Ken Dixon's Blog-O-Rama

Thursday Jan. 8 2008

Senate President Pro Tem Don Williams, D-Brookfield, may have shared a little too much with reporters Thursday afternoon, when he indicated that as a child, he was a petty thief.
The venue was a news conference ostensibly called to deflect some of the heat Connecticut has gotten. We’re last in the nation for investing the landmark multi-billion-dollar settlement with Big Tobacco into prevention and cessation programs.
Williams appeared with Speaker of the House Jim Amann and Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, asking Gov. Jodi Rell to free up $2 million to continue the portion of the “Quitline” program that provided nicotine patches and chewing gum to thousands of people who wanted to stop smoking. The funding dried up in November.
“I never smoked and there’s a reason for that and the reason is my dad,” Williams said. “I remember as a very young boy my father smoking. I remember seeing the pack of cigarettes on his dresser, when I would like to climb up on a chair looking for spare change and just looking on the dresser of your dad, which is something you do when you’re 4-5 years old. And this is before the Surgeon General came out with that historic report in the mid-1960s, linking cigarettes to cancer. And the company my father worked for, lucky for him, put on a seminar for employees. They showed slides, cross sections of lungs. They showed a cross section of a healthy lung, a nice clean, pink lung. They showed the cross section of a lung of a smoker: black pitted, diseased. He never smoked a cigarette after that and he told me and my brothers that story so many times that none of us ever smoked cigarettes.”
Speaking of lives of crime.
The fun, loud, jam-packed grand opening of the Two Boots restaurant on Fairfield Avenue in downtown Bridgeport on Wednesday night attracted more than it’s share of Bridgeport Democrats. It also provided a glimpse of what downtown can be again.
The Two Boots is right in the same block where the venerable Sol’s Cafe once stayed open into the pre-dawn hours, back when we were young, Len Paoletta was a good Republican mayor and The Telegram was Bridgeport’s feisty morning paper.
The Two Boots reservation list was thrown to the breeze and anyone who came in paid too much for small cups of beer, but noshed on free pizza and listened to four, count then, four bands, including The Zambonis.
Watching The Zambonis wail on their iconic “The Referee’s Daughter,” a rock ‘n’ roll tribute to a frozen love that dares not throw a cross check, made me feel a lot better about having purchased a pro model Hartford Whalers jersey before they decamped to North Carolina.
But where did I put the jersey, or sweater as you toothless skaters call them?
Beats me. Maybe in a bushel basket of T-shirts.
The management of Two Boots gave out very cool Mardi Gras beads to many in the crowd. Bob Walsh, the pesky city councilman with ridiculously high ethical standards – for Bridgeport – wore a suitable string of beads highlighted by a half dozen plastic skulls. More than one person named them. “There’s Joe Ganim, Ernie Newton, Lennie Grimaldi, Paul Pinto, John Fabrizi and the last one must be Bill Finch?” one comedian speculated.

Wednesday January 9
Now that the cornfields and the frozen north have spoken, the Blog-o-rama wants to savor last night, then plan for what could become a divisive February 5 primary here, when Connecticut becomes a small face in the big primary crowd that is being known as the Super Duper Tuesday.
We’re savoring the whopping 202 votes that former presidential hopeful Chris Dodd won last night in New Hampshire. Word of the veteran U.S. senator’s withdrawal from the presidential sweepstakes failed to get into the recesses of snowed-in places such as Franconia Notch, where I once wanted to open a Mexican restaurant called Franconia Nachos.
So if Dodd had dropped out of Iowa before the caucuses, would he have gathered more than 40 votes for his $13 million?
Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo said this afternoon that she anticipates an Obama/Clinton throwdown on the 5th. Any Democrat who gets 15 percent or more will trigger a caucus process for delegates that will be held in each of the five congressional districts on March 19.
At stake are Connecticut’s 60 Democratic delegates for the August national convention in Denver. For instance, if Hillary scores 40 percent and Obama equals it, they’ll evenly split the 60 delegates.
DiNardo, as chairwoman is uncommitted. “I anticipate a split delegation, but I think people will be respectful of everybody and their choice and I don’t anticipate any major fallout,” DiNardo, of Trumbull, said.
That’s no fun.
“I thought New Hampshire was interesting,” she said. “I wasn’t surprised at what happened. I think people have been supporting different candidates for different reasons. I’m pleased with the candidates we have, across the board.”
Isn’t that kind of boilerplate better suited to those icy ski slopes?
DiNardo’s elephantine counterpart, Chris Healy, chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, said this afternoon that Connecticut’s GOP has 30 delegates at stake for the national convention in Minneapolis is early September.
“Every state that has a primary in February, including Connecticut, will be critically important to the Republican and Democratic candidates,” Healy said in a phone interview. “But it’s too bad that the whole process has to be crunched into a national election in February. That’s no way to run a democracy.”
Healy sees a lot of varied interest for GOP candidates in the state. “That’s good for our party because it keeps people active,” he said, offering some boilerplate of his own. “We’re also looking for people to join the Republican ranks from the unaffiliated.”
Unlike Democrats, Republicans have a winner-take-all rule, so whoever gets the most GOP votes on February 5, wins all 30 delegates. Second prize is spending Labor Day in Minneapolis.

Senator Chris Dodd’s decimalogic popularity in Iowa may have been
foreshadowed by his “Rally Monkey” video blog. You can find it at:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1DQxLef0PA )

It may explain why the Corn Belt didn’t buy into his presidential
aspirations.

It’s Tuesday afternoon, January 8 in the Capitol and many veteran
state staffers are still reeling over the way that Republicans and
Democrats are shamelessly using the July 23 triple homicide of a
mother and her two daughters in Cheshire to posture politically, in a
legislative election year, over law and order.

On Monday afternoon, Gov. Jodi Rell announced a 10 a.m. Tuesday news
conference in which she would beat her own criminal justice task
force to the punch and announce recommendations for a special session
this month. She even released a letter to the “Big Six” legislative
leaders inviting them to the Tuesday newser.

Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams had scheduled a 1:30
appearance Monday in the Capitol Press Room to endorse Barack Obama
for president, but after getting Rell’s invitation, everything was
put back a couple hours so majority House and Senate Ds could concoct
a two-page reaction of their own on what they want for the special
session.

Rell, flanked by nine legislative leaders, task force members and
Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane, was asked by a reporter whether
the six months since the July 23 Cheshire murders represented a “lost
opportunity” for lawmakers.

“I think it’s been a great opportunity, as Kevin said, for people to
come together, to share information and frankly to have what I
consider a real eye opener on how this system works or doesn’t work,”
Rell said. “And I think it has been beneficial. I said we needed a
comprehensive review and look at the criminal justice system. It
wasn’t just the parole system that concerned so many people. It was
the entire process. So to answer your question, I think it’s been a
valuable tool for us to make decisions that we can move on
immediately.”

Another reporter, hinting at the politics of scheduling news
conferences and releasing proposals, asked Rell why she had the news
conference on Tuesday instead of waiting for her task force to
actually meet and present final recommendations on Wednesday.

“Because I got a draft copy of their report ahead of time,” Rell
said, laughing. “And some of the things that I believe we can do are
what I’ve outlined today.”

Rell said that she spoke Monday to Dr. William Petit of Cheshire,
whose wife and two daughters were allegedly murdered by two career
burglars. The governor said she went over the broad-brush details to
assure him that she and the General Assembly were on the verge of
toughening laws on burglaries and career criminals.

Williams was even more politically overt.

“I was very pleased that the governor has embraced the fulltime
professional parole proposal that we made last September,” he said.
“The good news is we’re all on the same page,” said House Minority
Leader Larry Cafero , who unsuccessfully attempted to hammer through
enhanced criminal penalties during a December 5 meeting of the House
that put them into a special session on criminal-justice reforms.

“My hope is that we’re all going to come together on a package,”
added Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield. “There is a
commitment on the governor’s behalf and the majority’s behalf to have
a session in January to deal with very important issues and we’ll
have a debate and vote on those issues.”

Hello gentle readers: Welcome to what I’m calling the Connecticut
Blog-o-rama. I intend it to be used for news-worthy items and comment
for which there might not be room in the daily Connecticut Post
newspaper. It’s Monday the 7th of January, but if Blog-o-rama began
last Thursday, I would have posted an item about the relative success
of Sen. Chris Dodd to reach his 2-percent goal in the Iowa caucuses.
Unfortunately, he didn’t anticipate the chances of the “2″ being
located to the right of two decimal points. The good news, quipped
Peter Urban, the Connecticut Post’s Washington reporter, is that
Dodd’s .02 percent didn’t met the threshold for a field sobriety
test, let alone a BreathAlyzer.

Today, as a warm-up to the Super Duper Tuesday primary, in which
Connecticut’s role will be diminished to a shadow amid the hundreds
of convention delegates at stake throughout the nation’s larger
states, the ever-optimistic Chris Healy, GOP state chairman announced
a fund-raising “straw poll” on January 25 in Middletown.
Connecticut Republicans are invited to pay $10 for a ballot there in
the Elks lodge, or on the State Republican Party’s website
(www.ctgop.org). Healy said part of the proceeds will be donated to
the Connecticut Breast Cancer Coalition Foundation.
“The Straw Poll is an exciting way for Republicans to take their
case to their fellow party members, exchange ideas and pick their
candidate a week before the February 5th primary,” Healy said in a
statement. “This election is historic in many ways and Republicans
in Connecticut will show they are ready to win Connecticut for our
candidate for the first time since 1988.”

The lodge’s doors will open at 6 and jawboning, buttonholing and
friendly coercion will continue until balloting begins around 8. Each
campaign will get 10 minutes to present their candidate or surrogate.
Currently there are 633,119 state Democrats and 392,076 Republicans
eligible to vote in the primaries. There are 808,380 unaffiliated
voters

Connecticut’s primary will coincide with balloting and caucuses in
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware,
Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri,
New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee,
Utah and West Virginia.