Chris Powell: Beware 'regulatory capture' of appointees to Cabinet

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Many teachers around the country are cheering the forthcoming change in national administration  because Betsy DeVos will be replaced as secretary of education. DeVos, an heiress and philanthropist, has been a fan of charter schools and a foe of political correctness. While not really expert in pedagogy, at least she has not been the usual tool of teacher unions.

But President-elect Joe Biden is encouraging teachers to expect Nirvana. Addressing them the other week, Biden noted that his wife, Jill, is a community college teacher, and so "you're going to have one of your own in the White House." Presumably that means that teachers will have "one of their own" at the Education Department as well.

Among those mentioned is U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Waterbury teacher and 2016 national teacher of the year, a Democrat who was just elected to her second term in Connecticut's 5th Congressional District.

Apart from her classroom work, Hayes has no managerial experience and her first term in Congress was unremarkable. Her recent campaign's television commercials celebrated her merely for listening to her constituents. While she won comfortably enough in a competitive district in a Democratic year, her departure for the Cabinet would prompt a special election that the Democrats might lose even as they already are distressed by the unexpected shrinkage of their majority in the U.S. House.

But then the U.S. Education Department does little to improve education. Mainly it distributes federal money to state and municipal governments, which do the actual educating. No matter who becomes education secretary, money will still get distributed and education won't improve much if at all.

Quite apart from the personalities, the big issue about the appointment of an education secretary is the big issue with other federal department heads. Why should the public cheer the appointment of an education secretary who is part of the interest group he would be regulating, any more than the public should cheer another Treasury secretary coming from a Wall Street investment bank, another labor secretary coming from a labor union, another defense secretary coming from the military or a military contractor, another agriculture secretary coming from agribusiness, and so yforth?

This kind of thing is called "regulatory capture" and it operates under both parties, though some special interests do better under one party than the other, as the cheering from the teacher unions indicates.

xxx

The virus epidemic has invited a comprehensive reconsideration of education but no one in authority has noticed.

Every day brings a change of plan and schedule in Connecticut schools. One day they're open and the next day they are abruptly converted to "remote learning" for a few days, a week or two, or a whole semester because somebody came down with the flu.

Amid all this many students have simply disappeared. Additionally, since education includes not just book learning but the socialization of children, their learning how to behave with others, the education of all children is being badly compromised.

Gov. Ned Lamont wants to leave school scheduling to schools themselves. This lets him avoid responsibility for any school's policy. But local option isn't producing much education.

The hard choice everyone is trying to avoid is between keeping schools open as normal, taking the risk of more virus infections because children are less susceptible to serious cases, or converting entirely to internet schooling and thereby forfeiting education for the missing students and socialization for everyone else.

If social contact can be forfeited, the expense of education can be drastically reduced. The curriculum for each grade can be standardized, recorded, and placed on the internet, with students connecting from home at any time, not just during regular school hours. Tests to evaluate their learning can be standardized too and administered and graded by computer. A corps of teachers can operate a help desk via internet, telephone, or email.

Much would be lost but then much already had been lost even before the epidemic, since social promotion was already the state's main education policy. Maybe the results of completely remote schooling would not be so different from those of social promotion.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: Puritan stink bomb explodes in the Northeast

Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death"

VERNON, Conn.

Secularists have already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of Christmas difficult but not impossible. The Coronavirus governors have raised his bid to destroy joy. And the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are leading the pack.

It is not enough that enlightened, “science-based” politics has driven our relations out of state, many of them in pursuit of fleeing businesses. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted at the borders, and those entering Connecticut from foreign parts – Massachusetts has recently been put on the interdiction list –- are beginning to feel what wretches feel.

It is less of a chore in Connecticut to bust the Mexican border and settle in one of our state’s sanctuary cities than it is for a gas-guzzling citizen of the “Land of Steady Habits” to escape the state’s onerous gasoline taxes by sneaking across Connecticut’s border to buy gas that is not taxed twice, once at the port and once at the pump. Bradley International Airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is beginning to look like a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing ashes in The Hartford Courant on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas:

“….Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them.

“’I am really worried about thousands of kids coming back from universities all over the country, places like Wisconsin and Nevada and Utah, where they have a 30 percent infection rate,’ Lamont said in Bridgeport.

“The governor said he’d work with governors in other states on ‘really strict guidance,’ perhaps asking students to quarantine for two weeks before returning to Connecticut, then get tested for COVID-19 when they arrive.

“Lamont said the Department of Public Health would soon issue guidelines for returning students.

“’I don’t want people just getting on that plane, going home, potentially putting their family at risk and their friends at risk,’ Lamont said.”

Really, with a daddy and mommy like Lamont, who needs daddies and mommies?

Thanksgiving, now that we are all toxic, will be less thankful. Halloween has flitted by like a ghost; no children were on the streets; the candy dishes are still full. All Saints Day was muted, church attendance having been clipped by Lamont’s emergency orders.

Facing a tsunami of atheist-tinged secularism G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” On this score, not much has changed over the centuries.

The four cardinal virtues listed by Aristotle are prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, all of them sadly missing in our politics, which gives us more than enough reason to fortify ourselves with them. A prudent, just and temperate policy on Coronavirus would allow and even facilitate the joys of Christmas, Thanksgiving and All Saints Day,

Long since secularized and bastardized as Halloween.

Columbus Day has passed without further Columbus statues having been beheaded by modern vandals, for which, exercising our First Amendment rights – but not in churches – we may thank God. Restaurants, those lucky few that have not yet gone out of business, are less than half full because they are only three quarters open on orders of the governor in preparation for a second wave Coronavirus panic.  Tomorrow, on a gubernatorial whim, the restaurants may be shuttered once again. The arts in Connecticut, all of them, are only virtually alive. Our cities are ghost towns. And though legislators, sequestered far from the state Capitol, have plenty of time on hand, not one of them appears to have had time to read Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque  of the Red Death’’. In it, precautions are taken by Lord Prospero to keep at bay the Red Death ravaging the countryside outside the walls of his castle: “With such precautions,” Poe writes, “the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.”

Ha!!!

A Puritan stink bomb has exploded here in the Northeast and left behind the wreckage of joy. Handshakes are out; hugs are out; kisses are fatal; even our daring president-elect, Joe Biden, has lately refrained from smelling women’s hair and pawing uncomfortable strange children. The Puritan Calvinists of pre-Revolutionary Boston must be clapping in their graves, applauding because John and Cotton Mather would rather sink into Hell than dance in their graves or celebrate a Bob Cratchit Christmas.

Don Pesci a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Serious cases, not tests, should measure pandemic

— Photo by Raimond Spekking

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Everybody is tired of the COVID-19 epidemic, and no one is more entitled to be tired of it than Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont. It has devastated the finances of state government, commandeered its management, crippled education at all levels, and worsened many social problems.

While people admire the governor's calm and conscientious manner, they may lose patience as his plan for returning Connecticut to normal starts reversing. Of course the epidemic is not the governor's fault and he deserves sympathy, but his reversal amid fears that the epidemic is surging again should prompt reconsideration of the measures being used to set policy.

Are the governor's premises correct?

The primary measure of the epidemic, in Connecticut and other states, is the "positivity rate," the percentage of daily virus tests reported as positive. One day about week ago the rate exceeded 6 percent, setting off hysteria among news organizations, before falling the next day to a more typical 3 percent. But these figures don't mean that 6 or 3 percent of the state's population is infected. These figures mean only that infection has reached those levels among people who chose to be tested in the previous several days.

Infection levels among the entire population of the state may be lower or higher than the daily "positivity rate." Paradoxically, a higher rate might be much better. That's because most people who contract the virus suffer no symptoms or only mild symptoms and do not require special treatment even as they gain antibodies conferring some immunity. Indeed, if the governor's data is analyzed in another way, so as to calculate what might be called the serious case rate, the positivity rate loses relevance, the virus looks less dangerous, and the epidemic looks less serious.

For the eight days from Oct. 26 through Nov. 2, the governor reported 7,806 new virus cases, 50 new "virus-associated" deaths, and 107 new hospitalizations. If deaths and new hospitalizations are totaled and categorized as serious cases, the serious case rate for those eight days was only 2 percent of all new cases, substantially below the positivity rate for those days -- 3.4 percent -- and way below the one-day positivity rate that caused alarm.

The mortality rate for the week was only six-tenths of 1 percent of all new cases -- and that is measured only against known new cases. If the mortality rate could be calculated from all new cases, including the week's unreported cases -- asymptomatic people -- it likely would be much smaller.

After all, it seems that 7,649 of the 7,806 people who figured in the virus reports for those eight days -- 98 percent of them -- were simply sent home to recover, perhaps with some over-the-counter or prescription medicine.

At the governor's Oct. 26 briefing Dr. John Murphy, chief executive of the Nuvance Health hospital network, tamped down the fright. Murphy noted that treatments for the virus have gotten much more effective since the epidemic began in March -- that while there is as yet no cure, there are medicines that slow the virus and aid recovery, and that as younger people with fewer underlying health problems have become infected, the virus fatality rate and the average length of hospitalization have fallen by half.

The great concern at the start of the epidemic -- hospital capacity -- remains valid, but it deserves reconsideration too. Back then the Connecticut National Guard set up field hospitals with nearly 1,700 beds, including more than 600 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. They weren't used before they were taken down, and with fewer than 400 virus patients hospitalized in the state last week, presumably the state, if pressed, could handle at least a quadrupling of patients.

None of this argues for carelessness, like that of college students partying in close quarters without masks, nor for reopening bars, where the virus may spread most easily. But it does argue for continuing the gradual reopening that was underway before a bad positivity rate scared everybody.

Of course, news organizations delight in scaring people with the positivity rate, but they are enabled in this by the governor's stressing it instead of the serious case rate.

If the infirm elderly and the chronically ill are better protected, fear may subside and relatively normal life may be possible again.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Landslides can bring out the worst in pols; casino fallacy

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Should every Republican on the party's ticket with President Trump this year be defeated if he won't denounce or at least criticize the president for his demeanor, policies, or both?

That's the suggestion of New London Day columnist David Collins, who complained the other day that he could not find one Republican candidate in eastern Connecticut willing to discuss the president. Noting the president's unpopularity in the state, Collins wrote: "Surely I can't be the only one who wouldn't consider voting for anyone who won't even comment about the head of their party and his agenda for the country."

Of course, Collins isn't the only one who feels as he does, but there are a few problems with his position.

First is that turnabout is fair play, and Collins lately has expressed outrage about Gov. Ned Lamont's disregard for the New London area. Since the governor is a Democrat, won't re-electing Democrats to the General Assembly vindicate the governor's disregard? Will electing Republican legislators produce any better results for the area? Republicans don't seem to have given much reason to think so.

The second problem, a bigger one, is the difficulty of punishing Trump's ticket mates for his offenses without also punishing the whole state. Yes, in general Republican state legislators are uninspired and timid, not much interested in gaining a majority, mainly content with escaping responsibility for governing, but at least they are much less enthusiastic tools of the government-employee unions and welfare class than Democratic legislators are.

So what is one to do if he detests Trump but also would prefer not to pay more in state taxes for Democratic policies and patronage that only impoverish the state? What if someone wants to avoid not just highway tolls but more raises and pension benefits for government employees while the private sector is crashing? Someone who feels that way and sets out to punish all Republicans for complicity with Trump ends up punishing himself as well.

The third problem is that political landslides such as Collins seems to be advocating can bring out the worst in elected officials, making them arrogant, corrupt, and stupid, as Connecticut might have learned after electing John G. Rowland to a third term as governor in 2002.

President Lyndon B. Johnson's big win at the top of the Democratic ticket in 1964 unleashed his escalation of the Vietnam War. But by 1967 even as the war was plainly a futile enterprise incompetently pursued, few Democratic officials dared to say a word against the president, just as few Republican officials dare to say a word against Trump today. Only when public opinion, without any help from most Democratic leaders, turned against Johnson in 1968 did the president withdraw from re-election -- and only after a Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected president did most Democratic leaders decide that the war was a disaster.

Similarly, Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972 only deepened his administration's criminal corruption. In less than two years both he and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, were exposed and compelled to resign.

Connecticut already suffers inefficiency and corruption in state government because of the state's lack of political competition. Shrinking the Republican minority in the General Assembly to spite the party for Trump won't provide any incentive for state government to improve. It will just give the majority party more license.

xxx

The MGM Springfield casino and hotel complex. Casinos redistribute money from the many to the rich few.

CASINO FALLACY: MGM's casino in Springfield is thumping its chest about all the jobs and tax revenue it has brought to western Massachusettts. But the jobs and revenue are not what was projected, and such claims are inherently misleading anyway.

For casinos produce nothing of value. People who spend their money at casinos no longer spend it on amusement somewhere else. Casinos merely redistribute money from the many -- the public, disproportionately the poor -- to the few, the casino operators, disproportionately the rich, and to the government. That is, casinos are mechanisms of regressive taxation.

A casino adds economically to an area only insofar as it attracts people from elsewhere, and so the only claim genuinely in favor of the Springfield casino is that it may have kept many Massachusetts gamblers spending their money at home instead of at the casinos in southeastern Connecticut.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: My Journal of the plague year, continued

Thank God for such friends.

October 25, 2020

VERNON, Conn.

Life goes on. {My wife} Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for the last dozen years, died as well. And my cousin, the city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us, Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease they purport to cure”

In an earlier letter, he wrote, “Whatever the problem is, you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”

And he wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting satirical play The Sale of Philosophers. Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have survived this poisonous sobriety.

Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist white silence.

Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”

Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away all treasures; for that is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.

The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into an attitude of compliance and submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.

He certainly has his finger on something there.

Did I watch the last presidential debate, he asks?

God no!

To the country mouse,

Well then, you missed a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media. Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.

The opposite is true, of course, with {Connecticut} Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun, destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll in Connecticut, 60 to 70 percent of which is attributable to bad political decisions made by the autocratic governor.

There will come a time when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.

But not yet. Perhaps after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda. 

My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or a nail salon.

A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline screams, “Just how bad could the latest spike get?”

About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily. Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”

“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”

Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger?

“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”

Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head. Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing that state and settling in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies.

Lucian, where are you?

... to be continued

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: Representative government crouched in fear

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Cronus devouring one of his children

VERNON, Conn.

The Hartford Courant paper points out the brutal irony:

“Connecticut has averaged 366 new cases a day over the past week or about 10.3 per 100,000 residents, just above the threshold at which states are added to the travel advisory. The advisory, which currently includes 38 states and territories, is updated each Tuesday in conjunction with New York and New Jersey. It requires travelers arriving from those states to either produce a negative coronavirus test result or quarantine for 14 days...

(Connecticut Gov. Ned) Lamont said …he’s considering a dramatic overhaul to the advisory, saying “It’d be a little ironic if we were on our own quarantine list.”

Connecticut’s list of quarantined states has grown by leaps and bounds, very likely because the parameters initially were set too low. The gods of irony will not be mocked. Cronus is now eating his own children.

It is nearly impossible to determine definitively who set the parameters, but we do know that Governor Lamont has been borrowing his Coronavirus defense system from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

In the absence of an advice-and-consent General Assembly whose Democrat leaders, Senate President Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Arsimowicz, relish pretending that Connecticut’s greatest deliberative body had been sidelined by Coronavirus, Lamont has become the King George of Connecticut, wielding nearly absolute power, and the sharpest weapon in Lamont’s rhetorical arsenal has been – fear of Coronavirus.

The pandemic is not a governor festooned with plenary powers. It is a virus, and viruses cannot suspend the operations of government and businesses across the state. We are where we are because politicians have made the choices they have made.

Gone are the days when President Franklin Roosevelt sought to stiffen American spines, first in the face of the Great Depression and then of the oncoming World War II – by advising his countrymen, “… let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself.”

Americans rose to the occasion. The Great Depression receded, as most depressions and recessions will do in a vibrant free market economy. The United States later officially entered the war on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor -- more than two years after Nazi Germany attacked Poland, in 1939, beginning the war -- and saved Western Europe from the Nazi Hun. Much later during the so-called “Cold War,” beginning in 1946-47, Western Europe and the United States combined to save Western Civilization from the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist beast. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan blew his horn, and the hated Berlin Wall soon came tumbling down, followed in due course by the dissolution of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Since the Founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,” in Lincoln’s often repeated words, the United States has survived colonial mismanagement – see Sam Adams on the point – an anti-colonialist revolution, various crippling recessions, a Civil War – which we thought, before Howard Zinn’s dyspeptic take on American history began to infiltrate public schools, buried slavery along with “the honored dead” at Gettysburg --   two World Wars, the prospect of nuclear annihilation,  and many other disrupting disasters that we had collectively survived.

The government of Connecticut, the “Constitution State”, faced with Coronavirus, has simply shattered. And the merchants of fear among us are still merchandising fear. That irrational fear has all but destroyed scores of small businesses across the state, the prospect of state surpluses, sound state and municipal budgets, public hearings, trials in the remnant of the state’s judicial system, public education as we have known it ever since the General Assembly in 1849 established the first public higher-education institution in the state, now Central Connecticut State University -- and representative government.

There is not a single politician in Connecticut familiar with Aristotelian causality, the living root of most modern science, who would testify under oath that a virus, rather than cowardly politicians, is the efficient cause of all these problems. The Coronavirus fear, like Cronus of Greek legend, is now devouring its own children.

Roosevelt rallied the nation to stop hiding under the bed. But the Coronavirus governors, who through their negligence are responsible for the majority of nursing-home deaths associated with Coronavirus in their own states, want representative government to remain crouched in fear under the bed. They want no public hearings, no votes on gubernatorial dicta by a full General Assembly, no attacks by columnists on their own criminal delinquencies, no suits in a crippled court system, and no contrarian opinions in editorial pages. They will tolerate no effective opposition. And should minority Republicans in Connecticut engage in reasoned opposition, they will be denounced by everyone hiding under a bed of complicity with President Trump who, despite his glaring vices, still is not Hunter Biden’s dad.   

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: The coronavirus, King Ned and the Conn. economy

VERNON, Conn.

While Connecticut’s Democratic-dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures that it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover.

According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, as of Sept. 4, commercial air traffic was down about 45 percent globally. To save costs, airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which hurts Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick.

Two questions present themselves: 1) Are the airline restrictions that Gov. Ned Lamont deployed in Connecticut at least partly responsible for the job losses related to a reduction of airline traffic? And 2) Will politicians such as Larson suffer because of these policies?

The answer to 1) is: A policy that discouraged air travel through the imposition of unusual restrictions – passengers coming from restricted states were required to self-quarantine for 14 days if they had not submitted to a Coronavirus test – certainly does not help. And the answer to 2) is: Nothing short of a nuclear winter in gerrymandered districts such as Larson’s 1st District and Rosa DeLauro’s 3rd District may interrupt their political careers, although this year DeLauro, a fashion maven  who has spent nearly 40 years in Congress, has a worthy opponent in Republican Margaret Streicker.

The Lamont directives are not only unusual; they interrupt normal business activity, do not provide uniform continuity of political action, may be unconstitutional, and are whimsical and palliative rather than curative.

The real cure for political action that hurts entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut – how is any restaurant to survive when it is being ordered to reduce its seating by half? – is to put a halter on runaway gubernatorial directives. And this cannot be done in the absence of a General Assembly that has been put in “park” for the last half year. There are some faint indications that, at some point down the road -- possibly after the 2020 elections, during which all the seats in the General Assembly will once again be secure in Democratic hands -- the state may return to some sort of normalcy. The real threat facing Democrats is not that the Coronavirus will mutate into the Red Death, but rather that Democrats, who have refashioned Connecticut into a quasi-socialist wonderland, may lose their majority status in both houses of Connecticut's recumbent General Assembly.

The signs of the times, at least in Connecticut – no longer the pearl in New England’s crown -- suggest a continuation of ruinous business policies. Connecticut’s General Assembly – more properly a fistful of Democratic legislators, a rump legislature – has just extended Lamont’s extraordinary powers by five months. Those powers allow Lamont to open and shut Connecticut’s entrepreneurial valves at will, and businesses, we know, react with horror at uncertainty.

We may well ask for whom is this a problem? Qui bono? Who profits by it -- certainly not representative government? Among Connecticut journalists, only Chris Powell, for many years the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, seems to be troubled by Connecticut’s highly unorthodox political arrangement. Powell suspects that Democratic-run government, rather than democratic government, is the principal beneficiary of the new, now nearly year-long constitutional re-configuration.

The extension of arbitrary gubernatorial directives allow Democrats to claim hero status at both ends of the politically caused pandemic. Through the imposition of fickle gubernatorial powers, the governor saves us from a fate worse than death; and, by calibrating the business closures, he appears to be saving us from the economic pandemic he and his Democrat do-nothing compatriots in the General Assembly have caused. The German critic Karl Krauss once described Freudian psychology as “the disease it purports to cure.” Similarly, the inscrutable and lawless Lamont business shutdown is the disease he and other heroic Democrat legislators are now purporting to cure – by partly opening the businesses they have closed through dubious constitutional means.  

Lamont is not up for re-election in 2020, but all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will be on the political chopping block next month.. So Lamont is content to take the political thwacks for the time being; the memories of average Connecticut voters are short-lived, and any autocratic directive issued by Lamont, both in the recent past and for the un-foreseeable future, will not bear the fingerprints of Democrat legislators, many of whom will be left unpunished in the coming elections.

It is doubtful that any directive issued by “King Ned” will benefit anyone but autocratic politicians. All such directives destroy creative solutions by restricting normal business decisions to a governor who cannot be corrected by either the legislative or judicial branches of government. A deliberative legislature may produce far superior solutions than those forcibly imposed by Lamont and his close advisers on the entire state, no corner of which is now represented by members of the General Assembly pretending that they are doing their jobs.

Most recently, the Hartford Symphony has furloughed all of its musicians; restaurants are closing; the workforce at Pratt & Whitney will be reduced; principals and superintendents of public schools lack uniform direction from a government that appears to be operating on the throw of dice; and at some point down the line an exhausted public, frustrated and powerless, will turn against its self-appointed benefactors.

There are two incalculable benefits in hitting bottom: 1) the bottom marks the end of the downward fall, and 2) those who hit bottom know that the way up lies in an opposite direction.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Self-interview of a Republican columnist in a deep Blue State

The Connecticut seal. By the way, there are some very good vineyards in what used to be called “The Land {State} of Steady Habits’’.

VERNON, Conn.

Q: Reading over your blog, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State”, I don’t see many “I’s”.

A: Modesty.

Q: No really, why?

A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This last group tends to dispense with “I’s”. 

Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the managing editor and the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. on his motivation. You said to him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more than 40 years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive, well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet, politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not appear to be paying much attention. So, you asked, what keeps him going. He flashed a smile and said, “Spite.” Does spite keep you going?

A: I doubt Powell ever bought the notion that political behavior swings on the writings of political commentators. His primary motivation is plain on the face of his opinion pieces, both editorials and op-ed commentary. He wants to set hard truths before the general public, hoping that not every citizen is motivated by spite or enclosed within a Berlin Wall of invincible ignorance. Off camera, so to speak, Powell has a quiet, infectious sense of humor. And a sense of humor is a sense of right proportion. He was joking. It’s possible that joking in the 21st Century will be a capital offense punishable by exile, as were serious crimes against the state in Roman and Greek times. In modern times, burning down buildings, liberating high-toned stores of merchandise, throwing Molotov cocktails at police buildings, are all okay; but we draw the line at making jokes. The Greek tyrant Creon feared Aristophanes as much as an invading army. One day, one of Creon’s factotums met Aristophanes in the street and asked him in a fury, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” Aristophanes answered, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.” Mark Twain also took comedy seriously, and his long suffering wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, worked tirelessly to protect him from a public whipping. In "The Chronicle of Young Satan, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts,” Twain has Satan say, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” 

Q: So, you are not spiteful then? 

A: Spite, like humor, is salt, to be used always sparingly. I acknowledge that every sealed closet has some bones concealed in it. I can only say I don’t feel spiteful, though I do think spite can flower into gorgeous commentary. I’m thinking of Alexander Pope’s long poem, “The Dunciad”. We should love lovable things and hate hateful things. The record -- and it’s a long one; “Connecticut Commentary” contains to date about 3,141 separate pieces, nearly all submitted as columns to a host of Connecticut papers – I think will show that I’m interested in the public persona of politicians, the face they present to their constituents. I’m certainly not interested in delving into the private soul of, say, U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, of this state, about whom I’ve written a great deal, much of it unpublished by Connecticut’s print media. It’s best to stay away from amateur psychology. Rummaging in private souls is very much like rummaging in attics – too many spider’s webs, hanks of hair, abandoned diaries, and moldy, old dolls.

Q: I’ve seen the Blumenthal cache. Much of it is well written, certainly publishable.  And you’ve said that nearly all of that cache had been sent out to various Connecticut newspapers. Much of it never saw print. Why not?

A: Thanks for your labor of love. It’s a good question. I suppose much of it may have rubbed editorial fur the wrong way. Part of this is business. Smaller newspapers, as you know, have been swallowed up by journalistic leviathans. The larger chains have a stable of dependable writers they may draw from. The whole of New England is a left-of-center political theater and has been for a long while. The General Assembly in the state has been dominated by left-of-center Democrats for a few decades; all the constitutional offices in the state are manned by Democrats; there are no Republicans in the state’s U.S. congressional delegation; virtually all the justices of the state’s Supreme Court have been placed on the bench by highly progressive former Gov. Dannel Malloy. Larger cities in the state – Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford – have been, some would say, mismanaged by Democrats for about a half century. And it is not news that the media do political business mostly with incumbents. So, while it is not at all excessive hyperbole to say that most of the state’s current difficulties may be laid squarely at the feet of immoderate Democrats, incumbents are, mostly for business reasons, lightly leashed.

Q: Why lightly leashed?

A: You cannot get water from a rock, and you cannot get printable news from non-incumbents. If the political state is largely progressive, the state media will follow suit.

Q: Why “immoderate” Democrats? 

A: Because Connecticut Democrats are no longer moderate, no longer centrists, no longer “liberal” in the sense that President John Kennedy or justly celebrated Gov. Ella Grasso were liberal.

Q: You knew Grasso.

A: I did. She, her family and my father and his family, while occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were friends all their lives in the social and political petri-dish of Windsor Locks. During those times, friendship transcended politics. And politics itself was well mannered and soft spoken.

Q: Not now.

A: No longer.

Q: What changed?

A: Do you mean nationally or statewide?

Q: Both.

A: Nationally, the Huey-Long-like personality of President Trump has thrown the right-left national polarity into sharp relief, but this polarity preceded Trump by decades. When everyone, including the overarching, permanent political apparatus and a politicized media, has a dog in the fight, a permanent dog fight should surprise no one. Statewide, Connecticut has become, within a very short period of time, perhaps the most left-leaning state in the Northeast. The drift leftward here began long ago. It was “maverick” Republican Lowell Weicker who,  first as senator then governor, took the road not taken by pervious governors when he forced through the General Assembly Connecticut’s income tax, a levy that has resulted in improvident spending, outsized budgets, preening politicians and a poorer proletariat. 

Q: That was the turning point? 

A: It was a crossing of the Rubicon by a small-minded man who had contemplated for years the destruction of his own state Republican Party, which Weicker had betrayed numerous times, that finally gave him the heave-ho. Without turning over the molding psychological dolls in Weicker’s attic, I think it is proper to conclude that the man was motivated principally by unalloyed malice, what aphorist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called resentment, an awful curse. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche warned, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” I never heard Weicker toss off a laugh line that was not spiked with malice. I’m referring here only to the man’s public persona, you understand. In private, he may have been Henny Youngman, for all I know. In politics, it is the characters who determine the play. And in Connecticut, neatly all the characters who advance the play are progressives motivated chiefly by a rancid lust for power, very Nietzschean. Without will, you cannot secure your ends. But when the will becomes the end, it’s doomsday. Nietzsche never quite worked that into his calculations. But the great tyrants of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did. Without God, Dostoyevsky said, “anything is possible” – even Weicker, the first of many of Connecticut’s “savior politicians.” The business of these savior politicians is to create the problems from which they pretend to save us.

Q: That seems a bit cynical.

A: Critical and descriptive, not cynical. The real cynics among us are those who believe positive knowledge is impossible. A perverse inability to see what lies right under your nose, George Orwell’s formulation, is the very definition of cynicism.

Q: Can you give us an example.

A: I think it is cynical to pretend not to notice the predictable effects of Gov. Ned Lamont’s shutdown of state businesses. Even a state legislator hiding under his bed, trembling in fear of Coronavirus, cannot fail to have noticed that a prolonged business shutdown would result in a diminution of state revenue; that the fatal failure of state government to provide adequate and targeted resources to nursing homes would result in needless deaths among people exposed to Coronavirus; that tax increases always transfer power and responsibility from citizens to the unelected administrative state, a descriptive rather than a cynical term; that a one-party state necessarily results in political oligarchy, which easily dispenses with representative government; that...

Q: Alright, alright, we don’t have all day here. Without being too cynical – excuse me, too descriptive – how do you see Connecticut’s future unfolding. 

A: What was it Yogi Berra said – the future ain’t what it used to be? In a representative republic, we used to rely on the common sense of voters to turn out politicians who pursued public policies inimical to representative government and the public good, one of the reasons Grasso agitated against an income tax. One of Grasso’s biographers is Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who argues that Grasso, a great governor, was wrong about the income tax.  Well, Grasso was right about the income tax, and she was right for the right reasons. Weicker was right about the income tax when he said, during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire, and he was wrong when, as governor, he poured income tax gas on Connecticut’s recession. The progress from Grasso to Bysiewicz, from Grasso to former Gov. Dannel Malloy and Ned Lamont is a fool’s journey in the wrong direction. The false solutions and the consequent havoc lie right under our noses. And it is long past time for Connecticut’s media to realize that the whole purpose of journalism is to describe accurately, in Orwell’s words, “the thing that lies right under our noses.” So, given our recent past history, our one party state, our wall-eyed media, our seemingly indifferent citizens, our representative-shy, inoperative General Assembly, which has just decided to surrender even more of its constitutional and legislative responsibilities to an incompetent governor, I would say Connecticut’s future looks bleak. 

Q: Just one more quibble before we go. You lament the want of common sense among voters. What made common sense a casualty of modern politics?

A: Both common sense and the conscience, an inseparable pair, have been surrounded and taken prisoner by wily politicians and a cowardly media. The founders of the republic feared, almost to a man that common sense – the moral imperative, the ethical genius that lies in all of us – could not survive immoral and ambitious politicians seeking to promote their own rather than the public good. We can only pray to God for the restoration of a moral order. God, Otto von Bismarck once said, favors drunkards, the poor and the United States of America. Pray he was right, because, except on their tongues, politicians in Connecticut, mostly pretending to be progressives, favor none of the above. And, once again, I am being descriptive here, not cynical.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

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Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden

Waiting to talk politics

— Photo by Visitor7

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”

— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father

VERNON, Conn.

I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.

The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.

Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.

“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”

The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium  holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.

Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.

“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”

“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”

“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”

“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’

“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)

It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.

It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.

The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.

Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.

In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.

In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.

And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”

“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February

—Photo by Gage Skidmore

Don Pesci: Things should have been opened three months ago with current rules

A waitress at a local eatery, closed for four months by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s ever changing executive orders, pops the question.

Her eatery is partially opened, but forbidden to serve more than half its regular clientele, many of whom will disappear if the eatery is not permitted to make a sustainable profit to pay the business’s overhead and its dwindling staff.

“If this place can be opened now, why couldn’t it have been opened” under the same severe regimen “three months ago?” the befuddled waitress asks.

Good question, but the common sense answer to the waitress's question will not be forthcoming from Governor Lamont or its waylaid legislative leaders, all Democrats, in the state’s seriously suspended General Assembly. The common sense answer to the question is simple and unambiguous. There is no reason why restaurants in the state should not have remained open during the pandemic four months ago. If social distancing, face masks, frequent disinfections of eating areas, and reducing by 50 percent a restaurant’s usual clientele, work now to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, the same measures would have produced the same result four months earlier.

An elementary school teacher asks this question: Why were elementary schools closed during the politically caused crisis?

Good question. We know – and have always known – that lethality among school children 14 years old and younger infected with Coronavirus has been hovering near zero. Why then were elementary schools in Connecticut shut down? The most frequent answer to this question is highly problematic. Children who are asymptomatic and who very likely had developed herd immunity, the historic prophylactic in viral contagions, can infect older adults. And these older adults are much more likely to die from the infestation than young children. Elementary-school closures are, in fact, a “save the elders” project.

Very good, how has Connecticut gone about saving the elders? In Connecticut and New York about 60 percent of those who died with – not of – Coronavirus were sequestered in nursing homes. We were protecting these elders by forbidding their relatives from eyeballing their care while, at the same time, failing to provide protective gear to the staff, heroes all, of nursing homes. And politicians in Connecticut knew – right from the beginning of the Wuhan infestation – that elders of a certain age, many of whom had medical preconditions that lethalized Coronavirus, were most susceptible to the Coronavirus grim reaper.

Well now, there is a bill before the gubernatorially suspended General Assembly right now that removes partial immunity from police officers across the state, all of whom will be susceptible to asset-swallowing suits filed by “defund the police” political agitators. Will partial immunity be removed from those politicians who are principally responsible for the carnage in Connecticut's nursing homes?

Never mind the oversight, we are told, the problem has now been corrected by Lamont, his political cohorts, and Dr. Close-The-Barn-Door-After-The-Horse-Has-Left. Not to worry; elder habitués of nursing homes who survived the political inattention of preening politicians are now, at long last, safe.

People wonder why the death count in Connecticut and New York are down, a cousin unable to attend the funeral of his uncle remarks – they removed the deadwood and are now taking their bows for having solved problems they themselves had created. They’re like the firefighter-arsonist who sets fires so that he can put them out and read about his courageous exploits in the morning paper.

It is perhaps unpragmatic at this point to hope that businessman Lamont and the Democrat leaders in the General Assembly will realize that Connecticut’s economy, artificially sustained by President Trump’s military- hardware acquisitions and the Wall Street casino, is weak at it core and will be further weakened by unnecessary shutdowns. Businesses lost to the Lamont shutdowns are irrecoverable, and there is yet another ten year recession grinning evilly at the state from the political wings.

Connecticut, now a beggar state, will attempt to squeeze money from the Washington, D.C., larder. Even now, Sen. Richard Blumenthal is hoping to wrest billions of dollars from the impeachable Trump administration, and there is not a journalist in sight who will summon up courage enough to ask him whether he would favor yet another Connecticut tax bump so that Democrats in the General Assembly will be spared the indignity of cutting union-labor costs.

When Connecticut –which has much more in common with dispensable nursing home patients than the state’s sleepy media realizes – finally disappears beneath the waves, who will be permitted to attend its funeral?  

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Conn.'s desperate restaurant owners wonder when...

How long?

VERNON, Conn.

On June 20, Connecticut will once again be open for business – sort of. The road to the grand opening has been a bumpy one full of false turns, sudden cul-de-sacs, and the driver of the bus headed towards a reopening of the state, now nursing a potential budget deficit of close to $1 billion,  appears to be navigating irresolutely.

Will restaurants in Connecticut be fully opened on the date set by Gov. Ned Lamont, June 20, or not? Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, with whom Governor Lamont of has of late been having a Coronavirus shut-down bromance, already has turned the corner. Restaurants in Rhode Island, having got the jump on Connecticut, already are opened for business – sort of.

In a June 3 story, Hearst news noted that Connecticut restaurant owners were clamoring for an earlier opening date for indoor dining: "Some 550 businesses signed a petition by the Restaurant Association calling for a return to indoor dining on June 10. They include companies operating nearly 40 restaurants in New Haven and 30 in Stamford, from chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings, with locations in Stamford, Danbury, Milford and North Haven, to local haunts like Galaxy Diner in Bridgeport and upscale options such as Mediterraneo in Norwalk and Greenwich.”

Executive director of the Connecticut Restaurant Association Scott Dolch wrote to Lamont, “This is not hyperbole. Just this week and only steps from the Capitol, Firebox Restaurant in Hartford closed after 13 years in operation. They simply could not hold out any longer. Right now, every day counts for our industry.”

 Tic Toc.

 And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

Well, Lamont drawled, “Everybody wants to get going yesterday — I appreciate that,” Lamont said. “I am going to be a little cautious in terms of what the next round is. ... Maybe we can accelerate that a little bit.”

And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s Coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

 "’I've just seen tens of thousands of people protesting in New York City — thousands more in Boston. Neither of them have opened up any of their restaurants - they haven't even opened for outdoor dining that I know of as yet,’ Lamont said. ‘So I want to be very careful before we open our restaurants and invite people from the whole region here.’"

That’s a NO to Dolch and his 550 business petitioners.

Dolch and Connecticut restaurant owners really have nowhere else to turn for succor. In ordinary times, Dolch’s petitioners might have curried support among a dwindling number of legislators in the General Assembly who do not want Connecticut to be eating Rhode Island’s dust, but the General Assembly has put itself in suspended animation until it once again is called into service by the governor, and Lamont’s extraordinary autocratic powers do not lapse until September. Already – someone is keeping count – Lamont ranks fourth in the nation among governors who have issued the most executive orders, and he has three months to go before he runs out of autocratic gas.

Other problems may be looming on Connecticut’s dark horizon.

 On June 4, the Lamont administration sent a notice around to Connecticut’s media that his administration is establishing a program, called the Connecticut Municipal Coronavirus Relief Fund Program, in which the state will reimburse city and town governments for expenses related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a story in The Day of New London.

The program, administered through the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, is setting aside $75 million to be distributed to municipalities in Connecticut, “part of $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds the state has gotten from the federal government.”

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, according to The Day’s story, “said it is appreciative of the announcement but noted that federal guidelines recommend that 45 percent of the total $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds, which would be $630 million, be spent on municipalities with populations below 500,000.”

There is, a reader who has successfully passed fourth grade exams in basic math will notice, a considerable difference between the $630 million the Feds expect Connecticut to distribute to its towns in Coronavirus Relief Funds and the planned Lamont distribution of $75 million. Some sharp-eyed accountant in Washington, D.C., is likely to notice the disparity and – maybe – cut Coronavirus funding to the Connecticut proportionally.

The national government now has a debt of some $26 trillion, and every penny helps.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Whatever the pandemic, most prisoners are not good risks for release

MANCHESTER, Conn.

How high-minded and humane the clergy members and the civil-liberties union people sound as they clamor and sue for the release of all prisoners in Connecticut -- even murderers -- to protect them against the risk of virus contagion in their confined quarters. Hundreds of prisoners and prison staff members have gotten sick from the virus and seven prisoners have died.

But the complaint is nonsense. The state Correction Department already has released scores of prisoners who were near the end of their sentences, behaved well in prison, were considered good risks, and had family or friends to take them in. But even those prisoners will find it almost impossible to get jobs while the state's economy is so sharply curtailed. Unemployment creates bad temptations for parolees.

Most prisoners are not good risks. Most are not near the end of their sentences. Upon release many could not support themselves honestly even if the economy were operating normally. Most do not have housing and family waiting for them. And most still belong in prison.

For while Connecticut's justice system, like all justice systems, has gotten a few cases spectacularly wrong, convicting innocent men of serious crimes, for most people getting into prison in Connecticut requires career criminality. Indeed, the state is full of chronic offenders with 10, 20 or more serious convictions who still have been given little or no prison time and remain free despite their amply demonstrated incorrigibility.

Most released prisoners get in trouble with the law again within two years. While this is partly because they lack job skills and are released without a job and housing, this does not excuse the government for failing to protect society against them. People who cannot support themselves honestly or are so damaged psychologically that they cannot stop harming others must be locked up, epidemic or no virus.

While this should be obvious, it is hard to find any challenge to the sanctimony of the clergy and civil liberties union. But the other day an inhabitant of the real world, New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes, provided a contrary view.

Chief Reyes told the city's Board of Alders that prisoners recently given early release because of the epidemic -- prisoners judged by the Correction Department to be the best risks -- are already causing trouble again in the city, reviving conflicts with old adversaries.

Some "are really violent and should not be coming out," Reyes told the board, adding that about 17 prisoners released early are now especially dangerous in New Haven again.

The chief said he wished that the Correction Department would consult with his department before releasing prisoners likely return to his city.

In a recent letter to Gov. Ned Lamont, 70 clergy members said releasing prisoners early to avoid virus contagion is "a profoundly moral and ethical issue" -- as if the health of prisoners should be the only consideration here. Consumed by sanctimony, the clergy members give no thought to the safety of others, not even in troubled cities like New Haven where serious crime is a daily occurrence.

This doesn't mean that all prisoners should be denied any chance of redemption. It means that anyone who works his way into prison in Connecticut is already a hard case and that health risks, inevitably high in prison anyway, are no reason to keep inflicting him on everyone else.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: In the pandemic, separating science and political science

Treating a patient on a ventilator in a hospital’s intensive-care unit

VERNON, Conn.

How scientific is science in the matter of Coronavirus?

There’s science and there’s political science. The one thing we do not want in any confluence of the two is confusion and mass hysteria, which can best be avoided by observing this rule: Politicians should decide political matters and medical scientists should decide medical matters. Occasionally, politicians decide that mass fright can better able convince the general population than rational argument.  

The answer to the above question is simple: In the case of new viruses, science, as defined above, must be silent. There can be no “scientific” view of Coronavirus because it is a new phenomenon, the recent arrival of a stranger on the medical block. Concerning Coronavirus, there are, properly speaking, multiple views of different scientists, many of whom will disagree with each other on important points.

Does Coronavirus remain on surfaces for long periods? A couple of months ago, we were told by politicians, relaying the news from “science”, that hard surfaces were repositories of Coronavirus, and that contamination from hard surfaces was as likely as person-to-person contamination. That notion has withered on the vine now that we know Coronavirus is most often spread person to person.

Do adults spread Coronavirus to children, or are children the Bloody Marys? This is an important datum because if children, who are much less likely than adults to die or be seriously ill from Coronavirus, spread the virus to adults, the wholesale closing of schools might be a protective measure.

But if adults pass the virus to children, the current view of many scientists, remediation efforts would be far different.  We are told that love covers a multitude of sins including, Agatha Christie advises us, murder. The word “science” misapplied covers, we have seen, a multitude of political sins.If we can learn from our past mistakes, we need not carry our mistakes into the future.

If the question is, “Have politicians in the Northeast made a mistake in trusting to some scientists?” the question is wrongly put. It’s not quite as simple as that. It will always be better to take advice from the horse’s mouth rather than from the horse’s posterior. But in the process, politicians must not allow differing scientists to determine the political course of a state.

Politicians, in the face of a pandemic, should not stop being politicians. That is what we have seen in Northeast states, where Coronavirus has dug in its heels. Here legislative activity has been shut down, and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has been festooned with extraordinary – some would say unconstitutional -- powers.

Like his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, Lamont has resorted to state-wide business shutdowns and sequestration. But inducing a long-lived recession in Connecticut, sequestration and data collection are not curative, however “necessary” they seem to be to some politicians who are masters in the art of spreading fear.

A vaccine may cure Coronavirus. What is called herd-immunity may reduce infestation.  Certain people, in many cases younger people, catch the virus and develop a natural immunity, foreshortening the mass of people fatally exposed to the virus. We know that Coronavirus has spread like a wildfire in nursing homes, because clients in nursing homes are older and subject to other infirmities that in their cases have dramatically increased the fatality rate in Connecticut and New York.

“Science” – real science – warned us of this at the very beginning of the infestation. We knew of a certainty that older people with compromised systems were especially vulnerable. So, knowing this, why did not the governors of Connecticut and New York direct more of their resources to nursing homes? That is a question that must be answered by our “savior politicians.”

Home sequestration, we have been told, helps to flatten the Coronavirus curve. What can this mean if not that sequestration prolongs the time during which the sequestered may in the future be exposed to the virus? Flattening the curve is not curative. Ask any scientist.

The Coronavirus pandemic has been Hell, but it is very important that we should not return from Hell with empty hands.

In Connecticut more than 60 percent of deaths “associated with” Coronavirus occurred in nursing homes; the figure is similar in New York. Cuomo recently acknowledged he was surprised to discover that a sizable majority of people in New York infected with Coronavirus had been sequestered at home. His surprise is surprising.

We are told that business re-opening will occur in Connecticut in three stages, somewhat like a rocket on its way to the moon. But surely business opening should be determined with reference to sections of Connecticut that have been severely or mildly affected by Coronavirus, and the distribution of Coronavirus throughout the state has been mapped by Johns Hopkins University ever since the virus penetrated the United States from its point of origin, Wuhan, China.

These are political decisions that should have been codified in law by a quiescent General Assembly. Political science – yes, there is such a thing – would tell us that we no longer enjoy in Connecticut a republican, small “r”, constitutional government. Instead, Governor Lamont has become our homegrown Xi Jinping, China’s communist tyrant who has now provided Connecticut both with a deadly virus and PPEs, the means of thwarting some of its effects.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: 'The indifference of the majority'

MANCHESTER, Conn.

How laughable that state legislators from both parties are starting to express annoyance with Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont -- some about the pace of reopening commerce amid the virus epidemic, others about financial issues.

For the governor did not adjourn the General Assembly when he declared an emergency amid the epidemic and claimed the special powers allowed to him by state law. No, the legislature adjourned and scattered itself and has remained adjourned even as all sorts of "essential" workers remain on the job enduring close contact with others, from nursing home aides to supermarket employees to postal carriers.

If those workers can stay on the job, legislators should be able to do the same. Otherwise legislators proclaim themselves inessential.

In the unprecedented circumstances of the epidemic the governor will never be able to please everyone in his pursuit of public safety, and everyone remains free to complain about his executive orders. But unlike ordinary citizens, legislators are free not only to complain about government policy but also to do something about it. Legislation could restrict the governor's powers, undo his orders, and begin to cover the huge state budget deficit caused by the epidemic.

As long as they fail to reconvene, legislators who complain about the governor will only be posturing, not working.

xxx

Meanwhile Local 2001 of the Service Employees International Union, a state employee union, is preparing a publicity campaign to counter criticism that Connecticut's state employee pension system is too expensive and unaffordable amid the huge costs of the epidemic.

According to the union, the expense of the pension system is not even a fair issue. In a message to members seeking volunteers to write letters for publication in newspapers, the union says: "When you open up the paper all you see is a coordinated effort to distort the truth."

That's union-speak for people who dare to disagree with the union. They must be dishonest.

The SEIU message continues: "Are you willing to be involved in the upcoming elections? The state representatives and senators running locally are the ones who make decisions about your health care and pensions. Let's be a part of electing the right people, but we can do that only if you get involved."

Of course government employee union members have the same political rights as everyone else. But unlike everyone else, the unions use those rights nearly every day. They have lobbyists at the state Capitol and, as the SEIU notice suggests, their members staff most legislative campaigns for candidates nominated by the majority party. Their success rate in elections long has been high, for, as the journalist James Reston wrote long ago, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority.

So is the SEIU really worried that the damage to state government's finances may be great enough to threaten union control of the legislature and the governor's office?

Does the union really suspect that to restore state government's finances the governor might try to exact from the government class a sacrifice resembling the sacrifice the epidemic has exacted from the private sector?

Does the union really fear that the governor might feel bad that the incomes of government employees have been completely protected during the epidemic while tens of thousands of private-sector workers have lost their jobs and may face higher taxes anyway?

Could the majority in Connecticut actually be induced to care about this disparity and prove Reston wrong for once?

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Do legislators have courage of grocery clerks?

MANCHESTER, Conn.

When, in March, the leaders of the Connecticut General Assembly suspended its regular session and then, last month, canceled it entirely, they were frightened of the virus epidemic. But now, after weeks of doing nothing except watching impotently, legislators are starting to seem more frightened of their own responsibilities.

After all, the state budget is a shambles, epidemic-mitigation expenses having exploded and tax revenue having collapsed. So what legislator isn't happy to let Gov. Ned Lamont rule by decree, shuffle the money around desperately as best he can, decide whom to help and whom to short, and determine how much longer to keep commerce closed? There is no fun in that, only risk and potential resentment.

But somehow the supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations, hospitals, nursing homes and various other businesses officially deemed "essential" have managed to remain open with little more augmentation than makeshift face masks and bleach. Other government agencies have continued to meet through electronic means, even complying with public accountability rules via the internet.

This situation implies that the General Assembly isn't more "essential" than barber shops or hair salons, which become more essential every day as hair tickles ears and collars and gray roots start glaring. While the barber shops and hair salons may reopen in two weeks, this may not be so encouraging, since at that point people may start to realize how long returning to normality will take, with barbers and hairdressers needing many months to work off their customers' inventory. (People may do best to start lining up outside now, as for tickets for a Beatles reunion concert.)

As the saying goes, "No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session," so maybe cynics will figure that the longer the legislature is suspended, the better. Tireless as Governor Lamont has been during the virus emergency, and as much as he is suddenly held in much higher esteem because of his efforts, public dissatisfaction with him can only grow the longer ordinary life remains disrupted.

Of course the emergency is not the governor's fault. But with the General Assembly self-suspended even as legislators, like many other government employees, continue to be paid and insured for not working, the public's normal mechanism for expressing discontent is broken and the governor has no one to share responsibility with.

So while Connecticut's law on declaring emergencies is similar to the laws of other states, it may be too broad. It has enabled the governor to commandeer the state even though the legislature was in session and not threatened with dispersal by any enemy. While Lamont has been sensitive to civil liberty, some other governors invoking the emergency laws of their states have not been, and Connecticut's law could be similarly abused in the future.

With an issue as important as reopening commerce, why shouldn't the legislature claim a say? Except for cowardice, why shouldn't legislators go on record about whether the big raises due for unionized state employees on July 1 should be postponed or canceled?

Lamont has been a benevolent dictator, but benevolent dictatorship should not become Connecticut's form of government.

The General Assembly disbanded itself needlessly and should reconvene immediately. Legislators will just have to summon a little of the courage being shown by nursing home aides, grocery clerks and the governor himself.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: Those gubernatorial Caligulas

Decisive executive: A marble bust of Caligula restored to its original colors, identified from particles trapped in the marble

VERNON, Conn.

Gore Vidal – deceased, but not from Coronavirus complications – was once asked whether he thought the Kennedy brood had exercised extraordinary sway over Massachusetts. He did. And what did he think of the seemingly unending reign of “Lion of the Senate” Edward Kennedy, who had spent almost 43 years in office?

Vidal said he didn’t mind, because every state should have in it at least one Caligula.

The half-mad Roman emperor Caligula, who reigned in 37-41 A.D., considered himself a god, and the senators of Rome generally deferred, on pain of displeasure, to His Royal Deity. Caligula certainly acted like a god. The tribunes of the people deferred to his borderless power, which he wielded like a whip. They deferred, and deferred, and deferred… .Over time, their republic slipped through their fingers like water. Scholars think Caligula may have been murdered by a palace guard he had insulted.

Here in the United States, we do not dispose of our godlike saviors in a like manner. At worse, we may promote them to a judgeship, or they may be recruited after public service by deep-pocket lobbyists or legal firms, or they may remain in office until, as in Edward Kennedy’s case, they have shucked off their mortal coil and trouble us no longer

.Coronavirus has produced a slew of Vidal Caligulas, all of them governors. In emergencies, when chief executives are festooned with extraordinary powers, the legislature is expected to defer to the executive, and the judiciary remains quiescent.

This deference to an all-powerful executive department is not uncommon in war, but even in war, the legislative and judiciary departments remain active and viral concerning their oversight constitutional responsibilities.The war on Coronavirus, however, is a war like no other. Here in Connecticut, the General Assembly remains in a state of suspended animation. Every so often, an annoying constitutional Cassandra will pop up to remind us that we are a constitutional republic, but constitutional antibodies in Connecticut are lacking. Our constitutions, federal and state, are still the law of the land, and even our homegrown Caligulas are not “above the law,” because we are “a nation of laws, not of men.”

These expressions are more than antiquated apothegms; they are flags of liberty that, most recently, have been waved under President Trump’s nose. However, in our present Coronavirus circumstances, no one pays much attention to constitutional Cassandras because --- do you want to die? Really, DO YOU WANT TO DIE?Every soldier who has ever entered the service of his country in a war has asked himself the very same question. And we are in a Coronavirus War, are we not? Pray it may not last as long as “The War on Drugs.” Drug dealers won that one, and Connecticut has long since entered into the  gambling racket; the marijuana racket looms in our future.

Then too, in the long run, we are all dead. Even “lions of the Senate” die. The whole point of life is to live honorably. And this rather high-falutin notion of honor means what your mama said it meant: don’t cheat; don’t lie; treat others as you expect them to treat you. Bathe every day and night in modesty, and remember – as astonishing as it may seem -- sometimes your moral enemy may be right. Put on your best manners in company. “The problem with bad manners,” William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “is that they sometimes lead to murder.” Caligula forgot that admonition.

Once Coronavirus has passed, we will be able honestly and forthrightly to examine closely the following propositions, many of which seem to be supported by what little, obscure data we now have at our disposal: that death projections have been wildly exaggerated; that reports of overwhelmed hospitals were exaggerated; that death counts were likely inflated; that the real death rate is magnitudes lower than it appears; that there have been under-serviced at-risk groups affected by Coronavirus; that it  is not entirely clear how well isolation works; that ventilators in some cases could be causing deaths.  These are open questions because insufficient data at our disposal at the moment does not permit a “scientific” answer to the questions that torment all of us.

At some point, a vaccine will be produced that will help to quiet our sometimes irrational fears, but vaccine production lies months ahead. The question before us now is: what is more dangerous, the wolf or the lion? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and allied governors in his Northeast compact, cannot pinpoint a date to end their destructive business shutdown because of insufficient data. According to some reports, Cuomo has hired China-connected McKinsey & Company to produce “models on testing, infections and other key data points that will underpin decisions on how and when to reopen the region’s economy.”

If the economy in Connecticut collapses because Gov. Ned Lamont accedes to the demands of those in his newly formed consortium of Northeast governors that business destroying restrictions should remain in place for months until a vaccine is widely distributed, the effects of the resulting economic implosion will certainly be more severe than a waning Coronavirus infestation. After Connecticut has reached the apex of the Coronavirus bell curve, it is altogether possible that a continuation of the cure – a severe business shutdown occasioned by policies rooted in insufficient data – will be far worse than the disease it purports to cure.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: In the COVID-19 crisis, both sides threaten liberty; block those raises!

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Fortunately it was just another brief bout of MAGA-lomania the other day when President Trump declared that he would decide when states lift the health and safety restrictions they have imposed because of the virus epidemic. Several governors, including Connecticut's Ned Lamont, quickly protested that the Constitution reserves such power to the states. New York's Andrew Cuomo protested most colorfully, noting that the president is not a king.

But amid the epidemic constitutional rights are under assault by many elected officials throughout the country, Democratic as well as Republican. Several states are imposing or threatening to impose penalties on religious services that exceed recommended attendance levels, in spite of the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of religion and assembly.

Connecticut isn't immune to such assaults. Lamont skirted the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms by telling gun shops they could remain open only by appointment. State Attorney General William Tong has joined other state attorneys general in a lawsuit to suppress publication of plans for guns that can be made by 3D printers, and this week Tong urged the federal government to criminalize such publication -- that is, to criminalize mere information, as if the First Amendment doesn't also guarantee speech and press rights.

The objection to making guns with 3D printers is that they can be manufactured without legally required serial numbers. But any gun can be, and the designs for many weapons have been published. If mere information can be criminalized in regard to gun designs, it can be criminalized for whatever government doesn't want people to know. Of course there would be no end to that.

Trump can't tell states when to lift their health and safety restrictions. But neither can Tong tell people what they can publish and read, no matter how politically incorrect it may be.

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Yankee Institute investigative journalist Marc Fitch this week reminded Connecticut that as of July 1 state government employees are due to start receiving raises costing at least $353 million a year. Fitch noted that Democratic governors in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are suspending state employee raises until the immense financial cost of the epidemic can be calculated.

So the Yankee Institute urged Governor Lamont to suspend the raises as well, but it's not clear that he can. For the raises are part of state government's current contract with the state employee union coalition, one of the many lamentable legacies of Connecticut's previous administration, and the federal Constitution forbids states from making any law impairing the obligation of contracts.

It's bad enough that the wages and benefits of state and municipal government employees have been completely protected even as the governor's own orders have thrown tens of thousands of people out of work in the private sector. For state government to pay raises while unemployment explodes in the private sector and state tax collections collapse would be crazy, more proof that nothing matters more to state government than the contentment of its own employees, whose unions long have controlled the majority political party.

But the governor is not helpless here. Using his emergency powers he could suspend collective bargaining for state employees and binding arbitration of their contracts for six months at a time or "modify" those laws to strengthen public administration during the emergency. He should do so, for as the treacle on television says, we're all supposed to be in this together.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: In Conn. (and elsewhere), the vast unfairness of responses to COVID-19

The last lifeboat launched from the Titanic

With all the patronizing piety they can muster, newscasters and commercials on television keep telling viewers, "We're all in this together," as if this will provide consolation and build national unity. It might if it were true.

A better service would show how, because of government policy, some people are surviving the COVID-19 epidemic comfortably while others, even though not infected, are being ruined.

Many government employees in Connecticut -- police and correctional officers, firefighters, child-protection social workers, and doctors and nurses -- are not just still working but risking their lives. Other government employees are not working as much as usual if at all but still being paid and insured though they are no more essential than many of the private-sector workers who have been furloughed or laid off because their employers have had to reduce or suspend operations.

Those private-sector workers who have lost their jobs and now face losing their housing and insurance still incur their usual tax obligations. While they will have less state income tax to pay, nobody is waiving property, sales, and gas taxes for them, and even renters pay property taxes indirectly, through their rent.

Of course, government's response to the epidemic was not calculated to penalize the private sector. But the consequences of its response are a reminder that most of the time government takes far better care of itself than it takes care of the public.

The huge if yet-uncounted cost of the epidemic requires confronting this unfairness.

While it may be hoped that the federal government will reimburse state government for most of its extraordinary expenses in the epidemic, by one estimate the epidemic still may cost state government $1.5 billion in tax revenue. That's almost 15 percent of the state budget, about half of which is spent on state and municipal government employees. How can such a deficit be closed without economizing with government employee compensation? Maintaining government employee compensation at current levels will be achieved only by reducing public services or raising taxes again, though Connecticut's high taxation already has cost it much population and business.

Since the General Assembly has been unable to convene and conduct normal business amid the epidemic, legislators should start contemplating this challenge on their own. The emergency powers claimed by Gov. Ned Lamont under Section 28-9 of the Connecticut General Statutes would enable him to suspend collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees, and thereby enable state and municipal government to begin to regain control of personnel expenses. But any such suspension could last for no more than six months at a time. Only regular legislation can regain that control for the long term.

Connecticut and the country won't be getting back to normal for many months. The epidemic soon may be slowed but the virus will linger into the summer and threaten to flare again when cold weather drives people back indoors.

Many smaller businesses are not likely to survive this -- not just restaurants and entertainment-oriented businesses but retailers and professional offices as well. The capital of those businesses will have been wiped out, along with the jobs they provided, and society may need years to regain income before it can support them again.

Temporarily bigger government likely will save Connecticut from the worst of the epidemic. But what remains of the state won't be able to afford as much of the government it had.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

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Chris Powell: Yes, anti-COVID-19 campaign could do more damage than the virus

Plague doctor in 1656

As Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and other governors curtail more commerce, industry, employment and ordinary life in the name of containing the new virus sweeping the world, people are starting to question whether the precautions are going too far. Is containing the virus worth crippling the economy, bankrupting so many businesses, throwing millions out of work and pushing their households into insolvency, destroying retirement savings, and exploding the national debt?

The official response is making the virus sound like the plague that killed half of Europe in the 1300s. But many people sense that it may not be that bad, may be no worse than ordinary influenza, which kills tens of thousands of people in the United States every year without setting off any alarm. Indeed, ordinary flu in Connecticut this year already had hospitalized more than 1,300 people and killed more than 60 before the new virus infected its first hundred people and killed anyone in the state. The state Department of Public Health noticed the flu's toll but only in a statistical sense. Except for the families of those who died, nobody else seems to have noticed, though "social distancing" a few months ago might have prevented many of those deaths.

Few notice how traffic fatalities add up either -- more than 35,000 every year in the United States, even as most could be prevented by "lockdowns" like those now being imposed because of the new virus.

Despite all the hysteria, financial loss and inconvenience generated by closing orders, most people diagnosed with the new virus find it anticlimactic. That is, for most a positive test for the virus prompts no hospitalization or special medical intervention at all. Instead most people are just told to go home, get well soon, and call back if they don't, just as they would be told upon diagnosis for the flu or a bad cold. Sure enough, they go home and most get well soon.

Doctors and governors warn that for every diagnosis with the new virus there may be a hundred undiagnosed people carrying it but not showing symptoms, and even the asymptomatic may infect others. Or the asymptomatic may not infect anyone and may never suffer any symptoms at all. Indeed, last week a Nobel prize-winning Israeli scientist speculated that half the population may be naturally immune to the new virus, and Chinese research has suggested that blood type may correlate with susceptibility. So while the mere number of infections may sound scary, it is not so important.

What may be most important is the percentage of people infected who die or require hospitalization. As of March 22 in Connecticut, the fatality rate from infections with the new virus was just 2½ percent and the hospitalization rate about 18 percent. Frail elderly people were most at risk of dying in Connecticut and most deaths elsewhere from the disease have involved either the frail elderly or those with already weakened immune systems. Hard-hit Italy reported last week that 99 percent of its fatalities were from these high-risk groups.

Of course, if infection spreads widely enough, even an 18 percent hospitalization rate would overwhelm the medical system. So widespread testing and quarantining as necessary, as South Korea has done, might be the best response. A government more devoted to public health generally than to fantastically expensive and stupid imperial wars might help too. But since, as flu and traffic fatalities show, life is always a judgment call about risk, and since it is known who is most vulnerable to the new virus, why not just isolate them rather than everyone else? For as the self-inflicted economic damage becomes catastrophic, the cure may be worse than the disease.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, vin Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Hartford (Rail) Line would work better if cities along it did, too

Hartford Line train in Hartford

Lauding the increase in passenger traffic in the first 18 months of the Springfield-Hartford-New Haven commuter railroad -- the Hartford Line -- Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont remarked the other week that he found it "astounding" that central Connecticut had gone without a commuter railroad for so long.

While the increase in traffic indeed is encouraging -- the millionth passenger appears to have ridden the restored line around Thanksgiving -- the long lack of commuter rail service between Springfield and New Haven is really not astounding at all. Because of the automobile and the commitment of government to highways, commuter rail service became deeply unprofitable in the 1950s and died in central Connecticut after the bankruptcy of the New Haven Railroad, in 1961. Amtrak's interstate service on the route long has been infrequent and clunky.

Commuter rail service from New Haven to New York survived the New Haven's bankruptcy because New York and Connecticut state governments have operated it with big subsidies as part of the Metro-North Railroad system. Heavy rush-hour traffic on the highways from New Haven to New York keeps the train attractive there despite the rickety tracks and bridges. But highway traffic between Springfield and New Haven seldom is bad enough to induce people to get out of their cars to take buses or the new commuter trains.

For passengers the new Hartford Line service is great and inexpensive, just $8 per ride. The line will get better as more stations are built. But when the service began in June 2018 every passenger trip was being subsidized by state government in the fantastic amount of $59. That subsidy was entirely operating cost, not counting the $700 million spent rebuilding the line. Even now, with ridership increasing, the subsidy per passenger trip is still about $56. A bus ride for a parallel trip costs a fraction of that.

It will be a miracle if the Hartford Line's per-passenger subsidy can be reduced someday even to $40, since the area served lacks the necessary population density and workforce flow patterns and since another prerequisite of a successful commuter railroad isn't always available: frequent bus, taxi, or subway service at major destinations.

But the Hartford Line seems like a far more promising transportation project than another heavily subsidized recent project, the Hartford-New Britain bus highway, which added little to commuting options that were already available. The Hartford Line's reach and service area are far greater. In a state that chose to encourage economic growth instead of just to cannibalize itself to pay pensions to government employees, something like the Hartford Line would be a much greater asset for "transit-oriented development."

Further, of course, highways represent government subsidies just as the new commuter railroad does -- so much so that highways have been given their own revenue streams with special taxes on gasoline and tires. Where population density is high and highways are already crowded, shifting subsidies toward mass transit makes sense.

Maybe the best government could do to build ridership on the Hartford Line would be to improve the demographics and commerce of the cities along it -- Springfield, Hartford, Meriden, and New Haven -- something that should be done for its own sake, quite apart from the success of the new railroad.

Improving the demographics of those cities will require examining what in government policy is perpetuating instead of eradicating the poverty there and thus driving self-sufficient people away from "transit-oriented development."

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.