Ken Dixon's Blog-O-Rama

Wednesday April 30, 2008

With the budget meltdown living up to its potential and Capitol pols stumbling over each other to feign fiscal relevancy, Blog-o-rama notices today that the Kentuck Derby must be Saturday.
More evidence: everyone from Senate President Don Williams to Gov. Jodi Rell and beyond are on their high feakin’ horses.
The early line is that Big Brown, with only three races under its feet, is the favorite for the Runnin’ for the Roses, while the odds of a state budget agreement by midnight May 7 are 3-1 against.

Tuesday April 29, 2008

It’s noonish and Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Nikki O’Neill, the widow of the late former Gov. William A. O’Neill, just unveiled a bronze plaque and a wooden sign designating the state armory as the Gov. William A. O’Neill Armory.
It’s probably appropriate that the outdoor sign is located between the main entrance and the more-informal door that leads to the Officer’s Club.
Nikki reminded everyone that her late husband, who might have made the U.S. Air Force a career if his father hadn’t died and “Billy” came back to East Hampton to run the family saloon, liked the O Club very much.
“A lot of very-important decisions were made in the Officer’s Club,” Nikki told about 200 people gathered on the armory’s second-floor gymnasium space. “Or at least, that’s what he told me.”
Nikki, appropriately enough, invited those present, including old loyalists like former Lt. Gov. Joe Fauliso, to repair to the O Club for “a light lunch and a few cocktails” after the event.
The 100 or so Connecticut National Guard troops – clad in desert camo – present at the ceremony seemed like they would have supported to idea, but they were on duty.
Nikki also said that former Speaker of the House Nelson Brown is recovering in a Groton assisted-living facility, waiting for a prosthetic leg, after a recent amputation.
Rell, who remembered O’Neill as governor when she was a freshman member of the House of Representatives, called him a “titan of Connecticut politics” and that he was “decent and fair.”
“Bill O’Neill always made sure common sense prevailed when decisions were made,” Rell said.
Maybe lawmakers currently embattled with the state budget, should take a page from the political playbook of the old timers and wander across from the Legislative Office Building, salute the new sign and plunge into the frfiendly darkness of the O Club to wet their whistles and talk some “common sense” with each other, for a change.j

Monday April 28, 2008

Rep. Don Clemons, D-Bridgeport, took a page fromr Ernie Newton’s expertise in malaprops this morning, during a news conference on the need for more black and Latino judges.
Newton, currently serving five years in federal prison on corruption charges, was famous for butchering the language.
He was possibly best known for asking that a state budget be cut with “a scaffold, not a meat ax,” when he meant scalpel.
Back when he was city council president in Bridgeport, Newton once proclaimed “I don’t want to be no escape goat.”
Anyway, Ernie’s out of circulation for a while and Clemons, chairman of the Black and Latino Caucus, led a news conference this morning on the need for more minority judges.
“We the members of the Connecticut Black and Latino Caucus are here to express our DISSATISFICATION with Gov. Rell regarding nominees of judges to Connecticut’s Superior Courts,” he said, not exactly getting the news conference off on the most-coherent foot.

Friday April 25, 2008

President Bush’s motorcade has paralyzed capital-area traffic this morning, on the way to in his flimsy “business” excuse to take a taxpayer-paid trip to Connecticut.
Late-morning traffic was frozen on I-91 south of Bradley International Airport, for his motorcade to a Boys & Girls Club function in Hartford, where he praised the club’s campaign against malaria.
U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, R-4, came off Air Force One with the president.
Things are so bad for the unpopular president that he finally broke down and publicly admitted in that Texas drawl that he was born in Connecticut to trigger a smattering of applause.
This fluke of the map and calendar occurred back in New Haven just after WWII, when his father was at Yale.
But the president’s main goal Friday was an early afternoon, $1,000-a-head function at Henry Kissinger’s place in Kent, to benefit the congressional candidacy of state Sen. David Cappiello, R-Danbury, who’s trying to unseat freshman U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-5.
Kissinger, you’ll recall, was the architect of the “Peace is at Hand” lie in Vietnam for President Richard Nixon in the runup to the 1972 election, when Hammerin’ Henry was secretary of state.
THERE’S a guy who should live in a “compound,” a term of art for an insulated multi-millionaire who’s still considered a war criminal by many around the globe. Bush was getting there by helicopter after motorcading back up to Bradley
Chris Healy, GOP state chairman, told Blog-o-rama yesterday that there’s going to be some kind of split between the state and national Republican parties over the revenue produced by the suddenly malaria-astute president.
It’s $10,000 to have a photo taken with Bush, on top of the $1,000 entry fee.
Nancy DiNardo, the state Democratic chairwoman who still is in denial over the Democrats’ potential for self-destruction in a presidential election year, cackled Friday:
“We hope that President Bush comes back often and continues to pose for pictures with David Cappiello and Chris Shays. With every visit to our state, he will remind the citizens of Connecticut that, if these two individuals are elected to the US Congress, they will carry on Mr.Bush’s failed policies well after he moves out of the White House.”

Thursday April 24, 2008.

Yale’s notorious Peabody Museum has had a marketing display set up this week in the underground concourse between the Legislativge Office Building and the Capitol.
It consists of posters touting the 11 curatorial divisions and “12 million specimens” located at the Whitney Avenue landmark.
Among the pictures of the carved wooden mask of the tiger spirit, the model of the giant squid, the beetles, the blue poison frog, the fossils and the Navajo blanket, was exactly zero mention of the thousands of objects looted from Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, back nearly 100 years ago by Yale’s Hiram Bingham.
Yale’s currently engaged in a long-running confrontation with Peru, which rightly wants their artifacts back.
Blog-o-rama says Yale should return the Andean heritage to the Peruvians and the museum, in turn, can take Doc Gunther, the 88-year-old former state senator honored by Germany in the state Capitol yesterday, for display behind glass with the museum’s other fossils.

Wednesday April 23, 2008

UConn Day in the Capitol, in years that basketball teams won the national championship, meant crowds of people filling halls and chambers, applauding their heroes.
This year, the galleries in the House and Senate were mostly empty, the corridors merely filled with deadly lobbyists.
The Blogster found it strange that the UConn men’s soccer team, say, wasn’t invited to take the place of the under-achieving basketball team. The soccer team got to a game away from the final four and had the player of the year in the NCAA, O’Brien White.
But your average lawmaker is a meat-and-potatoes basketball and football fan and lives to be on the receiving end of a smile from Jim Calhoun.
Blog-o-rama was probably the only reporter to embrace the coincidence that UConn Day in the Capitol came within minutes after Democratic leaders of the House got together with Jeff Hathaway, the athletic director, to announce the evaporation of opposition to any deal UConn can cut with the Notre Dame football program to guarantee seven years of football clashes either in South Bend, or Giants Stadium or up in dreaded Foxboro, the land of Richard Kraft, who once used Connecticut like a pry bar to leverage a better deal in Massachusetts.
That debacle was a funny unwinding and playing of John Rowland, back around the time he was doing crooked things in his private life, but we hadn’t yet realized it.
Today’s deal was to allow the Notre Dame/UConn clashes to appear in stadiums twice as large as Rentschler Field in East Hartford, the cozy 40,000-seat stadium that separate UConn for the true football factories.
Anyway, Blog-o-rama finds it obscene that Connecticut athletes, by and large, can no longer play athletics for their state university and we, the taxpayers are coughing up scholarship money for out-of-state semi-pros.
Alumni and season ticket holders, in turn, pay through the nose for seats to Husky football and basketball events staffed by merceneries from elsewhere and their over-priced, controlling coaches.
Geno Auriemma, the woman’s basketball mentor and the classiest coach in Connecticut, actually gets his players to graduate, which is the best thing you can say about the college-athletic experience.
Happy Freakin’ UConn Day!

Tuesday April 22, 2008

Finally, another primary is almost history and Blog-o-rama believes it would have been better to have had a primary in Connecticut THIS month, as opposed to Super Tuesday in February.
As much as the Blogster hates seeing TV get political advertising, an April primary really would have made us prominent way beyond out 60 measly Democratic delegates.
Granted Sen. John McCain would have been less relevant, but the whole political horserace this year has been mostly about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Plus, if the Connecticut primary were held during April, Connecticut reporters would have been able to go to school on the Washington testimony on the Iraqi War.
We could have been position to ask Obama and Clinton on their vision for the length of time they estimate the U.S. military bases will have to remain in Iraq, even as they try to position themselves as the anti-war candidates.The national press corps seems to keep its focus on month-old slips of the tongue, faulty memories and divisive background noise.

Monday April 21, 2008

The Republican governor, the one who got to the bottom of the Girl Scout cookies controversy last week, has just issued another news release about the persistent-offender controversy, which dates back to last July 23, when the Cheshire home invasion and triple homicide occurred.
Remember that those alleged murderers would never have been prevented from the home-invasion opportunity under a three-strikes law that could have sent them to prison for life?
Call it three strikes, call it persistent offender, but it’s symbolic of the active struggle between majority Democrats and Minority Republicans who are desperate for an issue, any issue that they can use to possibly gain a few more seats in the House and Senate.
Blog-o-rama, by the way, thinks things would be more interesting – and better balanced – if there were more Republicans in the Gewneral Assembly. The Blogster also thinks that Democratic leaders would admit that fewer members of their majority caucuses could make it easier to legislate.
Last week House Minority Leader Larry Cafero, R-Norwalk, offered up an amendment that would have rekindled the “three strikes” debate for a few hours. Rep. Mike Lawlor, D-East Haven, asked the House to reject the amendment and wait for a few more days for a bill to be crafted with prosecutors, in a variation on an announcement he made with Speaker of the House Jim Amann and Chief States Attorney Kevin Kane on April 11, including $15 million for additional personnel.
The House debate was sidetracked with Majority Leader Chris Donovan pulled the bill, temporarily and mercifully, from debate.
Rell’s people have been in the habit recently of working weekends and shooting out PR proclamations that TV stations pick up without a peep and as if they were actual news.
Today, they extended the weekend to Monday, with yet again, the governor pronouncing on “three strikes,” as if the House and Senate were Republican controlled and as if the persistent offender law hadn’t already been rewritten during that January special session.
It’s another example of how reactive the Legislature and the governor have been. A kid wraps their overpowered car around a tree? Make it tougher for all 16-year-olds to get a license.
Our violent society leaves several dead in unrelated incidents around the state? Issue another nerws release on that “three strikes” mantra and wrap yourself in a “tough on crime” blanket.
Meanwhile, conveniently forget about additional school funding for the state’s cities.
Forget about the separate-but-unequal education offered in the cities compared to the safe suburbs.