Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Connecticut lately has generated more than its share of silly paradoxes.

Having given up on the futility of criminalizing marijuana, state government is rushing into the marijuana retailing business with overregulation and overtaxation. This will make the drug even more available to minors while ensuring the black market’s continued profitability. Meanwhile the nanny-staters are campaigning to outlaw flavored vaping products because of the damage they do to the lungs of young people. Of course as with marijuana, what is forbidden may become only more enticing to the young.

The Connecticut Law Tribune has launched a campaign to repeal the First Amendment and overturn the press freedom on which the Law Tribune itself depends. The Law Tribune is advocating a “right to be forgotten” that would empower people to prevent news organizations from publicizing their criminal convictions after a certain interval. The General Assembly is already following that path, having legislated erasure of certain criminal records in the mistaken belief that such records, rather than a lack of job and social skills, is the primary impediment for former offenders.

If the Law Tribune gets its way, Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court decision prohibiting use of a criminal defendant’s interrogation unless he had been advised of his right to a lawyer, may have to become Anonymous v. Arizona. Gideon v. Wainwright, the court’s decision establishing the right to counsel of every criminal defendant, may have to become Anonymous v. Wainwright. Griswold v. Connecticut, the court’s decision establishing the right to contraception, may have to become Anonymous v. Connecticut.

And so on until there is no telling criminal cases apart and crime loses the deterrent of dishonor.

But the most substantial paradox in Connecticut lately may be the boasting by Governor Lamont and his administration about the steady decline in the state’s prison population even as crime around the state becomes more brazen and a matter of such concern that the governor himself has just had to propose a big anti-crime program.

The governor doesn’t seem to have noticed that many of the worst crimes in the state, including those committed by juveniles, long have been committed by chronic offenders — people who have figured out that the first objective of criminal justice in Connecticut is not to deter them but to keep them out of prison with “wrap-around social services.” That’s the euphemism for replacing prison guards with social workers on the government payroll. It doesn’t reduce crime but it helps the government class to feel better about itself.

The governor proposes to spend a few million more on training and hiring police and probation officers. But mere apprehension is nothing without punishment.

The governor would spend more to track guns brought into the state illegally. But with hundreds of millions of guns already in private possession in the United States, obtaining a gun will remain easy.

The governor would require “ghost guns” to be registered, as if a gun registration law will deter someone who is not deterred by the laws against murder, robbery, and assault.

The governor would put more restrictions on “assault weapons,” as if “assault weapons” rather than handguns are much used in crime. And he would put more restrictions on gun storage, as if that will do more than hinder store owners from protecting themselves against the chronic offenders.

The governor’s crime program is filled with still more trivia to create the impression of comprehensive action against crime without risking the controversy of restoring what is crucially lacking in Connecticut and other far-left jurisdictions — deterrence. But the governor’s program also lacks any recognition of an even more basic cause of crime: the worsening social disintegration arising from poverty, child neglect, and inadequate education.

Guns are just as available in Avon, Woodbridge, and Darien as they are in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, and gun law is the same in all those places, but crime is concentrated in the cities, with city people being most of both the perpetrators and victims. That won’t change as long as it remains a largely prohibited subject in politics and journalism.

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

By Chris Powell

How, in a wealthy and highly taxed state with scores of social programs and constant prattling about unmet human needs, does a 17-year-old girl approach adulthood missing six teeth and able to eat only soft food?

This month a report by Theresa Sullivan Barger of the Connecticut Health I-Team blamed the state Department of Children and Families for not taking custody of the girl soon enough after being notified that, after a long period of abuse and neglect, she had been expelled from her home and had to move in with a friend’s family.

DCF, always reluctant to remove children from their parents, replied that neglect, abuse, and an inability to function independently, criteria for removing a child, are usually harder to prove as children reach their later teens.

Of course there will be no definitive public accounting for the girl’s circumstances, because DCF case work is confidential by law until there is a fatality and the state child advocate investigates and reports. Only the girl herself and her supporters are fully free to talk and give their side now. Despite the journalism here that should stoke outrage, the governor and the General Assembly will ask no questions, much less investigate, though the girl’s case is another hint about the foremost problem of both Connecticut and the country — institutionalized child neglect.

Child-protection agencies seldom cause child neglect. Mostly they just clean up after it. Those agencies often can do little more than prevent kids from being maimed or murdered amid neglect or abuse. If children turn 18 and enter the world on their own with rotted-out teeth, child protection still can consider it a success.

But don’t stop with the missing teeth. How do most Connecticut children graduate from high school without mastering high school classes, many illiterate and qualified only for menial work as they reach adulthood?

A painful answer was provided in 2016 by Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher in his decision in one chapter of Connecticut’s decades-long, futile, and misdirected school financing litigation: neglect by parents compounded by neglect by state government, whose only genuine educational policy is social promotion.

Just as it’s enough for state government that children should reach 18 alive, it is enough for state government that children should finish their education with diplomas they didn’t earn. Poverty begins at home, with fatherlessness generated by welfare stipends, and then is perfected in school by social promotion. Abandonment of life’s crucial standards is comprehensive.

Meanwhile ever more proclamations, policies, and programs emanate from a government that is oblivious to its failure to accomplish more than its own expansion.

The most effective way for government to end poverty might be just to stop manufacturing it — to ensure that children have parents, to stop pretending they are learning when they’re not, and to start treating government as the means to an end, not the end in itself — the end, the purpose, being the child, the future.

The writer, philosopher, and Catholic polemicist G.K. Chesterton raged about similar obliviousness in government in Britain a century ago.

Chesterton wrote:

“With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.

“Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free and leisured mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

“That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s. No, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image. All around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.”

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe all those people who in the last year or so have given up on New York City and its inner suburbs and moved to Connecticut are not so good for the state after all.

While they have offset the decline in population that Connecticut long has been suffering relative to the rest of the country, they also have driven up the state’s housing prices and rents and have worsened its housing shortage. People who own their homes may be glad of their unrealized capital gains, but these gains come at huge expense to people who don’t own their homes.

Average rents across the country are estimated to have risen 14% to nearly $1,900 a month last year, which should shock the many homeowners who can remember paying rents less than $500 when they were young. Of course housing price inflation has come amid enormous price increases in all other necessities, including food, energy, and medicine. Altogether lately inflation is running well above 10%, double the federal government’s deceitful official figure.

This is what happens when the government hobbles the economy with ineffective epidemic restrictions and then pays people not to work, whereupon production of goods and services declines and prices rise still more. Inflation has far overtaken wage gains for ordinary people while enriching the already wealthy — the owners of real estate and stocks, which soar with inflation.

Even three years ago, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, a quarter of renters in the United States were paying more than half their income for housing. That burden for renters is surely far heavier now.

The virus epidemic and government’s mistaken responses to it are the first cause of the worsening madness and despair in society — the crime, drug abuse, and general hatefulness. But when it consumes half or more of people’s income, the price of housing is a big part of what brings them to the end of their rope.

Since most people in Connecticut have adequate housing — housing they can afford and even achieve capital gains from — the state is largely indifferent politically to the harm done by rising housing prices. A housing scandal in Danbury is receiving little attention outside the city, whose Zoning Commission is refusing to let a social-service organization, Pacific House, continue to operate a shelter for the homeless in a former motel building.

Pacific House would like to turn the building into what is called “supportive housing” — housing that includes medical and rehabilitative services facilitating recovery for residents. But the commission wants none of it. The commission is ready to push these troubled people back out on the street — in the winter, no less.

State government purchased the former motel for Pacific House’s use, and without zoning approval the shelter is able to operate only because of one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders. Those orders are to expire in a week.

The General Assembly should extend the one applying to the Danbury shelter and demand some humanity from the city’s Zoning Commission and the shelter’s neighbors, who haven’t been any more inconvenienced by the shelter than they were when the building was operated as a motel.

The cornerstone of the campaign of the likely Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, is an effort to make Connecticut more affordable. That objective will resonate widely.

But most Republicans, who ordinarily celebrate property rights and an “ownership society,” and most Democrats, who ordinarily pose as friends of the poor and struggling, are not enthusiastic about housing construction, at least not outside the already densely populated cities. No one wants more neighbors.

Even in the cities themselves, few people want greater population density and more facilities to help the troubled. Lately hundreds of New Haven residents have mobilized to block an addiction treatment clinic in their neighborhood, though the city is full of people needing such treatment — as are the suburbs.

Connecticut’s state motto sometimes seems to be “Not in my back yard.” But shunning problems doesn’t solve them. It worsens them and makes them more expensive. More housing could make the state less expensive.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s best investigative journalism so far this year was probably the Jan. 2 report by the Connecticut Mirror’s Andrew Brown and Kasturi Pananjady about the lovely little racket state government has been running with its unclaimed property program. The program, the Mirror reported, collected $2.3 billion in the public’s lost assets over the last 20 years but had returned to its rightful owners only 37% of the money, in large part because the program, as operated by state Treasurer Shawn Wooden, wasn’t looking very hard for the owners.

Indeed, the treasurer was doing more to advertise himself — inducing a government contractor to place him in television commercials for the state’s college savings program — than he was doing to advertise the unclaimed property. The Mirror reported that unclaimed property items worth $50 or less, totaling more than $40 million, weren’t even being included on the internet list maintained by the treasurer. So the Mirror itself created a complete list and posted it.

The Mirror also reported that much of the money confiscated by the treasurer’s office was diverted to state government’s program of public financing for political campaigns, like the treasurer’s own. No wonder Wooden and state legislators saw no urgency in fixing the program.

Wooden hid when the Mirror reporters were investigating his malfeasance. Instead he assigned assistants to make his excuses. Among other things, Wooden’s aides said state law actually prohibited the treasurer from advertising the unclaimed properties worth $50 or less.

And when the Mirror’s story was published around the state and cited in this column, the treasurer again hid, instead assigning aides to write rebuttals calling the Mirror report and this column’s commentary a bunch of lies.

It turns out that the lies were Wooden’s own. Last week the treasurer came out in public at last to announce improvements to the unclaimed property program. Now the smaller properties will be included in the treasurer’s internet list, because state law really does not prohibit their listing, as Wooden’s aides originally said.

Additionally, claims for return of lost property no longer will have to be notarized, and claims for payment of less than $2,500 will be expedited.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Wooden won’t still exploit his office by having the state contractor advertise him in the college savings program’s TV commercials. This being an election year, maybe Wooden will have his office put him in commercials for the unclaimed property program too.

The treasurer isn’t the only high official in Connecticut recently caught taking personal advantage of his office.

Last week it was reported that U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, has been using her campaign fund to employ her son and daughter, her son getting more than $15,000 and her daughter more than $21,000 over the last three years.

The payments have been reported and legal, and Hayes isn’t the first member of Congress to do something like this. Nevertheless in Hayes’ case it looks like nepotism and it probably is, since it’s unlikely that the talents of her children are so extraordinary that no one could replace them in her campaign. Hiring one child would be questionable; hiring two is exploitation.

This is not the example that might be expected of a former national teacher of the year. While it’s not a matter of national security, it suggests that Hayes quickly has gotten too comfortable as a member of the political establishment.

Meanwhile Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. is being investigated for hiring, as an executive assistant at salary of about $100,000, the daughter of the deputy state budget director, Kostantinos Diamantis, while the chief state’s attorney was seeking budget office approval of raises for state prosecutors.

There was no search for other applicants for the executive assistant’s position, and the woman seems to have had no special qualifications for the job other than her father’s supervision over the raises Colangelo sought. Diamantis was fired when the scandal broke.

In response to the scandal, Governor Lamont says he wants his high appointees to undergo an ethics training seminar, though the Wooden, Hayes, and Colangelo cases might already constitute an ethics seminar in themselves.

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

By Chris Powell

For most of the last 70 years in the United States, ever since the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Republican Party has been the party of repression — more intolerant of political dissent, more inclined to censor, and more eager to use government to ruin livelihoods.

Of course the Democratic Party hasn’t always been faithful to civil liberties. Southern Democratic administrations enforced racial segregation. Two Democratic national administrations put Martin Luther King under FBI surveillance and one also spied on Vietnam war protesters. But on the whole the Democrats moved past those things.

Not anymore. Amid the virus epidemic and the growth of political correctness and the “cancel culture,” coercion of individuals now is almost entirely a phenomenon of the Democratic national administration, Democratic state administrations, and Democratic polemicists. Never before has the old joke been more accurate: that Democrats don’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory.

The polling company Rasmussen Reports may not be the best in the country but it is generally taken seriously by leaders in both parties, and a poll it did last month on government policy toward the epidemic may be hard to dispute on the basis of published and broadcast news and commentary.

According to the Rasmussen poll:

— 55% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to fine people who do not accept COVID-19 vaccination, while only 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters do.

— 59% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to confine to their homes people who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Republicans oppose that idea by 79% and unaffiliated voters by 71%.

— Worse, 48% of Democrats favor letting government fine or even imprison people who publicly question the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Only 27% of all voters — just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliateds — favor making such criticism a crime.

— 45% of Democrats favor authorizing government to force people to live in “designated facilities or locations” if they refuse vaccination. This concentration camp idea is opposed by 71% of all voters, including 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliateds.

— 47% of Democrats favor having the government electronically track unvaccinated people. This is opposed by 66% of all poll respondents.

— 29% of Democrats favor taking children away from parents who refuse to be vaccinated, more than twice the level of support found in the rest of the population.

Of course especially when Donald Trump is around polls show that many Republicans also express belief in nutty things. But as reckless and repugnant as Trump could be as president, he was never a serious threat to civil liberty.

Despite the huge support among Democrats for more coercive policies amid the epidemic, Democratic governors, including Connecticut’s Ned Lamont, lately have been retreating from coercion, either because those policies seem to cause more damage than they prevent or because the governors realize that people are getting tired of coercion on the eve of election campaigns.

Nevertheless, with repression and coercion finding such support among Democrats — not just in regard to the epidemic but in regard to dissent generally — people who want to preserve civil liberty may want to test all Democratic candidates, up and down the party’s ticket, about the potential policies itemized in the Rasmussen poll, just as people might want to question Republican candidates about the return of Trump.

Meanwhile complaints from parents about public school curriculums and books stocked by school libraries are being called censorship. They’re not.

While the “cancel culture” seeks to drive dissenters out of all forums, complaints about school curriculums and libraries involve only what government chooses to teach or recommend to students. Even if the material being challenged in schools is removed, it will remain available elsewhere.

If a school is to be public, it must answer to the public for what it teaches and recommends, and school boards, superintendents, teachers, and librarians can’t be the last word about that. What is taught and recommended by public schools is ultimately for the public to decide.

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

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?

If allies are weak, am I not best alone?

If allies are strong with power to protect me,

Might they not protect me out of all I own?

— “A Puzzlement” from “The King and I,” Rodgers and Hammerstein.

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By CHRIS POWELL

Regarding foreign policy, Theodore Roosevelt famously advised: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” But in regard to Ukraine, President Biden embodies saber rattling. He warns repeatedly that Russia is sure to attack soon and makes a show of sending to eastern Europe what are only nominal forces, nothing that would much delay a Russian invasion.

Despite the saber rattling, everyone knows that the United States is not going to fight Russia militarily on Russia’s own border. Since conventional land forces are lacking in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, military resistance to a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be effective only with nuclear weapons, which would risk a world war — and for what?

The United States and NATO have no security interest in Ukraine and Russia’s other former satellite states, and those states, even the ones lately admitted to NATO, bring nothing to the alliance but liabilities. They aspire to be only trip wires compelling U.S. military intervention.

So in response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States will attempt only more economic sanctions, and even those may not be supported by other NATO allies, Germany foremost among them. Those allies know that Russia would have enough trouble just reincorporating Ukraine amid resistance from most Ukrainians — and those allies are desperately short of energy in the middle of winter, crippled by their stupid “green” policies, and probably won’t be able to get by without Russian natural gas for many years.

Meanwhile the United States is crippling its own energy industry.

That’s why the United States has nothing to lose by accepting Russia’s simple demand about Ukraine — to stop the eastward expansion of NATO and its placement of offensive weapons, potentially nuclear weapons, on Russia’s border.

Of course the United States made a similar demand of Russia — then the Soviet Union — in regard to Cuba in 1962, and, for nearly 200 years, via the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has claimed the right to repel foreign intervention in all the Americas.

Since the United States is not going to fight for Ukraine, it would give up nothing to get Russia’s promise to leave Ukraine alone as long as it stayed out of NATO. Of course the Russian regime is brutal and not particularly trustworthy, but having made such a deal, Russia would risk much by breaking it — not just sanctions but exposure of the true nature of its regime. Then even Germany might start to worry about relying on Russia so much.

In any case the European Union, home of many NATO members, is beginning to crack up under the weight of bureaucracy, political correctness, uncontrolled immigration, and nationalism. Every day NATO members in Europe are less inclined and able to defend themselves, much less the United States, while the United States remains obliged to defend them.

So it may be time for the United States to face the musical question:

“If allies are weak, am I not best alone?”

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THEY JUST WANT MONEY: State government, the Connecticut Mirror notes, has vastly expanded gambling in the state via sports betting and casino games on the internet and is tracking its new revenue closely without also tracking the increase in gambling addiction and without increasing gambling addiction services.

That’s sad in one way but in another it’s useful. For it proclaims state government’s highest priority is only to get more money by any means.

State government constantly prattles about the poor and sometimes appropriates money to be paid to them directly. Governor Lamont and other top Democrats now want to increase the state’s earned income tax credit for the poor. But making the poor more self-sufficient is something else.

No government that really wanted to help the poor and raise them to self-sufficiency would be hurling a lot more gambling at them on top of state-sponsored marijuana.

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

By Chris Powell

What has Connecticut gotten for the 33 years of litigation in the Hartford school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill, which purportedly ended last week with a settlement between the plaintiffs and state government?

The first result of the Sheff business is a mockery of state constitutional law and the courts themselves.

The state Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision in the Sheff case in 1996 proclaimed that every public school student in the state — not just students in Hartford — has a state constitutional right to a racially integrated education. That conclusion was not only dubious law — it was torn to shreds by the brilliant dissent of Justice David M. Borden — but also impossible to achieve as a practical matter, since it would have required the assignment to school by their race of tens of thousands of students across the state, which federal courts would have forbidden as federally unconstitutional.

Even the Sheff plaintiffs knew that comprehensive racial integration was impossible and they never pressed for it. They were concerned only about Hartford, where the school population consisted overwhelmingly of impoverished, fatherless, and neglected minority children whose educational performance was miserable.

While the Supreme Court’s proclamation of a constitutional right stands, 26 years later it is being violated in most towns and there is and will be no effort to enforce it.

So much for constitutional law in Connecticut.

The second result of the Sheff case is the continued de-facto racial segregation of the Hartford schools themselves.

Because of the state’s creation of Hartford-area “magnet” or regional schools that draw both city and suburban students, the city’s schools are less segregated than they were. But still about 60% of Hartford students are enrolled in schools considered segregated. Similarly, most suburban and rural schools in the state remain segregated too, overwhelmingly white.

Connecticut’s huge and long-lamented racial achievement gap between white and minority students endures in both the Hartford area and the state generally. And while the integration produced by the regional schools may have good results over the long term as students gain more diverse friends and acquaintances, the regional schools have had a negative effect as well.

That is, the regional schools drain Hartford’s neighborhood schools of their more-parented students, leaving the neighborhood schools with even more disadvantaged populations. While the regional schools are advocated for mixing disadvantaged minority city students with middle-class suburban students who may provide better examples academically, this comes at the expense of neighborhood schools that lose their own better examples.

Even so, the Sheff settlement has state government promising still more regional schools and school-choice programs — more openings for city students in suburban schools — until there is room for every Hartford student who wants to escape a neighborhood school.

Maybe then it will be possible to acknowledge the underlying problem officially — the most neglected kids, the core of the unassimilable urban poverty that long has driven the white flight to the suburbs and now is driving the minority middle class out of the cities as well.

In recent years state government is estimated to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on regional schools in the Hartford area and the complicated transportation arrangements they require. The integration this has produced is so small as to invite questions as to whether other approaches might be more productive and cheaper.

Poverty may be a virtue in religious orders but it is a curse in society, since the poor don’t pull their own weight. So suburban fear of housing for the poor is fair, and such housing is difficult to develop in the suburbs even as state law purports to require it in the towns with the most exclusive zoning.

So maybe once regional schools and choice programs have drained Hartford and the state’s other troubled cities of their most-parented students a decade or two from now, government in Connecticut will be compelled to examine the neglected children who remain and to inquire into what has made them so poor. If it is honest, such an inquiry will begin with government itself.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe with an eye to the public’s growing skepticism of rule by decree as his re-election campaign begins, Governor Lamont has asked the General Assembly to maintain a nominal state of emergency about the virus epidemic while allowing his emergency powers to expire Feb. 15.

Lamont’s request confused many legislators at first, but the pose he wants the legislature to help him strike might facilitate continued receipt of millions of dollars in epidemic aid from the federal government.

The governor also would like the legislature to continue a few of his emergency orders by enacting them in statute. If those orders are to remain in effect, the ordinary democratic way is indeed how to do it.

After nearly two years of rule by decree and extensions, Connecticut is long overdue to return to democracy. Yes, democracy takes time and can be messy. But by definition emergencies are sudden and desperate. They don’t go on forever, and the epidemic has waxed and waned and may keep doing so without confronting the state with any situation it hasn’t already faced. Most institutions are functioning, if not as well as they used to, like schools. But having fewer moving parts, the legislature can operate far more easily than schools can.

Apart from the necessity of getting back in the habit of democracy, extending the governor’s emergency powers would present a special risk. For no elected official should have unlimited power during his own campaign for re-election.

It is worrisome enough that with state government rolling in billions of emergency dollars from the federal government, the governor will be far more able than usual to use state resources essentially to buy votes.

The governor is not corrupt. But power hasn’t stopped corrupting just because Donald Trump has left the White House.

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In marking last week the 49th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade, Connecticut Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz seemed to go full libertarian.

“Government,” Bysiewicz declared, “should have no claim on a woman’s body or what a woman chooses to do with her body.”

That is, as the abortion-rights slogan goes, “My body, my choice.”

But then why does Connecticut continue to outlaw prostitution without objection from Bysiewicz?

And what about government’s requirements for people to get vaccinated and wear masks during the virus epidemic? Bysiewicz isn’t agitating about choice there either.

As a matter of law Connecticut could not be more pro-abortion than it is. The state even allows minors who have been raped to obtain abortions without the knowledge of their parents — even abortions arranged by their rapists. Any reversal of the Roe v. Wade precedent by the Supreme Court that returns to the states the authority to restrict abortion will have no effect in Connecticut.

So if Bysiewicz really believes in “my body, my choice,” her blinders are attached a little too tightly. If, on the other hand, she was just posturing reflexively and thoughtlessly for the abortion fanatics in her party, people may understand.

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WHERE ARE THE PARENTS?: For many years in the United States the first principle of tort law — the law for lawsuits seeking to recover damages for non-criminal wrongs done — has been to sue the nearest person with insurance. That pernicious principle gained spectacular publicity this week with the federal lawsuit filed in California against two social media companies by an Enfield woman who claims that her 11-year-old daughter committed suicide because of her addiction to social media.

Yes, social media sometimes have baneful consequences, but then all forms of communications do — telephones, television, radio, newspapers, the postal service, even playground arguments. Apparently the plaintiff and her lawyers in the California lawsuit anticipate that no one will ask how any 11-year-olds get access to the prerequisites of connecting to social media — computers, cell phones, and the internet — without the assistance or the negligence of their parents.

Maybe the defense lawyers will ask. Everyone else might help by asking what has become of parents lately in many other respects.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe the best measure of Bob Stefanowski’s vast improvement as a candidate for governor is how quickly he scared Democratic leaders and left-leaning observers into attacking him upon his formal announcement last week that wants a rematch with Governor Lamont.

Though Stefanowski still has to win the Republican nomination, for which he has three challengers, Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo called him “too extreme,” condemned him for accepting President Trump’s endorsement four years ago and campaigning against the state income tax then, and warned that he would “devastate” schools and medical care. Stefanowski, DiNardo added, doesn’t think climate change is a big issue for the state — as if many others don’t either.

Hugh Bailey, opinion editor of the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register, condemned Stefanowski and other Republicans for making an issue of worsening crime, especially in the cities, though New Haven police have failed to make an arrest in 78% of the city’s soaring number of murders in the last two years and though that issue and the crime issue generally had been raised weeks earlier by New Haven’s own city council.

With his declaration Stefanowski did mean to do a little scaring, but of his Republican rivals, not Democrats. He said he had committed $10 million of his own money to his campaign and he led the state news cycle for 24 hours, doing many interviews signifying familiarity with a range of issues. The income tax came up only when his interviewers raised it. To accusations that he is a loser, Stefanowski noted that he came fairly close to winning four years ago and that the governor himself had been defeated in his first two campaigns for state office.

Stefanowski’s critique of government in Connecticut was fair enough — that the state has become less affordable for the middle class and less safe. But he did not offer a detailed platform. While he noted that Connecticut can’t cut taxes without cutting spending, he didn’t specify where this should be done.

He pledged “forensic audits” of every state agency and of the spending of emergency federal financial aid. But while such audits are bound to find waste and fraud, big savings can result only from challenging mistaken policies that no one in authority dares to address, as with labor union contracting, education, and welfare.

Citing his business background, Stefanowski said, “I know how to restructure.” But the government employee unions and the special interests drawing their sustenance from state government know just as well how to prevent restructuring. The unions and special interests may have more influence over state legislators, even Republican legislators, than a Republican governor would have.

Stefanowski looks and speaks more like a political leader than Lamont does, but the incumbent enters the campaign with huge advantages.

Connecticut remains a Democratic state. While state government’s unfunded pension obligations make it technically insolvent, it is loaded with cash at the moment and the governor can use it to buy votes. The more relevant Stefanowski becomes on policy, the harder the unions and the other special interests will work against him. The governor is far richer and easily will be able to outspend Stefanowski despite his $10 million. And Stefanowski will have the Trump problem.

But then someone should ask the governor if he wants President Biden to campaign for him.

Maybe the Trump and Biden problems will wash each other out in time for state issues to be discussed.

Whoever becomes the Republican nominee will need to itemize the many management failures in state government — starting with recent ones like the Ollie and Katsouleas scandals at the University of Connecticut; state government’s concealment of thousands of the unclaimed properties it has seized from financial institutions; the constant release of chronic criminal offenders, adults and juveniles alike, who laugh at the law and the damage they cause; and the payment of more than $340,000 in salary to a Superior Court judge who hasn’t shown up for work in two years.

State government is full of such failures. Lamont and the General Assembly ignore them but voters might resent them if properly reminded.

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

By Chris Powell

Another spectacular embarrassment for the University of Connecticut, and thus for the state itself, exploded last week — the $11 million wrongful termination award for former men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie. It was compounded because there is no one really in charge at the university these days.

University President Thomas Katsouleas resigned last June after less than two years on the job, bailing out in a golden parachute to a tenured UConn professorship with a $330,000 salary. His temporary successor, UConn Health CEO Andrew Agwunobi, who held on to his medical position even as he became interim president of the whole university, announced Jan. 14 that he is leaving to run a subsidiary of health insurer Humana.

UConn’s vice president for research, Radenka Maric, had barely been lined up as the university’s second interim president of the year when the award to Ollie was announced.

Maric’s first task as president may be to decide where that $11 million is to come from, since the arbiter ordered it paid fast. UConn’s athletic department had just reported a $47 million deficit.

But after Maric finds the $11 million, she will be obliged to inquire into the Ollie disaster, because it was not just the fluke or the bad luck suggested by the university’s statement, which, remarkably, was anonymous, unattributed to any UConn official. The statement called the arbiter’s decision “nonsensical” and complained that it “seriously impedes the university’s ability to manage its athletics program.”

Of course Maric will do nothing about the disaster, because it is actually the result of the university’s own mistaken policies and misjudgments.

First, UConn’s contract with Ollie allowed his dismissal only for “just cause.” Anyone being paid $2.8 million per year in taxpayer money, as Ollie was, should be subject to dismissal simply for management’s loss of confidence.

Second, UConn allows its coaches to be members of the professors union, whose contract bestows additional job guarantees. While the university is sore that the arbiter concluded that the union contract superseded parts of Ollie’s personal contract, the university had allowed an employee paid $2.8 million per year to be part of the union.

That is, UConn had already compromised itself.

Third, nearly everyone who follows UConn basketball sensed that Ollie was fired four years ago not just because of a few national collegiate rule violations and some dissembling about them but because, despite having already taken his team to a national championship, he had just presided over two losing seasons. A coach whose team had done better recently would not have been punished so severely. He would have been reprimanded short of dismissal, as his predecessor, Jim Calhoun, had been after rules violations. But UConn was in a hurry and fired Ollie long before the National Collegiate Athletic Association issued its formal findings about him.

Fourth, in the four years since Ollie’s firing the university probably could have negotiated a financial settlement with him well short of $11 million, out of decency if not strategy. But UConn’s incompetence was crowned by arrogance.

And fifth, UConn’s come-and-go presidents aren’t the only ones who have been presiding over the Ollie case. The university has a Board of Trustees that either has been informed about developments in the case or hasn’t been and hasn’t cared to be. Somehow the board has gotten away with hiring Katsouleas as president only to discover that they couldn’t stand each other and with failing to condition the professorial sinecure in his contract on any length of service as president.

Governor Lamont appoints the trustees but has been indifferent to their performance. So under Lamont working at UConn is good but getting fired is even better.

Yes, UConn is not the only part of state government that always gives the store away, but even so this is a scandal that screams for investigation by the General Assembly.

Since the legislature investigates nothing and since UConn long has been exempt from scrutiny generally, the state will be lucky if even one journalist questions the governor and his challengers about the scandal during the election campaign ahead.

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