Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

Wanting to be pious, people like to say that a financial value can’t be set on human life. But of course society calculates such value all the time.

Government does it when appropriating for medical care and public safety. Insurance companies and their customers do it when writing and purchasing policies. Lawyers and courts do it when litigating damage lawsuits.

This may seem insensitive and, at times, even cruel, but life has to go on and everything can’t be liquidated to redress a single casualty.

So how much is Randy Cox’s former life worth now that he is paralyzed from the neck down as a result of the incident in June when he was in the custody of police in New Haven?

Cox was handcuffed and sitting in a police van without seatbelts when it stopped abruptly to avoid a crash, causing him to slide on a bench head-first into the van’s front wall, breaking his neck. It was captured on the van’s video system and quickly posted on the internet and seen worldwide.

Cox’s lawyers are suing for $100 million, one of them declaring: “There is no amount of money in damages that can compensate this man for the injuries he sustained.” But Cox’s other lawyer acknowledges that $20 million to $30 million might provide basic lifetime care for the paralyzed man, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker wants the lawsuit to end with a settlement rather than a trial.

While as a matter of law the city may be solely responsible for what happens to people in the custody of its police, Cox alone is to blame for how he came to be in police custody.

He was at a block party and scaring people by brandishing a pistol, prompting a call to police. He seems to have been drunk.

Police video shows him approaching officers while holding a half-empty liquor bottle and refusing to respond when asked his name and if he is carrying anything else. Officers found the pistol tucked into his pants, concealed under his shirt. Since Cox had no permit to carry the gun, he was arrested, cuffed, and put into the van to be taken to police headquarters.

Apparently believing that Cox’s uncooperativeness arose from his intoxication, officers at headquarters treated him callously, video of which has prompted anger. But that callousness did not cause Cox’s injury, nor does racism seem to have motivated the callousness, since, while Cox is Black, so are several officers who dealt with him.

Instead the case seems to have been just more of the ordinary madness of urban underclass life, which easily can make those who have to work with it insensitive and cynical. Their cynicism is often justified by the revolving doors of criminal justice — Cox himself is a repeat offender — and the chronic failure of social work.

The good intentions of public policy have not yet alleviated the madness.

There is more madness in the outrage being instigated by Cox’s lawyers, as well as in their demand for $100 million in damages.

For no one tried to harm Cox, much less harm him because of his race. This case is not what Cox’s lawyers liken it to, the murder of George Floyd by racist police in Minneapolis. Indeed, just two years ago New Haven had a Black mayor who didn’t worry about the lack of seatbelts in police vans. Most city residents are poor and from minority groups, and city government strives to be the most politically correct in the world.

If Cox wins $100 million in damages from New Haven, the bill will come to about $770 per capita or more than $1,000 per adult. The city’s insurer likely will pay much of it but then strive to recover it from the city through higher premiums. Since the city is impoverished, state government subsidizes the city heavily and so will pay too, even as Connecticut’s economy has been lagging and continues to weaken even as the state’s unmet human needs are huge and growing.

Yes, Cox deserves enough compensation to recover what reasonably can be recovered of his life, and the demagoguery of his lawyers may be just a strategy for raising the political pressure on New Haven city government to be more generous in a settlement.

But lawyers who demagogue about justice while working on a contingency fee basis, confident that their target has plenty of insurance, are not seeking justice alone. The righteousness business can pay well.

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

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By Chris Powell

With a protest march on campus the other day, students at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain showed the world that they haven’t learned what even kids in elementary school might be expected to know.

The students demanded that the university administration investigate a fellow student’s complaint of sexual assault that had not yet been made formally to any police agency or to the university itself.

Instead, the accusation had been made by the complainant only on a social media internet site, TikTok, which may be best known for posting videos encouraging young people to do stupid, dangerous, damaging, and even criminal things to get attention, the infamous “TikTok challenges.”

As it turned out, the university had heard of the accusation on TikTok prior to the student protest march and already had hired some outsiders to investigate, the campus police and New Britain police apparently being considered incompetent.

Having handled the matter in such a strange way, the university was in no position to remind the student protesters that if you want the authorities to act against crime, the first thing to do is to report it to them. Central’s campus is dotted with emergency telephone stations, and most young people these days would leave home in the morning without their shoes before they left without their mobile phones. But of course holding a protest march before there is anything to protest provides a rush of self-righteousness.

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ANOTHER ABORTION PHONY: U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat seeking election to a third term, isn’t the only candidate for senator who is dissembling on the abortion issue.

Blumenthal says his abortion legislation in Congress, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would simply put into federal law the policy articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. But the Roe decision held that states properly could prohibit or regulate abortion after the viability of the unborn child, while Blumenthal’s legislation would prohibit states from restriction abortion at [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] stage of pregnancy.

Blumenthal’s Republican challenger, Leora Levy, recently deflected a request from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers to say what she thinks about South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s legislation to outlaw abortions nationally after 15 weeks of gestation.

Levy used to support abortion rights. But during the primary campaign for the Republican Senate nomination, Levy declared herself to be completely anti-abortion and explained in detail why she had changed her mind. Now she seems to be changing her mind again.

“I am personally pro-life and I support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” she said in response to the inquiry from the Hearst papers about Graham’s legislation. “When I am elected to the Senate, I will be accountable to the people of Connecticut for my votes and positions.”

That is, fervent opposition to abortion is helpful in winning a Republican primary but not in winning an election. Levy is so principled on abortion that she now wishes the issue would just go away. Yes, Levy will be accountable for her positions after the election — when it’s too late for voters to do anything about being misled.

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ERASING ACCOUNTABILITY: Erasing criminal records, thereby diminishing accountability from criminals, and increasing accountability from police officers have become great causes on the political left in Connecticut. The resolution of a recent case in Hartford Superior Court showed that the first cause can defeat the latter.

Over the objections of a prosecutor, Superior Court Judge Stephanie A. Damiani admitted a former Glastonbury police lieutenant, Kevin Troy, to two diversionary programs as he faced charges of drunken driving and interfering with police. Troy had gotten drunk, caused a rollover crash in Enfield, and then lied to police about it, telling them that someone else had been driving. Troy’s completion of the programs will erase the records of his offenses.

Troy retired from the Glastonbury department after his arrest but is only 49 and might seek to return to police work elsewhere. With his criminal record erased, a big impediment to that will be out of the way.

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

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By Chris Powell

Holy cow! A few people in Connecticut are starting to notice the long failure of social policy and, more remarkably, finding the courage to discuss it.

The revelation came in a recent report by investigative reporter Bill Cummings of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers quoting some worthies in the Bridgeport area. Cummings wrote that “the number of homicides in Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven has remained consistent over the last decade, raising questions about whether policing and social programs — and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them — are making a difference.”

The report noted that for many years murder victims in the cities have been mostly young Black males from their teens to their 30s.

Bridgeport state Sen. Margaret Moore, a Democrat, said she was shocked by the Hearst report. “It seems like we have not learned anything,” Moore said, “and our values have not improved.” By that she meant that there has been no general [ITALICS] recognition [END ITALICS] and [ITALICS] acknowledgment [END ITALICS] of failure. “What we have done has not worked,” she said.

The president of the Bridgeport chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, D. Stanley Lord, expressed skepticism of “program after program after program,” doubting that young people are really being reached.

Indeed, if “Black lives matter” was more than a slogan for using social disintegration to gain political patronage, the self-slaughter of young Black men and boys in Connecticut would have let up a bit by now.

Unfortunately the Hearst report found no one proposing alternatives to “program after program after program.” There was the usual prattle about the need for more “job training,” but most city children never master ordinary elementary and high school subjects, prerequisites for any job beyond the menial minimum-wage work that often causes those stuck in it to try the drug trade instead.

Connecticut congratulates itself for a rising high school graduation rate even as chronic absenteeism is overwhelming in city schools, students advance entirely by social promotion, and even illiterates are given diplomas lest they lose self-esteem.

One observer quoted in the Hearst report, Jessica Pizzano of Survivors of Homicide, may have gotten closest to the underlying problem. “Kids don’t go to the street because they are bad,” Pizzano said. “They are looking for love and affection. Gangs are families — not great families, but for some that is the only structure they know, anyone showing you kindness.”

No one quoted in the Hearst report spoke the words “parents” or “fathers” and the report did not include them anywhere. But the report’s acknowledgment of the failure of Connecticut’s social policy may embolden others to make similar acknowledgments, and more acknowledgments might assist the realization that programs and policies that don’t achieve their nominal objectives are continued anyway because perpetuating them and the employment they provide now substitutes as their highest objective.

* * *

Most news reporting last week about the appointment of the new president of the University of Connecticut, Radenka Maric, by the university’s Board of Trustees was not interested in the terms of her new contract, despite the financial excesses granted to two of her three most recent predecessors.

Maric, who joined the university as a professor in 2010 and served as vice president for five years before being named interim president in February, is expected to be given a five-year contract. It has not been finalized but is expected to provide a salary of $610,000 with the incentive for “performance bonuses” and the usual presidential perks of housing and a car allowance — not too shabby.

But will Maric’s contract also contain a “golden parachute” provision like the one invoked by UConn President Thomas C. Katsouleas when he resigned in July 2021 after only two years on the job amid conflict with the trustees? Katsouleas was guaranteed a tenured professorship with UConn’s highest professor pay, then $330,000, and so may be around forever. Such guarantees are powerful disincentives to performance.

Last week the “golden parachute” issue had not yet been settled. So Connecticut will have to wait a while to see if UConn’s trustees have learned anything.

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

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By Chris Powell

Maybe that assistant principal in Greenwich who was recently caught admitting that he hires only young liberals as teachers, the better to propagandize students into voting Democratic, wasn’t such an outlier. The more recent incident at Southington High School, where an English teacher was caught inflicting political propaganda on students, suggests that Connecticut may actually be the center of the campaign to dump education for indoctrination.

The teacher distributed to students a packet titled “Vocabulary for Conversations about Race, Gender, Equality and Inclusivity.” It contained a glossary of terms involving transgenderism and racism, topics with which public schools are increasingly obsessed to the detriment of education. The glossary had no relation to material being taught in the teacher’s English classes but supposedly was meant to help if discussion ever turned to the glossary’s subjects.

Another section of the packet revealed that its objective indeed was to turn discussion to those subjects for indoctrination purposes. It said: “You can know in your heart that you don’t hate anyone but still contribute to their oppression. No individual is personally responsible for what white people have done or the historical decisions of the American government, but you are responsible for whether you are upholding the systems that elevate white people over people of color.”

That is: You kids may be oppressors too without even knowing it — yet.

While Southington School Superintendent Steven Madancy told a Board of Education meeting that he supports his teachers, in an open letter to the town he admitted that the English teacher had gone too far. “As a result of our comprehensive review,” the superintendent wrote, “the teacher now realizes that the sources utilized to develop these supplemental materials may not have been neutral in nature and recognizes the bias and controversial statements that some took issue with.”

So the teacher had been counseled not to do stuff like this again, which ordinarily might be enough. But instead things got worse.

The school board’s chairwoman, Colleen Clark, chided those who complained about the propagandizing. “I resent that a personnel matter regarding one of our teachers and our schools has been turned into a political platform by those who have noneducational agendas,” Clark said.

But those who complained about the English teacher’s manifesto weren’t the ones injecting politics into the schools; that was done by the teacher. (Since this is “public” education, despite the misconduct involved, the teacher has not been identified.)

Besides, since nearly everything in public education is to some degree a personnel matter, democracy inevitably makes public education political.

The situation got still worse with an open letter to the Southington board from 60 members of the faculty of Southern Connecticut State University, who called the board’s review of the teacher’s conduct “a politically motivated attack on free speech.”

But the teacher’s freedom of speech wasn’t attacked. The teacher was faulted for commandeering the school curriculum, which is for the school administration, the school board, and, ultimately, the public to determine.

That is exactly what the Southern professors meant to deny. They continued: “We strongly support parental rights in the home. But few parents are experts in education. … Parents … should not determine which texts are read and what language is introduced in order to make sense of those texts.

“To permit parents — or students — to object to what they perceive as ‘divisive’ texts is to descend down the slippery slope of allowing a relatively small but vocal group of parents and students to circumscribe and dictate the nature of public education.”

That is, the public has no right to review “public” education, which should be left to those who suppose themselves to be experts.

Instantly the Southern professors had turned from purported defenders of free speech to resentful opponents. For the critics of the teacher’s manifesto didn’t “circumscribe and dictate the nature of public education.” They exercised free speech in pursuit of their equally constitutional right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Once again those who dominate “public” education in Connecticut have revealed that they don’t think it should be public at all.

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

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By Chris Powell

Has Connecticut state government been turned around, going from huge deficits to huge surpluses, because of Governor Lamont’s great leadership, as the commercials for his re-election campaign claim?

The state has had worse governors but its much improved financial position has little to do with anything state government has done.

The improvement is almost entirely a matter of the billions of dollars in emergency money recently given to Connecticut by the federal government. The Lamont administration did not achieve its budget surplus with changes in policy or practice that produced big savings.

To the contrary, nearly every group with a selfish interest in government appropriations is happy and supporting re-election of the governor, the Democratic nominee. Nearly everything involving great expense in government goes on just as before, and the governor can merrily traverse the state distributing expensive goodies even as the price of food, fuel, and most other necessities has been driven up by inflation caused by the creation of the federal money financing the goodies.

Of course most people notice and resent the inflation. But few understand where it comes from. Most think it’s like the weather, beyond control. Connecticut Republicans haven’t tried to explain it, though it is explained by an old Republican principle:

Nothing in government is free except the posturing.

At least Connecticut’s Republicans have a small remedy for inflation: to use much of state government’s surplus to reduce gasoline, property, and sales taxes.

With a belated platform, their “Contract with Connecticut,” Republican candidates for the General Assembly have joined their candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, with a wonderfully mischievous idea for property tax relief.

This is the objective Democrats always are claiming to pursue but never achieve, since, by design, municipal spending rises to absorb whatever extra aid municipalities receive from state government in the name of property tax relief, the money being used not to reduce taxes but to increase compensation for government employees — the Democratic Party’s army.

That is, the Republicans would let people deduct from their taxable income as much as $10,000 of their municipal property taxes. In effect for many people this would be a big cut in the state income tax, which Stefanowski implausibly proposed to eliminate during his first campaign for governor four years ago. Under the Republican plan, the more municipalities raised property taxes, the more income tax relief property taxpayers would get — real tax relief at last even as state government’s spending might be restrained by falling revenue from the income tax.

In reducing state government’s revenue, the Republican platform is only the most indirect program for economizing.

It is not a plan to audit the expensive policies that long have failed to achieve their nominal objectives.

But then any serious review of education, welfare, urban, and economic policies would be terrifying, what with education’s costs, wokeness, and pomposity rising as learning collapses, the dependence and alienation of the underclass worsening, the cities sinking deeper in poverty and crime, and Connecticut lagging most states in economic and population growth.

Comprehensive policy auditing might be too much for most voters to take. Faced with such audits, most voters might retreat to watch more of the governor’s campaign commercials assuring them that everything in Connecticut is suddenly wonderful, and most might strive to believe it even if, through an open window, they could hear more gunshots, sirens, and sawing of catalytic converters.

When the emergency federal money runs out Connecticut will face the challenges and choices it now desperately postpones. This may happen sooner if the state surplus is spent through tax cuts as the Republicans propose and if the Federal Reserve, by raising interest rates, induces a severe recession in the name of curbing the inflation that has been caused not by low rates but by the creation and spending of vast sums unbacked by taxes or production.

Reality will be a terrible hangover — but for the time being that’s OK, since it won’t arrive until after the election.

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

By Chris Powell

Secrecy triumphed again this month in “public” education in Connecticut.

First the Connecticut State Colleges and University System refused to make available to the Journal Inquirer the personnel files of three officials who were sued in an employment discrimination case whose settlement recently cost the state $775,000. The newspaper was seeking to discover why the plaintiff, Manchester Community College President Nicole Esposito, was fired, what the defendants did to prompt her lawsuit, and why the college system decided to reinstate her with such expensive damages.

The system has refused to provide an explanation, though nothing in the law prevents the system from coming clean. Now the public will have to wait a year or more for the state Freedom of Information Commission to decide on ordering disclosure of the relevant documents.

Worse, several state legislators, questioned by the newspaper about the expensive case, just shrugged it off.

The leader of the Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, said he doesn’t like making public the personnel files of government employees, though with very limited exemptions this has been the law in Connecticut since before he was born.

Government employees, Rojas said, “should expect some level of privacy as it relates to their work and their careers.” He added that giving the public access to government employee personnel files “could have a very chilling effect on our ability to attract and retain talent.”

But disclosure was the law when those college officials were hired and the problem now is only the ability of government agencies and employees to delay disclosure until action by the FOI Commission, which is backlogged.

As for any “chilling effect” on attracting talent to state government, the three executives sued in the discrimination case — Robert Steinmetz, Andrew Kripp, and Alice Pritchard — are paid annual salaries of $256,000, $240,000, and $228,000, respectively. Would accountability for the discrimination case really chill them out of their state jobs and luxurious pensions?

The General Assembly could hold a public hearing and call witnesses to fix responsibility in this scandal but prefers to assist the cover-up.

Secrecy also triumphed this month in the Hartford “public” school system, which, after weeks of stalling, released documents showing that Kathleen Cataford, the school nurse suspended in March for supposedly identifying on social media a student undergoing sex-change therapy, was fired in July.

In fact the nurse wrote only that an 11-year-old girl in the school system was undergoing such therapy and that school policy is to conceal the gender dysphoria of students from their parents unless students want it told.

Hartford’s schools have more than one 11-year-old girl, so what really bothered the school administration was the nurse’s publicizing its policy of keeping parents ignorant of their children’s health problems, an increasingly controversial policy being implemented by schools throughout Connecticut and the country.

These circumstances suggest that the nurse’s firing, while politically correct, was improper and that she might win reinstatement by appealing to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration. After all, the board long has made it almost impossible to fire government employees for any reason.

So [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] the nurse appealed her firing? Hartford’s school system won’t say, though the state Labor Department, which supervises the mediation board, says no appeal has yet been received. (The nurse has made herself incommunicado since her suspension.)

Is the school system negotiating a financial settlement with the nurse? Again the school system won’t say. Maybe such a settlement won’t even be disclosed. In any case it may be fair to suspect that, as with the case of the community college president, any financial settlement will impair accountability to the public.

If public education isn’t going to be public, there is no need for it. Government can just give vouchers to parents and let them buy education for their children in the market that will quickly develop. In addition to being more accountable to parents, education by voucher probably would be much better and far less expensive.

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

By Chris Powell

How righteous Connecticut Attorney General William Tong sounds as he rails against M&T Bank for its defective integration of accounts from People’s United Bank, which M&T acquired in April. Tong also fears that M&T isn’t preserving as many jobs from People’s United as planned.

These problems shouldn’t be so surprising. Both banks are big enterprises, so their combination should have raised antitrust law concerns in the attorney general’s office as well as with federal and state banking regulators. Indeed, quite apart from those regulators the attorney general well might have prevented the merger on his own just by challenging it with an antitrust lawsuit in state court.

But antitrust law enforcement and banking regulation have not been taken seriously lately by either the federal government or state government. Big banks almost always get what they want.

Even now M&T’s dealing with the attorney general over his belated concerns won’t be hurt by the bank’s recent hiring, as a senior vice president, of Max Reiss, Governor Lamont’s former communications director. Banks know how to get what they want.

* * *

Kevin Ollie didn’t coach the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team long enough to get rich on the job, but now he has gotten rich from the university’s incompetent firing of him four years ago.

On top of the $11.2 million UConn paid Ollie this year to make good on what remained of his contract when he was fired, the university now will pay him another $3.9 million for lawyer fees and damage to his reputation, making more than $15 million altogether. Ollie’s lawyer seems to be more competent than all the lawyers who advised and represented the university on the issue.

The university’s incompetence here was in at least three parts: giving Ollie a multiple-year contract; allowing him to join the professors union, which increased his protection against dismissal; and then treating Ollie more severely for violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules than the university treated his predecessor, Jim Calhoun.

But UConn long has cared far more about appearances than about costs, and why should UConn care about its costs when Governor Lamont and the General Assembly don’t? At UConn $15 million is chump change, and it will remain chump change until the governor and legislature hold the university accountable for anything.

There has been and will be no investigation of the Ollie disaster, and UConn may be lucky that the costly disaster of its football team has just flared up again to distract from the costly disaster with Ollie.

* * *

THE PARTY’S OVER: Four years ago the Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, who is also this year’s Republican candidate, got more than 25,000 votes on the ballot line of Connecticut’s Independent Party. Stefanowski won’t be getting them this year, since, after some cheating and double voting at its convention, the party decided by one vote to nominate its own candidate rather than cross-endorse Stefanowski again.

This may not be as big a blow to Stefanowski as it is being construed as he challenges Governor Lamont, the Democratic nominee. For Stefanowski almost certainly brought more votes to the Independent Party line four years ago than the Independent Party line brought to Stefanowski. His votes on the Independent line came from people who wanted regime change but didn’t want to risk getting tainted as partisans.

Indeed, the platform articulated by the Independent Party’s candidate for governor, Rob Hotaling, sounds Republican, as it stresses reducing Connecticut’s cost of living and taxes. So why not cross-endorse the Republican candidate again? After all, the Independent nominee isn’t going to win but will split the vote aligned with the party’s nominal objectives. Under the system of ranked-choice voting lately being discussed in Connecticut, most of the Independent candidate’s second-choice votes would go to the Republican nominee.

This makes the Independent Party’s separate candidacy for governor a vanity project. Connecticut’s other two minor parties, the Working Families Party and the Griebel-Frank Party, are serious, cross-endorsing the governor.

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

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