Terry Cowgill

Connecticut’s Grandmother Fires A Rocket

Update Sunday: Now this is the kind of contrarian view I would expect from a fiscal conservative. I wonder if Rennie’s take is a harbinger of a revolt from the right?

Wow. That’s all I could say when I heard Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s budget proposal. And I don’t say that often about budgets (or about gubernatorial speeches).

[For all the official raw data, click here.]

Every fall when I wait to hear the dreaded “B-word” come from the Region One Board of Education, for example, I know I will be miserable having to spend the next several weeks wallowing around in balance sheets and wearing a green eye shade. That’s not to say what that board does is boring, but I know there will be few surprises beyond which programs to cut.

Yet Rell’s proposal, especially coming from a Republican thought to be something of a fiscal conservative, was stunning in its ambitiousness and scope. Democrats were taken aback (but mostly liked it) and some Republicans were dyspeptic at the thought of raising the income tax by 10% over two years and increasing total spending by 6.7% the first year and 4.7 the next.

[This just in: The House Speaker, a Democrat, is grumbling about the tax increases, arguing that we should use surpluses to fund an ongoing program. He also complained that when she was running for governor last year, Rell said nothing about tax increases. Earth to Amann: Mondale tried that in ’84; it doesn’t work very well.]

Continue reading Connecticut’s Grandmother Fires A Rocket…

Lapdog Joe

Here’s yet another reason why Joe Lieberman is the biggest phony this side of Hillary. Eat your heart out, Ned. And thanks, Colin.

The Blue-ing of Litchfield County

A big front page piece in this morning’s Hartford Courant by Cornwall’s Rinker Buck on the ongoing gentrification of the Northwest Corner.

Not many surprises for those of us who live and work here, but it’s nice to see Rinker spreading the word to the rest of the state about the challenges we at The Lakeville Journal have been writing about for some time (click here and here for examples).

This twins up nicely with a column just before Christmas by Rick Green on the shrinking (and related) Region One school district enrollments.

Update: There is also a scathing column in The Courant today by Kevin Rennie attacking Gov. Rell on her platitudinous inaugural speech and her general lack of a plan to do anything important.

Rennie is a former Republican legislator, so his comments will be noticed and given even more credibility than a similar attack from, say, Bill Curry or Colin McEnroe. I must say I find myself agreeing with him, but I’m not a Republican.

Kevin, you have a lot of guts, but if you show up at any GOP cocktail parties, be prepared for some baleful glances.

Rell’s Guard: Thugs Or Heroes?

[Photo of Ken Krayeske courtesy Melissa Bailey of CTNewsJunkie.com]

6:30 p.m. Update: The plot thickens. Maybe Ken was rushing toward the governor to get a photograph and his actions were misinterpreted.

A strange and disturbing story surfaced Wednesday in Hartford, where a freelance journalist and political activist was arrested during the governor’s inaugural parade and charged with breach of peace and interfering with a police officer.

There are many stories and blog postings on the incident on websites, among them The Hartford Courant and CTNewsJunkie. Gale Toensing, who edits The Corner Report, even went to the trouble of sending out a breaking news email yesterday to those on her list serve.

From the accounts I have read it is difficult to tell whether the State Police and Hartford’s finest simply overreacted at the perceived threat posed by Ken Krayeske or whether they used thug tactics to make an example of those who have heckled the governor in the past.

Continue reading Rell’s Guard: Thugs Or Heroes?…

What’s In A Name? Plenty …

After reading this morning in The Hartford Courant that state Department of Mental Retardation Commissioner Peter H. O’Meara is urging lawmakers to rename his agency, I got to thinking about the evolution of names and how exactly a label becomes offensive.

Most people hear the word retarded and it immediately conjures up images of Down syndrome or fingers curled inward like a ram’s horns. Of course, like many stereotypes, such is not always the case.

But when the agency’s current name was created, words like idiot, imbecile and feeble-minded were used routinely to describe such people. So advocates for those with IQs under 70 preferred the term mentally retarded.

It was accurate and it was not considered pejorative. Fair enough. But now, after decades of use, the term that carried less baggage has finally accumulated it.

Ditto some other terms that I have run across in my career(s). When I first started teaching in 1982, students with auditory processing difficulties or reading disorders were labeled learning disabled — not slow or (God forbid) stupid.

Continue reading What’s In A Name? Plenty ……

Wednesday’s Thoughts …

A strange and troubling story surfaced today about the ACLU challenging the decision of a high school in Enfield, Conn., to hold its commencement exercises in a church.

School boards in Enfield and elsewhere occasionally decide to hold graduation ceremonies in churches not because they want to turn us all into Bible-toting zombies, but rather because they don’t have the facilities to accommodate the hundreds (sometimes thousands) who show up for these events.

And a modest rental donation to the church is a heckuva lot cheaper than spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to rent the Springfield Civic Center, for example. Sam Brooke, the ACLU lawyer who wrote the letter to the school board, flatly labeled the practice “unconstitutional.”

Brooke said the establishment clause - “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” - prohibits government entities, including public schools, from taking any action that a reasonable observer would interpret as endorsing a particular religion or endorsing the practice of religion generally.

I guess Brooke thinks he is reasonable. Do you think it’s reasonable to conclude that the school board is trying to “establish” a state religion by holding the ceremony in a church for the sake of convenience? I am an agnostic and take a back seat to no one in my opposition to theocracies, but the phrase “separation of church and state” is nowhere in the Constitution.

Continue reading Wednesday’s Thoughts ……

Really? I’ll Look Into It!

In case you missed it, there was a very troubling story in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant on a scathing report issued by state and outside authorities on the internal affairs division of the Connecticut State Police.

Simply put, the 168-page report completed by Attorney General Dick Blumenthal’s office and the New York State Police paints a picture of an IA unit that was out of control and not doing its job. Authorities in whom we had invested our trust to police the police were either looking the other way or failed to follow-up on obvious leads. And there is strong evidence that they were directed to do so by superiors.

At one troop, The Courant reported yesterday, “an ‘open competition‘ existed among some troopers over who could make the most drunken-driving arrests on the midnight shift” — with little care given as to whether the arrests were legitimate or not. Of course, IA failed to properly investigate this matter as well.

This just drives home a point I like to make regularly (though not yet on this blog, if I’m not mistaken). You can’t trust any organization to investigate itself properly and fairly. The police have an obvious conflict of interest in having their IA divisions look into allegations of misbehavior. And not only because investigators are reluctant to report unflattering truths to their superiors.

Continue reading Really? I’ll Look Into It!…

Random Election Night Ramblings

6:30 a.m. House control for Dems now a foregone conclusion. Only the margin is in doubt. Dem Senate control hinges on the outcome in Montana and Viriginia. Dems are ahead slightly in both races. Virginia could wind up in court. The Commonwealth is crawling with lawyers already. A disaster for the GOP. Bush is scheduled to speak this afternoon. How can he possibly spin this?

Almost midnight. I am retiring for the evening. I’ve got an election story to write first thing in the morning. Waiting for Senate races in Montana and Missouri. It could be hours … adios until 6 a.m.

11:25 p.m. Hastert is all but conceding right now. He is resigned to looking for “a few pick-ups” out west. And NY GOP Rep. John Sweeney, who has represented Millerton and Pine Plains since Gerry Solomon retired in 2000, is gone, losing to Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand. Dick Gephardt is on MSNBC. He said, “This is like 1994 in reverse.” An apt simile … hard to disagree with at this point, although the Senate remains in doubt.

Continue reading Random Election Night Ramblings…

Picks and Predictions

Just started a personal blog and have posted my picks and predictions for key midterm elections — local and statewide. Click here to check it out.

Joe the Tele-Stalker

If you’re not a Joe Lieberman fan, you’ll probably find this video clip laugh-out-loud funny. You might even like it if you’re a Joe booster. Brought to my attention by MyLeftNutmeg. See, the lefties do have a sense of humor!