Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Legalizing recreational marijuana in Connecticut is off until a special session of the General Assembly this week, with House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Democrat, blaming the Republican minority for stalling passage during the regular session just concluded. The Republicans, Ritter said, planned to talk the legislation to death in the session’s last hours, obstructing other business.

Ritter’s criticism was unfair, since the marijuana legislation is complicated, controversial, and nearly 300 pages long. It had been approved only narrowly in the Senate, and rushing its consideration in the House on the eve of adjournment would have prevented understanding. Had the Democratic leaders been better organized, the bill might have been resolved weeks ago.

Complication is the big problem with the marijuana bill. Originally its premises were that marijuana is already pervasive in the state, that it is not so dangerous, and that criminal penalties for it have been weakened and are seldom enforced. But then legislators began scheming to turn the legislation into a source of tax revenue and political patronage. That caused most of the complication and controversy.

The issue could have and still could be handled simply. All that is needed is repeal of the criminal statutes involving marijuana — no licensing (that is, no patronage) and no regulations about the drug’s intoxicating component, just acceptance of the current situation. Driving while intoxicated will remain a crime, as will sales tax evasion. If any stores openly sell the drug, risking, however slightly, federal prosecution, they will be obliged to collect the ordinary sales tax and forward it to state government.

Such simple repeal of the state’s criminal law would also avoid any attempt at nullifying federal law, which licensing would be.

Even supporters of licensing, regulating, and special taxing of marijuana admit that those things might keep most trade in the drug underground.

Awash in federal money, Connecticut doesn’t need the relative pittance projected from putting state government into the marijuana business. Since there is also plenty of patronage in that federal money, Connecticut doesn’t need marijuana patronage either. So the legislature should just repeal a criminal law that is hardly being enforced anyway and leave it at that.

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THE LEWIS-PRESCOTT GANG: Since no nooses had been found lately at the Amazon warehouse under construction in Windsor, last week the noose fetishists contrived a new way of getting attention and distracting from the murders all around them in the minority community — they openly carried guns to their protest at the construction site.

One of them, Hartford’s Cornell Lewis, explained why: to threaten and intimidate. Lewis said, “We’re out here today with our weapons on full display — legally — embracing our Second Amendment rights to let Amazon know that we’re not going to put up with this kind of stuff.”

Manchester’s Keren Prescott, founder of the PowerUp CT organization, reveled in this gangsterism. “There is nothing like Black people exercising their Second Amendment right to get folks moving,” Prescott said. “We are tired of being nice.”

That is, the Lewis-Prescott gang is tired of being civilized. Displaying guns was their way of conveying the old gangster message: “Nice little place you have here. Shame if something should happen to it.”

Until lately Connecticut had avoided gangsters in political controversies. Now that the race mongers have added guns to their bullying, will those in authority stand up to them?

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FONFARA’S FEVER: Connecticut’s new state budget will bestow huge new appropriations on the cities, where most of the state’s racial minority population lives. But even as he voted for the budget, state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, denounced it as “status quo” and “a knee on the neck of the Black community and other underserved communities.”

Yes, since throwing more money at the cities without ever achieving improvement is only what state government long has been doing, the budget can be considered “status quo.” But “a knee on the neck of the Black community” it is not.

Fonfara is white and his fevered bloviating suggests that he has either lost his mind or fears a primary challenge from a minority candidate.

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

By Chris Powell

Some small good things were done by the session of the General Assembly just concluded, but the best things about the session may have been what it didn’t do.

That is, it did not raise taxes much — mainly on heavy trucks — and thus did not disadvantage Connecticut more relative to other states and did not give the state’s taxpaying residents more reason to consider leaving for less expensive jurisdictions. The large far-left faction of the Democratic legislative caucuses wanted to raise taxes sharply on the rich, but with the state rolling in emergency money from the federal government, Governor Lamont, a more moderate Democrat, prevented it, knowing it was financially unnecessary and could wait until after the next election.

The legislature did not create, as was proposed in the name of “equity” — now a euphemism for political patronage — an independent agency with its own revenue stream for spending billions on infrastructure projects in the cities, outside the normal supervision of the governor and the legislature. This was to be done on the false premise that Connecticut’s urban problem is the disintegration of infrastructure rather than disintegration of society.

Instead the legislature authorized $1.5 billion in bonding dedicated for the cities over the next 10 years, to be supervised by a new commission on which the governor, legislators, and their designates will serve, a  sort of subcommittee of the State Bond Commission. The initiative carefully preserves the false premise about the cause of the urban problem. 

The legislature did not raise gas taxes in the name of a “climate initiative,” and thereby left “climate change” to its historic perpetrators, the sunspot cycle and precession of the Earth’s axis.

The legislature did approve big increases in spending — 2.6 percent in the first year, 3.9 percent in the second — but the huge increase in federal money will cover it and most of the new money will go for more of the same things state government has been doing all along. Then, without more money from Washington, tax increases, or spending cuts, in three years state government will return to big deficits.

Funding is being increased modestly for the nonprofit groups that provide social services at half the cost of state government’s own employees. Subsidies also are being increased for people who buy medical insurance on state government’s insurance exchange.

As usual much of the extra money — starting with what is sent to municipalities — will end up raising compensation for government’s own unionized employees, the Democratic Party’s army. This will be euphemized as “property tax relief” though property taxes are never relieved.

But given the increased Democratic margin in the legislature, the damage could have been far worse.

In a discussion this week with talk-show host Will Marotti on WTIC-AM1080, Bob Stefanowski, the 2018 Republican nominee for governor, who may seek a rematch with Governor Lamont, remarked on some of state government’s recent embarrassments. Stefanowski said there is “no oversight.”

Indeed, this lack of oversight extends far beyond those occasional embarrassments and is a matter of the most expensive policies. While the governor and other Democratic leaders are celebrating their new budget as “transformational,” when the television cameras are off, does anyone really think that the budget will change anything about life and government in Connecticut?

For decades state government has been substantially increasing spending in the name of education, yet student performance has not improved and its racial gap remains mortifying even as school employees are better paid.

The same with the cities, whose populations grow poorer and where violent crime is worsening despite ever-increasing financial aid from the state.

If state welfare programs were making people self-sufficient, their appropriations would be falling, not rising.

Housing prices are soaring and economic and racial segregation are entrenched because the state’s housing supply is so constrained. There is little action there either.

And of course state spending can’t be reduced or even much redirected.

No, the legislature abolished its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago. It is of no concern whether anything in state government works much except to pay the wages of the Democratic Party’s army.

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

By Chris Powell

Misconceived when it began 20 years ago, the American expedition to Afghanistan is being misunderstood as it comes to its predictable end in failure and the benighted country returns to the theocratic fascism of the Taliban. The transition will be horrible, and Americans should be outraged — first of all at themselves.

The expedition began as a search for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. When bin Laden could not be found for years, the expedition became another one of nation building, like Vietnam. The new Afghan government nurtured by the U.S. has attempted democracy but has been hopelessly corrupt and its U.S.-trained military has not been eager to fight the Taliban by itself. So the Taliban gradually have regained control of most of the country.

Ten years after the expedition began, bin Laden was located in Pakistan and killed by U.S. special forces, but the exercise in nation building continued. Most Afghans have been indifferent to it — like most Americans. But for a few years young Afghan women have gotten a chance to see what liberation from theocratic fascism might be like — education, careers, equality with men, and escape from sexual slavery. Though many of these young women have been murdered by the Taliban in bombings and shootings at their schools or jobs, many have bravely persisted. Now their hopes are disintegrating. Soon many more will be dead or at least raped.

This outrageousness was well conveyed a month ago by the intrepid travel video producer Eva zu Beck, who posted at YouTube a few shows about her recent journey in Afghanistan. Zu Beck interviewed a young Afghan woman, Nazima Khairzad, who, with only primitive equipment and facilities, has become an excellent skier, won a medal at an international competition in Pakistan, and aspires to become an athlete and live a modern, independent life. (To Khairzad, even Pakistan seems advanced.)

But her achievements and aspirations have brought Khairzad mostly condemnation from her own community. Many called her a “bad girl” and some even threatened to kill her — this in an area not yet controlled by the Taliban.

As it withdraws its military from Afghanistan, the U.S. government is being urged to arrange the emigration of thousands of Afghans who supported the U.S. expedition. Humane as that sounds, it would be a mistake, as these Afghans did not help the United States as much as the United States, while mistaken, tried to help them achieve a civilized government. Rather than being removed from their country, these Afghans — especially the young women — should be encouraged to join the national army in support of the democratic government, and should be equipped by the United States if they can show themselves effective fighters against the Taliban.

For it’s their country, not ours. If they will not be as fanatic about democracy as the Taliban are about theocratic fascism, they will deserve theocratic fascism.

Sardonically summarizing U.S. foreign policy a few decades ago, the late, great conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. said, “Lose a country, gain a restaurant.” But amid the damage done to the hospitality industry by the virus epidemic, the United States won’t be needing another restaurant for a long time.

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A CHEAP POSE: American education is increasingly political indoctrination, especially at the higher levels, where the professoriat is crazy left. But the state Senate’s Republicans were just striking a cheap pose this week as they forced the Senate to vote on an amendment prohibiting Connecticut schools from teaching “divisive concepts,” such as that the country is “fundamentally racist” and that people bear racial guilt for the sins of their ancestors.

The amendment was defeated as all Democratic senators opposed it, most of them playing along with the recent race mongering in their party.

While much racial nonsense is coming up in schools around the country, there has been no formal inquiry into it in Connecticut’s schools and the legislature hasn’t undertaken one. Such an inquiry would be worthwhile, but it can wait a bit, since however much students are being propagandized and misled, test scores suggest that most aren’t learning much of anything.

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

By Chris Powell

Now that the General Assembly, without any research, just a lot of pious posturing, has passed legislation declaring that racism is the cause of the health disparities between the races in Connecticut, legislators should look at what has been happening right under their noses for months.

When the campaign to vaccinate people amid the virus epidemic began, it didn’t take long to notice that members of minority groups, especially city residents, were not participating as much as everyone else. State and municipal government officials and medical authorities were terrified by this and quickly responded with aggressive outreach efforts and vaccination clinics in the supposedly “underserved” communities. But even then minority participation lagged that of whites and suburban residents, and it still does.

Were members of minority groups more skeptical of the vaccines because of an evil medical experiment conducted on Black men in Alabama a half century ago? Maybe, but it’s unlikely that even most Black people today are aware of that awful history. It is more likely that the lack of participation is mainly a matter of the disengagement of the poor and less educated.

And that’s exactly what the Connecticut Mirror found last week as it examined vaccination rates in the state.

“Despite being prioritized for vaccine administration,” the Mirror’s Kasturi Pananjady and Dave Altimari wrote, “Connecticut’s cities have consistently lagged behind in the state’s vaccine rollout, and detailed data on the neighborhood level show that disparities mirror existing inequities, particularly socioeconomic ones.”

The Mirror report added that a “vulnerability index” of neighborhoods — measuring income, employment, poverty, and education — accurately predicted vaccination rates, just as a similar national study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control did in March.

So the racial disparities in public health are almost certainly not caused by racist policies and racist medical staff — those policies and staffers having given priority to racial minorities — but by poverty, whose causes state government never investigates.

Now it’s a fair guess that poverty itself is caused by the racism in government policy. After all, what about a welfare system that disproportionately inflicts fatherlessness and parental neglect on minority children? What about an education system whose social promotion disproportionately impairs the learning of minority kids, giving them diplomas when they qualify only for menial work? How do such policies help anyone escape or avoid poverty?

But welfare and education have become big businesses sustaining the very liberals who prattle about racism elsewhere. Their prattle about racism is excellent camouflage for their own, just as Connecticut’s new legislation about racism’s supposed responsibility for a public health crisis will preclude examination of the racism behind poverty.

The racial prattle is overtaking local government too. Though the virus epidemic had faded, Manchester canceled its Memorial Day observances and has canceled its July 4th fireworks and plans no ceremonies that day. But the town plans a full day of events celebrating “Juneteenth,” June 19, marking the day in 1865 when Union troops took control of secessionist Texas and declared the end of slavery there.

Juneteenth is portrayed as a sort of Black Independence Day and the end of slavery in the United States and thus a substitute for the Fourth of July, But this is a contrivance, for slavery legally continued in the United States for six months after the Union subdued Texas.

That’s because President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, enforced by Union troops, applied only to areas in rebellion, and two slave states, Delaware and Kentucky, did not rebel. So slavery there did not end until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was ratified in December 1865.

Manchester has officially proclaimed Juneteenth a municipal holiday, so the erroneous history the town is teaching is bad enough. Worse is the new holiday’s suggestion that July 4th is not everybody’s Independence Day. For while the Declaration of Independence did not free the slaves, it contemplated that freedom and the universal human rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But rather than talk back to racial separatism, Manchester is playing footsie with it. So much for patriotism.

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

By Chris Powell

While the General Assembly has never been known for political courage, the racial obsession that lately has been taking over there should have prompted some legislators to talk back to it by now.

For it has gotten ridiculous — and dangerous.

The much-touted legislation declaring racism rather than poverty to be a “public health crisis” contains new racial jargon that has caused some legislators to wonder what is going on, but most are going along with it anyway. The bill requires state government’s higher education programs to include “cultural humility education” so as to increase retention of people of color.

The bill explains “cultural humility” as “a continuing commitment to self-evaluation and critique of one’s own worldview with regard to differences in cultural traditions and belief systems, and awareness of, and active mitigation of, power imbalances between cultures.”

That’s not much of explanation, but it implies that one culture is as good as another and that, accordingly, power should be balanced among cultures.

Try telling that to the young women of Afghanistan, who, thanks to the 20-year intervention of the U.S. military, for a few years have gotten a look at a culture that exalts democracy, equal opportunity, and freedom of conscience. Upon the imminent departure of the U.S. military, those young women will be cast back into the sexual slavery of the Taliban’s theocratic fascism.

Advocating “cultural humility education” during debate on the legislation last week, Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, said: “When I see a white woman, I see a white woman. … I want you to see me as a Black woman and understand my journey and what I’ve been through.”

But of course that is the very definition, history, and danger of racism — seeing people first according to race and making presumptions about them. What Moore wants is exactly what the country has been striving to get away from since the modern civil rights movement began 70 years ago.

What Moore proposes is rank stereotyping, the refusal to see people first as individuals, to judge them, as Martin Luther King Jr. urged, by “the content of their character.” For simply by race one cannot know what people have been through and who they are.

If Moore’s arrogant presumption can be made, so can the Ku Klux Klan’s. Racism isn’t any more tolerable when Black people promote it, even though white people then are too scared to dispute it.

Indeed, the country’s problem today is too much “cultural humility,” the growing fear of standing up for values that make a civilization great and keep it improving — values like parenting, education, self-sufficiency, and color blindness. What will the country be like when Moore’s “cultural humility” overthrows that culture?

The unfortunate disparities among the races in Connecticut will not be closed by “cultural humility education” any more than they will be closed by the silly propagandizing over the supposed nooses that keep getting found at the Amazon warehouse under construction in Windsor. That propagandizing seems meant mainly to publicize certain Black politicians by virtue of their bellowing about it.

At their May 26 press conference Windsor Town Council member Nuchette Black-Burke complained that the nooses have “disrupted our quality of life.” But no one’s quality of life has changed on account of the cat-and-mouse game in Windsor, even as the quality of life in predominantly minority neighborhoods in Connecticut is being diminished every day by worsening crime — which few notice.

Just hours after that press conference on the nooses, a man was fatally beaten in Hartford. No one has been arrested for it. It was Hartford’s 14th murder of the year. New Haven has had at least 13, Bridgeport six. Do the nooses merit more attention than these murders just because they are unusual or politically useful even though they are meaningless?

The people bemoaning the nooses pretend not to realize that not one murder in the minority neighborhoods has yet involved a noose.

The surest way to make the nooses go away is to stop giving them the publicity their maker craves and knows he can get from opportunistic politicians who will do anything for publicity as long as it’s irrelevant.

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe last year’s presidential election wasn’t stolen, but it raised fair questions about the integrity of voting procedures, and this may have given Connecticut Democrats hints about making election fraud easier here.

The Democratic scheme is included in legislation proposed by Secretary of the State Denise Merrill and being hustled through the General Assembly without much critical examination. The bill would make voter enrollment information secret, particularly the birthdates of voters, and would enable voters to require that their entire voting enrollment data be kept secret in the name of personal safety.

But without public access to voter birthdates there is no way for the public, including journalists, to verify voting fraud or uncover duplicate voter registrations, either within Connecticut or with people registered to vote in Connecticut and other states. Since many names are identical or similar, a birthdate is crucial for distinguishing people. Further, the voter rolls are not updated as often as they should be, so on Election Day the rolls include many people who have moved or died.

Under the legislation, voter enrollment data would remain available to the secretary of the state, but she and other officials seldom go looking for voter fraud without first getting a complaint from a member of the public who is suspicious about something.

Making the voter enrollment database secret meshes with the Democratic Party’s desire to switch most voting from in person to mail, which will put intermediaries between voters and the casting of their ballots. Thus ballot and voter eligibility verification will become even more difficult.

There is little evidence that the longstanding procedures for voting in Connecticut are suppressing participation. But such concerns could be easily addressed by authorizing a week of early voting, provided it was conducted in person, without intermediaries. Secrecy for voter enrollment records will invite corruption and fraud.

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Governor Lamont is expected to sign legislation just passed by the General Assembly to erase hundreds of thousands of criminal convictions that are seven to 10 years old and considered relatively minor. The legislation’s mistaken premise is that many former offenders are prevented from getting jobs and housing because of the public record of their convictions — not because they lack education and work skills.

Criminal records are a strange concern about justice when there are tens of thousands of job openings in the state and government is paying people not to work by increasing unemployment compensation above ordinary wage rates. This is a doubly strange concern about justice when Connecticut keeps seeing serious crimes committed by people with long criminal records.

Another such case was publicized last month when, working with a DNA database, police in Avon charged a 73-year-old man now imprisoned in Massachusetts with a kidnapping and rape in Connecticut 37 years ago. While the defendant has been in prison lately, Avon police said he incurred 30 convictions before he got there, including convictions for … yes, another kidnapping and rape.

Connecticut’s persistent offender law allows prosecutors to seek and judges to impose longer sentences for certain chronic criminals. But the law leaves everything to the discretion of prosecutors and judges and is seldom invoked. So the revolving doors between police, courts, prison, parole, new crimes, and prison never stop rotating.

This situation calls for two solutions.

First, a tougher persistent offender law removing discretion from prosecutors and courts and requiring life sentences to be imposed upon, say, a third, fifth, or even 10th serious conviction. Incorrigibility is not so hard to spot.

And second, enhanced supervision of parolees so they are required to perform at least a year of employment with state government or under close government supervision, during which they would be provided basic housing and medical insurance and get on-the-job training and some ability to support themselves honestly.

Of course these solutions would cost some money, but they might protect many lives and reform many others and thus do more good than what the General Assembly is contemplating — another expensive patronage infrastructure boondoggle for hapless Hartford.

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

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone wanted Tribune Publishing Co. to be purchased by someone other than Alden Global Capital, since the hedge fund is seen as an “asset stripper.” Indeed, months before acquiring the shares of Tribune it didn’t already own, Alden had managed the neat trick of stripping the Hartford Courant of its own building, leaving Connecticut’s largest newspaper homeless.

But while nearly infinite money lately has been floating around the country and zillionaires abound, nobody offered more than the $633 million Alden offered to take Tribune private. Despite the decline in the newspaper industry, Tribune is said to remain profitable and to have millions in the bank, and the eight newspapers it owns apart from the Courant include some storied titles: the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Baltimore Sun.

So the lack of other bidders suggests wide scorn for the industry’s future.

That’s why bemoaning Alden is so hypocritical, as it was the other day when U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined Courant journalists at a protest rally. “Get a better buyer,” Blumenthal implored, even as his own family easily could have afforded becoming a major partner in a rival bid — but didn’t.

But rich people indifferent to the public interest in sustaining newspapers are not the main culprits of the industry’s decline.

Troubled as they are, newspapers remain the country’s primary source for serious news, news beyond idle distraction and titillation — news about government, community, business, and life in general. Television and radio pirate newspapers shamelessly. Some state and local internet news sites do great service but their “business model” is only charity and thus not so reliable.

The biggest problems for newspapers are the public’s diminishing interest in serious news and the country’s worsening demographics. Literacy and civic engagement long have been declining while poverty and violence have been increasing, especially in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Hartford. It takes courage enough to invest in the newspaper business generally, and heroism to invest in newspapers in disintegrating cities.

Even in Connecticut it is a matter of general indifference that half the state’s high school graduates never master high school English and math and so enter adulthood unprepared to be citizens, much less newspaper readers — or readers at all.

So horrible as it may seem, for the moment there may be nothing to do but to root for Alden, especially since before acquiring Tribune it already had acquired a hundred papers across the country and was the country’s second largest newspaper chain. Alden President Heath Freeman says the company’s goal is “getting publications to a place where they can operate sustainably over the long term.”

Of course to “operate sustainably” may require weakening Alden’s papers more. But then the content of nearly all newspapers long has been weakening along with their circulation. For in the end the investment newspapers rely on most is not that of their owners but their subscribers, and nobody needs a newspaper just to keep up with the Kardashians.

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MURPHY’S AWFUL ADVICE: If the United States is ever attacked again, nobody should seek advice from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.

“Israel,” Murphy said the other day, “has the right to defend itself from Hamas’ rocket attacks, in a manner proportionate with the threat its citizens are facing.”

But no country wins a war with a “proportionate” response to attacks. Wars are won with enough force to defeat the enemy and eliminate its warmaking capacity. Japan started its war with the United States by sinking a few ships at Pearl Harbor, but the United States won the war by sinking nearly all Japanese ships and leveling the whole country, concluding with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a recent newspaper essay Murphy also wrote that schools need fewer police officers and less student discipline and more counselors and social workers. But disruptions by students in school are helping to drive the exodus from the cities. Murphy misses that problem and the underlying one, since he fails to ask:

Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

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

By Chris Powell

Congratulations may be in order for the University of Connecticut’s Board of Trustees for discovering, upon the abrupt resignation of Thomas C. Katsouleas after less than two years on the job, that the university doesn’t really need its own president. For last week the board announced that Andrew Agwunobi, chief executive of the UConn Health Center in Farmington, will serve simultaneously as president of the whole university for the time being, continuing to receive his $709,000 annual salary at the health center while the board negotiates his pay for doing both jobs.

Agwunobi’s appointment suggests two things.

First, that Agwunobi may be a pretty good guy for his willingness to take on so much more responsibility while UConn hustles to return to normal operations as the virus epidemic fades.

And second, that the university has much surplus administrative capacity at its many campuses and the health center, since even the most talented executive can’t be in a dozen places at once.

Could an administrator already at UConn or the health center be qualified to become permanent chief of either institution? At least appointing someone from within to lead the university this time might spare the trustees the embarrassment they inflicted on themselves by making such a show of importing Katsouleas from Virginia.

The Katsouleas catastrophe — crowned by his golden parachute, his gentle descent into a tenured professorship with a salary of $339,000, the same disgraceful sinecure enjoyed by his predecessor — suggests that UConn may need a new president less than it needs new trustees.

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Social promotion’s triumph over Connecticut’s community college system seems to be complete.

The Board of Regents for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system announced last week that it will stop requiring “academically unprepared” students to pass remedial high school math and English courses before taking college-credit courses.

The board said more than three-quarters of community college students are failing to pass college-level math and English courses. So the students now will go straight to credit courses and be given “support services” for the subjects in which they are so deficient. Such practice in Georgia, the board said, has greatly increased community college student success in math and English. But even then most students don’t pass the tougher courses.

Additionally, the board said, the community colleges will stop using college placement examination scores when evaluating students for admission and instead will rely on high school grade-point averages.

“High school GPA is a far more accurate measure of academic preparedness for course placement than high-stakes standardized tests,” the board says. But that’s not what standardized tests themselves long have found, and such tests are far more objective measures than grades awarded under the social promotion that rules Connecticut’s high schools, where half the students graduate ignorant.

Community college applicants who can read may construe the new policy as another declaration that no public school students in Connecticut need to take their classes seriously and indeed needn’t learn much of anything by the time they finish high school in order to qualify for a public college education. The new policy of the Board of Regents is a gross devaluation of both college and high school and another proof that the state’s big educational problem is not higher but lower education.

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INVESTIGATION STALLED: Almost a year and a half ago, on January 15, 2020, Mubarak Soulemane, a mentally ill New Haven resident, was shot to death by a state trooper in West Haven after threatening people in Norwalk with a knife, hijacking a car, and leading police on a chase along Interstate 95. Eventually his car was stopped and blocked by police cruisers and, as he sat in the driver’s seat, he was killed by a barrage of gunshots from a trooper. Police video raises serious doubt that Soulemane was a threat at the moment he was killed.

The state’s attorney in Middletown, Michael Gailor, has been investigating the case and has taken too long to complete and publish his report. Public confidence in the police requires much quicker accountability. Governor Lamont should see to it.

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

By Chris Powell

Like the rest of the country, Connecticut is full of racial disparities. With legislation declaring racism a “public health crisis,” the General Assembly is formally determining that racism is the cause of most of these disparities.

But advocates of the legislation, like advocates of the similar declarations made by a score of municipalities in the state, fail to identify any supposed racists and supposed racist government policies causing the supposed crisis.

Instead the legislation would appoint a commission to study the disparities and presumably reach the conclusion the legislation preordains — that racism causes them all. Of course the commission will hire a director and two assistants and acquire office space and thus cost $500,000 per year.

Actual evidence of racism — the intent and design to oppress — is not the only thing missing from the discussion of these declarations. Also missing is acknowledgment that the most distressing racial disparities in public health correlate overwhelmingly with poverty.

To use some of the criteria cited by advocates of the legislation, do members of racial minorities disproportionately have poor health because no one will sell them healthy food, decent medical insurance, or housing safely distant from pollution sources? Or do they just lack the necessary funds? If so, who or what exactly is preventing them from earning more money? Where exactly are racists in charge?

Of course the study commission is not likely to pose such questions. For the commission is a Democratic Party project and answers to such questions would risk impugning Democrats. Indeed, as with the rest of the racial prattle, the main purpose of the commission seems to be to intimidate any opposition to the political left’s objective of enlarging government.

If the commission ever wants to do more than posture piously, an inquiry into racial disparities in poverty in Connecticut might be illuminating.

For example, for decades welfare policy has been destroying the family unit disproportionately among racial minorities, depriving most minority children of fathers and casting many of them into a demoralizing and lifelong poverty. Meanwhile social promotion in elementary education also has a disproportionate impact on children from minority groups, leaving Connecticut with a grotesque racial performance gap in education.

So how do government subsidies for childbearing outside marriage, the resulting destruction of the family, and the repeal of standards in lower education make members of minority groups more capable of supporting themselves and sustaining health?

Since they have such racially disproportionate results, these failed policies well might be called racist — that is, meant to keep minorities down. Of course the policies may have been well-intended, but after decades of catastrophic results, well-intentioned people might notice unintended results and do something about them.

On the other hand, if these harmful policies have become acceptable because they sustain the comfortable employment of so many people who consider themselves liberals and even “woke,” their supporters would deserve to be called racist. In any case these days it seems that only such labeling might gain attention for the problem.

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But obliviousness in state government and politics is entrenched, as House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Hartford Democrat, demonstrated last week.

To mollify the extreme-left Democratic legislators who want billions of dollars thrown at racial minorities for purposes yet to be identified, Ritter said he envisions a huge bonding program for unspecified infrastructure projects to reinvigorate the cities.

Ritter’s family has three generations of service in Hartford and state government. So where has he been? Throughout the Ritter era Hartford has become steadily poorer, more dysfunctional, and more violent despite a series of big infrastructure projects — Constitution Plaza, the Hartford Civic Center, and Adriaen’s Landing. Now Constitution Plaza and the Civic Center are nearly empty and the latter needs expensive renovation. Hartford’s latest big infrastructure project, Dunkin’ Donuts Park, is only 4 years old and still in good shape, but gunshots can be heard nearby almost every day.

Connecticut’s cities are not an infrastructure problem but a social problem, a problem of the people who live there. Government keeps messing them up.

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

By Chris Powell

All the noose-shaped ropes that keep being found at the unfinished Amazon warehouse in Windsor are starting to seem less like the plot for which the Hartford chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hopes — a plot to lynch Blacks — than a game of cat and mouse in which the mouse sees how easily the cat can be baited.

While by now nobody is really scared of the mouse’s ropes, at the NAACP’s insistence the reward for information leading to the mouse’s arrest has been raised to $100,000.

But even as the NAACP waxes indignant about the mouse, the organization is silent about the nearly daily shootings in Hartford, some of which lately have killed Black people, like 16-year-old Ja’Mari Preston of New Britain, who was shot to death April 10 a couple hours after a 3-year-old Black boy was shot to death nearby. An arrest has been made in the latter murder but not in the former, and no reward has been posted in that case.

Indeed, it seems that no reward has been posted in any recent unsolved murder in Hartford, where most crime victims and perpetrators are members of minority groups. (This lack of rewards could not be officially confirmed, since the city’s police department and mayor’s office declined to respond to repeated inquiries.)

So the NAACP’s obsession with the supposed nooses in Windsor is starting to seem like a campaign to distract from Hartford’s worsening social disintegration.

Really, exactly what is the crime being investigated at the warehouse in Windsor? Littering?

For knotting a noose and leaving it at a construction site doesn’t appear in the criminal code, and no one in particular yet has been injured or threatened by any of the nooses there, even as anyone may claim to be threatened by the nooses and the nooses may be just another stupid if provocative stunt, of which Connecticut and the country lately have had many.

It certainly is a successful stunt, since the NAACP is making sure that it consumes much time of the police and news organizations while people keep getting murdered nearby.

Until the perpetrators of the murders are apprehended, why should the police spend even a minute playing cat and mouse — except to help the NAACP look relevant again?

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The biggest controversy of the current session of the General Assembly is ending as a laugher. While exclusive zoning in the suburbs continues to segregate Connecticut racially and economically and housing prices are soaring, the legislature again has declined to change anything substantial.

The recent clamor for state law to override exclusive zoning has been boiled down to a bill that would require towns to allow construction of accessory apartments in single-family homes — unless towns really don’t want to. As a result many towns will continue prohibiting inexpensive housing.

As always, the decisive opposition to facilitating more inexpensive housing in the suburbs came from suburban Democratic legislators. The Democrats have big majorities in the legislature and could have reported any zoning bill they wanted. But all meaningful provisions were stripped out in committee.

The suburban Democratic legislators know that many of their constituents fear that inexpensive housing will unleash the pathologies of the city on the suburbs, since government policy long has been making a mess of the cities.

But while rising housing prices may cheer some homeowners, rising prices for housing are as hurtful for society as a whole as rising prices for food are, since both are necessities of life.

If state government ever could improve conditions in the cities, suburbs might be less afraid of inexpensive housing.

Lenin is supposed to have noted that if you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue about it. Seeming to agree is state Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, co-chair of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

At a briefing last week on the committee’s proposed state budget, Walker endorsed a silly bit of euphemizing that has been going around for a few years.

“It’s not ‘spending,'” Walker said of her committee’s budget. “It’s investing.”

Right — “investing.” Now what has all that “investing” in Connecticut’s cities accomplished?

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