Chris Powell column

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

(Presented by James H. Smith)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

Legislation sponsored by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal — supported by Connecticut’s other senator, Chris Murphy, and Governor Lamont, Democrats all — which was narrowly defeated in the Senate on May 11, titled the Women’s Health Protection Act, isn’t nutty just because it would authorize all abortions all the time, right up to birth. It’s also nutty because, after its title, it doesn’t mention women at all, not even once.

Instead the text of the legislation substitutes “person” for “woman,” apparently on a premise shared by all Democratic senators except Joe Manchin of West Virginia that there are no longer different genders and that men now can become pregnant.

The hallucination of transgenderism now rules the Senate Democratic caucus and Connecticut’s Democratic Party.

After all, why title the bill the Women’s Health Protection Act and then immediately cut women out of the text — except to deceive and signal belief in transgenderism?

Since Connecticut’s senators, the governor, and their supporters complain about [ITALICS] Republican [END ITALICS] extremism, they should be pressed about the implications of their legislation.

Do they really believe that men can become pregnant and need abortions?

Do they really believe that the law should be indifferent to the abortion of viable fetuses of full gestation?

Do they really believe that parents shouldn’t necessarily know that their minor daughters are having surgery?

Last week the governor admitted that he opposes conditioning abortions for minors on the notification and consent of their parents, even though state law requires parental consent for mere tattooing. The governor argued that the law doesn’t need to require parental notification because most minors seeking abortions tell their parents anyway.

Most may do so, but law is customarily enacted to apply to [ITALICS] departures [END ITALICS] from the norm. Most people don’t rob banks but for good reason bank robbery remains illegal, and a sensational case from 2009 provided Connecticut with everlasting good reason for requiring parental notification.

In that case a 15-year-old girl who ran away from her home in Bloomfield and had been missing for almost a year was discovered living with an unrelated 41-year-old man in West Hartford and to have obtained an abortion at a Connecticut clinic after becoming pregnant from her statutory rape by him, only to be returned to him and sex slavery because no one involved with the abortion asked critical questions.

While the age of majority in Connecticut is 18, for years now liberal Democrats in the state, starting with former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, have claimed that young people are incapable of taking full responsibility for themselves until they are 25 or so and that, as a result, they should be exempt from serious criminal penalties. So how do 15-year-olds become competent to decide by themselves on surgery?

The Women’s Health Protection Act, which the Democrats likely will keep submitting in Congress, would duplicate the horrible conflict of interest that Connecticut law creates with abortion. It would deprive minors of any true guardians at a moment of the most profound risk to their physical and mental health, instead giving guardianship to their abortion providers, even though, by definition, the pregnancies to be terminated are the result of statutory rape or worse and the failure to notify parents, guardians, or law enforcement may conceal the most abusive felonies and facilitate still more abuse.

You’re supposed to know better than to ask the barber if you need a haircut. So who should ask the abortion clinic if she needs an abortion?

Connecticut Democrats are calling the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, an extremist for his position on abortion. But Stefanowski supports the abortion policy established by Roe v. Wade — unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability, state regulation afterward — as well as parental notification, which Roe allowed.

With the Women’s Health Protection Act the governor and Connecticut’s senators and most state Democratic candidates would go far beyond Roe. Thus [ITALICS] they [END ITALICS] have become the extremists here, and crackpots as well because of their legislation’s suggestion that there is no biological difference between men and women and that biology itself has been a myth all along.

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

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By Chris Powell

Four months after the now internationally infamous “pizza sex” assignment was given to eighth-graders at Kennedy Middle School in Enfield, the town’s Board of Education has not yet figured out how it happened. Instead the board purportedly is stuck contemplating just [ITALICS] how [END ITALICS] to figure out how it happened.

The assignment told students to use pizza topping choices as metaphors in negotiating with each other the sexual acts in which they would like to participate. This supposedly was to be a lesson in consensus building, as if pizza toppings could not have accomplished that by themselves, without serving as metaphors for sex, as if students had not already encountered pizza toppings requiring consensus building at home, and as if a school system whose student performance is as poor as Enfield’s should have time for anything more than basic academics.

So should the local or state police, the state’s attorney, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation be asked to handle the case? Maybe a General Assembly or congressional committee? How about hiring a private investigator? Or, as some school board members have suggested, should the board appoint a “task force” to review Enfield’s school curriculum generally?

All this tortured contemplation aims to [ITALICS] avoid [END ITALICS] getting the answer the school board only pretends to be seeking — to avoid asking School Superintendent Christopher J. Drezak for a candid report on how the assignment got into the classroom, exactly where it came from, and how much school administrators knew about it before it descended on students.

For example, did the “pizza sex” assignment come from some lesson-planning service to which the school system subscribes? If so, what is that service and will the products it sends to the school system be made available for inspection by the board and the public?

How much more of this crackpot stuff has gotten into Enfield’s schools, and how did it get in?

Or was the assignment devised within the school system itself, and, if so, by whom?

And exactly who in the school administration and outside the school administration — the creators of the “pizza sex” assignment — thinks that middle school students should be instructed to reveal and discuss their sexual desires with each other in class? Who would deprive students of that much privacy, and why?

The only information provided by the superintendent so far is that the school system had two consensus-building lessons using pizza toppings and that the sexual one was sent to the classroom because of a staff member’s innocent mistake.

But was the school system’s acquisition of the sexually themed assignment a mistake in the first place, or was it a policy decision?

That is a much bigger question.

Obviously the superintendent knows [ITALICS] something [END ITALICS] about the origin of the lesson plan, and since he is paid more than $200,000 a year, he knows or should know more than he is telling.

But for some reason the school board won’t ask him in public, and two weeks ago he refused to answer this column’s simple questions as to where the assignment came from and how it got into the school system. He said the school board is reviewing the matter and he would reply when that review is completed — as if the information requested isn’t already contained in records that are held by the school administration and, under the law, subject to [ITALICS] immediate [END ITALICS] disclosure but being concealed to avoid embarrassment.

Of course the school board already may have been privately told where the assignment came from and is supporting the superintendent’s cover-up. An outsider’s complaint about the cover-up to the state Freedom of Information Commission might pry answers loose, but only after a year or two of proceedings, by which time, the superintendent and board may hope, the issue will have been largely forgotten.

But a freedom-of-information complaint isn’t necessary to establish that Enfield’s schools, like many public schools throughout the country, notably including Hartford’s, are doing things they don’t want the public to know about and so are deficient not just in student performance but also in basic accountability. That is, Enfield’s public schools, like many others, really aren’t public at all.

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

By Chris Powell

About 17% of state government employee positions have been left vacant, in part so Governor Lamont can improve state government’s financial position.

Prison employees are required to work abusive amounts of overtime even as they are at high risk of contracting COVID-19. The state police lately felt so short-staffed that they sank to giving administrative work to a trooper who was serving a criminal probation. Also short-staffed, the state Freedom of Information Commission is slower than ever in adjudicating complaints about denials of transparency in government, but then few in government outside the commission want transparency enforced.

So on the whole, despite its 17% vacancy rate, state government has muddled on. Indeed, in a campaign commercial the governor claims that “our state stayed strong and it’s getting stronger.”

With the state budget it just passed, the General Assembly has responded with more than its usual hypocrisy to the issue of unfilled jobs. According to the Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf, the budget prohibits the governor from reducing any agency’s spending as long as the state budget as a whole isn’t running a deficit. But then the budget also instructs the administration to find $140 million in savings — savings the legislature itself declined to search for and identify.

This way of economizing lets legislators pose as the good guys and coddle the state employee unions while making the governor take all the risk of looking like the bad guy.

Maybe the governor isn’t complaining about this publicly because the legislature demanded far larger unspecified savings from his predecessor. Still, it would have been fair for the governor to have vetoed the budget and told the legislature to find the courage to do the economizing itself.

Nevertheless, extravagance and incompetence continue in state government, especially at the University of Connecticut.

Last week Tom Hopkins of Connecticut Inside Investigator, a journalism project of the Yankee Institute, detailed how UConn recently concluded that an arts professor repeatedly made sexual advances to students, touched many inappropriately, and purchased alcohol for an underage student.

But, Connecticut Inside Investigator found, the university took only the mildest action against the professor. First UConn put the professor on paid administrative leave and then restored him to the classroom for a year, as well as to research and administrative work, whereupon he retired without any firing or discipline on his record that would impede his finding work elsewhere in education.

Also last week Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie reported that Rachel Rubin, UConn’s former presidential staff chief, who was paid $364,000 a year, recently retired with an annual pension of $144,000 and a payment of $82,000 for accrued benefits, only to be rehired soon afterward to assist UConn’s Board of Trustees with its search for a new president. In her temporary position in “retirement” Rubin may be paid as much as $200,000 a year.

Rennie notes that Rubin assisted the board in its hiring of Thomas Katsouleas as UConn president in 2019, which was a disaster, since he and the board quickly fell out and he resigned only two years later, golden-parachuting into a tenured professorship at UConn with a salary of $330,000 as guaranteed by his presidential contract.

Still, Connecticut has not reached the point where anyone in authority can criticize the university’s extravagance and incompetence. If the Republicans want a fat target in this year’s state election campaign, UConn is one.

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JOURNALISM PLAYS ALONG: As it becomes more politically correct and less critical, American journalism engages more in euphemism that takes political sides and sanitizes. There are no more illegal immigrants but only “undocumented” people. Supporters of abortion are “pro-choice.” Sex-change therapy for minors is disguised as “gender-affirming care” though it can have terrible adverse effects.

George Orwell saw this coming in “1984,” in which an apparatchik at the Ministry of Truth explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

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

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By Chris Powell

Both political parties in Congress want to sustain the immigration controversy for partisan purposes more than they want a compromise that could resolve the controversy’s two major components — securing the borders while providing a path to citizenship for longtime illegal residents and children whose violation of immigration law was not their fault and who, as a practical matter, know no other home.

Last week in Congress it was the same way with abortion. A majority could have been cobbled together in the Senate in favor of legislation nationalizing a broad but limited right to abortion, but the Democratic caucus in the Senate sought to go way beyond its purported objective of codifying the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The Democratic majority in the House already had passed a bill extending abortion rights beyond those laid out by Roe.

Among other things, the Democratic bill, supported in the Senate by Connecticut’s abortion fanatics Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and endorsed by Governor Lamont, would have left to a doctor’s discretion an abortion after the viability of the fetus, forbidden any parental notification requirements for abortions for minors, and forbidden even a 24-hour waiting period between a woman’s first medical consultation and her abortion. The bill would have nullified even the lesser restraints of Connecticut’s own very permissive abortion law.

The Democratic objective is all abortion all the time and any time, immediately on the spot and right up to the moment of birth.

The bill failed to get a majority of votes in the Senate. Several senators who voted against it indicated that they would support a less expansive bill, but the Democrats were not interested in negotiating such a compromise, even though it would have left them free to keep pressing for a more permissive law and though polls long have suggested that a compromise would reflect national opinion. Few people support unrestricted abortion just as few support prohibiting it — the extremes that dominate the two parties on the issue.

With their all-or-nothing approach, the Democrats wanted to sustain the acrimonious controversy, perhaps to distract from the roaring inflation, shortages, and social disintegration that are making the Biden administration so unpopular and threatening a Republican takeover of Congress in November’s election.

Neither side can acknowledge that the abortion issue is full of fair concerns and complications of law and morality that don’t lend themselves to the usual sloganeering and posturing.

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CITIES GET PLENTY: Much complaining in Connecticut politics and journalism has been done lately about the huge share of urban real estate that is exempt from municipal property taxes — government property and property belonging to nonprofit schools and colleges, churches, social-service agencies, and so forth.

The most recent reminder came the other day from a report in the Hartford Courant, which noted that 51% of the value of real estate in the city is tax-exempt even as state government never gives the city all that is supposedly due under the state’s payment-in-lieu-of-taxes program, or PILOT.

But the complainers fail to note, as the Courant failed to note, that quite apart from PILOT payments state government already reimburses Hartford and other cities about half their annual budgets.

Nor did the newspaper note that in 2018 under the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy state government assumed Hartford’s general obligation bonded debt of more than $500 million — a bailout of the city’s decades of mismanagement. In effect state government also paid for the minor-league baseball stadium Hartford had just committed to build while on the brink of bankruptcy, and did build with serious delay and cost-overrun.

Connecticut’s cities have been failing not because of any lack of money, since state government long has been throwing ever-increasing amounts at them. The cities have been failing because the ways the money is spent — largely at state government’s direction — perpetuate poverty more than they eradicate it.

Perpetuating poverty, the spending also perpetuates political dependence. The cities never improve but that’s OK, since they never stop providing huge Democratic pluralities.

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

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By Chris Powell

Especially in Connecticut elected officials claim credit for trying to solve the problems they themselves created. It happened again recently with legislation proposed in the General Assembly to require larger municipalities to create “fair rent” commissions with power to cancel or reduce residential rent increases.

Yes, along with housing prices generally, rents have been increasing dramatically since inflation exploded. By some calculations housing has never been more expensive relative to incomes. But the legislation effectively blamed landlords when the rent increases are largely the result of government’s own policies.

Impairing the ability of landlords to make money would only discourage the supply of rental housing.

Connecticut policy long has allowed municipal zoning regulations to stunt the housing supply. Like rent control, restrictive zoning subverts the market. If housing was easier to build, supply would grow and prices fall.

A recent state law aims to diminish the exclusivity of suburban zoning, but it is yet to have much effect even as it is prompting anger in some towns.

The housing shortage has bigger underlying problems.

First, people want to have children but don’t want to ensure that housing is available nearby for their kids when they start out on their own. Of course peace and quiet are great but many people want government to provide peace and quiet at the expense of people who don’t yet have adequate housing — to provide peace and quiet through restrictive zoning.

And second, people justifiably want good neighbors. Quite apart from racial and ethnic prejudices, which are fading, good neighbors means people who will behave decently, pay more in taxes than they consume in government services, and not manifest the pathologies associated with the never-ending poverty and depravity of the cities.

Connecticut’s zoning reform legislation vindicates these concerns insofar as it calls itself “fair share” legislation, confirming that new residents are a burden. Once or twice even the mayors of Hartford and New Haven have been candid about wanting to disperse their poorest residents to the suburbs. Indeed, poverty is no virtue, for with the poor come crime, dependence, and neglected children who wreck schools.

Suburbs sneer at this while city mayors have to cope with it. If government’s welfare, education, and urban policies were not chronic failures, suburbs might be more welcoming to new residents and to the housing construction Connecticut needs so badly.

All state government has to do is stop manufacturing poverty.

But maybe with the housing legislation Connecticut has been putting too much focus on suburbs. Lately the glorious cherry blossoms in Wooster Square Park in New Haven have provided a spectacular reminder of the advantages and potential of city life.

After all, the main problem with cities today is not infrastructure as much as many of the people who live there. A city with “mixed-use development” has great virtues — commerce, industry, hospitals and medical offices, various kinds of residences, markets, restaurants, churches, theaters, and parks, [ITALICS] all within walking distance of each other, [END ITALICS] with shops and housing often in the same buildings. In such places it is possible not just to live without a car but to be glad to be free of its expense.

Thanks in large part to Yale University, downtown New Haven somewhat sustains this way of life. Downtown Hartford lost it 60 years ago with horribly misguided urban redevelopment. But under the same mayors who would like to export their poor, both cities are waking up, striving to increase middle-class housing downtown or nearby.

Sometimes this effort is scorned as “gentrification,” but gentrification is exactly what the cities need. Why is Stamford booming while Bridgeport — only 23 miles east on the same railroad, highways, and coast, with a better harbor and an airport — sinking in decrepitude and struggling to just keep the lights on downtown?

Maybe it’s because, being closer to New York City, housing in Stamford long has tended to be more expensive and so being poor there wasn’t as easy as it was and remains in Bridgeport.

Of course the poor can’t be deported. So why can’t Connecticut ever raise them to the middle class? Why is the decades-long failure to lift them never even officially acknowledged?

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

By CHRIS POWELL

Empty gestures and distractions abounded last week in government and news reporting in Washington and Connecticut.

In Washington the Biden administration and White House correspondents celebrated the appointment of the first Black presidential press secretary — and not just a Black one but a member of a sexual minority. The appointment distracted from 20% inflation. Even better, now any journalist who asks a critical question about the Bumbler in Chief can be called not only racist but homophobic too.

Meanwhile in Connecticut the General Assembly voted to make a state holiday of Juneteenth, falsely described as the day in 1865 when slavery ended in the United States. In fact slavery ended on Juneteenth only in part of Texas being occupied by Union troops during the Civil War. Slavery continued in some other areas of the country until ratification of the 13th Amendment six months later.

Enactment of the holiday prompted some emotional displays at the state Capitol. But it changed nothing about the state’s awful racial disparities — in education, poverty, employment, housing, and crime. A few Black legislators did note another disparity — the hugely disproportionate incidence of abortion among Black women.

Had the legislature been interested in more than empty gestures it might have asked a few questions or even tried legislating about these disparities.

Does public education’s foremost policy — social promotion — help close or just worsen Connecticut’s notorious racial gap in education?

Is state welfare policy making poor Black women more self-sufficient or just more fatherless and husbandless and demoralizing them into seeing abortion as contraception?

Do the state’s sharply restrictive zoning rules and high taxes make it easier or harder to acquire housing and build wealth and security?

While the legislature has just enacted some tax cuts that will benefit people with lower incomes, the cuts are mostly temporary and will be more than offset by inflation, and the legislature did not confront the bigger questions, for that would have been controversial.

Designating Juneteenth as a state holiday may benefit only government employees, giving them another paid day off while services to the public are diminished. The holiday legislation is the adult equivalent of the bill some schoolkids were advocating to declare the lollipop Connecticut’s official state candy. Both bills showed that it is easy to advance the mere form of legislation but making any difference in the world is something else.

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FIRST AMENDMENT VIOLATION: While there was much insistence in the legislature last week that abortion should be a constitutional right, the legislature trampled a constitutional right that has never been in dispute: freedom of expression. That is, the legislature approved a bill to forbid advertising marijuana in Connecticut by out-of-state entities that don’t have a Connecticut marijuana retailing license.

State government has the authority to control the sale of intoxicating drugs, even if Connecticut’s state-sanctioned marijuana business violates federal law, which still criminalizes the drug. But advertising is protected by both the First Amendment of the federal Constitution and the Declaration of Rights of Connecticut’s Constitution.

The legislation is against the public interest in another respect, insofar as it will impede marijuana users from learning about better prices, products, and lower taxes across the state line.

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NOT SAFE AFTER ALL: The federal government long assured the country that the COVID-19 vaccines were perfectly safe. But they weren’t. Tens of thousands of adverse reactions to the vaccines have been reported, including many deaths, though the government didn’t start to take the adverse reactions very seriously until last week.

That’s when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration restricted the authorized use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it causes blood clots, a risk that was identified with the J&J vaccine a year ago, when its authorization was briefly suspended.

The other vaccines also have caused blood clots and deaths but the FDA is leaving them alone for now.

The FDA says its restriction on the J&J vaccine shows how effective the agency’s safety controls are. To the contrary, the restriction shows how unreliable and misleading the agency has been all along.

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

By Chris Powell

Abortion and gender dysphoria are serious issues worth serious discussion. But you’d never know it from listening to Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy. They offer only hysteria to rile up their supporters, fanning the flames of the culture war.

According to Blumenthal, the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision reversing its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade “would be a horrific moment inflicting a huge leap backward with incalculable costs and chaos for countless women and their families. … Overturning Roe v. Wade would leave American women abandoned and alone.”

Huh? “Incalculable costs and chaos” because states and Congress would recover authority to legislate about abortion through the ordinary democratic process? Blumenthal makes it sound as if nine unelected judges are plotting to fix abortion law throughout the country when in fact they are preparing to [ITALICS] relinquish [END ITALICS] the judicial power to do so.

And how would reversing Roe leave women “abandoned and alone” when they would retain all their other constitutional and statutory rights? If all women in the country rose up in support of codifying abortion rights, such rights would be codified everywhere. Such rights are not codified by certain states and by Congress precisely because many women disagree with Blumenthal’s abortion fanaticism, not because they are “abandoned and alone.”

Little protest of the court’s draft decision involves the issue actually before the court: What does the Constitution require? Indeed, few people other than legal scholars and serious journalists have even read the draft decision and its dozens of footnoted references. Nearly all the protest against the draft decision involves something else entirely: What should abortion policy be? Most of those protesting the draft decision seem to think that the Constitution requires whatever they like and prohibits whatever they dislike.

Some people argue that the court should not reverse precedents. Yet the court often has done so, as with the odious precedent in favor of racial segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson. That precedent endured for 58 years before it was reversed, nine years longer than the Roe decision has been in force, and adapting to Plessy’s reversal was far more disruptive than adapting to the reversal of Roe would be.

As policy rather than law, Roe well may have gotten abortion right — that it should be left to the individual prior to fetal viability, whereupon the state has a fair interest in legislating, including legislating to protect the lives of the unborn.

Short of saving a woman’s life amid a rare complication, there is no good reason for abortion after viability. After all, this is the age of free contraception, free “morning-after” pills, free abortion prior to fetal viability, and free surrender of unwanted babies at hospital emergency rooms.

While some states seem eager to outlaw abortion, over the long term, with democracy working on the issue, the policy outlined in Roe might make sense to most people and be legislated by most states and Congress.

Some people call reversing Roe “radical.” But far more radical is post-viability abortion, which in effect has become legal by judicial order nearly everywhere in the country.

Last month opponents of abortion somehow got hold of a medical waste truck carrying the mutilated corpses of late-term fetuses aborted at a clinic in Washington, D.C. Photos of the corpses were published. If the corpses had been found on a blasted street in Mariupol, no one except maybe Vladimir Putin would be denying their humanity and that a right to life had been unconscionably violated.

As for Senator Murphy, he is denouncing as “bullies” anyone who won’t ride the transgenderism bandwagon with him.

He charges that transgender students are prevented from participating in sports. But they remain free to participate in sports for their biological gender. He complains that transgender students are barred from using restrooms matching their gender identity. But this is only a matter of longstanding sexual privacy and safety. He complains about attempts to forbid sex-change therapy for minors. But such therapy often has damaging consequences that minors cannot fully evaluate.

Raising these objections to transgenderism isn’t “bullying.” It’s argument. The bully here is Murphy himself.

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

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