in the Senate.

Last week, after weeks of insisting that he had recovered from a stroke and should remain the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman participated in a televised debate with the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, the television talk-show doctor. Because Fetterman now has trouble understanding spoken words, he was granted use of video equipment to caption the questions.

Nevertheless, even Democrats acknowledged that their candidate’s performance was painful to watch. As the debate began, Fetterman’s first words were, “Hi. Good night, everybody.” At times he was incoherent and contradicted himself.

But of course Democrats are sticking with Fetterman though elected officials need at least normal communication skills, which their candidate now lacks. Like the Republicans, the Democrats figure that nothing matters except taking control of the Senate.

And both sides have good reasons.

Republicans figure that Walker, while an ignoramus, at least will be able to take instructions from the party’s Senate leadership to prevent President Biden’s appointment to the Supreme Court of another judge who, to placate the Democratic Party’s crazy left wing, professes not to know what a woman is.

Democrats figure that, impaired as Fetterman is, he at least will be able to take instructions from the party’s Senate leadership to prevent a Republican attempt to placate the party’s crazy right wing by impeaching the president for his own worsening dementia.

Politics, thy name is hypocrisy. Get used to it.

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

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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.

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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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