Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

According to those who supervise Connecticut’s elections, voter fraud is not a problem in the state — or at least not outside Bridgeport, where questions of honesty in elections often arise.

Last week the state Elections Enforcement Commission began investigating a complaint that a worker for the campaign of a candidate for a Democratic nomination for state representative in Bridgeport stole a voter’s absentee ballot. After two recounts and litigation, the primary appears to have been decided by just two votes. The litigation continues.

But the bigger election scandal last week was the conviction in Superior Court of Stamford’s former Democratic chairman, John Mallozzi, on 28 felony counts involving absentee ballot fraud in the 2015 city election. Mallozzi plans to appeal.

However the Bridgeport and Stamford cases are resolved, they suggest that Connecticut should take more seriously the threat of voter fraud.

Just because Donald Trump complained of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and then failed to document it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen more often than people think. After all, complaints of voter fraud were considered perfectly legitimate when Democrats made them after Trump’s election in 2016. (Those complaints were not documented either.)

Additionally, no one in authority in Connecticut has ever looked very hard for voter fraud, though the voter rolls in some municipalities are not updated as often as they should be and though the state has at least two “sanctuary cities” — New Haven and Hartford — that obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law and issue identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

Are illegal immigrants voting in Connecticut?

It’s plausible but nobody checks. Connecticut law makes citizenship a prerequisite for enrollment as a voter, but the state’s enrollment process does not require documentation of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport. People registering to vote need only to claim that they are citizens. Registrars don’t ask for proof.

As the Bridgeport and Stamford cases involve abuse of absentee ballots, they are reminders that the less Connecticut requires voting to be done in person and the more it allows voting by absentee ballot, the greater the potential for fraud will be.

Election security can be assured only by in-person voting that requires presentation of valid identification, preferably photo identification, and by a registration process requiring proof of citizenship.

This doesn’t mean that Connecticut should reject early voting, for which a state constitutional amendment will be on the ballot in the Nov. 8 election. But early voting should be in-person voting at town halls or other official locations, not more voting by absentee ballot. Early voting by absentee ballot will be an embossed invitation to fraud.

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Good for the governors of border states Texas, Florida, and Arizona for sending illegal immigrants and asylum seekers north to “sanctuary” cities and states, giving those jurisdictions a taste of their own poisonous medicine. The border states long have been overwhelmed by the federal government’s failure to control the borders and fairly resent the “sanctuary” crowd’s encouragement of illegal immigration.

So now Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and even Martha’s Vineyard are being rudely confronted with the burden of supporting thousands of new arrivals who compete for already strained local resources and housing.

Consistent with this country’s ideals, its immigration law is extremely liberal and small-d democratic and should remain that way. But the Biden administration’s policy of open borders has caused anarchy.

So maybe the political mischief of the border-state governors is the only way to persuade the Democratic Party, which rules those “sanctuary” cities and states as well as the federal government, that controlling the borders is urgent and that the country shouldn’t admit more people than it can assimilate in an orderly way.

Connecticut is among the “sanctuary” states, and now the airport in its most self-righteous “sanctuary” city, New Haven, has nonstop flights with six cities in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis should take note.

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

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By Chris Powell

Ranked-choice voting has an endorsement from Governor Lamont, a Democrat, and an open mind from his Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, so it is doubly worth discussing during this election campaign.

The ranked-choice idea applies to election contests with three or more candidates, contests that present the risk that the candidate with the most votes will have only a plurality rather than a majority of the vote and thus enter office with less legitimacy unless there is a runoff election. Without a runoff election, the plurality winner could be repellent to most voters, installing extremism when most votes were cast for moderates.

Ranked-choice voting provides an [ITALICS] instant [END ITALICS] runoff election. Voters are invited to indicate not just their first-choice candidate but also second and even third or fourth choices. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least votes is disqualified and his votes are reassigned to candidates as his voters directed. This process is repeated and the votes of the eliminated candidates reassigned until a majority is constructed.

This avoids the expense of reaching a majority by holding multiple elections.

The main objection to ranked-choice voting is that it might confuse people. But ranked choice doesn’t require people to vote for more than one candidate for any office; it just enables them to do so. Anyone confused by the new system could keep voting the old way, making just one choice for each office on the ballot.

Theoretically, a ranked-choice system gives voters more power, allowing them to protect themselves against what they consider the most objectionable potential results of an election. Such a system also might encourage people to vote for lesser-known but possibly better-qualified candidates without risk of wasting their vote, since their second-choice candidate will get their vote if their first choice fails.

The ranked-choice system has not been tried enough in the United States to be sure about it. But over time it might strengthen minor parties and increase voter choice without causing much damage to the two-party system, since most ranked-choice votes might be transferred to major-party candidates in an election’s second tabulation.

Ranked-choice voting also might diminish the influence of “spoiler” candidates, candidates seeking to take votes from other candidates just for spite, since many votes for spoilers would be reassigned anyway.

In any case, in recent decades Connecticut has had some important elections with three or more candidates in which the plurality winner well may not have reflected the desire of the majority.

Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the Republican nominee, was elected U.S. senator in 1970 with only 42% of the vote in a three-way contest, the other two candidates being Democrats who split their party. Ranked-choice voting might have elected one of the Democrats.

Weicker was elected governor as an independent in 1990 with only 40% of the vote in a three-way contest, defeating a Republican and a Democrat who ran third, though Weicker probably would have won a runoff with most Democratic votes transferred to him.

The state’s 1994 election for governor practically screamed for ranked-choice voting, since it had four candidates, with the winner, John G. Rowland, the Republican, receiving only 36% of the vote, a liberal minor-party candidate getting 19%, and a conservative independent candidate getting 11%. Ranked-choice voting might have elected the Democrat, Bill Curry, who received 33%.

The Republican primary for governor four years ago also made a strong case for ranked-choice voting, since the winner, Bob Stefanowski, got only 29% of the vote in a five-way contest. Ranked-choice voting might have given the nomination to the convention-endorsed candidate, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, or ranked-choice voting might have unified the party faster behind Stefanowski.

Governor Lamont observes that apart from building majority support for the winner, ranked-choice voting might improve the tenor of politics, since candidates might refrain from getting nasty about lesser competitors and risking second-choice votes.

Given its history of important elections settled by less than a majority vote, Connecticut has strong reason to consider ranked-choice voting.

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

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By Chris Powell

If distributing more money was the solution to the state’s serious social problems, Connecticut would have solved them long ago. Instead state government now has another commission, the Commission on Community Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention, which met for the first time last month and is to advise the state Public Health Department about awarding another $2.9 million in grants to “community-based violence-intervention organizations.”

Despite last month’s announcement from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign that Connecticut is headed toward “four more years of gun safety,” the daily shootings continue, especially in the cities. Except for the political patronage to be conferred by those grants, no one really needs “community-based violence-intervention organizations” to figure out why.

For starters, most children in the cities have little if any parenting. More than 80% are living without a father in their home, many having no contact with their fathers at all. Many of their mothers are badly stressed by single parenting and trying to make a living, even with welfare benefits. Some have drug problems. Some are so addled that their children are being raised by a grandparent.

Their parents having failed them, many children then fail in school, if they even reach school. The chronic absenteeism rate in Hartford’s school system is 44%, in New Haven’s 58%. It is high in some suburbs too. While most children in Connecticut graduate from high school without ever mastering basic math and English, the failure to meet grade-level proficiency in city schools is catastrophic at all levels.

As a result many young people — most young people in the cities — enter adult life without the education and job skills necessary to get out of poverty, demoralized, resentful, angry, often unhealthy mentally as well as physically, lacking respect for society and indifferent to decent behavior. These circumstances prove disastrous when they collide with the natural male aggressiveness that has never been tamed by parenting.

Many quickly get in trouble with the law, and repeatedly, and so become still more alienated, not ever understanding what hit them and why, since, after all, the underclass lifestyle has been normalized. Guns are everywhere — and always will be, no matter what laws are enacted — and so will always present what seem like opportunities for advancement or settling scores.

“Community-based violence-intervention organizations” and their advocates think that, most of all, these troubled young men need a good talking to, and indeed such counseling can help temporarily in critical situations. But other critical situations soon develop unless someone can escape the underclass culture.

As with so much else wrong with society, government chooses to address only the symptoms, not the causes. Especially with social problems, when government encounters the equivalent of broken pipes flooding a road or basement, it doesn’t try to repair the pipes but instead calls for more buckets for bailing. The bucket manufacturers make a fortune but the problem is never solved, since mere remediation quickly becomes too profitable financially and politically.

Government refuses to learn from this though it’s an old story. Many years ago an episode of the television drama “Law and Order” showed police detectives entering a dark and dingy city apartment where an abandoned baby was crying. A veteran detective who had seen it all remarked: “How about if I just take him to Rikers now?”

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PARENTAL BILL OF RIGHTS: While the formal text of the “parental bill of rights” proposed by the Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and Laura Devlin, which was cited in this column last week, does not say so explicitly, Stefanowski elaborates that its provision on school choice means to make church schools eligible for state-financed student vouchers.

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SOCIAL SECURITY TAX: Supporting U.S. Rep. John B. Larson’s legislation to strengthen the Social Security system, this column last week misstated the annual personal income level at which the Social Security tax is lifted. It is $147,000, not $400,000. To improve the system’s financing, Larson’s legislation would impose a special 2% tax on incomes above $400,000.

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

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By Chris Powell

Call it an opportunistic feint in the “culture war” if you want, but the “Parental Bill of Rights” proposed last week by the Republican nominees for governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and state Rep. Laura Devlin, raises important issues Connecticut should stop evading.

Several of the Republican proposals are vague. The Republicans say they oppose presenting sexual topics to the youngest students but don’t specify an age or grade at which sex education in school becomes appropriate. Of course this vagueness is not likely to protect the Republicans from the Democratic demagoguery that in Florida misrepresents the state’s fourth-grade threshold as a “Don’t Say Gay” law.

The Republicans oppose student masking and vaccination requirements that deny parents “any recourse to object,” but that recourse isn’t defined either. Should Connecticut reinstate a religious exemption from vaccination of students for the basic childhood diseases? The Republicans don’t say.

The Republicans call for expanding school choice for students in underperforming schools and endorse vouchers in principle. Would church schools qualify for these initiatives with government money?

While the long decline in public education’s performance argues strongly for making church schools eligible, especially in the cities, again the Republican candidates aren’t clear. Governor Lamont contends that state government’s system of magnet schools provides sufficient choice, but in a recent court settlement his administration admitted that the system is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] sufficient, that it is unable to meet demand for escape from many failing schools and should expand. Meanwhile Catholic schools have been closing even as the need for their old competence and economy has exploded.

The Republicans propose spending a lot more money on tutoring students whose education was set back the most by the closing of in-person schooling during the virus epidemic. The Republicans also propose spending more to secure schools against attack. The Republicans don’t say exactly where the money should come from, but then as state government rolls in billions of dollars of free federal money, the Democrats don’t care much about where money is to come from either.

At least the Republicans [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] specific in calling to prohibit biological males from competing in girls sports in public schools. But the Republicans frame this as a matter of safety when it is really a matter of fairness, of preserving equal opportunity for girls under Title IX of federal civil rights law.

No matter, since Democratic demagoguery here will accuse the Republicans of “transphobia” and worse, even as Governor Lamont is trying to dodge the issue by contending that policy on transgender athletes should be left to local option — that is, that the rights of female students should vary among school systems, even as many high school sports events involve two or more towns that could have contradictory policies.

The Republicans dodge a little here too, saying that some mechanism should be developed so that boys wanting to be girls can keep competing. But of course they already can compete in events for their biological sex.

Unfortunately omitted from the Republican proposals is any reference to the policies of deception already adopted by school systems in Hartford, New Haven, and other places in regard to students with gender dysphoria. Such policies forbid schools from notifying parents if their children are getting their school’s help in changing their gender identity and names, unless the children approve of informing their parents.

Such policies usurp parental custody, may prevent parents from controlling the medical treatment of their children, and may cause critical delays in treatment before irreversible harm is done.

While such policies have been adopted nominally in the open, at public meetings, they have not been widely publicized and, at least in Hartford and New Haven, not directly publicized to parents at all. That’s because any school that made sure that parents fully understood that they will be kept ignorant about the health of their children might face much angry objection.

Of all the rights parents have or should have, none is greater than the right to know exactly what schools are doing with the health and very identities of their children.

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

By Chris Powell

Interviewed Sept. 4 by Dennis House on WTNH-TV8’s “This Week in Connecticut,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, an advocate of unrestricted abortion, got away with a big fib.

House asked: “What do you say to a pro-life voter who may be turned off by your stance and may say, ‘Why can’t we have some protections for the unborn?'”

Blumenthal replied that the Women’s Health Protection Act, which he authored but did not pass the Senate, did provide protections for the unborn. “All the Women’s Health Protection Act does,” Blumenthal said, “is to codify Roe v. Wade as we did in Connecticut.”

The senator’s assertion is contradicted by the Congressional Research Service’s summary of his bill.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Roe case in 1973 established a [ITALICS] limited [END ITALICS] constitutional right to abortion. It held that government could restrict abortion after fetal viability.

But Blumenthal’s legislation goes far beyond that. The Congressional Research Service’s summary says: “This bill prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of, and access to, abortion services. Specifically, governments may not limit a provider’s ability to provide certain drugs, offer abortion services via telemedicine, or immediately provide abortion services when the provider determines a delay risks the patient’s health.”

Thus under Blumenthal’s bill, abortion providers themselves, not state laws, would decide whether an abortion is permissible — even at the moment of birth. Blumenthal’s bill was essentially a sneaky mechanism for legalizing late-term, post-viability abortion throughout the country without being explicit about it.

Horrifying as late-term abortion is, some people openly advocate a right to it. They are honest about it and some are willing to argue their position. On that TV program Blumenthal was not honest about it but wasn’t challenged.

Blumenthal also is getting off easy with a television commercial for his re-election campaign in which he is thanked by the widow of a U.S. soldier who served in Afghanistan and died of cancer he believed was caused by toxic smoke there. The widow says the senator helped her husband get assistance from the Veterans Administration after being denied.

Creditable as this was, it was only the ordinary constituent service most congressmen provide every day. Blumenthal’s commercial is more important for implicitly, if inadvertently, raising the issue of his support for the 20-year “nation-building” adventure in Afghanistan during his two terms in the Senate.

The United States continued this adventure long after nearly everyone could see that Afghanistan really isn’t a country at all but only a collection of primitive tribes that aren’t interested in what foreigners consider democracy and civilization. The disproof of Blumenthal’s long support for the war was the instant collapse of the Afghan “government” upon President Biden’s abrupt and incompetent withdrawal of U.S. forces a year ago.

Despite the thousands of military and civilian casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted there, Afghanistan already seems to have been forgotten in U.S. politics.

Blumenthal would not be airing the commercial about the soldier if he wasn’t confident that no one will ever ask about his share of responsibility for the soldier’s death.

Of course Blumenthal’s responsibility is no greater than that of hundreds of members of Congress, four presidents, and dozens of generals. But the responsibility is real all the same, and the adventure in Afghanistan will be more shameful still if this election passes without efforts for accountability.

As the campaign intensifies, all sorts of sinister-sounding TV and radio commercials are descending on Connecticut, some financed by the candidates themselves, others by shady committees. Some will be true, some half true and not entirely fair, and some worse. But this might not be the only way to campaign.

Federal law could require broadcasters to make ample free time available to candidates for federal office, provided the time was used exclusively for commercials in which the candidates themselves are the only ones to appear and speak.

Such commercials might not always be truthful and fair, but if candidates had to take that much responsibility, they might improve their messages.

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

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By Chris Powell

How racist is Enfield? Town government’s overreaction to a recent disgraceful but trivial incident is giving the impression that the town has become the northern headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, even though the incident could have happened anywhere.

It occurred as members of the Enfield High School football team were knocking on doors soliciting financial donations. At one door a Black player was scorned and sent away with a racial epithet from the resident. Police investigated but determined that, abhorrent as the resident’s conduct was, there was no cause for arrest.

Whereupon town government convened another of those “community conversations on race,” as if the whole town needed to be lectured on decent behavior.

Maybe Enfield really is that hateful. But if so, specific evidence of anything seriously wrong in town regarding race has not been reported and was not produced at the first “community conversation,” which drew 200 people to Enfield High School. Instead the moderator urged people to examine their own consciences about race, as if some might be obliged to make confession.

In the absence of evidence apart from a single small incident, summoning a “community conversation” was presumptuous, if politically correct.

Enfield and other towns [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] have a “community conversation” on race, but of a different sort — regular hearings to air specific complaints about racism in town and to investigate them.

The perpetrator of the insult to the high school football player is known to police, the player, and others and should be invited to the first such hearing along with the insulted player for questioning and discussion. Other witnesses to what they consider racism in town should come forward too and their complaints should be followed up at future hearings, with the accused people and institutions invited. Town officials and residents then could discuss what if anything should be done.

Such procedure would generate real and relevant conversations, not the pious and irrelevant handwringing of the first “community conversation.” Far more than such handwringing, a hearing on specifics might deter racists, warning them that they might be held accountable in public for their hatefulness.

More likely, of course, such a procedure would generate few if any complaints of racism in Enfield. Maybe then the town could begin to get its good name back and, along with Connecticut generally, might pay less attention to the occasional and trivial misconduct of jerks on their own doorsteps and more attention to the state’s longstanding racial disparities.

Those disparities include the racial performance gap in education, zoning’s obstruction of racial and economic integration, and welfare policy’s destruction of the family and creation of a racial underclass. Obsessing about occasional racist epithets uttered by nobodies is a pathetic copout.

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SOCIAL SECURITY’S ENEMY: As they campaign for re-election, Democrats on the national and state level are touting lots of new programs created in the name of alleviating poverty, even as soaring inflation, caused in part by the explosion of those programs and other government spending, erases the programs’ benefits.

Meanwhile the nation’s most comprehensive anti-poverty program, Social Security, is eroding under that inflation even as Connecticut’s own U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, bravely keeps pressing legislation to improve the system’s benefits and finances.

But according to a recent report in Politico, Larson’s Social Security bill is being blocked not by the usual retrograde Republicans in Congress but by the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Larson’s bill isn’t another giveaway to be financed by debt and inflation. It would be financed largely by eliminating the limit on Social Security taxes paid by high earners, whose Social Security taxes now are capped at the first $400,000 of annual income.

Pelosi and her husband have gotten rich trading stocks whose values are heavily affected by the federal legislation she steers and votes on. Her party should push her out of the way and pass Larson’s Social Security bill while the Democrats still have a majority in Congress and a president who would sign it.

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

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By Chris Powell

Reactions last week to the inadvertent confession of the Greenwich assistant principal who admitted hiring only young and liberal teachers and excluding Catholics, the better to propagandize students and induce them to grow up voting Democratic, have been just as revealing as the confession itself.

State Attorney General William Tong seemed more upset about what he called the “vigilante journalism” of Project Veritas, which surreptitiously recorded the assistant principal’s incriminating comments, than he was about the illegal discrimination itself.

“Journalism should be left to journalists,” Tong said. “I think there’s something really wrong with vigilante journalism, and I don’t think it should be celebrated. There are no rules when somebody engages in Wild West vigilante journalism and tries to entrap somebody.”

But while Project Veritas may have used false pretenses to induce the assistant principal to speak, it didn’t “entrap” him. No crime was committed or plotted. Further, journalism is a constitutional right belonging to everyone. Anyone can be a journalist at any time, no training or credential required.

If, as Tong seems to wish, the Greenwich story had been left to respectable news organizations, it almost certainly never would have been obtained, which might have been OK with the attorney general, since public education is an adjunct of his party, the Democrats.

Nevertheless, Tong said his office, which recently was given civil rights enforcement authority, “will conduct a thorough investigation and review and analyze all the evidence.” But he added: “This will not happen overnight,” which may have been assurance to everyone tainted by the Greenwich scandal that the attorney general’s report will not be issued until after the state election in November.

The reaction from Connecticut’s biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, was even more resentful than Tong’s.

According to National Review, CEA President Kate Dias sent an email to union leaders instructing them not to speak to journalists who “have not been vetted” and indeed not to comment on the Greenwich scandal at all.

Dias’ message, National Review said, also told union leaders to warn their colleagues that undercover journalists are “lurking.” She wrote: “Keep meetings closed and ensure your members are the only people present. Remind your members that they could be the next victim of a hit piece if they aren’t fully aware of whom they make comments to and what they say.”

In directing union members to deal only with “vetted” journalists, Dias sounded like Tong in wanting to confine the news to organizations that can be trusted not to embarrass anyone in authority. This is hardly to the credit of those organizations, since it signifies that they are much appreciated for long having minimized or ignored the political skewing of public education.

Adhering to its self-serving conception of “public” education, the CEA refused to respond to an inquiry seeking to confirm the authenticity of the statement National Review attributed to Dias.

Tong and Dias, political liberals, demonstrated that state and local government generally and public education particularly have much to hide. But not so long ago it was liberalism that celebrated and relied on “vigilante journalism” and conservatism that deplored it and even condemned it as unpatriotic.

Most respectable institutions of journalism supported the Vietnam War for many years and recited the U.S. government’s misleading or false communiques without critical examination, just as they overlooked the government’s spying on war protesters and civil rights advocates who were breaking no laws. Exposing the government’s lies about the war required the vigilante journalism of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department consultant who stole and leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The essence of most journalism in that era was captured perfectly by the great liberal political cartoonist Jules Feiffer. One of his cartoon panels concluded: “If you want lies, you go to a government press conference. If you want truth, you steal it.”

Or, as the Project Veritas corollary goes, if you want truth, you also can trick those who conceal it into revealing it innocently, leaving them and their co-conspirators sputtering impotently when they are exposed.

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

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By Chris Powell

News organizations in Connecticut lately have turned their attention to the shortage of housing in the state, which is especially oppressive to the poor as rents rise not only because of the shortage but also because of inflation. People increasingly are confined in small, uncomfortable, and even unsanitary apartments in unsafe neighborhoods.

Exclusive zoning is part of the problem. So is the failure of federal housing subsidies for the poor — Section 8 vouchers — to keep up with inflation. Irresponsible landlords are part of the problem too.

But the news organizations always fail to acknowledge and explore the biggest part of the housing problem, even when it stares them in the face, as it did recently in the pages of the Waterbury Republican-American and The Day of New London.

That is, the biggest part of the housing problem is the irresponsibility of hapless tenants themselves.

The Republican-American related the experience of a single woman with six children who wants to leave her three-bedroom apartment in Waterbury for a safer neighborhood somewhere but can’t afford to because her Section 8 voucher won’t pay enough.

The Day featured a single woman with four children living in a two-bedroom trailer in Groton. She needs a larger home but long has been out of work and will take a job only if it has flexible hours allowing her to look after her kids.

Of course no husbands or boyfriends sharing responsibility for the children could be found in the news reports. Instead these reports, like all such reports, seemed to assume that children are as accidental as the weather and their expense cannot be anticipated.

The reports also seemed to assume that people who live in the decent way — first acquiring an education and job skills, then establishing themselves financially, and then choosing a reliable partner before undertaking the responsibility of children — are chumps who should pay extra for those who live irresponsibly.

Yes, government must take responsibility for the children whose parents fail to. But government should examine how much its methods of support for such kids is facilitating irresponsibility and indeed destroying the family, as indicated by the spectacular increase in child neglect in the last half century.

For the country’s sake as well as their own, the chumps should wise up. For housing is ever more expensive for the chumps as well, and the more the country subsidizes irresponsibility, the more irresponsibility it will get. Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim seems to have been forgotten: The first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight.

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HOW TO REVIVE HARTFORD: Government in Connecticut doesn’t seem to have much of a housing policy besides leaving builders to deal with demand and zoning. That policy isn’t accomplishing much. But Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin sees the opportunity to do much more without displacing or aggravating anyone.

Hartford’s downtown office buildings are being emptied by the transfer of office work to work at home via the internet, and Bronin notes that space in those buildings might be converted to housing. For some years now Hartford city government has recognized that housing is what downtown needs most to become a vibrant neighborhood, and, encouraged by city government, apartments have been going up, if slowly.

But amenities like supermarkets and household services downtown are still lacking. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Getting markets is hard without the housing, and getting housing is hard without the markets.

The answer, Bronin says, may be to get mixed use out of the office buildings where businesses are giving up space — reconfiguring them with shops at street level and offices and housing upstairs. Supplemented with several schools nearby, this could produce a vibrant, middle-class neighborhood where people could live without cars, walking or taking a short bus ride to whatever they need in daily life.

Because of the multiplicity of building ownership, fulfilling such design will be a challenge, requiring great coordination. But the whole state would benefit from such new housing in downtown Hartford, and Connecticut might be delighted to discover that there can be more to city life than drug dealing, panhandlers, and shootings.

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

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By Chris Powell

No one who closely follows “public” education — with its secrecy, deception, political correctness, pretension, contempt for parents, unaccountability, declining standards, financial excess, and steadily worsening performance — can be surprised by the confession of Greenwich elementary school vice principal Jeremy Boland, surreptitiously video-recorded by a seductress working for Project Veritas.

Boland’s confession, posted on the internet this week, was so candid and brutal that even leading Democrats in Connecticut, including Governor Lamont, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and state legislators, had to profess to be appalled by it, though the political indoctrination of students described by Boland is only what the Democrats preside over.

The Democrats’ criticism of Boland’s confession emphasized instead his determination not to hire Catholics as teachers. If applicants are Catholics, he says, “You don’t hire them. … Honestly, I don’t want to.”

But Boland’s bias against hiring Catholics isn’t religious but political, and it is perfectly rational in pursuit of his objective, which he describes as indoctrinating students with liberalism so that they are more likely to vote Democratic when they grow up. Boland notes that Catholics and applicants older than 30, whom he also refuses to hire, are more likely to be conservative.

That is, Boland isn’t against Catholics as teachers because of their religion itself but because of the conservative leanings their faith may give them.

Of course religious and age discrimination in employment long have been illegal, and surely Boland knows this. But he sees political indoctrination of students as his patriotic duty.

Boland stresses that he must be “subtle” as he injects politics into the curriculum. He explains that while he cannot explicitly put political issues to applicants for teaching jobs, he has developed questions that are likely to elicit indications of an applicant’s political incorrectness.

For example, Boland says, if applicants say they would side with parents on a curriculum question, “They don’t get the job.” And if applicants say students are not informed enough to make their own decisions about their gender identity, they will be disqualified too.

If applicants “were raised hardcore Catholic,” Boland explains, “it’s like they’re brainwashed. You can never change their mindset. … They’re just stuck real rigid.”

Maybe so, but then, oblivious to the irony thundering around him, Boland himself aims to “brainwash” his students so they will be just as “rigid” in a different political direction.

“The open-minded, more progressive teachers,” Boland says, “are actually more savvy about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention their politics.”

His interviewer asks: “So it’s like you present everything in a way that’s subconsciously influencing the kids to vote liberal but not doing it in such an explicit way where the parents can actually get mad at you for it?”

Boland replies: “Right.”

While his perversion of the teacher hiring process may have put Greenwich in legal jeopardy, Boland probably hasn’t done much actual damage. He indicates that he has hired only four or five teachers, and since, upon disclosure of his comments, he was immediately placed on leave pending investigation, he is unlikely to do more hiring any time soon.

The much bigger question is how much the administration of the rest of public education reflects Boland’s outlook and pursues his objective. While there are some conservative school systems in the South, Midwest, and mountain West, in Connecticut and the rest of the country it is hard to find a school system that isn’t already pressing students with “social-emotional learning,” invitations to transgenderism, and various degrees of political propaganda.

After all, there is a reason why teacher union members always constitute the biggest bloc of delegates at Democratic conventions and a reason why Connecticut law exempts teacher performance evaluations from disclosure, alone among all performance evaluations of government employees.

This reason is not a desire for impartiality and accountability. It is the effectiveness of schools for propagandizing. Even if he is fired Boland will deserve a medal for making this plain.

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

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By Chris Powell

During his travels around the state distributing goodies in pursuit of re-election in November, Governor Lamont might perform a valuable service by pausing for a moment here and there to examine the performance of ordinary management in state government.

Two weeks ago the big failures were in education, where a state technical school teacher who had been fired for abusing minority students was reinstated to her job with $225,000 in back pay. An arbiter ruled that since the technical school system hardly ever fires anyone, it couldn’t fire this teacher either.

Then, under pressure of a gender discrimination lawsuit, the state Board of Regents for Higher Education reinstated a community college president and paid her $775,000.

Meanwhile the parade of misconduct in the state police continued. First eight state trooper recruits were dismissed for cheating on an examination at the police academy. Then over several weeks five troopers were suspended on various charges, including theft, sexual assault, hit-and-run driving, and domestic violence.

Then Bill Cummings of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers produced a more shocking report: that four more troopers had escaped discipline after being caught creating hundreds of fake traffic tickets to try to gain favor from their superiors — and that state police headquarters could not explain why the four were let off so easily.

According to the Connecticut Examiner’s Steve Jensen, at least the commanding officer of the state police, Col. Stavros Mellekas, issued a note of caution to his department. “These incidents do not define us,” the colonel wrote, “but we need to step up and lock down behavior.”

And then a case worker for the state Department of Children and Families was charged criminally with helping a client evade arrest for child sex trafficking.

The governor, a Democrat, had nothing to say about these incidents of misconduct. Republicans didn’t call attention to them either. After all, most of the state employees involved are members of unions whose endorsements are coveted.

But even if no one in authority is curious about these cases, they still suggest that state government is not operating well for the public and, worse, that Connecticut’s politicians are too scared to try to change that.

If competence and integrity seem hard to achieve in state government, developments last week in Bridgeport suggested that achieving competence and integrity in government in Connecticut’s cities may be impossible.

Mayor Joe Ganim, whose first administration was a criminal enterprise that sent him to prison for seven years, last week hired as the city’s senior labor relations official a former Newtown police officer who was convicted 10 years ago of embezzling $95,000 from the town’s police union while he was its treasurer. Of course in Bridgeport city government a background in embezzlement may be considered valuable experience.

And a month after agreeing to a three-year extension of his contract, Bridgeport school Superintendent Michael Testani announced that he would leave in November anyway to become superintendent in neighboring Fairfield. But since Bridgeport may be Connecticut’s leading poverty factory, it is hard to blame anyone in public education for departing for a place where most students come to school prepared to learn — or where the kids come to school at all. (Last week Hartford’s superintendent acknowledged that 44% of that city’s students are chronically absent.)

As with the recent distressing incidents in state government, last week’s developments in Bridgeport should have caught the attention of Connecticut’s political leaders but didn’t, even as it is a fair question whether, amid their worsening poverty, the cities are capable of self-government at all. Throwing lots of money at them as state government long has done may alleviate political pressures but it has not improved living conditions, especially not for the many fatherless and neglected children in the cities.

The state and federal governments have been doing the poverty thing for almost 60 years. Will another 60 years have to pass before anyone in authority in Connecticut notices that it’s not working?

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

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