Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Despite the criminal prosecution underway in Minneapolis for the wrongful death of George Floyd, police officers are far more sinned against than sinning and are crucial to decent society. So claims that a flag displayed to support them is racist are ridiculous.

The flag in question, the “thin blue line” flag, is a replica of the United States flag with a blue stripe superimposed across its middle. It is no more inherently racist than Black Lives Matter flags and posters. Yes, there are racist cops just as there are racists in the Black Lives Matter movement, and racists may use those flags and posters to solicit support. But the flags and posters have legitimate meaning and are not contaminated by occasional misuse.

These days making an accusation of racism is the quickest way to intimidate one’s adversaries. Those who accuse the “thin blue line” flag of racism want to undermine support for all police officers. That must be rejected.

Nevertheless, it is just as well that South Windsor’s Town Council failed last week, on a tie vote, to pass a resolution authorizing the “thin blue line” flag to be flown on a town government flagpole in the center of town, as organizational and commemorative flags are authorized to fly there.

For there is a serious problem with the “thin blue line” flag: the Flag Code of the United States. The code is federal law and it says: “The flag should never have placed on it, or attached to it, any mark, insignia, letter, word, number, figure, or drawing of any kind.”

That is, the flag always should be displayed exactly as it is.

While the code establishes protocol for the flag, no penalties can be imposed for violating it. It is trumped by the right of free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Indeed, the Supreme Court has courageously ruled that people have a First Amendment right to burn or deface their own U.S. flags.

But people who love their country should treat the flag, the country’s symbol, with respect. They might do well to note a part of the code that is routinely violated:

“The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, or printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.”

While people have a right to disobey the flag code, a government flagpole should not be party to it. Surely South Windsor can find another way to show its appreciation for police officers and defend them against the anarchistic smears of racism.

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UNCONSTITUTIONAL BILLS: The First Amendment is not getting the respect it deserves from the General Assembly. Several bills that violate the First Amendment have been introduced and are being taken too seriously.

One would prohibit the publication or broadcast of the identities of the victims of fatal accidents, as well as photos of fatal accidents, before a victim’s family is notified. Such circumstances can be shocking, but then word of any untimely death is shocking, whether it comes from police or news organizations. The right to publish and broadcast public events can’t be curtailed, and delays in police work can’t be allowed to obstruct freedom of expression.

Another bill would block public access to housing court records while letting journalists see them. But journalism is first a constitutional right, not a profession, and anyone can be a journalist at any time. If a journalist has the right of access to public records, equal protection of the law requires that everyone have access.

A third bill would give state government the power to interfere with the ownership and finances of the Hartford Courant because the newspaper holds an antique state charter. But the charter did not give state government the authority to run the paper.

The pending acquisition of the newspaper chain that owns the Courant by a rapacious investment house may be a disaster for journalism nationally and in Connecticut, but then anyone else can make a better offer for the paper.

Legislators might do far more for journalism if they ever made sure that Connecticut students could read at a high school level and had some understanding of citizenship when they are given their diplomas.

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

By Chris Powell

While Governor Lamont’s office has conscientiously produced detailed virus-epidemic data every weekday for a year now — a triumph of organization and persistence — his administration and news organizations have made too much of it and the governor himself is gently backing away from it.

The daily data has included three main components: the number of people newly testing positive for the virus, the new hospitalizations of people carrying the virus, and new “virus-associated” deaths. The data components may be the best that could be devised but they really aren’t so meaningful.

The administration long stressed the first component, the “positivity rate,” and news organizations still do. But this is the least meaningful component. When it is reported that, say, 4 percent of people tested for the virus on a particular day were positive, it gives the impression that this reflects the degree of infection in the whole state. Instead it is only a measure of the people who chose to get tested that day. Since many may have gotten tested because they weren’t feeling well, the testing sample is doubly unrepresentative.

Further, the tests themselves are unreliable. They produce many false positives and many positives involve people who have no symptoms or only mild ones.

The governor lately has been annoyed by the continuing emphasis on the “positivity rate,” since Connecticut’s rate is higher than that of many other states, giving the impression that there is more infection here when the difference may be only a matter of Connecticut’s doing more testing. So the governor wants to keep reopening the state and to pay less attention to the “positivity rate” and more to the second component of the data, hospitalizations of people infected with the virus. This component is indeed more relevant, bearing on the capacity of the state’s medical system.

But the epidemic never has come close to incapacitating the system. Emergency field hospitals were set up briefly but never used. Reporting the total number of hospitalizations and the daily number of new hospitalizations tended to exaggerate the severity of the epidemic because it did not characterize the patients. Many ordinary ailments can push the frail elderly or chronically ill into critical condition, It is much more threatening when previously healthy young people need hospitalizing. But the daily data never made the distinction.

For the same reason the third component of the data, people who died with the virus (though not necessarily of the virus), could be misleading too. With or without epidemics, people are always dying, especially the elderly, and while the number of “virus-associated” deaths in various age groups has been recorded, it has not been publicized on a daily basis and so the raw death count also has made the epidemic scarier. As it has turned out, most deaths indeed involve the frail elderly.

The best way to evaluate the daily epidemic data probably has been to add the new hospitalizations and deaths and divide them by the new positive tests to calculate a serious case rate — the daily percentage of virus-infected people who have died or required hospitalization. The serious case rate long has been less than half the “positivity rate,” and it has been declining toward 1 percent or less as medicine has learned how to treat infections better than to put people on ventilators and pray.

But even at the height of the epidemic and the panic about it, 95 percent of the people testing positive in Connecticut were just sent home to recover, and nearly all did. The recovery rate nationally is near 99 percent.

That’s why the big lesson of the epidemic seems to be to protect the frail elderly and the chronically ill, especially in nursing homes, not to suspend commerce and education. Despite its good intentions, the suspension of normal life by many state governments, including Connecticut’s, has caused economic and social damage that may never be fully remediated, and it increasingly seems like a catastrophic mistake.

Maybe this mistake was unavoidable, there having been no epidemic so scary since the polio epidemics of 60 years ago. But the current era was already hysterical before the epidemic, and government and news organizations have made the epidemic much scarier than it should have been.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s lawns are turning green again. Robins are scouring them for worms, which are returning to the surface despite the high taxes and accusations of racism above ground. Redwings are trilling madly over the ponds, brooks, and marshes.

Daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. Leaf buds on the trees are swelling. Many days are blessedly sunny and mild.

Kids are going back to school — not that anyone ever will be able to tell from their test scores, but at least they’re out of the house again. Virus epidemic restrictions are fading as people get vaccinated. Money for state government doesn’t just grow on trees now; it rains down from the heavens as never before.

Indeed, in another month Connecticut, in its natural state, may become, as it does for a while every year, nearly the most beautiful place on Earth, just as it may be climatically the safest and most temperate.

Politically there will be as much to complain about as ever, but consider the alternatives.

Connecticut people wintering in Florida, many of them tax exiles, are planning to return north to escape the summer heat down there, as well as the alligators, Burmese pythons, lizards, and insects as big as pumpkins.

Texas, another state without an income tax that lately has drawn many people from Connecticut, was also without electricity and drinking water for much of February, and soon its heat and humidity may make its Northern transplants miss snow.

Tennessee, which also manages without an income tax, lately has been suffering floods and tornadoes on top of country music.

California, once the “golden state,” has been impoverished by bad public policy and is being overwhelmed not just by taxes but also by poverty, homelessness, drugs, illegal immigration, and political correctness. State government there seems oblivious as many middle-class people depart or sign petitions to remove the governor.

Maybe the recent arrivals in Connecticut who hurriedly escaped New York can give their new neighbors some valuable reflections.

Of course no place is perfect, but nothing about geography or climate stands in the way of Connecticut’s regaining the advantages it had before it succumbed to the old corruption of prosperity — the belief that prosperity is the natural order of things, not something that had to be earned and must be constantly re-earned. Whether Connecticut can restore its prosperity is entirely a political question, a question of whether its people retain enough civic virtue to discern and assert the public interest over the government class and other special interests.

If glorious spring in Connecticut cannot persuade people that such an undertaking is worthwhile, nothing can. Those who often threaten to leave but haven’t left yet should take a bigger part in the struggle.

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WHERE’S THE RACISM?: Maybe the people who are accusing Connecticut’s suburbs of being racist will explain how it is racist not to want to be stuck with a school system like Hartford’s, whose chronic absenteeism rate among students approaches 50 percent.

It’s not the fault of school administrators and teachers. The other day the Hartford Courant reported about the daily circuses being staged by city schools to entice students to show up. The circuses seem to be helping a little, but it is not cynical to ask: Where are the parents of the chronically absent kids? Are racists blockading their homes?

Is the exclusive zoning in many suburbs why so many city kids have been skipping school?

Zoning doesn’t know anyone’s race. Zoning does have a good idea of people’s financial circumstances and the financial capacity of the town that enacted it, and it wonders: How does any town benefit from a large population of unparented and desperately disadvantaged children who run school performance way down and expense way up?

Complaints of “structural racism” don’t answer that question. They distract from it and prevent any inquiry into why so many children have no parents and are so neglected.

If structural racism was really the problem in Connecticut, laws long in place would have solved it already. But structural poverty remains to be addressed, and, worse, remains even to be acknowledged.

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

By Chris Powell

Just as Hillary Clinton and the sleaziest elements of the Democratic Party gave the country Donald Trump, Trump and the sleaziest elements of the Republican Party now have given the country Joe Biden.

Also a gift of Trump is the press that has fawned over Biden even as he stumbled up the stairs to Air Force One, doddered and cheat-sheeted through his first presidential news conference, and imposed silly but politically correct policies by executive order, insofar as Trump caused Trump derangement syndrome.

Of course the country well may be relieved that disgraceful tweets no longer emanate from the White House around the clock and that there now are days when the country is not embarrassed by its president, if only because he is kept out of sight.

But Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons, the southern border has been flung open again, the futile war in Afghanistan is being extended, and trillions of dollars are being created and distributed to states and municipalities as spectacular slush funds in the name of remediating the self-inflicted damage of virus epidemic lockdowns,

While Trump, unpredictable except for his vulgarity and ignorance, alienated this country’s allies, his recklessness also kept its adversaries off balance. News organizations don’t have to acknowledge Biden’s cognitive decline for this country’s adversaries to see it, and it may embolden them into making challenges we are not prepared for.

Soon there could be worse things than mean tweets, and then what? Will God still be looking after fools, drunks, and the United States?

* * *

Having visited immigration facilities at the southern border the other day, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said he “fought back tears” as he saw hundreds of migrant children being detained on their own.

Murphy’s tears might as well have been those of the crocodile variety, since, having long been indifferent to security at the border, the senator shares responsibility for the renewed disaster there, along with Biden and other Democrats in Congress.

Vulgar and cruel as Trump could be, at least he declared that the border should be secure and he scared people out of entering the country illegally or making bogus claims for asylum. But during his presidential campaign Biden promised a change in policy, and potential immigration lawbreakers are taking him at his word.

Now the president is telling them not to come here, but a more persuasive message is being conveyed by admission of the many people who are coming anyway, especially the kids about whom Murphy professed to get teary.

People would not be heading for the border if they did not expect a good chance of admission. Indeed, most of the children have been sent across unaccompanied because everybody knows that while parents with children may be turned back, unaccompanied children eventually will be forwarded to relatives or friends living in this country, many doing so illegally, while the children’s cases await disposition.

Anything short of a policy of blocking all illegal border crossings and requiring asylum claims to be made outside the country will constitute a broad invitation to the people of impoverished and violent Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to keep taking their chances on a long, dangerous, and sometimes fatal journey.

That’s why the bigger cruelty here hasn’t been Trump’s at all but that of the Democrats who put immigration enforcement in doubt as they strive to erase the borders and proletarianize the country.

* * *

WHAT’S TO EVALUATE?: Teacher evaluation has never been very serious in Connecticut and legislation is pending in the General Assembly to make it less so. The bill would prohibit school systems from using student test scores in teacher evaluations for the next three years.

The rationale for the bill is that the extended interruption of schooling by the virus epidemic will set back education for a long time. But of course school administrators know this and will handle evaluations accordingly. In the meantime test scores still will continue to signify something.

After all, if teacher evaluations can’t take student learning into account, what else is there? Classroom decoration? Blackboard penmanship? Or just a teacher’s usual cooperation in promoting students from grade to grade even as they fail to learn anything?

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

By Chris Powell

Participating in a legislative hearing on housing discrimination last week, state Rep. Michael Winkler, D-Vernon, may not have known (along with most of his constituents) a couple of disgraceful aspects of United States history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II when they were falsely suspected of disloyalty. Or maybe Winkler just forgot about them. That can happen.

So Winkler mistakenly remarked that a Greenwich housing official who was defending his town against complaints of exclusivity should not have counted residents of Asian descent as members of oppressed minorities because Asian Americans never faced discrimination.

While mistaken, Winkler had not “disparaged” people of Asian descent, as some people inferred and some news organizations reported. He was just opposing exclusive zoning and was a bit inept as he argued, accurately, that wealthy Greenwich is not as open residentially as it might like to pretend, and that Blacks are the most disadvantaged of Connecticut’s minority groups.

But since this is the era of political correctness, indignation, intimidation, and posturing, Winkler’s colleagues at the state Capitol couldn’t just cordially correct him. They had to demonstrate their righteousness by denouncing him as if this avuncular liberal Democrat was actually a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

The next day state Attorney General William Tong, himself of Asian descent, carved time from his busy schedule posturing elsewhere to pile on, though Winkler had already apologized contritely at the end of the hearing the night before. His contrition did Winkler no good. The verdict was already in: Off with his head!

Tong bellowed: “The history of bias and hate against Asian Americans in this country is long and largely invisible, an unfortunate reality that has been highlighted by the ignorant comments made by Representative Winkler. The myth of the so-called ‘model minority’ is a dangerous fiction that for too long has allowed this country to erase and ignore this shameful history.”

Of course nearly everybody these days wants to be considered a victim of one thing or another because victimhood is so powerful politically. If you’re a victim, everyone is supposed to be cowed into doing whatever you demand, even if it isn’t any fairer than what was done to you. Victim status is especially useful to politicians, even those who have reached high office, thereby inadvertently giving evidence that maybe they weren’t such victims.

Anyone who questions this racket risks getting called an ugly name. So most people in politics endure it in silence.

But the “model minority” is not a myth about people of Asian descent in America. The social science and occasional political controversies suggest that despite the bigotry they have faced — much reduced now, the Chinese Exclusion Act being long repealed and the internment of the Japanese Americans long repudiated by statute and reparations — Americans of Asian descent indeed tend to work harder than they complain. As a result their success, as a proportion of their numbers, is much greater than that of other ethnic groups and whites, especially academically. This may have more to do with culture and family values than genetics.

So the bigger history here is not, as Tong says, “shameful” but heroic — a history of overcoming injustice and thus making the whole country more just. Indeed, that remains the American story generally, which in turn is part of what used to be called the ascent of man, though it may have slowed lately.

Even as the attorney general postures about injustice to people of Asian descent in the distant past and in the present in other states, he has dismissed injustice to them right in his own state. For Tong has taken the side of Yale University against the litigation brought on behalf of students of Asian descent who claim that in pursuit of “diversity,” Yale, like other elite institutions, has imposed a quota on their admission, just as higher education long has done against Jewish students with superior qualifications.

If academic achievement determined admission, student populations in higher education would be even more Asian and Jewish than they already are. But the political correctness Tong strives to serve in pursuit of even higher office confuses diversity with justice.

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

By Chris Powell

Political correctness and its cancel culture are starting to evoke the second great Red Scare and the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Last week the talented young political journalist Alexi McCammond was pushed out of the editorship of Teen Vogue magazine just as she was starting the job. Anti-Asian and anti-homosexual comments she had made on the internet 10 years ago, when she was 17, galvanized the magazine’s staff against her, and two advertisers threatened to withdraw. The magazine’s owner, the Conde Nast chain, which had been aware of McCammond’s old offense, turned on her.

It didn’t matter that McCammond, who is Black may have come to recognize her own bigotry as she grew up. Two years ago she had acknowledged and publicly apologized for the mean comments and alerted her prospective employer about them. Conde Nast first thought that youthful mistakes might well be forgiven when sincerely repented. But the PC cancel culture, which seems especially virulent among journalists, quickly intimidated management out of its quaint attitude.

McCammond’s hateful adversaries are teaching not only that there can be no forgiveness for thought and speech crime even when it is repented but also that it merits a virtual death sentence. For how is McCammond to get another job now? What employer will consider hiring her and risking a confrontation with the woke mob?

And if there is to be no forgiveness, why should anyone repent anything?

The prophet of old taught: “Go and sin no more.” The prophets of the cancel culture teach: “Go cut your throat before we do it for you.”

* * *

COLLEGE LOAN RACKET: With its first tranche of college loan debt cancellation, the Biden administration has confirmed that much of higher education is a racket and aid to it is not support for education at all but just for educators, who are a big part of the Democratic Party’s army.

The cancellation, announced this week by U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, will erase obligations to repay about a billion dollars in loans taken by students who claim that their colleges deceived or defrauded them in some way. This billion dollars is a small fraction of the estimated $1.7 trillion owed by about 45 million college borrowers. While most of them are quite able to pay, the Biden administration is expected to follow with more loan forgiveness.

The college racket goes far beyond college borrowers who have not found employment that pays well enough to support a decent living as well as loan payments. The racket also encompasses the millions of college graduates and dropouts who hold jobs for which no higher education is required.

Secretary Cardona did not announce prosecutions of any colleges that defrauded or deceived students, nor any reconsideration of the self-serving attitude prevailing in educational circles that everyone should go to college. In his brief tenure as Connecticut’s education commissioner, Cardona never addressed the remedial nature of public higher education in the state, where most freshmen at public colleges never mastered high school work and so must take remedial courses.

College loans are not the country’s big educational problem. The failure of lower education is.

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UNJUSTIFIED GUILT: No matter how much they scramble and publicize, state and municipal government officials can’t satisfy themselves over what they call the “equity” of their campaign to get people vaccinated against the virus epidemic. Vaccination in Connecticut so far has covered a much larger share of the white population than the racial minority population.

Officials should stop lashing themselves about this, for it is only to be expected. Racial minorities long have lagged in the metrics of many good things and have led in the metrics of many bad things — because race correlates heavily with wealth and poverty.

People with more money can afford to take better care of themselves. They tend to be better educated and more engaged with society and to know more about how to deal with the world.

Not so with the poor. Extra efforts always must be made with them, and even then they may be suspicious and standoffish.

There is a big “equity” issue here but it has little to do with vaccinations. It is the failure of welfare and education policy — and it can’t be discussed.

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

By Chris Powell

With as much as $4 billion in discretionary largesse about to descend on Connecticut’s state and municipal governments and school systems, economizing and improving services to the public will be removed from the agenda for a long time. These slush funds can only worsen the excesses and exploitation in government, even as the Yankee Institute’s extraordinary investigative reporter, Marc Fitch, has noted some big excesses this month.

Fitch reported that another 62 managers at the state Transportation Department are being permitted to unionize though their annual salaries range from $86,000 to $149,000, quite apart from their luxurious fringe benefits.

According to Fitch, an official of the state Office of Policy and Management explained at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee that the State Employee Relations Act “has a very stringent definition of a managerial employee” and it is difficult for the administration to meet the classification criteria — not even with positions whose salaries are so high.

Another OPM official was quoted as saying there were probably about 3,000 managers in state government 20 years ago but now there are only about 1,300. This produces a ratio of about one manager for every 30 employees, which isn’t much management at all. But then politics has ensured that there never can be much management.

Citing national data, Fitch notes that state and municipal government employees in Connecticut, at 74%, are the most unionized government employees in the country. The public gets no benefit from this, but candidates for state office get union support.

Fitch also notes that only two-tenths of 1 percent of Connecticut state government employees who have passed their probationary period are dismissed for performance reasons each year, making them either the best government employees in the world or the least managed.

Of course this doesn’t mean that state employees are bad people, just extremely privileged ones. It also means that most state legislators and governors are the tools of the government employee unions and that most taxpayers are uninformed.

This is not likely to change until the state’s minority political party has the wit and courage to pick up on the Yankee Institute’s work — and the desire to become relevant.

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STORY FROM THE STREET: Rivaling the Yankee Institute for the most important journalism in Connecticut this month was a report by the New Haven Independent’s Courtney Luciana last week about the heavy demand on a church-sponsored overnight “warming center” in Hamden that had to start admitting people by lottery while turning others away.

Interviewing the homeless as they lined up, Luciana waded deep into the real world.

There was an irresponsible young couple who can’t take care of themselves but whose female member had just gotten pregnant anyway.

There was a former drug addict who had just been laid off.

There was a college graduate who was fleeing domestic violence, had gotten evicted, and was sleeping under bridges.

There was a military veteran who said he came to New Haven because he thought he’d have a better chance to get housing and turn his life around.

Some of those seeking entry to the “warming center” had more affecting stories than others but their merits made no difference in the lottery. Because of lack of space many had to be turned away into the freezing night.

People should bear the consequences of their irresponsibility. They should pull their own weight. But government policy often encourages irresponsibility, and judgments must be suspended when people are stuck out in the cold.

In recent years Connecticut has reduced chronic homelessness with what is called supportive housing but has not made so much progress with the mental illness and addiction usually behind homelessness.

Government in Connecticut always has money for less compelling things, like raises and pensions for its own employees, and people throughout the state are celebrating rising prices for housing though housing is a necessity of life whose price should be driven down, not up. As the Independent’s report suggested, the most urgent work of government in Connecticut may remain in the street.

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

By Chris Powell

What should the legislation now making another appearance in the General Assembly be called: “aid in dying” or “assisted suicide”? It depends which side you’re on.

“Aid in dying” makes it sound a lot nicer, just as “pro-choice” has become the euphemism for “pro-abortion” or, more fairly, “pro-abortion rights.” Meanwhile there is no getting around it: “Suicide” signifies desperation and despair.

The bill would authorize doctors to prescribe fatal doses of medicine to terminally ill people who want to end their lives. They might have various motives — chronic pain, invalidism, reluctance to become a burden on their families, or severe depression.

The bill’s opponents contend that pain almost always can be controlled medically now and that there would be great risk of hustling the afflicted into dying for the convenience of others. The bill’s advocates say it contains regulations against that.

This trust in regulations may be a bit naive since government can’t always be around when it is needed. Who can forget the “bring out your dead” scene in the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”? That’s where the wheelbarrow master collecting corpses amid a plague declines to accept a frail old man who is being carried out by a young relative while still alive. The wheelbarrow master says, “I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.” But a little cajoling by the young relative produces the “aid in dying” necessary to get the old man loaded aboard — a quick and surreptitious clubbing to the head.

On the other hand, can government be trusted to tell people what they can do with their own lives? Who else’s business is it really? How is the “war on drugs” working out?

In his play “Julius Caesar” Shakespeare inclines to the libertarian side of the issue as the conspirators discuss the risk of failure of their plot to assassinate the emperor and restore the Roman republic.

CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, you gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, you gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.

CASCA: So can I.
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.

Good for the Catholic Church in Connecticut for citing the sanctity of life in opposing “aid in dying.” But far more lives — mostly young ones — are lost or jeopardized every day because of practices and policies that neither the government nor the church bothers to get upset about or even examine.

After all, in the long run we’re all terminally ill even as the short run is often one blind spot after another.

* * *

NULLIFICATION CATCHES ON: Republican-leaning states that support Second Amendment rights are considering legislation to nullify federal gun laws, especially now that background-check legislation has a good chance of passing Congress. But somehow this nullification movement seems to have escaped the denunciation it deserves from Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all of whose members support stronger federal gun controls.

Could such denunciation be lacking because no one in authority in government in Connecticut has any business criticizing nullification elsewhere? For Democratic-leaning Connecticut long has been engaging in more nullification than any state since the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s. Connecticut’s nullification is aimed against federal immigration law, as the state obstructs federal immigration agents from doing their jobs and issues driver’s licenses and other forms of identification to immigration lawbreakers.

The Republican-leaning states are only contemplating nullification. In Connecticut it is aggressive policy.

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

By Chris Powell

As hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants rain down on Connecticut’s schools, a potentially decisive experiment in education is beginning. Bright markers should be placed on the current measures of every school system’s performance and revisited often from now on to determine if the money makes any difference.

The Hartford and Bridgeport school systems, whose impoverished and fatherless students perform terribly, are to get about $130 million each. This will enable an increase in their per-pupil spending of 40 percent if the money is spent in one year, or an increase of 10 percent if spent over four years. Other poor-performing school systems with impoverished and fatherless students, those in New Haven and Waterbury, will get around $95 million each. Nearly all Connecticut school systems will get large amounts.

Apart from remedial classes to make up for the schooling missed because of the epidemic over the last year, school administrations may have to think hard about what to do with the money. The easiest decision for them will be to do what they have done with budget increases for decades: increase staff compensation, though this never improves student performance.

Congress and President Biden have offered no ideas as to how schools should spend the money, as the legislation provides no instructions. If Congress and the president meant the money mainly as a reward to the teacher unions for their support for the Democratic Party, the legislation would not have had to be written differently.

Maybe school systems at least will hold hearings to gather the public’s suggestions for the money. But the legislation appears to prohibit using it to shore up underfunded pension systems or to cut taxes. The legislation wants the money spent, though using it to cut taxes might have the same effect, since then taxpayers would have more of their own money to spend. Indeed, since most property tax revenue in Connecticut is spent on schools and the property tax is considered most burdensome on the poor, cutting property taxes might be the best thing to do.

In any case, everyone should watch closely to see whether the federal bonanza improves student performance. If it doesn’t — as the great increases in school spending in Connecticut during the last four decades have failed to improve it — maybe school spending increases at last can be acknowledged as political payoffs to the teacher unions.

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JUST PLAIN INDIANS: With better timing Connecticut’s Schaghticoke Indian tribe might have become the richest tribe in the country. For almost 300 years the tribe has had formal recognition by state government and a reservation out in the woods of Kent, though state government repeatedly allowed the reservation to be chipped away to a fraction of its original size.

But because of internal rivalries the Schaghticokes stumbled for many years in their pursuit of federal recognition, the prerequisite for the Indian casino business, which the tribe wanted to enter. By the time the U.S. Interior Department recognized the Schaghticokes, in 2004, the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes already had recognition and were operating casinos, and state officials and the Pequots and Mohegans didn’t want any more. The Interior Department was pressed to reverse itself, which it did in 2005, disregarding the merits of the Schaghticoke claim.

An advocate for the Schaghticokes says that if the tribe was authorized to operate a casino, it could give state government a much better deal than it has with the Pequots and Mohegans. But then any casino operator could give the state a better deal, for Connecticut doesn’t need Indians to operate casinos.

And even if a much better deal was available, state government could never accept it, since the two casino tribes have become so rich and so influential in state politics that they can prevent competition forever.

It doesn’t matter that the Schaghticokes may have a superior claim to historical continuity and thus to recognition. It’s too late. All the necessary money has been lined up along with the politicians, and the Schaghticokes are on the wrong side of it.

They will have to content themselves with their last few acres of forest and with being just plain Indians. At least they may be sincere ones — Indians even though they never will have a casino.

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

By Chris Powell

Democrats in Congress, including Connecticut Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are excited about the chance of enacting a federal law to require background checks for all gun purchases and transfers. Republicans in the Senate long have been the obstacle to this but they have lost their majority, and Democrats in the Senate might get the bill through if they stick together and get a few Republican votes. They should, since there is no good argument against background checks. Indeed, they are already required for most gun sales.

But the claim made by the Democrats in support of the legislation — that the lack of background checks is a big cause of gun violence — is ridiculous. Gun violence arises mainly from poverty and the trade in illegal drugs. Background checks will have at best a marginal effect on crime.

People who are educated and skilled enough to make an honest living seldom do it with guns. The real problem behind gun violence is the failure of poverty and education policy. Besides, so many guns are in civilian possession throughout the country — hundreds of millions — that guns will remain easily accessible from clandestine sources even if comprehensive background checks are enacted.

Guns are blamed for crime because politics doesn’t permit the relevant policy failures to be audited. The “gun lobby” — a misnomer for what is neither the infamous National Rifle Association nor gun manufacturers but the political activism of millions of gun owners — may be strong, but it is nothing compared to the poverty and education lobbies. Far more people are part of the latter lobbies, making far more money. The latter lobbies intimidate politics out of auditing their failures and blame their failures on guns.

In pressing for background checks the Democrats are creating what should become an embarrassing irony for them. Background checks would disqualify people with criminal records from getting guns legally. But while Democrats pursue background checks in Washington, in Connecticut they are backing legislation to conceal all misdemeanor convictions after seven years and most felony convictions after 10 years. This records concealment would requalify for gun ownership many people of questionable character.

The claim for the “clean slate” bill is that the accessibility of criminal records prevents parolees from getting jobs and housing. Of course a criminal record is an impairment, but most people with records suffer far bigger impairments — their lack of education and job skills. This is especially so with men from racial minorities who went into the illegal drug trade, got violent, and were sent to prison, the men about whom advocates of the “clean slate” bill express most concern.

Many employers and landlords will take chances on applicants with criminal records if they can show rehabilitation and work skills. Indeed, even being a Nazi SS officer was no impairment for rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was hired by the U.S. Army just a few weeks after Germany’s surrender in World War II. All was quickly forgiven. (A movie about von Braun was titled “I Aim at the Stars,” whereupon the comedian Mort Sahl said it should have been subtitled “But I Sometimes Hit London.”)

Concealing criminal records would be unfair to crime victims. It might endanger anyone with whom a former offender began a relationship. Government should not deny people’s right to know what they may be getting into.

And while forgiveness is often in order, accountability always is. Records concealment would preclude both. People can’t forgive what they don’t know about.

The premise of the “clean slate” bill is that enforcing ignorance will solve the problems of parolees. It won’t, for records concealment is no substitute for what government owes them. That is, help getting reestablished, like six months of menial employment, job training, basic housing, and medical insurance. If parolees are freed without that much help, concealing their criminal records will do them little good. For even without access to criminal records, any responsible employer or landlord will ask a parolee where he has been lately, and he won’t get far without a verifiable explanation.

The “clean slate” bill is just liberal camouflage for walking away from the problem. Solving it would cost money.

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