Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Doing Good: Judge Norko And The Hartford Community Court

2009-11-24T16:16:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has ever gotten himself in trouble – many of us from the age of twelve to twenty, though perhaps not criminally – knows that there comes a point in a richly deserved punishment when the agony, despair and humiliation of punishment trails off into a healing repentance. Many of the great novelists – Fyodor Dostoyevsky in “Crime and Punishment,” Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Victor Hugo in “Les Miserable” – have written persuasively about that spiritual pivot point.

Community Court Judge Raymond Norko, much more than most of us, has seen men swing, as from a hangman’s noose, between punishment and rehabilitation. The lower depths pass before him daily. That parade is a dispiriting experience, particularly when the level of criminal activity is such as to allow a restorative punishment that may – just may – set the foot of a potential hardened criminal on the road to a life in which crime plays no part. One of the great failings of jurisprudence in our time is that the tools in the retributive tool box of judges do not, in many cases, permit judges to be prudent in assigning punishment, and jurisprudence always should involve prudent punishment.

Judge Norko thinks the opportunity for rehabilitation ought to occur somewhere in the punishment process, the sooner the better. And he is determined to place in the tool box of judges and law enforcement officials appropriate alternative punishments that have been shown to aid in the process.

The Hartford Community Court is Judge Norko’s brain child. In theory, the community court springs from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s golden perception that if communities did not tolerate minor crimes, they later would not be prey to a plague of big time lawbreakers: If you permit a broken window to stand in a community, you are simply inviting crime. The perception is a frank avowal that major crimes such as murder, rape, assault, etc. are related to unattended offenses such as breach of peace, larceny, first time marijuana charges, disorderly conduct, threatening, criminal trespass, solicitation of prostitutes, as well municipal ordinance violations such as loitering, public nuisance, drinking and excessive noise.

An ounce of prevention of criminal activity will always be worth more a pound of cure. There are more strings to Judge Norko’s instrument than is the case with other judges. The Hartford Community court works hand in glove with police, bail commissioners, state’s attorneys, public defenders, social services and court supervised community service organizations. Community service is one of the most important attributes of the court because it places the offender in his own community to work out his punishment. There is nothing like service in your own community to knock off the rough edges of an attitude. Community service also signals to the community itself that the court is serious in providing sanctions for quality of life crimes responsible for neighborhood deterioration.

In the summer of 2009, the community court handled a record caseload of 9,743. In the first half of the same year, Hartford police reported that Part 1 crimes (murder, rape, assault, etc) decreased 8.9%, hard statistical evidence, Judge Norko says, “ that if you go after low level crimes it eliminates the permissive attitude of “anything goes’ and makes it much less likely that violent and bigger crimes will occur. It’s the ‘broken windows’ theory brought to life.”

The statistics provided by the community court illustrate its interconnections with other agencies: In September the court recorded 1,275 arraignments. In the same time period, the court dispensed 2,562 hours of community service, made 278 social service referrals and 76 referrals to mediation. The suburban caseload was 11% and the appearance rate was an astonishing 89%.

Important though the figures may be for funding purposes, statistics are the poorest measure of what happens in this court. It is a transformative pivot that may turn, in the few cases I was privileged to witness, despair into the first flaring of hope.

A young man with dreadlocks, an erect bearing and a frozen face stands before the judge, who has seen him before, his mother to his left and his father, tall and slender as a reed, to his right. The young man has already completed his punishment and is now awaiting the final disposition of his case before Norko who, as everyone in the court is aware, is no push over. This judge is 100 percent con-proof. The young man and the judge have finished their business together. The father’s head is still down, his hands clasped tightly together in front of him. Judge Norko calls the young man by his first name and he looks up.

“You love your father and mother?”

The young man smiles broadly, “Yes sir, I sure do.”

“That’s good, because they love you.”

The father, astonished, raises his head. Through a flickering smile he whispers a hasty “Thank you, judge” before all three leave the court.

The community court draws recourses from state agencies, the Social Service Department and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and private non-profit agencies. Community Partners in Action provides all the community service programs. Mediation services are provided by the Hartford Area Mediation Program (HAMP) under a contract authorized by statute. Adjudication staff positions include Judge Norko, the state’s attorney, the public defender, assistants and others.

Hartford’s Community Health Services African Men In Recovery Program (AMIR) is one of the most important agencies involved with the community court. AMIR, under the direction of the indispensable George Dillon, aides African-American and Hispanic males afflicted with substance abuse problems and/or mental health issues.

Judge Norko describes Dillon, who works with the community court each Wednesday accepting referrals and reporting to the court on their progress, as a “miracle worker” who “takes men in almost desperate situations and conditions and helps them achieve substantial progress towards their recovery.”

Last March the U.S. Department of Justice selected Hartford’s community court as one of three nationwide sites forming a “Community Court Mentor Site Network.” The court now serves as a role model “to other jurisdictions seeking effective ways to combat such crimes as prostitution, public drinking and drug use, vandalism and other low-level crimes that affect the quality of life in city neighborhoods.”

The community court is trying, as Norko ably put it, “to put a foot in the revolving door by addressing the underlying issues that are often the root of a person’s involvement in the criminal justice system. Accountability through community service and a helping hand through social services is the most productive manner I know of to deal with these low-level crimes.”

Owing to Judge Norko’s organizational and administrative skills, the Hartford Community Court, which also services surrounding municipalities, runs its daily activities like the proverbial well oiled machine. The efficiency of the court is also due to the zealous involvement of Public Defender Liz Ahern, Prosecutor Kathleen Dwyer, the unfailingly cordial Court Interpreter Jacqueline Torres and Judge Norko’s indispensable administrator Chris Pleasanton. The question mark hanging over the whole enterprise is: What will happen when Judge Norko retires in three years?

In this court in particular, justice and remediation depend upon a comprehensive understanding of how the court interacts with its indispensable secondary actors. The primary beneficiaries of the court are the lawbreakers the arc of whose life course will not be bent in a beneficial direction in the absence of this institution. But it is not often sufficiently appreciated that the communities in Harford and those huddled around it benefit greatly from the court’s daily activity.

The British author G. K. Chesterton use to say of Pimlico, the equivalent of Hartford in his time, ridden with seemingly intractable problems:

“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing — say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico, we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful.

“The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved...

“A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.”

There are some in Hartford who love the city with a seemingly irrational love, as women love their children – because it is theirs. Among these are Judge Norko and those who work with him in the improbable task of making Hartford as fair as Florence.

MYTHS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

2009-11-24T11:20:00.000-05:00

1. 640,329 jobs “saved/created” in Connecticut’s 45th Congressional district.
2. U.S. has high Infant Mortality.
3. 45,000 died because they didn’t have health insurance.
4. U.S. is unhealthy, only 37th healthiest in the world.
5. Social Security Trust Fund, Medicare trust fund.
6. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi despises private insurers driven by profit.
7. Passive smoke, a killer but where are the bodies?
8. DDT, miracle that saves lives from malaria, banned.

1. 640,329 jobs created and saved? Bogus. House oversight subcommittee says $136 billion has been paid out from the $787-billion stimulus package, for jobs counted, double-counted, in nonexistent Congressional districts, including the 45th in Connecticut (we have five), 26th in Louisiana, 12th in Virginia and other imaginary places. An $890 shoe order, rated nine new jobs. An Alabama housing authority on a $540,071 project, rated 7,280 jobs but the Birmingham News only found 14. Where are the grants going? “Who knows, man, who really knows,” answers the Communications Director in charge for the Administration’s “recovery.gov” (WallStreetJournal 11-19, A20).

2. Infant-Mortality Rate
Definition: Number of infants per 1,000 live births, who die within one year. (The U.S. has a lot of premature births.) The U.S. counts births that are not counted in other countries. If, like those other countries, we didn’t count them, our rate would be higher than it is.

The U.S., Sweden, and Germany count every infant showing any sign of life: if its heart beats, if its muscles move, if it is breathing. Other countries don’t count them. Japan and certain European countries count infants only if they breathe.

Many countries don’t count underweight babies: France, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Netherlands, and Poland don’t count infants weighing under 500 grams, or premature infants of fewer than 22 weeks gestation.

Russia till the 1990s didn’t count babies weighing under 1,000 grams, or if fewer than 28 weeks gestation, or shorter than 35 cm. in length.

If the U.S. excluded infants not counted in other countries, its IMR would be 22% to 25% lower than it is, around #22 or #23 for Canada and the UK, and its IMR would be around 4.8 instead of 6.3. Data (it’s the U.N.’s) exist for 195 countries. Here are many countries with the lowest IMRs:

.
Rank IMR
1 Iceland 2.9
2 Singapore 3.0
3 Japan 3.2
4 Sweden 3.2
5 Norway 3.3
6 HongKong 3.7
7 Finland 3.7
8 Czech Republic 3.8
9 Switzerland 4.1
10 South Korea 4.1
11 Belgium 4.2
12 France 4.2
14 Germany 4.4
19 Netherlands 4.7
24 Ireland 4.9
33 U.S. 6.3
37 Poland 6.7

3. 44,000 deaths because decedents were uninsured.
A study “found that every year in America, lack of health coverage leads to 45,000 deaths,” Senator Max Baucus told his Senate Finance Committee. “No one should die because they cannot afford health care.”

Oft-repeated 44,000 is based on a sample of 9,000 collected from a survey between 1988 and 1992. Respondents were asked if they had health insurance. Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Woolhandler and Dr. Himmelstein, the study’s authors, assumed that any health calamity was attributable to lack of insurance. Dr. H also co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which boasts it’s the only physician organization dedicated to single-payer national health insurance.

4. U.S. only the 37th healthiest country in the world? This is a faulty study by the World Health Organization. Based on data of a decade ago, it judged health-care systems by factors sometimes irrelevant: “responsiveness” (speed, choice, quality of amenities); health-level, inequality in health-care outcomes, individual spending. Where data for some countries did not exist, WHO used surrogates, literacy and income-per-capita (for what?). WHO adjusted for national health expenditures-per-capita, which it adjudged a bad thing: “Because the U.S. ranked first in spending, that adjustment pushed its ranking down to 37th behind Dominica, Costa Rica, and Morocco, which had ranked 42d, 45th, and 94th but after the adjustment ranked above the U.S. (WallStreetJournal Oct. 21 A19).

5. Social Security Trust Fund? Even a Medicare Trust Fund? There are no such things. There may be I.O.U.s and/or bookkeeping entries.

6. Insurance companies’ profits.
Profits of health-care insurance companies are relatively low compared with profits of other types of insurance. Most recent annual profits barely exceeded 2% of revenue. (They’ve been re-rated “negative” from “stable,” faced with a shrinking market for private insurance.) The list of industries which follows starts with the least profitable. All industries related to insurance are included in this list. The others, we have selected randomly from a long list.

Profit Industry Rank

3.3% Health care plans 86th
3.6% Hospitals 77th
3.6% Insurance brokers 75th
6.6% Drugs, generic 45th
8.4% Home health care 30th
13.5% Drug delivery 14th
16.5% Drug manufacturers 7th
25.9% Beverages—Brewers 1st

7. The Environmental Protection Agency, after numerous gross statistical errors, could only boost the very low ranking of environmental tobacco smoke (passive smoke) to a miserably low significant figure, way below getting lung cancer from drinking one glass of whole milk daily for 70 years. Perhaps for public consumption, EPA settled on the figure of 3,000 deaths a year. One official in a private letter to his friend, which we have in our file, wrote that zero deaths would be equally valid.)

8....DDT, the most wonderful chemical ever. “It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable,” concluded the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the year before EPA head William Ruckelshaus banned it. Thanks to Ruckelshaus, Rachel Carson, environmentalist extremists, and the WHO, millions of Africans including children are dying or disabled today.

Why, these irrational policy errors?

By Natalie Sirkin
c2009

Obama In China, Honeymoon's Over

2009-11-23T13:40:00.000-05:00

Williams, More Jobs Please

2009-11-21T08:57:00.005-05:00

President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s senate Don Williams was invited by the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut to give a talk, presumably on the state’s faltering economy, a delicious irony, rather as if the moneyed classes of pre-revolutionary France were to invite Jean-Paul Marat to a salon to give a chat on the future of the monarchy.

Williams who, along with his comrade in arms in the House, Speaker Chris Donovan, is principally responsible for having produced a budget now nearly half a million in arrears, told the group that the state has to “ratchet it up,” shove a little more money in the direction of education and improve Connecticut’s rail lines. Improved schooling, Williams said according to an account in the Norwich Bulletin, “wouldn’t require much extra spending and could be accomplished chiefly through policy changes. Connecting Hartford, New London, and Springfield, Mass., through rail would better move people and goods around.”

The completion of that line will better enable unemployed people to move from Hartford to Springfield. It has no other use. And just now, according to a story in the Hartford Courant, students are hunkering down in 4-year and 2-year community colleges until the epoch of unemployment passes by. Our leaders, strangely indifferent to plight of the people they rule and ruin, cannot read the papers – and they most certainly cannot read the times.

The question the Democratic dominated legislature should be considering is this: What will it take, short of a revolution, to persuade these so called leaders to become serious about cutting spending?

And God Said, “Let There Be Universal Health Care.”

2009-11-20T20:15:00.004-05:00

On the question of a public option in the health care debate, liberal Democrats are now playing the God card, and it would appear that every liberal’s favorite whipping boy, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is in their view a moral apostate.

Lieberman, already in Dutch with the far left of his party for having fraternized with the enemy, has vigorously opposed the “public option” – a euphemism for nationalized insurance – for non-theological reasons having to do with dollars and cents.

But no sooner did Lieberman say he felt it was a “moral obligation” to oppose a ruinously expensive nationalized health insurance plan than there appeared out of the blue a union inspired “vigil” of rabbis and imams and priests and Unitarian ministers all inveighing against Lieberman as a religious reprobate.

It certainly is odd how the seemingly inflexible doctrine of the separation of church and state — vigorously applied to crèches during the Christian season of joy – just comes and goes.

Most news accounts of the vigil did not touch on its auspices. The vigil, which occurred before Lieberman’s house in Stamford, was assisted by CSEA/SEIU Local 2001, a state union.

The purpose of the vigil, the union group announced on its site, was “To demonstrate to Joe Lieberman that we need health care reform and we do not want him joining any filibuster of health care legislation. The Interfaith Fellowship for Universal Health Care, a faith-based organization that includes religious leaders from all major faiths, is organizing this event.”

The union group urged its members “to participate and demonstrate our opposition to Sen. Lieberman's obstruction of efforts to pass meaningful reform. The event will be solemn and highly dignified, and attendees will be asked to dress appropriately and NOT to bring protest signs.”

Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) issued a clarion call: “Please join people from across Connecticut – representing all walks of life and all faith traditions. Remind Senator Lieberman that we are united in our call for quality, affordable health care we can count on!”

CCAG’s director is Tom Swan, the campaign manager of Ned Lamont’s failed senatorial run against Lieberman. A little more than a year ago, Lamont appeared in a video clip hawking a Million Doors for Peace effort endorsed by CCAG:

In the video, Lamont anguishes over ex-President George Bush’s successful war in Iraq and advises recruits to “knock on doors. Remind them why we’re not going to let this happen again.” Lamont is referring to Bush’s “war of choice.”

Alas, it happened again when President Barrack Obama introduced more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, the current president’s “war of necessity.” President Obama has been anguishing for a month over how many troops to send to Afghanistan, sometimes called the graveyard of empires. If Lamont now seems unconcerned with knocking on doors for peace, it is because he is considering a run for governor on the Democratic ticket and currently is engaged in a head to toe reinvention process. Gone is the anti-war Lamont progressives came to love and honor during his successful primary challenge to Lieberman, who went on to win the general election. Governors in charge of their state’s national guards generally cannot be found knocking on doors for peace. This would be doubly unlikely for Lamont, who will be expected as governor of Connecticut to support the war mongering efforts of a Democratic president.

In their vigil, the clergy seemed at some pains to make the point that opposition to the specific health care plan containing a public option was immoral. One rabbi warned Lieberman sternly “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbors. It is with a heavy heart that I proclaim to you Senator Lieberman that that is exactly what you seem to be doing at this time.” Another dithered over whether he thought it prudent to throw his theology into the political ring but finally succumbed, possibly at the urging of CCAG and unions thumping for nationalized health care.

“The moral imperative for our time is clear,” he said. “Anyone whose guide in public policy is conscience, anyone who argues that faith and religious traditions should direct our actions, such a person must stand for universal health care in America. It happens we are all also citizens of Connecticut. That fact leads us to ask you Senator Lieberman, what is it that you stand for?”

Such political specificity must always be theologically suspect. Jews apparently are not moral Jews when they vote against national insurance programs and, according to Jesse Jackson, neither are blacks black.

But God works in mysterious ways and does not always take the route suggested by Democratic politicians. To put it in other terms: God’s way is not always and unvaryingly Dodd’s way. U. S. Sen. Chris Dodd favors a national health insurance plan; Lieberman does not, which is not to say that Lieberman favors sacrificing the children of union leaders to Moloch.

Other plans beside those offered by progressives may provide health care to those presently who have no health insurance. And it seems to be Lieberman’s fugitive hope that the thing may be done without bankrupting the nation or Connecticut, which use to be known as the insurance capital of the world and still employs quite a few people in the business.

Income Tax Proponent Hale, Tax Scofflaw

2009-11-16T10:46:00.000-05:00

John Lender of the Hartford Courant notes: “If former Democratic state Sen. Gary A. Hale hadn't voted the way he did 18 years ago, he might not owe the state $77,951 in back taxes today.”

Hale, a state senator in 1991 when the income tax was rammed through the legislature by then Gov. Lowell Weicker and his minions, switched his vote from ney to yea and so secured passage of the tax.

The state Department of Revenue Services now is hounding Hale for non-payment of income taxes. The 50th of the state’s top 100 tax scofflaws, Hale owes Connecticut $77,951 in non-paid income taxes, thus joining a roster of distinguished Democratic tax delinquents, including Tom Daschle and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Leading the roster is Rep. Charlie Rangel, spotted on this blog several months ago as a snoozing tax cheat.

Rangle will be investigated by the same bunch of friendly legislators who, a few months ago, found Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd culpable – but not too culpable – of ethical violations.

In Defense Of Lisa Moody

2009-11-15T14:17:00.002-05:00

The question at bat is: Was Lisa Moody, Governor Jodi Rell’s chief aide, the governor’s Svengalli?

Svelgalli was a fictional character, an evil hypnotist in George du Maurier’s novel “Trilby.” Not even Moody’s most severe critics would assert that she manipulated the governor by hypnotizing her or casting spells over her.

But did she influence the governor?

It would be odd if she did not. One always hopes that chief aides are more influential than, say, the editorial board of the Hartford Courant.

There is a temptation on the part of press people to over inflate the influence played by aides, perhaps because they are reluctant in their criticisms to mortally injure the king. During ex-president George Bush’s administration, Vice President Dick Cheney was portrayed pretty much as Bush’s brain. The president was thought to be a major duffer. Since Svengalli was a fictional character, it may be more helpful to inquire whether Moody was Rell’s Cheney.

Was she?

Yes and no. Cheney’s influence over Bush has been greatly exaggerated. Moody and Rell were a pair; they played well together. And when things went wrong, Moody took the bullet for her chief. She kept the jackals at bay and performed the more disreputable chores of politics with a certain aplomb. Moody would be the first to admit that she made mistakes. In fact, she has admitted to mistakes. But she was no Svengalli. Rell ran the executive department, and Moody aided her.

There is always a danger in the misattribution of power and responsibility. Sometimes the king deserves a thwacking, but this becomes less likely the more the king is thought to be under the influence of a shadowy aide. If Cheney really was Bush’s brain, we can hardly blame the brainless executive for whatever mistake he may have made in office, many of which had been attributed to Cheney.

Moody was a Democrat whom Republicans in Vernon coxed to their side because she was useful to them. It is proper to characterize her as a person “of no certain address,” someone for whom party affections and ideas mean very little. Now, that is a note of character that most certainly is important. But you will not find it stressed in any account of the cross influence between Rell and Moody – because part affiliation is unimportant to many commentators writing on politics in Connecticut.

It is very interesting to see who, among her past political acquaintances in Vernon, came readily to her defense after it had been suggested in several commentaries that her service to Rell was, on the whole, not beneficial.

Former Mayor of Vernon and partisan Democrat Marie Herbst said, “She's very, very, very compassionate.” And former Vernon Mayor Ellen Marmer defended Moody against a charge of nastiness: “Lisa is powerful, opinionated and bright. She's in a position of power. All of those things put together in the political arena don’t make you popular most of the time. What I can say of Lisa very easily is maybe some of her actions are self-serving, but most of her actions are for the state (or), in our case, the local climate. Her ways may be problematic for some people, but she's not doing anything to be nasty.”

Accusations of nastiness have been raised in a Greenwich Time story by “anonymous state workers,” precisely the people one might expect to be at loggerheads with the governor and her aide, both of whom in economic hard times are duty bound to say “no” to the sometimes unreasonable demands of anonymous union connected state workers.

Kevin Rennie, a Courant columnist, reasonably points out that “Rell sleepwalked through the year's critical budget debate… When a wreck of a budget reached her desk at the end of the summer, she took a powder. Rell would neither sign nor veto the $38 billion behemoth; she would watch it pass into law. To distract attention from her abdication, Rell tried to veto a few million dollars in expenditures, though she'd been told she'd given up that authority when she didn't sign the budget. From her address in Never Never Land, she persisted in the silly ruse.”

All true, sadly. Rell talked the talk, but she declined to walk the walk. And she got hornswoggled.

Rennie also suspects that both Rell and Moody will attempt to sabotage the campaign for governor of Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele:

“Rell got the open race for the Republican nomination for governor off to a bad start when she stuck the knife into loyal Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele. He had quickly signaled he would be a candidate for governor and said he had Rell's support.

“Rell declined to confirm that she supports Fedele and declared there are several competent candidates. Fedele says Rell promised to support him; Rell says she did not. One of them is not telling the truth. In the credibility stakes, Rell runs far behind Fedele.

“Fedele holds a special place on Moody's long list of enemies. Had Rell sought another term, Fedele could not be sure he'd have been her running mate.”

As Attorney General Richard Blumenthal – the Democratic Party’s Great White Hope for either governor or U.S. senator – might say, “Stay tuned.”

Blumenthal, Or The Ambiguities

2009-11-14T17:18:00.005-05:00

According to a story in the New Haven Register, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal put a stop to the chatter that he might run for governor “at a gathering of students, senior citizens and local dignitaries… arranged by The Women’s Center at Gateway Community College.”

“Is this the time Blumenthal will take all that political capital and run for governor,” Topics Editor Mary O’Leary wrote, “now that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell has announced she will not seek re-election, giving Democrats their first good shot at the top job in 18 years?

This interrogatory was followed by the now traditional let-down: “Blumenthal said no, he’s running for attorney general ‘because it is a job I love, because it enables me to fight for people and make a difference. I have no plan to run for governor.’

“On the other hand, asked if he would run in 2012 for U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s seat, Blumenthal said: ‘It would be a challenge that I would welcome, if it were the right time to do it, and I thought I could make a difference. Stay tuned.’”

If only there were a Democratic Party Central that could by a mere glance of disapproval whisk the attorney general from the office that has entrapped him and plop him into a political spot of its own choosing. Democratic king makers are interested in Blumenthal because his popularity rating is stratospheric.

Gov. Jodi Rell’s popularity rating also was sky high during part of her gubernatorial term. But, compared to Snow White, Blumenthal is a shining God, the equivalent in our politics of Phoebus Apollo.

Every time Blumenthal has been nudged towards higher office, he has refused, leaving the door teasingly ajar. And every time he has refused, his “bow out” has been more closely examined than the portentous oracles at Delphi, whose pronouncements, publicized by the priestess who was Apollo’s interpreter were, to say the least, ambiguous. Ambiguity needs a professional priesthood to interpret it.

Blumenthal said no to a gubernatorial run. That’s plain enough; “no” is no. And he has given his reason: He loves his job. Who would not love a job that permits him to spank the fannies of gluttonous businessmen in public? Who would not love a job in which he could dump into the public treasury a portion of the ill gotten gains of Fruit Loop producers?

In a subsequent interview with the Day, Blumenthal beat a hasty retreat from his “no” after having received a flood of phone calls begging him to run for governor

Now comes the ambiguity: Blumenthal would leave the job he loves on what conditions?

The job of U.S. senator would be “a job I would welcome.” But even here plain-speak is attended by the furries of ambiguity…”if it were the right time to do it” and if “I thought I could make a difference.” This diffidence is quickly followed by a sunburst of hope: “Stay tuned.”

It only remains to put these effusions into hexameter verse to have an oracle worthy of Delphi. Right now, as these words are being printed, the modern Pythia – the female priestess who in pagan Greece served as a vehicle for the word of Apollo at Delphi; for a gratuity, of course – is examining Blumie’s oracular emissions. In the modern period, there are many Pythias: lobbyists trained and paid to interpret oracular statements, editorial boards, reporters, members of the New Democratic Apollonarian Party, bloggers committed to the destruction of Joe Lieberman, Blumiepuffers in the press and elsewhere… and on and on.

Some of Blumenthal's admirers, men and women of a practical bent, are now scrutinizing these statements in hope that a correct interpretation would find Blumenthal, their Achilles, leaving his comfortable tent to turn the battle in their favor.

“Please, please, let it be so,” they pray at the alter of their god, quite willing to throw an live lamb on the offering brazier, if only Blumenthal will come to his senses, leave the job he loves, join them in their effort to make the world over.

A little common sense may be in order here.

Men are moved mostly by fear and love. Among the little discussed reasons Blumenthal may not wish to leave his job is this: He may not be able to leave it without exposing his entire record in office to his successor, and to the public. All those e-mails left behind, and some of the grosser errors he has made in his prosecutions, may testify against him if he should run for higher office.

The job he so loves may be his ball and chain, and fear more than love may explain his extraordinary reluctance to come to the aid of his party by running either for governor or senator. If that is the case, Democrats have in the past and will in the future be wooing Blumenthal in vain. Too many skeletons in the closet may be keeping Blumenthal at home in command of the closet.

Dodd, Dancing with “Scheme Liability” Lawyers

2009-11-14T09:19:00.010-05:00

In Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, the Supreme Court Ruled in 2008 that companies cannot be sued just for doing business with another firm that had committed fraud. In tandem with another precedent in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver, the ruling put a check on what the Wall Street Journal has termed “’scheme liability’, in which trial lawyers seek to rope in parties acting legally for having done business with parties that don't.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, accused by some of his opponents of playing patty cake with corporate campaign contributors, is on an anti-business head trip just now. In the dust and dirt of battle, it has been forgotten that Dodd, at one point in his sterling career, set his face against lawyers who unjustifiably drove up the cost of doing business through excessive litigation.

One of the reasons doctors send their patients to so many specialists, driving up insurance coverage and medical costs, is because by so doing they are buying protection from suit happy law firms. Whispering in the whirlwind, some Republicans have demanded tort reform, so that doctors once again can practice medicine without padding themselves up in protective gear to avoid the kinds of lawyers who make their living by chasing ambulances.

The Consumer Protection Department should have forced Angelo Mozillo, the CEO of Countrywide, now bankrupt, to have tattooed on his puffed up chest “Made in the US Congress.” Countrywide, as well as Fannie and Freddie Mac, were government created monopolies.

Before congress offered special perks to monopolies that came crashing down upon his head, Dodd was a leading champion of tort reform. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was, according to the WSJ, “Senator Chris Dodd's finest hour. Joining with House Republican Chris Cox, Mr. Dodd led an override of a Bill Clinton veto to end the scourge of 'strike suits.' Prior to the law, trial lawyers would wage legal blitzkrieg against companies guilty only of a falling stock price. Since its enactment, lawyers have had to present some evidence of actual fraud before launching fishing expeditions under the civil discovery process.”

The falling of the house of Countrywide upon Dodd’s head has had the predictable effect of scrambling his brains.

By passing Section 984 of the Draft Dodd bill, which in effect overturns the Supreme Court decision in Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, the legal blitzkrieg against companies that do business with fraudulent companies – such as, for example, accounting firms -- will commence anew. And the author of the new legislation is…. Envelope please... Chris Dodd, the former scourge of lean and hungry scheme liability lawyers. The Security and Exchange Commission, it should be noted, already has the authority to bring cases against those who aide and abet fraud.

The anti-business provision in Dodd’s bill will, according to the WSJ, “allow private cause of actions and extend liability to accounting firms, lawyers, suppliers and anyone else that has a commercial relationship with a company that commits a securities fraud,” paving the way for unscrupulous law firms to sue innocent plaintiffs to force settlements and enrich law firms that certainly will want to express their gratitude to Dodd in the form of campaign contributions.

The Banking Committee over which Dodd presides as chairman probably will take up his bill by Thanksgiving, after which Dodd’s campaign coffers will undou btedly be filled by grateful lawyers.

Dodd’s political problems have been sufficiently ventilated in Connecticut’s media. In order to escape these toils and trials, the senator has permitted himself a quick makeover, little realizing that the political graveyard is littered with the bodies of incumbent politicians who have failed to read correctly the signs of the times. Businesses are suffering both from an ebbing recession and a future inflationary period that will reduce the capital necessary for business expansion and jobs. This may not be the time to turn over the remains of dying businesses to scheme liability lawyers.

It would seem, from efforts of this kind to placate fervent anti-business proponents on the left, Dodd has moved quickly without any visable discomfortfrom the scalding pot to the red hot frying pan .

This Could Be The Start Of Something Big: Liberal Bloggers Apologize To Bush

2009-11-13T17:44:00.001-05:00

“If you have been reading us for any length of time [ “us” is the liberal blog HillBuzz ] you know that we used to make fun of “Dubya” nearly every day…parroting the same comedic bits we heard in our Democrat circles, where Bush is still, to this day, lampooned as a chimp, a bumbling idiot, and a poor, clumsy public speaker.

“Oh, how we RAILED against Bush in 2000…and how we RAILED against the surge in support Bush received post-9/11 when he went to Ground Zero and stood there with his bullhorn in the ruins on that hideous day…

“As we will always be grateful for what George and Laura Bush did this week, with no media attention, when they very quietly went to Ft. Hood and met personally with the families of the victims of this terrorist attack.

“FOR HOURS.

“The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them.

“If there are any of you out there with any connection at all to the Bushes, we implore you to give them our thanks…you tell them that a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown, Chicago were wrong about the Bushes…and are deeply, deeply sorry for any jokes we told about them in the past, any bad thoughts we had about these good, good people.”

And, just to show they are serious, the bloggers offers a kick in the pants to:

“…the current president, Dr. Utopia, made us realize just how wrong we were about Bush. We shudder to think what Dr. Utopia would have done post-9/11. He would have not gone there with a bullhorn and struck that right tone. More likely than not, he would have been his usual fey, apologetic self and waxed professorially about how evil America is and how justified Muslims are for attacking us, with a sidebar on how good the attacks were because they would humble us.”

All in all, a generous about-face.

First Person Singular: An Interview With Chris Powell On Connecticut's Senatorial Race

2009-11-12T09:15:00.005-05:00

Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, is a knowledgeable observer of Connecticut politics whose column appears in that paper and a dozen others in Connecticut and the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. When Powell became managing editor of the JI in 1974, he was the youngest editor of any daily in the state. I must here acknowledge that I wrote a regular column for the JI for about 15 years when Powell was also editorial page editor, drawing from time to time on his unfailing political memory. Powell, who off-line is screamingly amusing, agreed to submit to an interview broadly focused on the U.S. Senate race featuring the Democratic incumbent, Chris Dodd, and a crew of ebullient Republicans.

It is difficult to place Powell on the political spectrum except to say that he loves a good story and has a gift for poetic concision: "The General Assembly is little more than a nest of locusts. ..."

I recall once describing Powell as a "radical (small 'd') democrat," a title he did not resist. He is inclined to throw the truth around in his columns as if it were a bomb -- which it often is -- at which point many politicians, screwing wax into their ears, occasionally walk off in a huff.

* * *

DP: The senatorial horserace involving Chris Dodd won't be up for a year, but speculators are taking bets. There are five Republicans in the race: Rob Simmons, Linda McMahon, Sam Caliguiri, Tom Foley, and Peter Schiff. Dodd appears to have recovered somewhat from an earlier bashing by embracing more fervently those on the left in his party. The P.T. Barnum among Republicans, McMahon, has lots of money, and money certainly does not hurt. The bloom on President Barack Obama's rose appears to be fading. Dodd has tied his prospects to Obama's plans for medical insurance, an industry still strong in Connecticut. And the role Dodd played as Senate Banking Committee chairman during the collapse of the housing market is sure to come up in the campaign. What are the Republican prospects for an upset in November? I realize that any predictions are subject to change. But can you give us a snapshot of the terrain so far?

CP: I suspect that Connecticut's Senate election will be determined more by doubts about Dodd's personal integrity than by doubts about his record, particularly his long subservience to Wall Street. That will be too bad, since, in providing what turned out to be the crucial support for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and thereby letting commercial banks and investment houses merge, Dodd bears as much responsibility as anyone for the collapse of the world financial system. His Irish "cottage" and the terms of his mortgages are trivial by comparison, not that those things don't imply his having lost touch with Connecticut, a sense of entitlement as part of the ruling class. The polls say Rob Simmons is the strongest Republican challenger, and certainly he is the most credible, given his long record in public life. The other Republicans have a lot of heavy baggage: Linda McMahon's clownish business background and her unfamiliarity with issues; Peter Schiff's anarchistic ideology, his tax-resister father in prison, and his never having voted before; Tom Foley's only qualification being his fund raising for a former president loathed in the state; and Sam Caligiuri's inability to raise much money. It's Simmons' race to lose.

DP: Some people may be unfamiliar with the Glass-Steagall Act. It dates from the Roosevelt administration, I think, and suffered the death of a thousand cuts over the last half century. Who is responsible for its demise, and doesn't the destruction of commercial banks in the recession/depression give us reason to hope that it might be restored? The recession certainly cleared some dead brush away.

CP: The Glass-Steagall Act -- the one enacted in 1933 -- separated commercial and investment banking. The reasons for and against its repeal in 1999 are cited in the link above.

Basically, the repeal let the New York financial houses get as big as they wanted and do whatever they wanted, including putting at greater risk bank deposits insured by the federal government. The act's repeal was achieved largely as a matter of the political influence gained by the financial houses in both parties, but Dodd's support of repeal was deemed crucial in achieving a majority. I don't think that the New York investment houses have been destroyed. To the contrary, now they have taken over the government entirely. It's the government that has been destroyed.

DP: The state Republican Party has not had conscientious stewards. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who served the state for many years as senator, was indifferent if not hostile to it. Former Gov. John G. Rowland was much in the habit of making compromises with the Democratic opposition in the General Assembly, though he did spend a little less than the Democrats wanted. Gov. Jodi Rell recently seemed to be talking the talk on spending reductions before she succumbed, for whatever reason, to the Democrats in the legislature. Connecticut's Republican Party has not been able to distinguish itself sharply enough from the Democratic Party to persuade voters to replace Democrats with Republicans in the legislature. There are no longer any Republicans, moderate or otherwise, in Connecticut's congressional delegation. The last two moderate Republican U.S. representatives, Chris Shays and Rob Simmons, were defeated in 2008 and 2006, respectively. Is party differentiation important or not? And if it is important, what should the Republican Party be doing, within the state and nationally, to make itself more enticing to the public?

CP: Yes, party identification is important because political competition is important. How could the Republican Party differentiate itself from the Democratic Party in a good way -- that is, of course, in a way I like? Maybe first Republicans should see how parasitic the financial system has become, thanks to lack of government regulation. There IS something worse than socialism, or at least as bad -- corporatism. The financial houses have bought the Democratic Party, so why should the Republican Party stay bought? There is an old tradition of prairie Republican populism to be restored. Chesterton's peasant proprietorship, with nearly everybody owning some property and thus having a capitalist stake in society, ought to be the objective, not coddling big money. After many years as a Democrat, I became a Republican in 1991 because it was, in Connecticut, the party that was not quite controlled by the public employee unions, and because Connecticut Republicans seemed to have less stultifying dogma than the Democrats did. In Connecticut's Republican Party one can express an unorthodox thought and the worst that will happen is that you'll be considered eccentric. Try it in Connecticut's Democratic Party and you'll be burned as a heretic.

Which is not to say that Connecticut's Republican Party still isn't too terrified of the public employee unions to try to restore public sovereignty over them. But at least there is always a chance that a Republican primary will nominate a candidate who is not exactly proud of being a stooge and a tool. Connecticut Republicans should stress that differentiation, since many people are coming to see that the biggest problems on the state and local level are the cost and inertia of the government class. Fiscal conservativism, restraint on government, and libertarian mores might have a chance as an opposition party platform in Connecticut, if not nationally.

DP: We both admire Chesterton who, along with his friend Hilaire Belloc, was an apostle of what he called "distributism." You've described it very well. I recall quoting Belloc's advice to the rich in a piece I did in the Journal Inquirer: "Get to know something about the internal combustion engine; and remember, soon you will die." It's doubtful either of the two would be permitted to write for most modern newspapers. In the Chestertonian scheme, everyone is invested in the social order. Here in Connecticut, the working poor, whose virtues Chesterton never tired of celebrating in hundreds of pieces he wrote for various publications, are "invested" only on the receiving end. The tax structure is such that people who we might consider upper middle class to rich finance the spending end. One of the reasons the stewards of public employee unions, mostly liberal Democrats, do not fear spending excesses is that their constituency is not heavily invested on the tax side. To put it bluntly: Spending continues to rise because the bulk of tax consumers do not suffer the pain of paying for improvident spending. How can this defect be ameliorated under the present political circumstances?

CP: Yes, taxes are as necessary to having a stake in society as property ownership is, and a tax system that exempts all but the very rich from bearing any of the burden of government is too progressive and fosters irresponsibility and selfishness over citizenship. I'm not sure what to do about this in the short term, other than to resist demagogic appeals for taxes on the rich that are meant only to get the hands of the government class on more money, not to increase fairness. In the long term, government could just stop impoverishing society in dozens of ways -- from the dumbing down of schools to the waging of stupid imperial wars to the subsidizing of childbearing outside marriage. But any decent society has to do something on its own to preserve a little virtue, to have some expectation of achieving prosperity through its own work rather than through parasitism. It would be good to teach self-reliance, but then you have to have an economy where people can succeed by relying on themselves, an economy full of opportunity, an economy where failure is not rewarded by the government. That's not Bailout Nation.

DP: We both know that moderates do have an advantage over philosophically committed candidates. Untied to political philosophies of any kind, they may more easily maneuver between the left and right poles. Of course there are disadvantages, particularly in a selection system that relies on primaries rather than party nominating conventions. Nominating conventions have tended to drive candidates to the political center, because the decision makers in nominating conventions are primarily interested in winning general elections and assembling winning tickets. The determining factors in selecting candidates in a primary -- or, in the present case on the Republican side, where there are multiple candidates vying against each other -- are different than would be the case in general elections. Would you agree that, among the Republicans vying for Dodd's seat, someone like Sam Caliguiri is more conservative than, say, Rob Simmons who, now playing to a conservative base for a Republican primary, has moved right of center on some issues? Dodd clearly has moved left of center, perhaps hoping to avoid charges launched from the left that he is in the pocket of moneyed interests. Ralph Nader's old chestnut that Dodd is "the senator from Aetna" has been tossed around among leftist bloggers with knives in their brains. Do you think that in placating the far left, Dodd will leave himself vulnerable to charges that he has abandoned the center?

CP: Simmons has a long record and will have to be careful with any new conservative posturing lest people be reminded of how that posturing conflicts with his record. I don't know that Caligiuri has a long enough record to be stereotyped as a reflexive conservative. He has voted alone against the pervasive budget nonsense in Hartford, but that could mean only that he's sane, not particularly conservative. Everybody who has voted against that nonsense has been proven right. Yes, Dodd is trying to secure his left after decades of being less the senator from Aetna than the senator from Wall Street. He'll probably be beaten only if his Republican challenger attacks him from the left AND the right, just as Joe Lieberman defeated Lowell Weicker for the Senate in 1988 by enveloping him, exploiting both liberal and conservative grievances against Weicker. (Who can forget BuckPAC?) Six years earlier Toby Moffett ran against Weicker only from the left and lost, if narrowly. Liberals might be tempted to vote against Dodd and for a moderate Republican who stressed Dodd's long subservience to the plutocracy. And true conservatives might not mind that at all, having no more sympathy than liberals for the bailout of Dodd's friends on Wall Street.

DP: That seems to be a useful strategy for Republicans. When Bill Buckley, whom you mentioned, was asked in Danbury what Richard Nixon was really like -- the president had just then returned from China, where he had clinked glasses with Chairman Mao, earning Buckley's enmity -- Bill asked his questioner, "Which Nixon? There are four of them." There are, we have agreed, at least two Dodds. There are five Republicans running against him. Let's explore the Peter Schiff salient. I have reviewed some clips of his appearance on Dennis House's program on WFSB-TV3, "Face the State." Schiff was being interviewed by House and two liberal reporters. You called Schiff an anarchist. Having viewed these clips, I'm not sure that he wouldn't take your observation as a high compliment. The reporters wanted quickly to decapitate him but they were having a hard time of it. The point of their questions, as I understood them, was something on this order: Schiff was going to Washington to be a U.S. senator, and Congress is a school for compromisers engaged in expanding the public good. Schiff was rigid in his views, a sort of anti-Ralph Nader. Apart from watching the heads of market regulators falling into the baskets underneath the guillotine, what on earth did he plan to DO when he got to Washington? Schiff said, in so many words, that he would busy himself disassembling the regulatory apparatus that had put a ball and chain on the nation's economy. What will Dodd -- the Ralph Nader Dodd -- do with this guy in a debate?

CP: I'd disassemble the nanny state as much as Schiff likely would, but I would also argue that it is the government's failure to regulate the big banks and investment houses, the government's having been taken over by big-money interests, that has plundered and laid low the country. I'm afraid that Schiff would hobble the government while leaving big money alone to keep running things. Yes, government is too big, but its job should be to see that nothing gets bigger than the government, the representative of the sovereign people. In any case, even if Schiff is right on certain things -- and I think he is -- I don't think he can be politically successful in Connecticut . What is likely to be his agenda is too extreme. Maybe just as important, I don't think Schiff is cut out for politics in the good sense. He acknowledges never having voted before, which does not indicate the love of country he says motivates him now. He co-authored with his father a book advocating refusal to pay federal income taxes. They are principled people, to be sure -- and Schiff's dad is in federal prison for his principles. But wouldn't Dodd LOVE a campaign where the Republican nominee had to explain THAT over and over! I've attended many financial conferences where Schiff has spoken and I don't think he's capable of listening to anyone but himself. I don't think he has the slightest political sense or talent. But we'll see soon enough.

DP: I’ve seen Sam Caliguiri perform in person only twice. Both times he was speaking to the choir, groups of Republicans in Coventry and Bloomfield. He will have a money problem, of course; Simmons less so because of his national contacts and his standing so far as the leader in the Republican race. McMahon and Foley will self-finance their campaigns. Caligiuri's narrative is fetching: The son of an Italian immigrant who made good, in part because of sacrifices endured by his parents, he learned the importance of honor and straight dealing at his father's knees. When Waterbury was sinking in a swamp of corruption, Caligiuri was then going under anesthesia for an operation and awoke to find himself the serendipitous acting mayor of Waterbury. He let it be known early in his administration that he would not seek a term of his own, a move that defanged his opposition. He initiated important reforms in his hometown and would pursue the same path in Washington as Dodd's replacement. Caligiuri presents himself as what one might call a pragmatic conservative, someone able to cut through the Berlin Wall of egotism and partisanship in Washington to achieve goals that would advance the common good. Dodd, he says, has been corrupted by Beltway politics, an eventuality he hopes to avoid through a self-imposed term limit that will allow him to focus on needed reforms. Not an unappealing narrative. There is an unspoken, honorable tradition among political commentators in Connecticut, who view themselves as no respecters of money in politics, to make an honest effort to level the playing field by giving quality coverage to neglected opponents. In Caligiuri's case, since most media commentators are liberals, this would require them to lay aside their political preferences and embrace what they may take to be a conservative scarred with leprous sores. Are they up to it? Or is Caligiuri in the wrong race? In that column in which you described the General Assembly as a "nest of locusts" -- wish I had said that -- you suggested that Caligiuri should run for governor instead.

CP: As a political and ideological matter, I can't see why any Republican would deny Simmons the Senate nomination. He has vast experience, a record of much political success in competitive districts, good ability to raise money, and in the polls does the best by far of the Republican Senate candidates. Caligiuri is already crowded out of the Senate race behind Simmons and the three self-funding multimillionaires. But as a candidate for governor Caligiuri likely would stand out as the only candidate saying something, the most specific on fiscal policy matters. He has voted against consensus budgets because he knew what they were going to lead to -- the disaster Connecticut is in now. He's smart, decent, attractive, and has relevant experience in government that goes beyond his brief time in the legislature. None of the likely Republican candidates for governor is well known or rich enough to finance his own campaign, and Connecticut remains a Democratic state. So the only way the Republican nominee for governor will have any chance will be if his message is pointed and fearfully relevant. If people are still angry next year, such a candidate might be heard, and the right message might be worth more than money.

DP: Barack Obama, a persuasive rhetorician and devoted man of the left, was a year ago swept into office on what some regard as rather amorphous promises of hope and change. Democrats in Connecticut may be surprised to learn that Republican conservatives were very much put off by ex-President George Bush's irresponsible spending. And some conservatives were deeply divided on the utility of the war in Iraq. Buckley, for instance, citing John Adams, thought it was imprudent to fight a war in Iraq in a vain attempt to shower the country with the blessings of democracy. Some things have changed nationally. President Obama, making a distinction between a war of necessity (Afghanistan) and a war of choice (Iraq), is expected to commit more troops to Afghanistan. Dodd's positions with respect to recent wars have "evolved." He was opposed to the first Persian Gulf War, fearing that it might become a Vietnam-like quagmire. Dodd supported Bush's war of choice in Iraq at first and later opposed it, along with other leading Democrats, when Bush's prosecution of the war seemed to be failing. Republican neocons now appear willing to support Obama's prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, though they suspect that he will try to win that war on the cheap, refusing to commit enough troops. As far as I know, none of the Republicans in the Senate race, apart from Schiff, will be willing to exploit Dodd's vacillations on recent wars -- because, unlike George Will, they believe that the war in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, is winnable. Are they missing an opportunity?

CP: I sure think so. The public opposes both wars now because it perceives them as not WORTH winning. The country is not and never will be prepared to commit the resources necessary to win these wars, if winning can even be defined. The United States was not attacked from Iraq or Afghanistan in any sense that the resources of those countries were used to attack us. We were attacked because of our own failures of airport security, immigration enforcement, and border control -- failures that, remarkably, continue. To send soldiers to risk their lives when their country is not prepared to commit every resource to their success is a criminal betrayal, treason. But somehow this proposition can't be expressed by anyone running for office, even as most people probably would agree with it.

DP: You have been involved in the news business most of your life. Traditionally, the news media has played an important role in candidate selection, sometimes through endorsements, explicit and implicit, always through its role as a trusted information provider. With the rise of Internet blogs and other unfiltered, raw information streams, including talk radio and extra-party advertising, the role and direction of the mainstream media have shifted: Reporters have blogs, and news reports now draw on unedited raw information in an attempt to outpace instant news providers. Some dare call it gossip. One is reminded of Soren Kierkegaard's sassy observation that once the modern world perfects the means of communication, it will find that it has nothing worthwhile to say. Like the whisper in the whirlwind, Kierkegaard thought that in the future the truth would be hidden in a welter of babbling. Are the news media progressing or regressing? Are they capable of advancing the public virtues you and I find so necessary in our modern atomistic epoch? And what effect will these changes in the means of communication have on our politics -- for good or ill?

CP: On the whole, I'd say the news media are regressing, even as I'm glad of the democratizing influence of the Internet. But of course Internet sources are often unreliable, superficial, unaccountable, and even ill-intentioned. I'll kick the mainstream news media as much as anyone else but I don't think the good journalism that has blossomed on the Internet has yet compensated for the good journalism that has been lost in the decline of printed and commercial TV and radio news. But we may be looking in the wrong place for the source of the problem. Where the people maintain their civic virtue and patriotism, they will find a way to get reliable information. Maybe the best measure of civic virtue is voter participation, and it has been steadily declining for decades. My newspaper is largely a local newspaper and puts the better part of its resources into reporting about municipal government. On municipal government's biggest day in Connecticut, the biennial municipal election, in a typical town maybe 40 percent of the voters vote. And those who are registered to vote are perhaps only 80 percent of those who are eligible to register. Do the math -- 40 percent of 80 percent -- and it seems that on municipal government's biggest day in Connecticut only about a third of the adult population is even remotely interested. On a typical day my newspaper devotes 10 pages to things more or less related to public policy and one page to celebrity gossip and fruitcake stuff. The election participation figures suggest that, as a business proposition, we may have this exactly backwards. If you want a better public life, get a better public.

Gov. Lamont’s Free Advice vs Mom's Free Advice

2009-11-11T11:17:00.001-05:00

Your mom, in a moment of brute honesty, may have told you that money can’t buy everything. But this was because she was not Ned Lamont or Michael Bloomberg.

Lamont is the millionaire from Greenwich who wants to be governor of Connecticut, and Bloomberg is the present redundantly rich mayor of New York. During the recently concluded New York mayoralty race, Bloomberg almost didn’t buy the election. It was a close shave but, in the end, money spoke loudly.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post now tells us that “Prominent Democratic operative Howard Wolfson is advising Ned Lamont's candidacy for governor of Connecticut, adding a high-profile element to what is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most interesting Democratic primaries in the country in 2010.”

“Wolfson comes to Lamont directly from his role as the senior strategist of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's bid for a third term, a race that the media tycoon spent more than $100 million on to win by five points.”

In an e-mail exchange with Cillizza, Lamont remarked, “Howard is a friend and I have many friends giving me plenty of free advice,” a friendship no doubt formed on the battlefield of Lamont’s primary challenge against present Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman.

One hopes that in that contest Wolfson, a member of Hillary Clinton's inner circle during her 2008 presidential bid, was paid for his efforts.

Your brutally honest Mom may have told you that nothing is free. But she wasn’t a multi-millionaire.

The bright side of the Lamont gubernatorial bid might be that, with Wolfson’s invaluable though free advice, Governor Lamont may yet be able to figure out a way to persuade the state’s progressive Democratic leaders in the legislature that the millionaires in Greenwich are necessary to the prosperity of the state.

God Bless The US Marines On This Their 234th Birthday

2009-11-10T19:07:00.000-05:00

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE, A VIEW INTO OUR FUTURE

2009-11-10T18:49:00.001-05:00

Karyn Frist, an American, had just given birth at Princess Anne Hospital in Southampton, England. She and her husband, William H. Frist, MD, were in England, he on a seven-month assignment from Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Frist, for his chief residency in cardiothoracic surgery, would be exposed to non-heart aspects of chest surgery. He would encounter a variety of heart and lung pathologies doctors rarely see in the United States. Dr. Frist would be the senior registrar, “who assumed major responsibility and performed all of the surgical cases; he or she ran the surgical clinics, [and] made all major clinical decisions.”

After that, he would be specializing in heart transplantation at Stanford University Medical Center at Palo Alto. After that, he would be the Majority Leader of the United States Senate.

The British nationalized health care in 1948. In Southampton, Dr. Frist, assigned to the Western Thoracic Hospital, notes some striking impressions in his new (and seventh) book, A Heart to Serve, The Passion to Bring Health, Hope, and Healing (New York, Center Street, Hachette Book Group, 2009).

Dr. Frist has much to praise. “At the time of delivery, we just had to show up at the hospital. Paperwork seemed nonexistent; I don’t even recall having to sign any paperwork as we were admitted.” The care given Mrs. Frist in her pregnancy was “superb.” The general practitioner visited her at her home and they had tea.

Then the problems started. In hospital, following birth by Caesarian Section, Mrs. Frist had each day for a week to walk the corridors looking for sheets for her bed and her new-born infant’s bed. There was no one to help.

Then the problems started for Dr. Frist. “After 4:00 p.m., we were not allowed to do any more cases; the operating rooms closed, and the surgical staff went home. We started afresh on the [waiting] list the next day.” Quitting [at tea-time] is single-payer Britain’s way of rationing health care when the patients’ needs outrun the country’s supply.

Some striking similarities take me back to my own experience in a London hospital around the same time (for me, 1968). Following my operation, not one human being came into my room. It could have been because of a shortage of nurses; it could have been because I was a private patient, not being included in National Health Service. My surgeon, Mr. Wolf, appeared the following day or two days later. I asked him for a glass of water for my terrible headache, which he brushed aside. He said it was “character building” to have a headache and do without a glass of water. I asked him for the results of the surgery. He said he had not had time to consult the pathologist. (I learned later that he had not cut out anything. What had he done?) The bill, which was higher than I had been led to expect, arrived at our sublet Hyde Park flat before I got home from the hospital.

The rationing in single-payer Britain can be fatal to health. Dr. Frist as senior registrar had a list of names of over a hundred patients waiting for heart surgery during that month. Surgeons did two surgeries a day, on the patients who were highest on the list, unless there was a “clear-cut emergency.”

By the time he got down to patient number seventy or so, he noticed that some of the patients had died waiting. (No clear-cut emergency there? No way of knowing as they had not reached the top of the list.) In the United States, that procedure would never have been tolerated. “If we had one hundred patients who needed open heart surgery, we’d work around the clock and get them all done within a week.” For elective surgery, patients might have to wait a couple of weeks, “but it wasn’t because a government bureaucrat was rationing their care based on money available or some politician’s decision to cut off the money spigot.”

Rationing to kill. If during the operation, Dr. Frist noticed some minimal spread of the tumor, “that would be the end of surgery. I would tell the patient and their family that surgery was all that we had to offer and share with them the statistics showing that the patient would unfortunately not live beyond a few years because of the spread of the cancer. They accepted this. They didn’t ask what more could be done.” They didn’t ask for a second opinion. In the United States, if it looks as if the cancer is spreading, the surgeon recommends radiation and perhaps chemotherapy.

So much for single payer. On to public option. The progressive left regards public option as a down-payment on single-payer, according to an Oct. 22 Wall Street Journal editorial, which asserts that public option “will quickly blow up the private insurance market.”

Senate Leader Harry Reid is putting public option-with- an-opt-out provision into the Senate health-care bill. If so, as a “matter of conscience,” Senator Lieberman told Fox News on Sunday, “I will not allow the bill to come to a final vote.”

Is Great Britain the future for us under Speaker Pelosi’s bill passed Saturday night? Readers who support public option need to read pages 96-103 of Dr. Frist’s book to appreciate what will become of our system, the finest health-care system in the world.

By Natalie Sirkin
c2009

Lauds At Rell Leave-Taking

2009-11-10T12:45:00.002-05:00

One way to gain friends and influence people in the opposing camp, if you are a governor, is to leave office. This will please the opposition, particularly if you happen to be popular. As governor, Jodi Rell was more popular with Connecticut voters than any of the Democrats presently in the gubernatorial field.

It is therefore not surprising that when Rell decided not to pursue another run as governor, reporters beating the bushes to find someone in the Democratic camp who might be willing to say something pleasant about the departing governor were amply rewarded.

According to one report, Rell was a “fair-minded leader driven not by ideology but rather by old-fashioned common sense.” She was a “moderate,” which is far better than being a “conservative,” though lately the word “conservative” has been drained of much of its venom, particularly when it is forced to march hand in hand with the word “fiscal,” as in “fiscal conservative.”

Former Speaker of the House Jim Amann, now running for governor, used to style himself a “fiscal conservative,” without any apparent damage to his reputation.

Bill Curry, a Democrat who ran for governor more than once and lost, was trotted out to effuse, and he did not disappoint.

Curry lauded Rell as exuding “a certain decency, and that was her political calling card and strongest attribute. Democrats often deride her for being merely 'nice,' but in this world, 'nice' gets you a lot and not just in politics."

Rell’s “temperate” political philosophy endeared her to Curry: "She may have won the prize for least ideological Republican of her generation, and that went over big in Connecticut.”

Curry himself is, of course, non-non-ideological although, despite frequent dips into ideology, he remains decent and nice.

So the point would not be lost in his encomium, Curry added that Rell did not relish “deep debates on the arcana of public policy,” as one reporter put it. Curry cited Rell’s “failure to achieve property tax relief and health care reform as two of the biggest disappointments of her tenure.”

So gracious was Curry that he even aspersed Rell’s departing chief of staff, Lisa Moody, with cautionary praise:” She had a superb political operative in Lisa Moody, but what Jodi didn't have was a superb policy person, and one of the things that went wrong for her is that Moody was left wearing both hats when she was really only good at one.”

If only Rell had thought to take on board as a chief of staff an ideologue like Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, a Democrat who, during the last budget tousle with Rell, managed to get by the governor a progressive income tax, and who, unsurprisingly, thought Rell was “at her best when she put aside partisan politics and did not give in to extremist trends nationally in the Republican Party.”

Republicans would be hard pressed to recall a single day in the last few months when Williams, quick to praise a virtue he does not practice, put aside his ideology to give Connecticut a budget that would not bankrupt the state. And yet Williams is widely regarded as a “moderate” because, as one reporter put it, he and Rell alike “backed civil unions for same-sex couples, embraced stem cell research and signed a sweeping public campaign finance law,” all measures indicating a “moderate” political philosophy.

How different it was just two days before Rell shocked the state with her surprise announcement, when the chase after Rell was on in earnest.

The state’s highly partisan, ideologically driven Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, everyone will recall, had just joined the hunt.

Telling a reporter “We do have a game plan,” the attorney general had just sent out “a demand letter,” demanding that Rell cough up “scores of documents in an investigation of whether a University of Connecticut professor's $223,000, taxpayer-funded study on government efficiency was misused to provide political advice to Gov. M. Jodi Rell.”

Blumenthal’s method in such a business is not unlike that of other attorneys general. You gather together a huge cache of information – some of it pertinent to the investigation you have undertaken, some of it not -- plop the load on a conference table, and have your associates comb through the mountain of raw data looking for any piece of political dirt that may be cherished and saved up for future political combats.

Rell was asked whether the attorney general, mentioned numerous times in press accounts as a luminous candidate for governor, played any roll in her decision to forgo the defense of her seat as governor.

It did not, Rell said, an appropriate answer for someone who is a decent non-ideologue lamb led to the slaughter.

The Rell Frog March: Blumenthal Has A Game Plan

2009-11-09T12:12:00.002-05:00

John Lender of the Hartford Courant is reporting that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a partisan Democrat who was mentioned in a focus group discussion conducted by soon to be disgraced professor Ken Dautrich of UConn, is progressing quite nicely with his “investigation” of Republican governor Jodi Rell.

Apparently, Blumenthal possesses indeterminate powers that allows his office to to seize the assets and property of the victims he plunders through the misuse of fatally flawed affidavits. G-d only knows what other extraordinary powers this man commands.

Blumenthal told Lender, “"We do have a game plan.”

Blumenthal has not-exactly-subpoenaed “scores of documents in an investigation of whether a University of Connecticut professor's $223,000, taxpayer-funded study on government efficiency was misused to provide political advice to Gov. M. Jodi Rell.”

Instead, the intensely partisan attorney general has sent out what is called “a demand letter” to Rell. It is supposed she will comply with the demand letter.

When Blumenthal has finished assembling a huge cache of information from Rell and UConn, he will plop the load on a conference table, and his associates will comb through the mountain of raw data looking for any piece of political dirt that may be cherished and saved up for future political combat.

Blumenthal has often been mentioned by his party as a possible candidate for governor.

Is it not incredible that Blumenthal – who has his fingers in so many partisan political pies, and who could be called as a material witness in any real non-partisan investigation of Rell, since he was mentioned in the focus group discussion that spurred the investigation – should have been permitted to stick his nose so far into this particular political tent?

And is it not equally incredible that Jon Lender, a superb reporter, has not caught Blumenthal up on the point?

Defending Lieberman

2009-11-08T10:24:00.011-05:00

Judging from what George Jepsen, a Hartford lawyer and former chairman of the state Democratic Party, might call the preponderance of evidence, it is an easy and painless matter to assault Sen. Joe Lieberman in print.

This happens frequently, most recently when the Hartford Courant – whose writers are not, shall we say, friendly to Lieberman – opened its pages to yet another assault, this time by Jepsen.

The Jepsen piece in the Courant, “Whatever Lieberman Is, It Isn't Loyal ,” published in Sunday’s paper so as to expose it to more eyes, follows a piece written by Bill Curry in a previous Sunday paper pouring ashes upon the head of Lieberman for having “vowed to support a Republican filibuster of any health care bill containing the dreaded ‘public option.’”

Both Curry and Jepsen are heavy hitters in the party, outspoken partisan spokesmen. They are both tied by bonds of affection to their party and are honorable men. However, if I had to choose one to have a cup of latte with, I would pick Curry as the more elegant writer and entertaining chatterer.

Lieberman’s name was bound to come up in recent published reports in connection with an announcement by liberal heart throb Ned Lamont that he intended to put together an exploratory committee to advise him on a gubernatorial run.

In a Rick Green column, Lieberman is mentioned twice, not fatally or venomously. Green wondered whether Ned Lamont, who successfully ran a primary against Lieberman, had a second act in his repertoire, now that he has thrown his hat “near the gubernatorial ring,” as one reporter wittily put it.

If the Jepsen piece in the Courant is confusing on moral imperatives, it may be because it was craftily designed to confuse.

Mr. Jepsen writes that “He (Lieberman) exalted morality over personal loyalty in excoriating President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, yet demanded personal loyalty from Connecticut Democrats in 2006 who opposed the Iraq war on moral grounds.”

There is a tangle of confusion here, and it should not take a lawyer to unravel it.

Mr. Jepsen cannot plausibly deny that the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal was a scandal. Even ex-president Clinton, after he found it impossible to deny that he did not “know that woman, Lewinsky,” readily admitted he had caused a scandal.

It was in all the papers at the time, the flames being fanned by partisan Republicans.

It is true that Lieberman reproved the president on moral grounds, and following Lieberman reproach, the better angels of Clinton’s nature caused him to put forward an implicit apology, both to the nation and more importantly to his storm tossed wife.

Surely, the former Chairman of the state’s Democratic Party would not wish to place morality BELOW what he calls loyalty to the party. Loyalty to the Democratic Party during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal did not require men of conscience to bite their tongues when confronted by the unsavory facts. Even Mrs. Clinton, way down the road, expressed exasperation at her husband.

There is some indication in the Jepsen piece that Mr. Jepsen is asserting Lieberman thought or said that Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq ought to have put aside their moral objection to the war to support him -- because failing to do so would have indicated a lack of loyalty… to his party?

It is doubtful that Lieberman, especially since he disagreed at the time with others in his party on the point of the Iraq war, would have made the mistake of conflating himself and his party.

While the Watergate scandal was unfolding, a delegation of prominent Republican visited then President Richard Nixon and urged him to resign his office. Barry Goldwater, later to run on the Republican ticket for president, was one of the delegates. Would Mr. Jepsen assert that Goldwater’s act was disloyal to the Republican Party? That assertion may hold water, it seems to me, only if one conflates Nixon with the Republican Party.

Mr. Jepsen’s point, if he ever had a point, is confusing.

Lieberman addressed the Clinton/Lewinski scandal in a book published in 2000 called “In Praise of Public life.”

In it, he described with great disdain the features of public spectacles. It was not surprising, he wrote, that many young people had become disenchanted with politics after scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra. This is what he wrote about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal:

“That is not surprising when you think about the sordid spectacle that culminated in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, the partisan bickering and bloodletting unleashed through that national crisis, the aura of zealous pursuit infecting the independent council’s investigation, the media’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for scandal, the assent of a character like Larry Flint as a moral arbiter and influence on this momentous process. In the wake of such a gaudy and demeaning saga at what is supposed to be the highest, most dignified level of our society, is it any wonder that Americans by the millions simply turned away in disappointment and disgust?”

It is plain from this description that Lieberman was not solely absorbed by the delinquencies – one might almost say the juvenile delinquencies – of the president. He was concerned, as a matter if principle, with the moral retrogression of the culture.

We all have different memories of these things. My recollection is that Lieberman’s reproof help to forestall an impeachment inquiry then underway. This certainly would have been a service to both Clinton and The Democratic Party.

Curry’s objections to Lieberman are sounder; and yet even he, a superb moralist, tends to forget in his criticism that it was the left wing of Curry’s party -- allied with former Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker and Tom D’Amore, implacable enemies of their bete noir -- that gave Lieberman the boot. After having been dumped from the party he had served with some distinction, Lieberman defended his seat in a general election against Lamont as an independent – and won. His victory, such as it was, caused a seismic disturbance in the Democratic Force that continues to rattle some brains within the party even now.

But really, if one is drummed out of the party, the unceremonious ejection frees one from some forms of a servile loyalty that even Curry would not wish to respect. If Curry doubts it, he might want to have a chat with that principled paragon of party independence, Republican maverick Lowell Weicker, some of whose agents are now assisting Lamont in his gubernatorial bid .

The Progressive U.S. Congress

2009-11-07T15:30:00.001-05:00

It’s official, Politico reports: There are 237 millionaires in Congress, some of them progressive Democrats.

Quick – before they skedaddle -- tax’em!

Shays Points The Way

2009-11-07T15:15:00.005-05:00

Keila Torres of the Connecticut Post reports that former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England standing – before he was knocked down by Democrat Jim Himes – is selling his house of ten years and has made a handsome profit on the sale.

The water side 12-room Colonial on Beacon Street was purchased in 1999 for $490,000, has an assessed value of $817,580 and is expected to sell for over a million.

Shays has fled with his wife to Maryland, so as to be near the beltway, where both are scraping by to keep bone and sinew knitted together.

"Yes, I'm selling the house on the water," Shays said last May. "The taxes are high and we are not really in a position to keep it."

Hmmm … yet another nutmegger driven from his hearth and home by joblessness and high taxes: A Greek comic of the Old School would see a strong note of irony in there somewhere.

To The Millionaire Sitting In Darkness

2009-11-06T15:13:00.004-05:00

At the beginning of November, there occurred on the blog site “Connecticut Local Politics” a fruitful discussion concerning the yet nascent conservative movement in Connecticut.

The disputants fell into one of two pews: There were those on the left side of the church who, biting their knuckles, supposed the state was falling into the clutches of wicked national conservatives; and there were those, myself among them, on the right side of the church, who pointed out that the powers that be in the state, what ever the drift nationally, were moderate Republicans, a vanishing species, and left of center Democrats, with nary a conservative in sight.

Politically, Connecticut has rested for years -- now uneasily -- in the hands of liberal Democrats. Presently, the state legislature is full of progressives, captained in the House by a former union steward, the redoubtable Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, and in the senate by a committed progressive, Don Williams. The legislature has enough votes to override Governor Jodi Rell’s veto; and should anyone suppose that Rell has served as a breakwater preventing liberals from spending the state into penury, the last budget battle may disabuse them of his fantasy.

To avoid a political trap door, Rell refused to sign Connecticut’s spendthrift budget, intending to line-veto some expensive unnecessary earmarks. After the swollen spending budget passed through the legislature somewhat in the manner of a cow passing through innards of an anaconda, Rell was told she could not do this without having signed the budget. Check mate time had arrived, and the Queen – Snow White, as the Democrats preferred to call her – had been outflanked.

The budget passed by the veto proof Democratic majority, which relied for balance upon one time only revenue sources and a pocket full of smoke and mirrors, was found by Democratic state Comptroller Nancy Wyman to be out of balance by about a billion dollars, a figure that is certain to increase.
The final budget, recently pushed through the legislature by Williams and Donovan, is a $37.6 billion lodestone that disperses $18.64 billion this fiscal year and $18.93 billion in 2010-11.

Noting the many getting and spending problems in Connecticut, Moody’s has rated the state’s bonds down from 2AA to negative, a cold splash in the face for Democrats in the legislature who had hoped to patch their budget with a new progressive income tax and bubble gum.

The discussion at CLP evolved into a useful discourse on the many houses within the conservative movement; one is tempted to use the word “diversity” in this connection.

One Blogger was kind enough to provide a partial listing of some of the well appointed chambers:

Fiscal conservatives
Libertarian conservatives
National Security-oriented
Neoconservatives
Paleoconservatives
Traditionalist conservatives
Religious Right/Theoconservatives
Social conservatives
States’ rights

The proposition that the conservative movement hath many mansions, somewhat like Heaven, was stoutly defended by another blogger, ACR (Doug Hageman), a stalwart member of Connecticut’s Republican Central Committee.

My own contribution was to point out, with a bow to C. S. Lewis, that a thing seen from the inside is often very different than the same thing seen from the outside.

Most nutmeggers in the middle have received their information about conservatives from those who are hostile to it. The horns and tail with which the conservative movement in United States has been adorned is a rhetorical flourish necessity to those who wish to gather all the little unaffiliated chicks under their left wing.

One thing is absolutely certain: For the last half century in Connecticut politics, the state has been dominated by liberals and moderates; which is to say, the deciders, both inside and outside government, have been center left, and the engine that moves the center – a compliant and complacent media, unions, organized political groups – has been left of center.

Should anyone doubt this, let them rise to a challenge: Name three conservatives on the staff of the only state wide newspaper in Connecticut going back, say, 30 years. None will be able to point to a well organized conservative group of long standing in the state able to turn out as many votes as unions, or the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG), or… here may be included the whole alphabet soul of left of center groups that dot the state like mushrooms.

For liberals, left of center politicians, latte sipping, putatively “objective” commentators and former Rockefeller Republicans who prefer NPR to the toxic conservative radio talk show hosts, Connecticut is and has been a Garden of Eden; which is another way of saying that liberals have been unimpeded in their largely successful effort to spend the state back into the dark ages, while charging the bill to millionaires and mini-millionaires.

That’s a short way of saying that, whatever the economic or social problems besetting the state, it ain’t the fault of conservatives. Broadly speaking, conservatives have never in Connecticut had their turn at political bat. The sense among easily spooked defenders of the status quo in Connecticut is that into this garden now creeps a snake. The winds of change outside the usual safe liberal precincts have ruffled the feathers of those who duty it is to cooperate with the present system.

There are two kinds of Republicans in Connecticut: satisfied Republicans and dissatisfied Republicans. There are in the state two kinds of Democrats: satisfied Democrats and dissatisfied Democrats. There is an inchoate feeling among some political watchers, so far untutored by sound research, that the growing pool of independents in the state is fed from these two tributaries. It is the secret dream of all political organizers within both major parties to adapt their parties in a way so as to capture this growing pool of voters. This is not possible without changing either of the major parties in such a way as to make both of them uninviting to their present members.

People who don’t like the way things are going in Connecticut ought, purely as a practical matter, to hitch up with the conservative or libertarian movement -- because these are the only practical engines of change within the state.

But, you say, you are not a conservative; you are cold on libertarianism; you prefer to get along by paying the dhimmie tax of the reigning power. Very well. Political ecumenism does not require you to join a church. Conservative doors have no locks and bars on them. They are organizations, political instruments, tools. Look upon them as opportunities for change, if that is what you desire. If you do not desire change, I am afraid I must play the bearer of bad news: The tide of change is on its way to your doorstep all the same. This is especially true in Connecticut, where the state, after years of coasting, has set its foot on a sharp down-slope that even progressives such as Ned Lamont – the heartthrob of the left who challenged and beat Sen. Joe Lieberman in a primary -- find as dangerous as it is slippery. Casting off his mask as the darling of the far left, Lamont is now exploring a run for governor. Should he or someone like him be successful, what reason have you to believe that he or his kind will not yield to the blandishments of a Speaker Donovan or a President Pro Tem of the state Senate Williams?

Last week, I wandered into a book store in Farmington. My wife and I delivered a Oreck vacuum cleaner for repair in the area, and were told by a repairman who took pity on us, because we had traveled some distance, that if we hung around for an hour, he would have it ready for us.

So, we drifted across the street to Borders; and there, near the coffee section, we came upon that old anti-corporatist war horse Ralph Nader holding forth before a small crowd of titulated onlookers and potential clients.

Nader was doing what he has done from time immemorial: He was persuading the corporate community, this time by means of a novel he had written, to join him in an effort to disenfranchise the corporate community by giving him millions of dollars. Apparently Walter Buffet is one of the anti- Ayn Randian characters in Nader’s new novel. The moneyed class is anxious to serve.

“All we need,” Nader told the crowd, “is about eight billionaires” to finance his utopia, a command economy in which benevolent bureaucrats would direct corporations what to produce from a Washington DC platform empty of lobbyists.

Give be your billions, Nader instructs the billionaires in his novel and atop the political stump from which he has been pontificating his entire adult life -- I’ll do the rest.

And they do, they do. The Connecticut Citizen Action Group founded by Nader and then Connecticut congressman Toby Moffett, plucks its money from wealthy gardens in West Hartford, New Canaan and Greenwich. The Gold Coast is anxious to help.

Why do they do it?

Perhaps on the gibbet, the last billionaire – for there will be none, nor millionaires either, in Nader’s dystopian economic universe – will have the pleasure of saying no to his destruction... or not.

There must be better charities than this to give to. There must be places that will use these misdirected givings to a better purpose than to buying rope with which to hang millionaires and mini-millionaires; and if there is not such a group here in Connecticut, a few hundreds thousand – billions are not necessary, though certainly they will be grateful accepted – may produce one.

It cannot happen too soon.

Governor Lamont's Chance

2009-11-05T10:09:00.007-05:00

The day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans in Connecticut appeared to have staged something of a come-back, evidence that the party is not cold-stone dead, Ned Lamont announced he was forming a committee to explore a run for governor.

The following day, his announcement was wreathed in headlines. The Hartford Courant ran a top of the fold front page story: “Ned Lamont May Run For Governor.”

Is there any significance to the timing?

If one is going to throw one’s hat “near the ring,” as one publication put it, a post election period is not a bad time to do it. The T.S. Elliot poem, “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes to mind:

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;…
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

The attention grabbing headlines suggest that Lamont’s entrée into the race will change the Democratic political terrain. There are now multiple candidates on the Democratic and Republican side both in the gubernatorial race and the race for the senate.

Lamont is best known for having won a primary against Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose unpalatable position on the Iraq war earned him the enmity of left wing progressives.

In a late day interview with Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo (TPM) , a liberal blog site, Lamont was asked whether he expected to win the endorsement of Sen. Joe Lieberman.

"I, um, I wouldn't expect that," Lamont said, after a brief pause. "But I certainly reached out to Sen. Lieberman today, if he wants to hear why I'm doing this, and why I think it's important."

It may have been a bad day for the senator, whose office in Washington DC was infested with 9 sit-ins protesting Lieberman’s position on health care.

Lieberman ran in the general election as an Independent and managed to hang on to his seat; it was here that an irreparable breech occurred. The primary jihad threw into bold relief a split in the Democratic Party those on the left continue to exploit.

In the course of his primary battle, Lamont assembled a “kitchen cabinet” that may prove useful to him in a prospective gubernatorial campaign.

In the kitchen during Lamont’s primary were: Tom Swan of the “Connecticut Citizen Action Group,” a left wing group fathered in 1970 by Ralph Nader and then congressman Toby Moffett; Tom D’Amore, Lowell Weicker’s aide de camp during his senatorial reign and later during Weicker’s wandering in the wilderness as an Independent governor; Weicker himself, who came out of retirement to plug Lamont’s campaign against his old nemesis Joe Lieberman, and the usual suspects in the media. Possibly Bill Cibes, who ran for governor on a pro-income tax plank and was soundly rejected, may have been floating around the Lamont camp under deep cover.

The reassembling of the kitchen cabinet active during Lamont’s senatorial campaign may already be in process. Lamont and Cibes are attached at the head. As pedagogical bunkmates at Central State University in New Britain, they have written together a paper regarded by some on the left, now slouching towards the center, as a program of action that may prefigure Lamont’s gubernatorial campaign.

Bass remarked in his report that Lamont’s gubernatorial run will be “different” than his primary. In politics – particularly for candidates like Lamont, who has no previous baggage as a practical politician – there always will be time for visions and revisions.

It will be recalled that Weicker, during in his own career in public office, cut his jib to the political winds; that is what a “maverick” does.

Weicker began his career in the senate as a screaming pro-Vietnam war Republican. Only later did the conservative Republican from Greenwich discover the virtue of being a maverick, “his own man” as he referred to himself in campaigns in which he made common cause with Democratic senators Chris Dodd and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Connecticut Republicans attached by bonds of affection to their party even now -- so fresh is the memory of Weicker’s recurring and wounding defections -- would have no difficulty in drawing up a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” on Weicker’s part, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, that forced his party, finally and at long last, to declare its independence of the maverick.

The principle virtue of the “maverick” is maneuverability. Throwing off the bonds that tie him to his party, the maverick can more easily move between ideological lines and snatch votes from the right, left and center – to be sure, at the risk of being disrespected by his base.

The blood of the far left still runs hot against Lieberman, and Lamont has surrounded himself with friendly Weicker associates. Indeed, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Lamont is Weicker’s political afterlife. A Greenwich millionaire, Lamont has lots of money, a few ideas that may propel him in a more moderate direction, much good will on the far left for his yeoman’s service in the primary against Lieberman, and a practical political background shallow enough to allow him to present himself to the general public as a “pragmatist.”

In Connecticut politics, pragmatists are those politicians proficient in fooling most of the people some of the time.

Lamont has a chance.

The Republican Sweep

2009-11-04T10:12:00.002-05:00

The Wall Street Journal, the day after a Republican sweep, acknowledged that President Barack Obama was dealt a tough hand, a deep recession and a financial crisis.

“But in New Jersey especially,” the paper notes, “former Goldman Sachs chief Jon Corzine became governor in the belief his financial industry skills would bring the state's high taxes and high spending under control. He didn't and he lost. If Washington's Democrats keep pushing taxes and spending in the same direction, they may be joining Jon Corzine on the retirement beaches soon.”

Here in Connecticut, Democrats ought to heed the same warning. The depth of the disenchantment with Democrats in Connecticut, as reflected in some astonishing spreads – Torrington: DEM 1796; GOP 6571 – should be worrisome to Democratic leaders who interpreted Obama’s win as a signal that his progressive programs would lift all the Democratic boats.

There is room for second thoughts. And some progressives are beginning to bite their nails.

Schiff Among The Liberals

2009-11-03T20:58:00.002-05:00

Liberal journalists don’t quite know how to undermine the candidacy of Peter Schiff, who is running against Sen. Chris Dodd as a Republican, but in time they’ll figure it out.

On Dennis House’s “Face the State,” two liberal commentators, Rick Green of the Hartford Courant and Brian Lockhart of the Stamford Advocate tossed Schiff around on their horns for awhile. It was difficult to tell who was having more fun.

A libertarian economist, Schiff tends to reserve his fire for autocratic governments that distort private transactions through either unsupportable taxes or regulations or both. In fact, if you have a moment, he would be happy to explain to you that all regulations and business taxes are impositions on wages, because businesses pass along these charges to their customers. An unfettered private market, according to Schiff’s view, distributes goods and services more efficiently and less expensively than over-taxed, over-regulated economies. Schiff prefers consumption taxes to income taxes.

If Schiff were a politician in, say, Hugo Chavez’s utopia, he would instantly be gagged and rendered harmless. Some of Schiff’s views do not sit well with liberals at ease in command economies

On the other hand, liberals have been flirting for a long while with libertarianism lite on some issues vital to them.

Liberals have often maintained that government officials should not post themselves under our beds and write legislation forcing their puritanical moral dictums on gays who want to marry and be their potty old selves. Schiff told Green he had no problem with gaiety.

Neither is the Republican candidate for senator hot on the war in Afghanistan: It’s costly and no one in the Obama administration yet has settled upon a reasonable goal for the country. What is the end point of our presence there, Schiff asked? Given the economic recession in the United States precipitated by the collapse of the housing industry, which in turn was caused by Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, can we afford to maintain a presence in Afghanistan until we lose the war?

Schiff would not obstruct attempts to legalize medical marijuana. When asked the question by Green,” Schiff seemed rather puzzled and responded at first with an innocent shrug, saying “I don’t smoke marijuana…” Then, divining the import of Green’s question, he gave a cheery green light to decriminalization.

One could almost see Green ticking off the usual liberal litmus test list: Marijuana okay… gays alright... anti-war views sound…

Still, it was clear to both interrogators that sitting before them was a troubling candidate. Should Schiff be successful in toppling U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, what would he DO in Washington? Would he spend most of his time knitting his register like Madame Defarge, while watching politician’s heads fall from the guillotine into baskets?

Schiff gave his two questioners to understand that he would be very busy dismantling the regulatory machinery in Washington D.C. This is not the way to gain friends and influence liberals, and the dread prospect caused a few worry marks to appear on Green’s forehead.

Wait a minute, cautioned Lockhart, isn’t it common knowledge that all of our troubles right now have been caused by a lack of regulation?

It is, answered Schiff, “and common knowledge is wrong.” Then he led the two through a maze of cause and effect that pointed a boney finger in the direction of regulators who laid the trip wires that blew up the housing market, one of whom was Dodd.

The imperturbable House, used to such patter, seemed to take the coming Schiff revolution in stride.

Things became confusing when Green asked whether Schiff would have supported the GI bill after World War II. This was the bill that facilitated college educations for returning servicemen. Schiff said he didn’t know and asked Green if he knew why present day college education was so expensive.

It is altogether possible that Schiff, who does do his homework, read Green’s article in the Courant a week earlier entitled “High-Quality Education Comes At A High Price.” Green’s second paragraph began: “The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education estimates that tuition and fees have risen 439 percent since 1982, while the Consumer Price Index has grown by 106 percent and median family income has increased by 147 percent.”

Education costs, Schiff told Green, follow in the rut of government subsidized student loans. If money is cheap and credit easy, students avail themselves of more loans. Colleges then hike up their costs to capture readily available money.

If Linda McMahon is the P.T. Barnum of Connecticut politics during what promised to be an entertaining scramble for Dodd’s seat, Schiff is its Cassandra. Or, better still, he is Peter crying wolf -- when the wolf really is at the door.

Has “Socialism” Become A Red Herring?

2009-11-03T15:27:00.003-05:00

Yes, pretty much.

Socialism arrived in Europe with the Christian message, tucked inside an embarrassment of Beatitudes.

There are two sets of Christian Beatitudes. Mathew (5:1-12) is toothless, because none of the blessings in Mathew are accompanied by the red in tooth and claw curses found in Luke (6: 20-26).

“Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you that are rich: for ye have your consolation.” And there is this hard to swallow beatitude: “Blessed shall ye be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you and shall reproach you and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake… Woe to you when men shall bless you; for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets.”

That last might serve as a testament useful to column writers. You cannot go far wrong when you take up arms against the world, which belongs to Satan and, for the moment, at least in Connecticut and Washington DC, to the Democratic Party.

At it most elemental, Christianity was and is an organization, the fancy word for which is “church.”

When Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, was banished to the wintry wilderness of Rhode Island by false prophets in Massachusetts, he took up cudgels against the Cottons and Mathers of the world. His cudgel and consolation he found in the lines quoted above: “Blessed shall ye be when men shall… separate you.” Shun their blessings, Williams shouted to an unheeding Boston, “for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets.”

Williams never let the Boston ministers, warm by their firesides, forget his first bone chilling winter in Providence. That winter wanted his life and remained in the marrow of his bones. The Indians who saved him from the howling winter would remain in his heart to the end.

Every organization is both a refuge from the world and a redoubt.

Is this socialism, this huddling together for mutual succor?

It is, pretty much. The language itself is a social product. Adam, before Eve, did not need language. The unsociable lonely dead need no means of communication.

Now, some social services are provided by the state. Others are provided by what is blushingly called “the free market system,” partially compromised in some cases by errant socialist tendencies. Karl Marks, for instance, would have been proud of the hospital that cares for the indigent and passes along their bills to other business patrons, for in this case service is flowing from each according to his means to each according to his needs.

What this means is that we already have a system in which private enterprise, sniffing at socialism, conducts business according to socialist and religious prescriptions.

However, because the state gives us – for a price – postage stamps and police officers and teachers, it is by no means appropriate that the state should give us our daily bread. It is very important not to confuse the things of man with the things of the state. The state did not invent wheat; it did not even invent the wheat thresher. And before the wheat arrives at our table as bread, it passes through the hands of many people, few of them agents of the state. It takes a village to make a loaf of bread. A few politicians can make the Department of Motor Vehicles. Villages are made up of mutual aide societies, such as families, the smallest and heartiest of G. K. Chesterton’s vibrant cultural platoons. It will be important to recall that you cannot have the cultural platoons that G. K. Chesterton so often delighted in if the state, like some secular Aaron’s rod, swallows up all the little platoons.

To take a word in season from Sarah Palin’s new book, that is socialism gone rogue.

Benito Mussolini, who got many of his best lines and not a few of his ideas from his first mistress, an ardent communist socialist turned fascist socialist, summed up fascism briefly in a few well chosen words: “Everything in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state.” Mussolini was a journalist and had a way with words. When the Italians tired of him, just before he was swallowed up by a larger national socialist, Herr Hitler, Mussolini lived for awhile in his own diminishing state and finally was strung up at an Esso station by a mob of resentful, terribly ungrateful citizens.

The state -- especially in Italy, but in the United States as well -- is an unforgiving master.

Everything You Were Afraid To Ask About Dick Blumenthal

2009-10-30T20:41:00.009-04:00

Blumenthal and the Media

It would be a considerable understatement to say that the relationship between Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Connecticut’s media is cordial. The great failing of the state’s media is that it seems to be unwilling -- or perhaps unable -- to mine below the surface of the attorney general’s all too frequent press releases.

In a recent focus group finding, a matter of fierce controversy between Gov. Jodi Rell and her opponents, it was determined that Blumenthal was at least as popular if not more so than Rell, whose rating after a bruising budget battle with Democrats was 59%, low for the governor. Focus group participants said of Blumenthal, according to a report in the Journal Inquirer, that he was “a strong leader they would have faith in to lead them out of the budget deficit problem… One participant thought that Blumenthal was on television and ‘out there’ as much as the governor.”

Connecticut’s media has a good deal to do with Blumenthal’s shining image on a hill. That image remains lustrous despite some heavy panting from Blumenthal's critics. The Competitive Enterprise Institute http://cei.org/pdf/5719.pdf (CEI), for instance, rated Blumenthal as the worst attorney general in the United States.

George Gombossy’s report on a case involving Valerie and David Hoffman is illustrative. Gombossy, it should be noted, is no longer associated with the Hartford Courant. The bulldog consumer advocate was “let go” after he took a bite out of one of the Courant’s advertisers, so Gombossy claimed. The Courant strongly insisted at the time that Gombossy’s position was eliminated and that he was eligible but declined to apply for a replacement position at a lesser salary. Gombossy’s quarrel with his former employer is in litigation and, as is usual in such cases, parties to the suit have clammed up – to a point: Gombossy carried his jihad with his former employer to his new blog site, “Connecticut Watchdog." At the end of September, the Courant reported: “George Gombossy, The Courant's former consumer columnist, has filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, charging that his dismissal violated his right to free speech because he insisted on writing investigative columns and blogs that criticized major advertisers”

Two primary sources, Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection and Attorney General Blumenthal, were useful to Gombossy in the promotion of his Courant columns. It was a report from Blumenthal on Sleepys, a large mattress company chain and one of the Courant’s reliable advertisers, that was partly responsible for upending Gombossy’s career at the paper. Gombossy had written for the Courant for 40 years. He was for 3 years the paper’s consumer protection watchdog. Since his departure, Gombossy’s Courant archives have been blocked by the paper. But the opening few paragraphs on his report on the Hoffmans, dated Feb. 17, 2008, are, to say the least, a tease:

“Year after year, Valerie Hawk-Hoffman invited unsuspecting would-be customers to her graceful colonial home in Bethel on Saturdays for classes on the wonders of herbs and how they could help you look younger, thinner and improve your sex life.

“After the class many of them signed forms to purchase products like Cold Away, Skinny Mini, and Italian Bee, expecting to receive a sample of the product.

“But based on more than 200 written complaints to state officials, what many of those customers unwittingly signed up for were automatic shipments that could only be canceled by certified letters accepted by Hoffman a month before the next shipment. Some complained they had received multiple orders each month when they signed up for one monthly order. Others accused her of refusing to accept their certified letters…”

The attorney general’s initial press release, dated a year earlier, Feb 19, 2007 announced a joint legal action with Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) Commissioner Jerry Farrell, Jr. against “Sunrise Herbal Remedies, Inc. - also known as Sage Advice, Inc., and Herbs and Teas - and its owner Valerie Hawk-Hoffman.” The press release quoted both the attorney general and Farrell:

"Our lawsuit charges that this company repeatedly sent consumers herbs they never ordered and then tried to bully them into paying," Blumenthal said. "Instead of relieving stress and promoting harmony as its products promised, Sunrise Herbal raised anger and blood pressure by seeking to exploit consumers. Our evidence shows that they sent regular shipments when customers made one-time purchases or shipped two to three times the amount ordered. My office will fight to stop these abuses and win restitution for costumers (sic)."

"Business practices such as these cannot be tolerated," Farrell said. "What is envisioned as a one-time purchase should not become a never-ending nightmare of hassles. This wasn't just one consumer who had a problem - it was many consumers, and that goes to show that this was an intentional business practice of the company, not a mere mistake."

The lacuna between Blumenthal’ s initial press release and further hearings and judgments on the Hoffman case should have provided Gombossy with enough time to flesh out his story. As usual, Gombossy and much of Connecticut’s press rely heavily on Blumenthal’s press releases. There was little follow-up reporting on the Hoffman case as it wended its way through multiple court hearings.

Gombossy’s report is more colorful than Blumenthal’s, though the attorney general, practiced in the journalistic art from his days as an Editorial Chairman and reporter for the Harvard Crimson, likes to paints in bright strokes.

In Gombossy’s first few leading graphs, one can almost see the spider inviting the fly into her web so as to sell her herbal tea -- and then eat the victim.

Blumenthal would later sue Hoffman, as well as her husband -- who had no business connection with his wife’s company -- for $1,332,000, a mind-boggling amount levied against a business woman who sells tea and herbal products. In the largest CUPTA settlement in history, a multi-billion dollar industry, Microsoft, paid out less money in fines than Blumenthal has sought from Hoffman’s one woman operation. The amount demanded as reparations from the tea and herbal vendor and her husband, a building contractor, it may be imagined, was somewhat stressful to them.

In his Courant column -- written, according to the dates specified in the Courant archives, a year after Blumenthal’s press release announcing the Hoffman’s suit -- Gombossy claimed: “…based on more than 200 written complaints to state officials, what many of those customers unwittingly signed up for were automatic shipments that could only be canceled by certified letters accepted by Hoffman a month before the next shipment. Some complained they had received multiple orders each month when they signed up for one monthly order. Others accused her of refusing to accept their certified letters…”

Gombossy cites “more than 200 written complaints” received by Blumenthal and Farrell, and writes that “many of those customers,” though he does not indicate how many, “unwittingly” signed up for automatic shipments.

Let’s pause here and ask the kinds of questions journalists should ask upon receiving press releases from Blumenthal.

How many of the 200 complaining customers “unwittingly” signed up for their merchandise? The forms they were signing were business contracts, and it must be presumed that few of the 200 complainants were illiterate. Of the 200 complaining customers, how many were from out of state, beyond Blumenthal’s jurisdiction? Of the 200 customers cited by Blumenthal as complainants, how many did not buy products from Hoffman? The answers to many of these questions would be forthcoming in public court records that were either not examined or reported upon by Gombossy.

Did the customers signing the forms for Hoffman’s products perhaps notice the “Auto Ship” information included on the contracts to which they appended their signatures? That information specified the terms under which the pre-product could be cancelled. Auto Ship is a common devise, especially for perishable merchandise. If this language was on the signed forms– and it was – how can it be said that those who signed the orders had “unwittingly” signed up for automatic shipments?

Gombossy mentioned that the shipments “could only be canceled by certified letters accepted by Hoffman a month before the next shipment.”

Herein lies a story that might have been explored by Gombossy had he been just a wee but more energetic in questioning claims made by Blumenthal’s office.

Valerie Hoffman was summoned to a meeting at the offices of Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection, an agency that often works hand in glove with the attorney general’s office in the prosecution of consumer complaints.

Made aware of the alleged complaints against her, she gave indications she wanted to satisfy the complainants. A professional business woman, Hoffman did not want her business to be crippled by endless litigation. She thought at the time that all the reported complaints alleged against her could be settled for about $7,000. None of the complaints, she thought, were justified. Never-the-less, she expressed her willingness to satisfy those customers alleged to have complained– whether or not she thought the complainants had sufficient cause to complain.

She then asked the officials at DCP what they wanted her to do. They made only one request of her: Should consumers wish to cancel out of the auto ship contract, they must do so by certified mail, a process that consumers would later find burdensome. This unfriendly consumer policy Hoffman was required to adopt by the DCP was so onerous that some of Hoffman’s customers refused to cancel by certified mail; others cancelled late. Many of the suits were related to this discontent.

Because Hoffman was pre-ordering product, her customers were required to cancel orders some days into the prior month. A customer who sent in a registered letter at the end of May canceling an order for June, for instance, had already ordered product for June that was in the process of being shipped. Overlooking such details, Blumenthal’s office simply assumed that every complaint was legitimate, when this was not the case.

Hoffman readily complied with the request made of her by the DCP. Later on, this would prove onerous for people who wanted to cancel their orders, because it required money and time from the complainants. The requirement mentioned by Gombossy was one demanded of Hoffman by the DCP, a piece of useful information not included in Gombossy’s column written more than a year later, which leaves the reader with the impression – easily corrected by asking a few important questions – that it was Hoffman who was erecting frustrating obstacles standing in the way of customer cancellations.

In fact, Hoffman wanted to satisfy her customer’s issues quickly. But any possible attempt to satisfy their concerns was put on hold after Blumenthal’s office began the litigation against her. It would be true in a precise sense to say it was Blumenthal and the DCP, not Hoffman, whose actions prohibited Hoffman from satisfying her customer’s requests. Such inconvenient items were not mentioned in Gombossy’s report, because the report relied exclusively on the word of Blumenthal, the theatre director who was framing media reports.

If the matter had been put to a judge at this point, the judge very likely would have cautioned the complainants to read contracts before they signed them.

It would take the Hoffmans years before they were able to put their case before a judge in a hearing they had demanded as soon as the litigation had commenced. The Hoffmans were driven to trial by the outrageous demands made by the attorney general’s office. Fortunately, they were luckily enough to have engaged a good lawyer, Jim Oliver, who has guided them through treacherous litigation shoals. Along the way, a private window on the questionable methods used by that office was opened to them. That window today remains shut to reporters and commentators who are strangely incurious concerning Blumenthal’s misuse of his authority.

Blumenthal And Hoffman

Whatever case Blumenthal thought he had against Hoffman was seriously flawed from the beginning by what Hoffman in her court challenges considered to be gross prosecutorial misconduct.

Blumenthal’s modis operandi in consumer protection cases usually follows the same course. The cases that flow into his office have a few different tributaries. Some cases are picked up from news accounts; others leech into the office from the Connecticut’s Consumer Protection Department; others arise from spin-off investigations conducted by Blumenthal’s office; still others are piggy-back cases that have been probed by other attorneys general.

Again, the Hoffman case is illustrative. The case drifted on to Blumenthal’s radar from consumer complaints made to the Consumer Protection Department. Blumenthal announced his intent to sue in a press release, which was picked up by the Hartford Courant. The case lingered in his office until it garnered more press, by Gombossy among others, nearly a year later, at which point Blumenthal’s office, startled awake, began to pursue the case in earnest. When Hoffman was summoned to Blumenthal’s office, she was told that it now would cost her considerably more money to settle her case because she had “embarrassed the attorney general.”

When Blumenthal becomes earnest, he obtains ex-parte judgments from courts.

An ex-parte judgment is a delicate instrument most effectively employed in criminal cases, such as mob actions and drug cases. It permits a prosecutor to obtain from a judge an attachment of assets without the necessity or precaution of a hearing. Blumenthal’s ex-parte judgment stripped the Hoffmans of their 14th Amendment Constitutional right to be secured in their property from prosecutors who declined to allow them to answer charges they knew to be false.

A procedure of this kind is a scalpel that should be use with great caution. Blumenthal’s office wields it like a mace.

In the Hoffman case, Blumenthal used the exparte judgment to attach the assets of Valerie Hoffman’s husband, a builder in Maine. The Hoffmans declared in litigation briefs that Blumenthal or his agents had reason to believe there was no connection between Mr. Hoffman’s construction business and Mrs. Hoffman’s business. Mr. Hoffman’s business depended upon using the profits he had realized on one construction project to finance successive projects. Blumenthal’s exparte attachment of Mr. Hoffman’s assets interrupted this process and destroyed his credit.

But there is more: Especially in civil cases, it’s essential that the affidavit used to secure the ex-parte seizure of assets should be flawless -- because it is on the basis of the affidavit that judges award prosecutors extraordinary power to seize assets with a wink at 14th amendment constitutional amendment.

Section 1 of the 14th amendment, adopted after the Civil war, provides: “…No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The affidavit submitted by Blumenthal’s office, attorney Oliver contended in court, was fatally flawed. Nearly all the statements contained in the affidavit were not “facts” based on personal knowledge, as required by statute. The affidavit was replete with opinions and legal conclusions based upon a review of hearsay documents.

In his press release, the attorney general contended with much fanfare that 200 customers had issued complaints either to his office or to the Department of consumer protection. But when the time arrived for Blumenthal to put up or shut up in a judicial proceeding, his office produced one authentic witness who admitted under cross examination that she had not read the contract. The witness conceded she had been reluctant to cancel her contract because the policy imposed on Hoffman by the state’s Consumer Protection Department was too burdensome to her.

The Assistant Attorney General who had been handling the case, Matthew Fitzsimmons, called one other witness to the stand – himself. He was, the Hoffman’s contended, an inauthentic witness. In fact, he was not a witness at all, a witness being someone who has first hand knowledge of events litigated. Fitzgerald’s testimony was hearsay, a fact dutifully noted at the time by the judge, who had put to Fitzgerald the following query: Are you sure you want to do this?

Fitzsimmons was sure: He mounted the stand and was cross examined. From that time forward, the jig, as they say in the slammer, was up.

Fitzsimmons’ testimony demonstrated he had no personal knowledge of any of the consumer transactions upon which the State based its enforcement action. The sole witness’ testimony established that Fitzsimmons lacked any personal knowledge concerning how Mrs. Schreiber came to participate in the auto-ship program or whether she, in fact, even suffered a consumer injury.

Blumenthal had seized the property of a man living in Maine, a state that falls outside his jurisdiction, through the use of a defective affidavit, positive publicity from a media that asked few follow-up questions of Blumenthal and failed to survey and report on litigation that contradicted Blumenthal’s assertions in his press releases.

Chutzpa And More Chutzpa

The exparte attachment on assets that Blumenthal regularly receives from judges tilts the playing field between Blumenthal’s heavy handed prosecutors and – there is no other way to put this – the attorney general’s litigatory victims. It is a ton of bricks placed on the prosecutorial side of the judicial scales. Used by unscrupulous attorneys general, this blunt instrument renders victims quite literally defenseless, because a defendant deprived of his assets is shorn of the means of defending himself from what may be unjust prosecution. The questionable seizure of assets is in turn used by Blumenthal’s prosecutors as a hostage to persuade his victims to surrender their imprescriptable constitutional rights and to reach pressured agreement with prosecutors to settle the cases in Blumenthal’s favor.

Courts tend willingly to grant exparte seizures of assets when they are deployed to give prosecutors an edge in their dealings with unscrupulous and dangerous drug lords and mafia figures. But even in these cases, the affidavit used to secure the seizure of assets without a hearing must not be based on hearsay testimony. The affiant, the person whose testimony is represented in the affidavit, must have personal knowledge of the facts to which he has sworn in the affidavit.

This rule of court was not met in the Hoffman case. The affiant was an assistant attorney general who had no personal knowledge of the facts represented in the affidavit. The entire house of cards erected by Blumenthal against the Hoffmans was built with this joker card as its foundation stone.

To deploy such a fatally defective weapon against a vendor of tea and herbs is the equivalent of placing a grenade in playpen, hoping against hope that children will not pull the pin. And indeed, Blumenthal’s office sometimes seems to be run by grinning children for whom winning at all costs is a categorical imperative. It may well be an imperative: Blumenthal has so often boasted that his office brings in more money than it spends that one begins to wonder whether the office is driven by greed rather than justice.

In the Hoffman case, Oliver contends, Blumenthal’s prosecution was fatally flawed from the beginning. The affidavit used to secure without a hearing before judge the seizure of Hoffman’s assets and those of her husband implicitly asserted that the facts represented in the affidavit were drawn from a credible witness. This was not the case. Despite Blumenthal’s boast in his first press release that there were more than 200 clients duped by Hoffman, the sole affiant in the affidavit used to seize the Hoffman’s assets was an attorney general in Blumenthal’s office whose remarks were hearsay and who had no personal knowledge of the consumer transactions represented in his materially false affidavit.

Judges should be wary of such submittals from Blumenthal’s office: This is not the first nor -- without the scrutiny of watchful judges -- will it be the last time that attorneys in Blumenthal’s office have relied on materially false affidavits of this kind to secure the assets of their victims.

In another case now making its way through the courts, Blumenthal relied on shoddy investigation to assemble an affidavit used to procure from a judge an exparte attachment of business equipment from the owner of a pellet business, also defended by Oliver..

The owner of the pellet business was shorted by his supplier in an attempt to extort from the pellet business a number of New York customers. The owner was in the process of satisfying the complainants by procuring supplies from a different resource – at a loss to himself –when Blumenthal intervened in the case and shut down any possibility of remuneration.

Blumenthal’s investigator, who compiled the affidavit necessary to allow Blumenthal to seize without a hearing before a judge the equipment the owner needed to satisfy his customers, later admitted in discovery documents that his affidavit was defective.

Relying on one witness, investigator claimed in his affidavit securing the exparte attachment that goods were fraudulently transferred by the owner of the pellet business. In a discovery deposition, Blumenthal’s investigator asserted he had no knowledge of any goods, property or money fraudulently transferred by the pellet business owner, fatally undermining the rational used to procure the exparte attachment.

It is becoming difficult to avoid the seemingly obvious conclusion. This is a procrustean effort on the part of Blumenthal to fashion affidavits that will allow him to seize property without a hearing to support his premature press releases.

Procrustes was the amiable Greek innkeeper who professed to have a bed that would fit any shape. Those of his customers who were to tall to fit in the bed found themselves bound to it, and their limbs were shortened to accommodate the bed, while his shorter customers were stretched to fit. Facts and affidavits, the body of evidence necessary to procure from deceived judges who award Blumenthal the authority of seize assets that freeze all business activity, appear to have been adjusted to fit Blumenthal’s ingeniously conceived press releases.

Forced to the wall by such unorthodox methods, the owner of the pellet business attempted suicide. Luckily, he was unsuccessful and may someday live to see a time when Connecticut’s attorney’s general may prosecute the right offender.

Before that happens, judges will have to look more closely than Connecticut’s media at Blumenthal’s questionable methods and bullying tactics.

What Next?

Mrs. Hoffman tells me the pain is missing from this piece.

It’s taken me a long time to build up the business,” Hoffman says, “And I’ve been a responsible stakeholder. Blumenthal claims to have received 200 complaints. That’s less than 1% of my business, which means that 99% of my clients had no trouble with any of these policies. When certified letters were sent, none were refused. The two clients who claimed they were – that’s TWO clients – later acknowledged they sent the letters to the wrong address. All this was demonstrated in court, when finally I had my day in court. But Blumenthal is not interested in compliance. He’s interested in dollars.”

It’s not as if Hoffman was hiding her business policies under a bushel.

“The opposite is true,” she said. “Unlike most companies who have their policies in tiny illegible type, I splashed my policies everywhere: on the website in three places, on my brochure, on the receipts, on the invoices, on the wall of my office. I did everything but tattooed them on my forehead. When a client purchased products on the website, they could not sign off with signifying that they agree to these policies. Their signature signified agreement with the policies. Companies are required only to state their policies, and this was done. It may have been overdone.”

Hoffman – and some judges – believes that she has been far more responsible than Blumenthal.

“After three years of litigation,” she says, “Blumenthal’s office still does not know who really is due a refund or who was refunded or who was not refunded. These things should have been known before Blumenthal brought suit. He brings suits that destroy lives, and he doesn’t even know if he has a legitimate suit. But how could anyone expect that office to behave ethically or morally, when year after year they brag how much money they make for the state? Their office is in the extortion business. They throw you in a room with a huge guy who tells you that if you don’t give them money, they’ll ruin your life. That is what happens. And now, not one but three judges have called their office immoral, egregious, vexatious, corrupt and potentially criminal.”

Her struggle is not over.

“We have two suits in process and a new suit pending,” she said. “In previous litigation, Blumenthal claimed sovereign immunity. But that didn’t fly because, according to the judge, sovereign immunity – complete immunity from prosecution – does not apply when one’s actions are egregious, shocking and completely immoral, as in this case.”

In a Maine case, Judge Hornby noted: “The plaintiffs assert that Fitzsimmons swore to a false affidavit in connection with attaching Maine real estate. Such behavior by a state assistant attorney general -- if it occurred -- is deplorable, and could be subject to criminal penalties, bar discipline and other sanctions.”

Hoffman notes, “Matt Fitzsimmons, the attorney in Blumenthal’s office who prosecuted the case, now has admitted in discovery responses that he lied on his affidavits. He is now subject to the loss of his license to practice law, as well as criminal penalties. These admissions have made it possible for us to open other suits. Right now, Blumenthal’s office is facing three multi-million dollar suits filed against them for civil rights violations, abuse of process, slander of title and illegal attachment.”