Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Even as his party’s leaders in the state Senate kept insisting that Connecticut has no serious crime problem and that the crime clamor is a Republican contrivance, last week Governor Lamont called a press conference at the state Capitol to acknowledge the issue and pledge to act on it.

The governor, a Democrat, said he would appoint more judges to address the purported backlog in Connecticut’s secret and thus grossly unaccountable juvenile courts. If more judges don’t solve the problem, at least they will provide patronage opportunities.

The governor also described having just met privately with the mother and grandmother of the latest victim of the juvenile crime wave his party’s leaders deny, a 14-year-old boy from Hamden who was fatally shot in the head in the middle of the night somewhere near Waterbury.

The boy had been in trouble with the law, the governor related, and his mother and grandmother wished that juvenile court had been stricter with him and had monitored him more. When the court took off his ankle bracelet, he took off too.

As is usual in such cases, there apparently was no father in the home to help keep the boy out of trouble. The governor didn’t address this and indeed such circumstances cannot yet be discussed in polite company.

Even the Republicans pressing the juvenile crime issue don’t dare to approach its underlying cause. Instead of asking where all the messed-up kids are coming from and what government policies facilitate the child neglect that is fatherlessness, the Republicans join the Democrats in bleating about the need for more “wraparound social services” for chronic young offenders.

The bipartisan suggestion is that all might be well if every difficult kid had his own special-education teacher, therapist, social worker, police officer, public defender, and probation officer — all unionized government employees, of course, getting overtime if “wraparound social services” ever happen to be needed on Columbus Day — because fathers aren’t necessary. But at least fathers might be less expensive.

The Republicans can claim a political victory in the governor’s addressing their issue. But Lamont’s hand was forced mainly by the atrocities and bodies that have been piling up so high in newspapers and broadcast news. The governor surely knew that he was starting to look oblivious.

Even so, every political response to the problem so far is just posturing, and mere posturing from now until the election next November won’t stop the atrocities and the bodies from piling up higher. That will make the governor and the Democrats look feckless, and since the Democrats run the state, few will notice that the Republicans are feckless on the issue too.

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IT WASN’T THE VIRUS: There was a lot more obliviousness going around last week. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy held a discussion with various officials and “behavioral health providers” about the impact of the virus epidemic on mental health.

But the epidemic isn’t what has driven the country crazy. What has driven the country crazy is government’s response to the epidemic — lockdowns and mandates, like requiring people to submit to an experimental vaccine that has ever-increasing side-effects — a response that has disrupted all aspects of life in the name of preventing fatalities from an illness that, far from being a new plague, has a 99.8% recovery rate.

This policy evokes the oblivious observation attributed to a U.S. Army major after a battle during the Vietnam war: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

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LIQUOR AND INTEGRATION: Prosperous Woodbridge, with a median household income of $158,000, got its first liquor store last week after town zoning regulations were relaxed. The regulations had prohibited liquor stores near residences, and they continue to prohibit other ordinary property uses near just about anything else.

This is highly exclusive zoning. It has pushed many things into other towns so Woodbridge residents can have quieter lives while other towns have had to deal with the traffic of Woodbridge residents looking for liquor and other stuff.

Exclusive zoning is partly why the population of Woodbridge is only 3% Black, far below the state average. But then maybe liquor is more important than racial integration.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont is in a “strong position” for re-election a year from now, according to the results of a statewide opinion poll announced last week.

But while the governor, a Democrat, is surely the favorite, Connecticut being heavily Democratic, the poll was largely a con job, less interesting for confirming the governor’s front-runner status than for some findings its announcement didn’t emphasize.

The poll was undertaken by a North Carolina-based operation that, while high-mindedly named Public Policy Polling, is heavily affiliated with the Democratic Party. Indeed, the poll was commissioned by Democrats for Education Reform.

On top of that, the poll’s policy questions were ladled with goodies associated with Democratic campaigns even as popular positions associated with Republicans were omitted.

That is, this was a “push poll,” framed to elicit particular responses.

The figures touted by the poll’s announcement showed the governor comfortably leading the two most likely candidates for the Republican nomination for governor — 52-36% over the 2018 Republican nominee, Bob Stefanowski, and 52-32% over former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides.

But the governor’s lead fell sharply when poll participants were asked if, today, they would vote for Lamont or think it’s “time for someone new.” Then the governor led by only 50-41%, with 9% undecided.

Similarly, more people viewed the governor “unfavorably,” 36%, than Stefanowski, 30%.

The poll’s ranking of important issues was not so favorable to Democrats either. The issues most important to voters were jobs and the economy, at 36%, and taxes, at 21%. All impartial evaluations say Connecticut’s economy is weak and its taxes remain extremely high.

So the poll did not really suggest much enthusiasm for Lamont even as it implied a few openings for a Republican campaign.

With the Biden administration sinking in public esteem so much that, amazingly, many people are starting to miss Donald Trump, Connecticut Democrats may need more than push polls by next November.

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THE MISSING CONVERSATION: Another issue on which Connecticut Democrats are weak is crime. They boast about a declining general crime rate even as criminal atrocities and enforcement failures explode, as others did last week.

Hartford police said a gang member fired a gun through the driver’s side window of a police cruiser, nearly striking the officer inside, just hours after murdering a woman in an apartment nearby. The suspect was caught and police said he had a long criminal record with more than a dozen arrests, including some lodged just 11 days earlier for weapons, narcotics, and probation violations.

Hartford police Chief Jason Thody and Mayor Luke Bronin said the suspect’s record showed he should have been held without bond for the most recent offenses charged to him before the murder and the assault on the officer. The mayor said “we need to have a serious conversation” about why the suspect was free.

But there is no mystery about why career criminals are on the loose in Connecticut. The state doesn’t deter them. Many repeat convictions leading only to probations or token punishments often precede murders and other serious crimes. Connecticut tends not to take chronic offenders seriously until they kill someone, and the state has no incorrigibility law. Last week even a “10 strikes” law might have prevented that murder in Hartford.

This is the “serious conversation” Connecticut hasn’t had yet, because it would be politically incorrect.

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DON’T REDUCE SCHOOLING: But obliviousness is not yet politically incorrect here. So some boards of education in the state are being asked to add a holiday to their school calendars — Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

The holiday’s advocates seem not to have noticed that because of the virus epidemic many Connecticut students have just lost a year of education.

Incorporating religious holidays in school calendars must be determined by the number of families needing them. Diwali doesn’t come close to qualifying yet, and given the recent loss of education, nothing new should.

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

By Chris Powell

As a practical matter “critical race theory” may be little more than the assertion that nearly everybody and everything is racist and that anyone who doesn’t comply with the demands of its advocates is even more racist. Whatever “critical race theory” is, it does not seem to be formally taught in schools in Connecticut.

But there is plenty of evidence that, propelled by “critical race theory,” race is being injected into school curriculums in Connecticut and elsewhere with psychology and propaganda in the name of diversity and inclusion. This is what the “critical race theory” controversies in Guilford and other towns is really about, and it is fairly challenged on two fronts.

First, it’s unlikely that younger students need any racial focus to learn to treat each other decently. Emphasis on race at an early age is bound to make children self-conscious and uneasy and to inflict fear, guilt, and grievance even as the basic integration of racial and ethnic groups may be the best lesson schools can provide. The normality of integration and diversity can overcome fear and erase self-consciousness and uneasiness about race and ethnicity — if schools ensure discipline and quickly and visibly punish bigotry.

Second, “critical race theory” is politically opportunistic and simpleminded. For issues of race and ethnicity, including slavery, are not peculiar to the United States. They are the fundamentals of human history. Most nations were built on race and ethnicity.

So while racial and ethnic issues must be taught, they need to be formally taught as history — world history as much as U.S. history — not raised as an insinuation that particular students or their ancestors bear special responsibility for history or that history owes privileges to particular students or their ancestors.

Since U.S. educators belong overwhelmingly to the extreme political left and are members of far-left unions like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, parents are well entitled to be suspicious of what goes on in classrooms in regard to race and other controversial subjects like transgenderism. This suspicion is deepened because, by design, what happens in classrooms is seldom accessible to the public, and because school administrations are often as secretive, unaccountable, and resentful of scrutiny as any corporation.

Schools everywhere long have been notorious for concealing staff misconduct, and even now, at the insistence of Connecticut’s teacher unions and school administrators, teacher evaluations are uniquely exempt from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law. Parents mustn’t know anything that really counts.

Education’s resentment of the public was reflected the other day when former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, nominated by the Democratic Party for a non-consecutive second term and supported by the education establishment, confronted school controversies. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe declared. He boasted that he had vetoed legislation to require schools to alert parents when instructional materials include sexually explicit content.

While parents don’t directly tell schools what to teach, of course they elect school boards and legislators who set such policy and they comment at school board meetings. That some parents lately have been behaving badly at meetings doesn’t diminish the public’s right to scrutinize and be heard. Any misbehavior at meetings is easily addressed by local authorities, as by having a police officer or two at meetings where angry people are expected.

This isn’t enough for the education establishment. Last month the top two executives of the National School Boards Association sent an open letter to President Biden likening the expression of anger at school board meetings to “domestic terrorism.” That charge led Attorney General Merrick Garland to direct the FBI and federal prosecutors to devise “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” as if local police can’t and don’t already do that job.

The association’s board quickly repudiated and apologized for the letter from its executives. Parents, the board acknowledged, must be heard. But how much the public can be permitted to know about its schools remains a question, nationally and in Connecticut.

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

By Chris Powell

Two decades ago government corruption in Connecticut was a spectacularly Republican phenomenon.

First state Treasurer Paul Silvester, appointed by Gov. John G. Rowland to fill a vacancy, was caught taking bribes for awarding pension fund management contracts. Silvester and nine others were convicted on federal charges and Silvester went to prison.

Then Rowland himself was caught taking from state contractors gifts that might as well have been bribes. Facing a bipartisan impeachment inquiry by the General Assembly, Rowland resigned, was indicted on federal charges, confessed, and went to prison too.

But today corruption in government in Connecticut is mainly a Democratic phenomenon, if only because there is so little Republican administration anywhere. Two Democratic state legislators now are under federal indictment.

The first, Bridgeport state Sen. Dennis A. Bradley, is charged with campaign finance fraud along with his treasurer, and one of his campaign aides has already pleaded guilty.

The second legislator, West Haven state Rep. Michael DiMassa, who resigned this week, was also an aide to the City Council and is charged with embezzling more than $600,000 from the city’s federal virus epidemic relief money, using phony invoices from a dummy company. The scheme described in the indictment seems so threadbare that it has impugned the rest of city government, raising suspicion DiMassa had help.

But then management long has been lacking in government in West Haven. Because of its former insolvency, since 2017 the city has been operating under the supervision of the state Municipal Accountability Review Board.

Last month a City Hall employee in the Democratic bastion of Hartford was fired for destroying financial records of the office where she handled cash and fee payments. Her office had just come under audit.

Of course there always will be corruption in politics and government, and Connecticut Democrats may argue that the recent charges are not really so much when the party runs nearly everything here. But as Republican legislators note, with state and municipal governments now rolling in more federal emergency aid than they know what to do with, comprehensive auditing is required.

The state Office of Policy and Management promises more auditing, but that office belongs to the governor, also a Democrat, who, preparing to seek re-election next November, may not be eager to overturn every rock in every city and town with a Democratic administration. Ideally some of the emergency federal money should be used to hire outside, politically unconnected auditors — a lot of them.

But then little in government in Connecticut is seriously audited, and the fraud suggested by the indictments of the legislators and the firing of the Hartford City Hall employee is the least of the fraud problem. For expensive policies from which thousands of state and local government employees and contractors draw their livelihoods long have failed to educate, lift the dependent to self-sufficiency, and repair the cities, even as those policies keep devouring hundreds of millions of dollars each year without getting a fraction of the attention given to West Haven by the “accountability review” board.

Since they sustain so many dependents, those failing policies might defeat even an army of auditors.

Presiding in the DiMassa case, U.S. District Judge Sarah A.L. Merriam said the defendant is being treated for gambling addiction. The indictment says DiMassa used some of the embezzled money to buy thousands of dollars in casino gambling chips.

But having recently legalized sports betting and put itself into the bookmaking business, state government will just shrug at West Haven’s financial loss and the wreckage of DiMassa’s life. They will be considered a cost of doing business, sure to be offset by state government’s increased take from gambling, which includes monthly tribute from the state’s two Indian casinos.

Casino gambling and embezzlement always go hand in hand and no thought will be given to this latest evidence.

But the governor and legislature at least should wonder why the latest political corruption indictments are federal. Do Connecticut’s own prosecutors have no resources for pursuing political corruption, or just no interest?

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

By Chris Powell

Writing last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, state Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, argued that raising gasoline prices by what she estimates as 5 cents per gallon under the Transportation Climate Initiative advocated by Governor Lamont would be no big deal, because people just shrug off rising gas prices.

Yes, gas price increases tend to be accepted, but that is because gas is a necessity of life. That’s why rising prices for food, housing, and medical care — other necessities — tend to be accepted as well. Contrary to Palm’s cavalier suggestion, this acceptance does not imply approval and a lack of hardship. After all, inflation is already exploding and gas prices are only part of it. There is much hardship and government shouldn’t worsen it.

But imposing hardship is the very objective of the Transportation Climate Initiative – to coerce people into driving less and using less gas and thus to generate less pollution on pain of having less to spend on food, housing, medical care, and everything else. Since Palm acknowledges that rising gas prices probably don’t cause people to drive less, she must also acknowledge that instead of cutting pollution, the TCI will just reduce living standards.

Essentially the TCI would be another hidden tax on gas imposed at the wholesale level, like Connecticut’s gross receipts tax. It would make the tax increase look like a price increase imposed by gasoline businesses, not government policy.

Contributing to this deception, Palm’s essay injected some demagoguery. Why, she asked, are some people upset about a possible 5-cent increase in gas taxes that might result “if petroleum distributors were actually held accountable for their enormous, devastating carbon footprint?”

Oh, yes — it’s those big, bad petroleum distributors, not Palm’s own constituents who drive the cars that burn the fuel that causes the pollution, as if the distributors would keep pushing out fuel even if no one bought it, and as if the problem is the supply, not the demand.

Palm estimates that the TCI would cost a typical Connecticut resident $15.60 per year, which, she writes, is a fraction of the extra money people already have been paying on account of the recent increase in gas prices. But Palm offers only the old rationale for all tax and price increases – that it is just a little more — as if incrementalism doesn’t add up.

Connecticut didn’t get to be highly taxed all at once. The state achieved that dubious distinction by heeding the calls of legislators like Palm to pay a little more here and a little more there, over and over again.

Besides, Palm and other TCI advocates don’t really believe their own claims of a climate emergency. If they did, they would search more broadly for the revenue needed to address it, not settle on raising the cost of a necessity of life.

State government is full of inefficiency and exploitation, especially in its government labor policies, but these are overlooked because their beneficiaries are special interests more influential than ordinary taxpayers and, in the eyes of the TCI’s own advocates, more important than any climate emergency itself. For example, sustaining Columbus Day as a paid holiday for government employees continues to take precedence over any climate emergency and the provision of the many goodies and benefits Palm imagines being financed by the TCI:

“Clean electric buses. A dramatic reduction in asthma rates. … Shuttles for the elderly. … Light rail systems. … Conveniently located charging stations. And, of course, jobs.”

But those imagined benefits require big presumptions: that state government won’t keep diverting transportation money to general purposes, and that as many jobs might not be created or sustained just by letting people keep and spend their own money.

While pollution needs to be curtailed, local and regional undertakings like the TCI aren’t likely to accomplish much, since any reduction in pollution in Connecticut could be offset by increases in pollution in other states even as Connecticut kept disadvantaging itself with higher taxes. It’s a national and international problem requiring rules with much wider application.

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

By Chris Powell

More complaining about Alden Global Capital’s dismemberment of the storied newspapers it recently acquired from the Tribune chain appeared this month in a long and — to journalists, anyway -– infuriating essay in The Atlantic magazine by its reporter McKay Coppins.

This dismemberment, Coppins noted, includes the Chicago Tribune’s former headquarters, the landmark Tribune Tower, which has been converted into an apartment building.

But at least what remains of the newspaper still has modest offices in an industrial area across town near the newspaper’s press. Another former Tribune property, the Hartford Courant, no longer has even that much. Somehow Alden acquired the Courant’s headquarters on Broad Street in Hartford and kicked the newspaper out even before acquiring the Courant itself and the other Tribune papers. The Courant now seems to be entirely a work-from-home operation, and like several other Connecticut papers, including the Journal Inquirer, now is printed by the Springfield Republican. The Courant’s address has become a post office box.

From Los Angeles to Chicago to Baltimore to New York and to Hartford, how the mighty have fallen, though the journalists who remain in the formerly great papers of old soldier on bravely and sometimes well.

Of course the dismemberment of the former Tribune papers is just part of the decline of serious state and local journalism generally. But while Alden may seem especially predatory in its liquidations, the company is not a cause but just a symptom of what has gone wrong with the news business — and not just the rise of the internet and the transfer of advertising there but, more so, the public’s loss of interest in state and local news.

This is in large part a matter of declining demographics.

After all, newspapers survived major challenges from competing new technologies before — first radio and then television, whose main products are entertainment, not news, and whose state and local news reporting always have been and remain weak. Even now anyone who wants to be well informed about state and local government and community events and to participate in public life has to subscribe to a newspaper.

While some places — including Connecticut — now have a few internet sites providing state and local news, most are niche operations that don’t attempt to serve any area comprehensively. They concentrate on government and their audiences tend to be smaller even than newspaper audiences. They are not any more profitable than most newspapers, and many are operated as nonprofits supported by donations, if sometimes large ones from foundations. This method of operation is hardly a business plan and may subject the internet sites to more political pressures than advertising subjects newspapers to.

But if more people wanted state and local news and commentary, newspapers and news-based internet sites would have more readers, and as their audiences grew, they might become profitable from increased advertising.

The movement to convert newspapers to nonprofits and to operate internet news sites that way presumes that substantial interest from the public is no longer attainable.

It is hard to argue with that presumption. After all, throughout the country and even in Connecticut most young people, the products of social promotion, graduate from high school without ever mastering basic math and English. Most gain little if any knowledge of the country’s history and civics. Even in Connecticut, a comparatively wealthy and well-educated state, the typical high school graduate or college freshman cannot identify the three branches of government. (You know: the lawyers, the teacher unions, and the liquor stores.)

That is, most young people are not being prepared to become citizens in a democracy, much less followers of state and local news.

This may be the underlying reason Alden is liquidating so much of the former Tribune papers, draining away their capital, like their real estate, and why no one outbid Alden for the Tribune papers with the confidence that solid journalism could be made profitable again. For the future isn’t just disruptive technological change but also social change, which may be far more disruptive.

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

By Chris Powell

Success in politics is often believed to require making a lot of noise purporting to address issues without really doing anything about them, since doing anything might upset people invested in the status quo. Introducing their juvenile crime proposals last week, the state Senate’s Republican minority followed this formula. The juvenile crime issue exploded in Connecticut in June when a man jogging on a sidewalk in New Britain, Henryk Gudelski, was run down and killed by a stolen car apparently driven by a 17-year-old boy who had been arrested 13 times in the last 3½ years. Though some of the charges were serious, the boy had remained free. Since then the juvenile crime issue has been intensified by a rash of car thefts and even shootings committed by juveniles.

The Republican senators argue that more offenses charged against juveniles should qualify for transfer from juvenile court, which is secret, to adult court, which is public and can impose heavier sentences. But this would leave discretion with juvenile court — the same discretion that, in the New Britain case, piled arrest upon arrest without any accountability to the public.

The Republican senators would allow juvenile offenders to be detained for more than six hours when arrested. But not having gotten a trial, such juveniles will be released soon anyway. This wouldn’t be adjudication, and any greater safety would be temporary.

The Republican senators propose 24-hour electronic monitoring of juveniles charged with violent crime who are already awaiting trial on other charges. But this presumes that chronic young offenders should remain free indefinitely, as in the New Britain case. That also makes no one safer.

The Republican senators propose next-day arraignments for juvenile offenders. But an arraignment doesn’t resolve a case. The teen in the New Britain case probably had many arraignments before Gudelski was killed.

And then the Republican senators propose what seems obligatory prattle in discussions of juvenile crime: a lot more social work for juveniles.

Like everything else lately suggested about juvenile crime in Connecticut, the Republican proposals miss the crucial point. That is, no purported reforms could be evaluated in the future any more than anything in juvenile justice can be evaluated now unless the whole system was made public, as the state Constitution requires when it proclaims that “all courts shall be open.” The problem is that state government long has been violating the Constitution without being held to account.

Indeed, the General Assembly could enact any law about juvenile justice and still never be sure it was being followed unless juvenile courts were opened to the public just like other courts. That’s why the Republican proposals are meaningless. They brought the senators some publicity without threatening to exact any accountability from the juvenile justice system.

So now everyone is happy.

Reform requires accountability and should start with a public investigation by the legislature of the many cases involving the teen charged with killing Gudelski as well as the cases of the many other chronic juvenile offenders. The legislature’s Democratic majority, the party of social work, doesn’t want any case investigated, and now even the Republican senators have forgotten Gudelski’s name.

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SECRECY COSTS $705,000: While secrecy in juvenile justice is costing lives, secrecy in city government has just cost Meriden $705,000.

According to the Meriden Record-Journal, that’s how much the City Council has agreed to pay former City Manager Guy Scaife to settle his federal lawsuit charging that he was wrongfully fired four years ago in retaliation for alerting the council to improper expenses the council turned out to want to conceal. An audit of those expenses is said to have been commissioned but no results have been announced.

Scaife charged that in violation of Connecticut’s open-government law, the council’s Democratic and Republican caucuses met secretly about concealing the expenses.

While the council denies Scaife’s charges, $705,000 is far more than a nuisance settlement. Obviously the council set out to hide wrongdoing and, in paying Scaife so much to go away and avoid a trial, plans to keep hiding it.

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

By Chris Powell

You’d never know it from the constant clamor by Connecticut’s news organizations and politicians about “domestic violence,” but the wisdom of the ages may still apply insofar as two people can keep living as cheaply as one — at least if they can stand each other. Not all married people in Connecticut or throughout the country are trying to kill their spouses.For a study published Oct. 5 by the Pew Research Center confirmed the old saying. The study reported that married and romantically partnered couples in the United States are more prosperous and healthier than single people.

The study’s bad news is that the married share of the population has been declining for 30 years and a larger share of the population now remains single well into adulthood.

Of course in theory single life may leave people with more options. Unfortunately their greater chance of getting stuck in poverty or illness may curtail their options. While in some respects people curtail their options by marrying, in other respects their greater prosperity increases their options.

The growth in the single adult population implies the disaster the country long has been facing with childrearing. Children can’t have too many people to love, protect, and encourage them, but these days millions of children are lucky to have even one parent or guardian and so they start life at a disadvantage, compounded by government’s failure to draw policy conclusions from studies like this new one.

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BIDEN REHABS TRUMP: What has the Republican Party done this year to earn the resounding approval it has gotten in the most recent national poll by the Gallup organization?

Nothing. The Republicans have just sat around like everyone else watching as the incompetence of President Biden and his administration makes the country miss Donald Trump.

According to Gallup, more people now consider the Republicans superior to the Democrats on both economic issues and international affairs. Some polls even show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical presidential rematch in 2024, though it is hard to imagine Biden maintaining the necessary stamina for even another year.

Of course 2024 is a long way off. But campaigns are already starting for next year’s elections for Congress, and the Democratic majorities there are paper thin. A switch to Republican majorities seems likely.

More than dissatisfaction with the Biden administration would be required to make next year’s Republican nominations for governor and Congress desirable in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut. But in addition to crime, Connecticut is full of serious issues that state government long has overlooked. Maybe the national polls will encourage Connecticut Republicans to try getting more relevant.

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DON’T FEED AFGHANS: Now that the supply of dollars has been cut off with the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Afghanistan, Reuters reports that officials of Western governments and the United Nations are working to turn the spigot back on to prevent the country’s economic collapse. The new theocratic fascist Taliban government is no more capable of running the country than the puppet regime was. Indeed, Afghanistan is hardly a country at all, more like a grouping of medieval tribes.

The plan, Reuters says, is to get money to the Afghan people without also underwriting the Taliban. This is a silly delusion.

For a gangster regime like the Taliban easily can confiscate whatever it wants from the people, and any money sent to and kept by the Afghans will make them more content to be ruled by the gangsters. But hunger and general privation may encourage Afghans to overthrow the regime.

The Biden administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan forfeited to the Taliban military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Taliban can sell that equipment to Iran or China and already may have begun to do so. In any case under U.S. occupation the Afghans had their chance to build and sustain a decent government. Being so primitive, most Afghans couldn’t have cared less, and the United States was stupid for thinking they ever might have cared.

If the Afghans are hungry or need medicine, their country has great mineral wealth and can sell the mining rights to China, which, having a gangster regime itself, will have no problem underwriting gangsters elsewhere.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut was pretty normal this week. The cities again were full of shootings and other mayhem. Group home workers went on strike because, while they take care of people who are essentially wards of the state, their own compensation omits medical insurance.

Hundreds of health care workers were suspended for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Tens of thousands of children went to school without learning much, since at home they have little in the way of parenting and thus no incentive to learn.

The two longstanding scandals in the state police — the drunken retirement party at a brewery in Oxford and the fatal shooting of an unarmed and unresisting mentally ill 19-year-old in West Haven — remained unresolved, the authorities apparently expecting them to be forgotten. They’re probably right.

And Governor Lamont called for sticking with football at the University of Connecticut despite its worsening record and expense.

Nevertheless, the great political controversy of the week was something else — a Facebook post by state Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly. It likened the governor to Adolf Hitler on account of the emergency powers that Lamont repeatedly has claimed and his party’s majorities in the General Assembly have granted him in regard to the virus epidemic even though there no longer is any emergency — at least none involving the epidemic.

Rather than apologize for her intemperance and hyperbole, Dauphinais “clarified” that she meant to liken the governor to the Hitler of the early years of his rule in Germany, not the Hitler of the era of world war and concentration camps. This wasn’t much clarification, since the Nazi regime established concentration camps just weeks after gaining power in 1933 and unleashed wholesale murder on its adversaries just a year later, on June 30, 1934 — the “night of the long knives” — more than five years before invading Poland.

But so what if a lowly state legislator from the minority party got hysterical on Facebook?

Her name calling did no actual harm to anyone. The governor’s skin is far thicker than that. Indeed, to gain sympathy any politician might welcome becoming the target of such intemperance and thus gaining sympathy.

Besides, Dauphinais’ hysteria wouldn’t even have been noticed if other politicians didn’t make such a show of deploring it over several days. The top two Democratic and top two Republican leaders of the General Assembly went so far as to issue a joint statement condemning the use of political analogies to Nazism. In separate statements they criticized Dauphinais by name.

They all seemed to feel pretty righteous about it.

But meanwhile they had little to say about the state’s problems that really matter, problems affecting the state’s quality of life, problems on display throughout the week. Maybe they should thank Dauphinais for the distraction she provided them.

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Will his support for UConn football be Governor Lamont’s Afghanistan? Is the state just throwing good money after bad?

Now that Hartford wants to tear up Brainard Airport for commercial development, could Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford be leveled and Rentschler Field rebuilt as the airport it once was, replacing Brainard?

And will anyone ever take responsibility for anything at UConn?

Probably not. For even if UConn football is a disaster forever, it will cost far less than the disasters of Connecticut’s education and welfare policies.

Why get upset at UConn football when the more Connecticut spends in the name of education, the less education is produced and the poorer students do, or when the more that is spent on welfare and social programs, the less people become self-sufficient and the more they become dependent on government?

The problem with UConn football is that results are still the object of the program and the public easily can see them — the weekly scores during football season and the losing record.

By contrast, the educational scores — the results of standardized tests — are publicized only occasionally and not on the sports pages, while the results of welfare and social programs are never audited and reported at all. With education and welfare, results are no longer the objective. They have become an end in themselves.

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

By Chris Powell

Rallies around the country and Connecticut this month supporting abortion rights and opposing the new anti-abortion law in Texas were full of bluster and slogans but offered little sound argument.

Foremost among the slogans was “My body, my choice,” but no one seemed to notice the far larger violation of that principle happening with the COVID-19 vaccines though they remain experimental.

Vaccine coercion and abortion libertarianism are contradictory principles of the political left.

At the rally in Salisbury, Laurence Rand, a retired teacher who called himself a scholar of constitutional law, noted fears that the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to overthrow its 1973 precedent in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade. “We have a Supreme Court that is out of touch with the will of the people,” Rand said. “Nowhere is that more evident than in its recent decisions regarding abortion.”

But real constitutional scholars understand that in this country courts are commanded to decide cases not according to the popularity of the litigants and their propositions but according to the law. Since neither the federal nor state constitutions mention abortion, it is reasonable to argue that states may legislate about it, as Texas and Mississippi lately have done so controversially.

Rand added that the country will have proper abortion policy “only when we have as many women in Congress and state legislatures as we do men.” But this suggestion that men are the main culprits behind restrictive abortion law is ridiculous.

For women are prominent in the anti-abortion movement, and of course many men support abortion rights — among them men who find that they have impregnated women and don’t want the responsibility of fatherhood. Even a few politicians who have struck anti-abortion poses have advocated abortion in their personal lives.

Protesting at the Supreme Court in Washington, Elaine Baijal, 19, a student at American University, said that in the 1970s her mother marched with her mother in support of legalizing abortion. “It’s sad,” Baijal said, “that we still have to fight for our right.”

But it’s not sad at all. It’s democracy. The country remains much divided on abortion and no strong national consensus has been democratically reached, though it’s possible to imagine one — a libertarianism that ends upon the viability of the fetus outside the womb. Such a policy would hardly be oppressive, since so many contraceptive devices are available and essentially free for those unable to pay, including “morning-after” pills, and since abortion itself is essentially free for those unable to pay.

Even the greatest liberal of his era in the U.S. Senate, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called abortion-rights absolutism — the demand for late-term abortion — infanticide.

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HOORAY FOR HOBGOBLINS: According to state Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, and Frank Hanley Santoro, a former assistant U.S. attorney, who wrote an essay published last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, “dark money” from far-right hobgoblins like Koch Industries and the DeVos Family Foundation are financing citizen groups around the country that are challenging school boards over their racial curriculums.

If so, hooray for the hobgoblins, since political influence on public education is not from the far right at all but overwhelmingly from the far left, starting with the teacher unions, which pretty much control the Democratic Party nationally and in Connecticut.

In Connecticut teacher union members commonly serve on school boards where they negotiate and vote on contracts with the local affiliates of the union to which they belong in the nearby towns where they are employed. This is a conflict of interest but it is seldom noted by news organizations or even rival political campaigns.

In Connecticut campaign money and volunteer work provided by teacher unions dwarfs any support provided by the far-right hobgoblins to skeptics of the education establishment.

Indeed, Connecticut has a law actually forbidding school systems from reducing their spending even if their enrollment collapses. The law’s point is to ensure that any financial savings in education are diverted to raises for teachers, not returned to taxpayers.

The Koch Brothers and Betsy DeVos didn’t push that law on Connecticut. The teacher unions did.

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