Posts published in “Guest”

Hartford - Hubbard-Hall President and CEO Molly Kellogg challenged Gov. Ned Lamont face-to-face Wednesday to explain why the Waterbury-based chemical company should stay put.

Kellogg bluntly told Lamont that her family’s 170-year-old manufacturing business could consolidate in South Carolina where running a business is less costly and complicated than in Connecticut.

Later, she said she did not find the governor’s generic responses to her reassuring, but she also expressed a desire to remain in Connecticut where Hubbard-Hall has its roots.

Kellogg got to ask Lamont the second-to-last question when he addressed a business lobbying day that the Connecticut Business & Industry Association organizes every legislative session.

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Read in Republican American

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The leading Senate Democrat draws a rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts.

Democrats like to accuse President Trump of violating institutional democratic norms, and often he does with his rhetorical broadsides. But at least he’s never directly threatened the U.S. Supreme Court the way Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did on Wednesday.

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump.

Mr. Schumer was speaking before abortion-rights activists as the Supreme Court considers whether to curtail the ability of abortion providers to sue on behalf of women seeking abortions—a doctrine known as third-party standing. Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

Early Voting; Last-Minute & Online Registration; Absentee and Provisional Ballots; Ballot Verification and Counting After Election Day

[Editor's Note: If you liked the tallying of votes in Iowa (41 delegates), California (495 delegates) may offer you true love.]

Fourteen states hold primaries next Tuesday, but millions of votes will already have been cast for those contests.

Rules on returning absentee ballots vary. Many states such as Colorado and Minnesota require that absentee ballots be received no later than Election Day.

But in Washington, California and some other states, ballots merely must be postmarked by the election date or day before. So ballots may roll in days later, which could delay election results.

Three-quarters of California voters are expected to receive absentee ballots this year, and political experts project that 40% will be cast before South Carolina’s primary on Saturday. But young people especially tend to procrastinate, so all ballots may not arrive until days after Super Tuesday. Many will also have to be verified.

That’s because Democrats have recently overhauled so many election procedures that mischief and mistakes are almost certain. Californians may now both register and vote at any place in their county on Election Day. Only two weeks ago California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law letting voters change their party identification and address through Election Day. Independents must ask for a Democratic ballot if they want to vote for a Democrat.

Democrats are still griping about the chaotic Iowa caucuses, but the results from California—which awards 495 delegates—may not be known for weeks.

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

What appeared to be a ritual demolishing of the billionaire candidate may humanize him to voters.

Michael Bloomberg must have expected the ambush. He should have prepared himself. For some reason, he didn’t. In his first presidential debate, in Las Vegas last night, his rivals pelted him with rotten fruit. Standing there at the end of the row of candidates, taking it, he seemed inert and discomfited. He made me think of a marble bust. He looked vaguely like William McKinley.

Welcome, the others jeered, to the presidential race. It was a ritual hazing—cruel and a little too easy. The 2020 Democrats, especially the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters on the left, enjoy the theater of Cultural Revolution now and then, and Donald Trump’s “Mini-Mike” was the perfect specimen-bourgeois billionaire, led out to be tormented in the public square and condemned for his deviations—for his off-color (and weirdly off-center) remarks, for stop-and-frisk, and above all, for his plutocrat’s money. There was a frisson of Robespierre in the spectacle, an aspect of pent-up fury, of revenge.

Next morning, the commentators shoveled on further obloquy. They agreed that in this debut, the billionaire had “lost,” and that his novel, Wizard of Oz candidacy was badly damaged. He’d been forced out from behind his campaign of slick and expensive television advertising and required to show himself, in real time, for what he is.

The consensus on the left declared the evening a triumph for Warren. She was “on fire.” She was “aflame.” MSNBC and the New York Times editorial board assumed that her fiery passion was a good thing. They used the word “eloquent.” Warren insulted Bloomberg as mercilessly as she knew how, her relentless voice hammering and quavering, her hair bouncing as usual, her blue eyes flashing behind the oval panes of her eyeglasses. The performance seemed to pay off in all directions; the Warren campaign raised $3 million in contributions in the hours after the debate. These things are a matter of taste. Senator Warren’s indignation struck me, anyway, as narcissistic (a common affliction on the left). People out in the un-woke reaches of the country find that quality to be not just unlikeable but unbearable.

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Read in City Journal

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In his book The Meritocracy Trap, Yale Law School’s Daniel Markovits argues that rather than democratizing American society, meritocracy has contributed to increasing inequality and the decline of the middle class. We asked him what it would take to create a society with opportunities for more Americans.

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Read In Yale Insights

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Bud Morten debunks Sen. Cathy Osten

On January 19, State Senator Catherine Osten (D-19th District) published an op-ed in which she states: “There is some very good news happening in Connecticut right now,” and goes on to cite two recent reports from the State Office of Fiscal Analysis and the State Comptroller, both of which she claims are “full of good news” about what she calls “Connecticut’s financial rebound.”

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Read on CT Mirror

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Read and comment on The Red Line