Connecticut remains one of the top three most expensive states in the nation for electricity consumers, a class that includes us all. Decades of promises to do something about the cost of power have provided only more misery for ratepayers. It did not have to be this way.

CT budget expected to hit $27B. What lawmakers say as we face among highest cost of living in nation

Lamont has made the state so inhospitable to innovation and broken so many promises that his credibility as an informed leader at a critical time is gone. As one example, Lamont says we need more natural gas. We have needed more natural gas for years. Our own American aristocrat did not think so a few years ago when he killed the Killingly gas plant that would have provided power to more than 420,000 homes.

Four years ago this month, when Connecticut’s demand for new sources of electricity was well-known, Lamont announced he was against the Killingly plant. The decision pleased those who do not see natural gas as a bridge to a sustainable energy future. Lamont has been especially susceptible to environmental purists in his party, particularly as election years draw near.

Lamont, who possesses significant skills as a conciliator in this fractious time, has presided over deep divisions in energy policy and seems not to care. He continues to ignore a law that he signed requiring him to appoint two additional members to the state’s utility regulator, Public Utilities Regulator Authority or PURA. The law says he shall appoint five members. It is well-settled law in Connecticut that shall means shall. Still, Lamont refuses. This will have implications for Lamont when he has to make the case that the incoming Trump administration is disregarding the plain meaning of federal laws.

PURA itself is a mess. Lamont could burnish his woeful “Right to Know” credentials beyond owning the original Norman Rockwell painting of that title by performing a simple act. He could make sure that all PURA commissioners have direct and unfettered access to the agency’s files. He could also insist that votes of PURA commissioners are properly held and recorded.

There is an obvious solution to our insufficient supply of natural gas: convince New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to permit the expansion of natural gas pipelines that run through New York into New England. The two Democrats must have frequent contact to discuss and address regional issues. Make the pipeline a priority.

The governor also needs to repair relations with Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. His dealings with her have not, regrettably, been honorable. Lamont has backed out of renewable energy projects that our neighbors expected Connecticut to participate in after the governor said we would.  They learned they cannot count on Lamont. That will be difficult to repair.

It is wrong to mislead the public into thinking that there are vast amounts of hydropower from Canada that can be sold to Connecticut consumers at a low cost. Building the lines to transport electricity from Canada to New England has been a long, expensive and controversial process. If recent history is any indication of future obstacles, there will be no relief for Connecticut from Canada.

It gets worse. The most beautiful word in Donald Trump’s limited vocabulary, according to him, is “tariffs.” He has threatened to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian exports to the United States because he loathes our democratic allies. That will add significantly to the cost of the electricity we purchase from our peaceful northern neighbor.

Lamont’s fellow Democrats in the legislature add to the gloomy outlook. The co-chairs of the energy committee, Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, and Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, published a bizarre opinion piece, that we presume they wrote together, excoriating The Courant’s reporting and accusing international business rating agency Standard & Poor’s Rating Service of being the tool of utilities Eversource and United Illuminating. This is conspiracy mongering stuff.

S&P downgraded its ratings of two Eversource subsidiaries, Connecticut Light and Power and Yankee Gas Services. No corporate executive likes to share that sort of news with shareholders because it means the cost of doing business may rise. It is not news that Connecticut is a challenging place to do business. Even Lamont disclosed that several years ago when his entrepreneurial wife went to Tennessee to begin a new enterprise.

Lashing out at the media for your own failures is an old and frequent gambit of politicians mired in failure. Connecticut’s energy market is a mess and events such as extreme weather could suddenly make it far worse.

Weaving fantasies, keeping fingers crossed, and blaming the press will not keep the heat, air-conditioning, and lights on in the crunch. We want reliable energy at a reasonable price. It’s not a lot to ask.

Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com

Voters in November increased the already formidable Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. The Democratic leaders have interpreted this as one more reason to carp about the fiscal guardrails enacted in 2017. They are the reforms that have allowed the state to function with budget surpluses rather than the deficits that plagued it for a decade.

Those deficits were accompanied by the burden of additional taxes and growing long-term debt. Many legislators have been elected since the state’s nagging budget problems were effectively addressed by a bipartisan coalition of legislators. Long term debts have been reduced, freeing hundreds of millions for the endless demands of spending. But it is never enough for many.

All sorts of mewling has broken out in a sustained effort to send Connecticut back to the grim years of deficits and tax increases. This noxious nostalgia has its fingers at our throats at the worst possible time. The incoming administration of Donald Trump will be filled with his disciples who believe they serve an emperor, not a president in a democracy.

The nomination of Russell Vought to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget ought to alarm every person of goodwill. Vought is one of the leading forces behind Project 2025. That’s the ugly document from the zealots at the Heritage Foundation that seeks to dismantle much of the government that secures freedom and opportunity under the rule of law.

Vought, who served in the first Trump administration that voters turfed out of office in 2020, embraces the imperial presidency. This is what a tiny plurality of voters embraced in November—and now they are going to get it good and hard. This is not a secret. It’s there in black and white. Vought believes a president possesses the authority to refuse to spend money Congress has appropriated.

One of the dangers Trump perpetually poses is his erratic commitment to keeping his word. Nevertheless, we must be prepared for the worst, which will be terrible. The Washington Post reported before the election that Trump is determined to ignore laws arising out of the budget process.

Post reporters Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage wrote, “The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.”

A president whose favorite Bible verse is “an eye for an eye” will govern with a broad definition of retribution. States like Connecticut need to brace themselves for cuts in programs like Medicaid, which largely pays for nursing home care. That could mean billions withheld from the state. U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney warns state and local governments to button up their paperwork for funds before Trump and his zealots get their mitts fully on the government exchequer.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, knows how to work the levers of government. As the former chair of the House’s appropriation committee, DeLauro should be able to show her benighted Republicans that the heavy hand of impoundment will hurt them.

Attorney General William Tong has a taste for performance over substance. Let’s hope he understands this is no moment for mere theatrics and Instagram videos. Tong has entered into a “Project for Accountability” with some of his counterparts in other states. Shhh, Tong has emphasized the importance of secrecy to colleagues, so don’t tell anyone who does not read The Courant.

Lawyers in Tong’s office will be taken off their assigned areas of work and deployed to join (once in a while lead) other states in challenging Trump laws and lawlessness. The former head of the now-defunct Trump University has promised to do away with the Department of Education. Connecticut’s own Linda McMahon will be in charge of wrestling that agency out of business. The consequences are yet to be determined but they will fall most heavily on children and their families.

McMahon, the head of Trump’s America First Policy Institute, has made a dramatic transformation from moderate Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and 2012 to a zealot. The wrestling and show business mogul has overseen online rages about the establishment doing business with the Communist Chinese Party interests. She would likely never condemn Elon Musk in public or private but, my goodness, these wild-eyed rants will undermine the credibility of a person who often seemed reasonable by nature and intent a decade ago.

Full marks for Gov. Ned Lamont for appearing Wednesday before the joint House and Senate session and suggesting the legislature figure out how to spend more effectively the money it has because trouble is coming from Washington.

Reach Kevin F. Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

In January 2001, then-U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was instrumental in snagging a pardon for his friend Edward Downe as former President Bill Clinton headed out the White House door. On Tuesday, Dodd received from President Joseph Biden the nation’s second highest civilian award, the Presidential Citizens Medal, for bringing America “closer to our highest stated ideals”— but it instead recognized the enduring power of cronyism in politics.

Biden’s statement explaining the award to Dodd was as incomplete as a Hunter Biden gun permit application. The outgoing president praised Dodd for 50 years of public service, saying he “has stood watch over America as a beacon to the world.”

We continue to dwell in a dark age of cynicism that will grow worse in many ways in the next four years. It did not start with Chris Dodd but the Connecticut Democrat made a lasting contribution to the decline of trust in American institutions.

In June 2008, Conde Nast Portfolio magazine reported that Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, had allegedly received preferential treatment in two mortgage refinances on his properties in Connecticut and Washington, D.C. in 2003. A Senate ethics investigation found Dodd had not violated Senate rules (which are not robust) but scolded Dodd in a letter that stated, “once you became aware that your loans were in fact being handled through a program with the name ‘VIP,’ that should have raised red flags for you.”

Countrywide became one of the uglier faces of the subprime mortgage lending at the center of the 2008 banking crisis and the severe recession that it caused. Dodd, though he denied any knowledge of the VIP program, became the face of Countrywide-induced misery. Dodd’s ties to distressed financial giants that had contributed to his many political campaigns added to his negative image.

Around the same time, Dodd insisted that two major government backed mortgage companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, were in fine condition. That was just weeks before Dodd helped pass a rescue plan for the two companies that would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Between 1989 and 2008, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had donated more political contributions to Dodd than any other candidate, according to PBS.

And then there was Dodd’s Irish real estate. I wrote the first story about it in this space in January 2009. Ireland’s land records are nothing like ours. They reveal little information. Dodd was a familiar figure in the affluent Roundtree section of Connemara in the Republic of Ireland. Someone in the area noted that Dodd seemed to have placed a low value on the 10 acre property in his Senate ethics filing as real estate values in Ireland soared after Ireland adopted the euro as its currency.

Dodd purchased the property overlooking the sea in 1994 with a partner, Edward Downe’s college pal William Kessinger, a Kansas City real estate developer. Dodd owned 1/3, Kessinger 2/3. A year after Dodd obtained the full pardon for Downe, the senator purchased Kessinger’s interest in the Irish property for a few thousand dollars more than Kessenger had paid for it nine years before, despite the Central Ireland Bank finding Irish real estate prices quadrupled between 1994 and 2004.

The revelations caused a considerable stir in 2009. Others picked up on the Irish real estate story, including the Wall Street Journal. The deal stank and, worse, its timing a year after the Downe pardon looked like a reward.

Then began an ugly hunt for how I had obtained real estate land records that Dodd wanted no one to see. An American reporter looking into the story I had written made his own visit to Dublin to examine records. He was startled a few minutes after leaving the Irish land registry to receive a call from a Washington operative asking him what he was doing in Ireland.

There was the media fightback on Dodd’s behalf. New York Times columnist, who’d spent her early career covering Connecticut politics, weighed in with excuses so weak they still startle. The columnist, whose rectitude patrol knows how to wound, excused what she would normally condemn. She called the Countrywide and Irish real estate issues as regrettable, “but given the fact that after nearly 25 years, he is still one of the poorest members of the Senate, I think we can work under the assumption that he is not in it for the money.”

By 2008, Dodd was not close to being among the poorest members of the Senate. He ranked 66th in wealth of the 100 senators, but Dodd had been repeating that old canard for so long that his fan retracted her fangs and adopted it. A similarly situated Republican would likely not have received the same treatment from the columnist.

Beleaguered by low poll ratings, Dodd announced in early 2010 that he would not seek a seventh six-year term. He would, he later mused, like to teach but not lobby. But he did lobby and made many millions doing it for the Motion Picture Association of America from 2011 to 2017.

Through the years, Dodd remained friendly with Biden, who was vice president when Dodd left office. On Wednesday, Biden diminished himself by trying to wash away Dodd’s disgraces with an honor he did not earn.

Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com

The most unusual constant of the year’s bewildering presidential campaign was that many voters who provided Donald Trump with his narrow plurality in the popular vote professed not to believe much of what he said. The rest of us did.

Trump’s supporters’ cynical instincts may have been right on one decisive issue: the cost of food. In August, the Republican claimed, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.” The smart shopper will defer purchasing staples until January 21. Or maybe not. This month, the president-elect told Time magazine, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” We knew that in the fall. So did he.

The year was also marked by heroic figures who helped transform an approaching catastrophe into a mere calamity for free people.

Kamala Harris met the moment thrust upon her in July. The aftermath of President Joe Biden’s dire June debate performance forced Democrats to confront his ill-considered re-election bid. If he had remained on the ballot, the election would not have been close. More Stepford Republicans would have won seats in the Senate and the House.

Harris ran an optimistic campaign in an oddly pessimistic age of wonders. She refused to descend into the muck and sneer at our nation as “the garbage can of the world.” She said what her opponent would not: We want the free people of Ukraine to defeat the invading Russians. In 50 years, Harris’s pummeling of Trump in their only debate will cause viewers to wonder, “And they chose him?”

Liz Cheney’s rectitude continues to cause democracy’s domestic foes to tremble. The former House Republican refuses to allow her former colleagues to forget their craven submission to January 6th insurrectionists and their leader. In this rigidly tribal age, Cheney did what her beliefs required when she endorsed and campaigned with Harris.

In narrow control of the House, Republicans want to prosecute Cheney for serving as co-chair of their chamber’s January 6th investigation committee. Trump has reserved a particularly noxious strain of bile for Cheney. The weak masquerading as strong have long feared authentic courage.

David Frum is more than a political commentator. He brings moral clarity to explanations of events and their consequences while inspiring confidence that we will recognize ourselves when we emerge from this dark time. Frum did not retreat from the fight when his daughter Miranda died from a brain tumor in February. Through unspeakable sorrow, his voice never faltered. You may not know it, but you are in his debt.

Our own U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney quietly received a high honor this fall. On October 22, the Governor-General of Australia appointed the Vernon Democrat an Honorary Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia. Courtney has been a principal leader in strengthening the Pacific undersea alliance of the US, Australia, the UK and New Zealand as democracies seek to contain Chinese aggression. It is a vital effort that secures peace and freedom through the coordinated use of the world’s most advanced submarines, many made in Groton.

If Connecticut voters preferred workhorses over show ponies, Courtney would be beginning his third term in the Senate. They don’t, but the former state legislator has made himself one of the most consequential members of Congress in an urgent matter of peace and freedom.

Hundreds of thousands of former morning viewers of MSNBC delivered an unmistakable message in November. They fled from watching Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski after the two craven media personalities made a post-election pilgrimage to Trump’s Palm Beach resort to sue for peace.

The married double act fell out with Trump during his first term. By 2020, according to Scarborough, Trump had called him a murderer a dozen times. In the spring of 2020, Trump tweeted, “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new AP-NORC poll show they’re tuning out

Scarborough and Brzezinski engaged in preemptive capitulation “to restart communications” with Trump. The couple spent the previous 10 months of the year warning that Trump posed a threat to democracy’s future. The stench of appeasement was thick in the air when Brzezinski compared their visit to Trump with the diplomatic work her father performed as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. She was never that important. Viewers saw through the ruse and abandoned the two opportunists and their supporting cast of talkers, who suddenly stilled their voices.

Finally, a personal note. My friend Ruth Solomkin died in Bloomfield this spring at the age of 104. She was a marvel. The child of parents who fled one of the czar’s many pogroms against Jews, Ruth was making and sustaining friends to the end. She remained interested in the world until the end and, more difficult, always interesting herself. So many people arrived for her funeral on a rainy morning in West Hartford that it had to be moved from the temple’s chapel to its main room.

The world will be a better place if we all try to be a little more like Ruth Solomkin.

Reach Kevin F. Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

Twelve months ago, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was vacuuming up large campaign contributions at the home of the nearly $4 million-a-year head of non-profit Hartford HealthCare, Jeffrey Flaks. The CEO, president and director’s Dec. 1, 2023, event for Murphy’s successful re-election campaign included contributions from other health care executives, lobbyists, and powerful insurance chiefs.

The top ticket price was $3,300.

Last Sunday, Murphy deployed a carefully choreographed (you know he’s serious when he dons that baseball cap to address his followers), ugly video posted on social media directed at the mob that approves of the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. According to Murphy, we should be just as angry at the deaths of the thousands of anonymous people who die each day as we are at Thompson’s December 4 murder. The 18-year veteran of the House and Senate claimed those thousands perish “at the hands of a health care industry that mostly doesn’t give a sh*t about people and only cares about profits.”

That houseful of Murphy donors Flaks and a Hartford HealthCare lobbyist rounded up a year ago to pay tribute and write hefty checks to Murphy included a lot of people who have done very well indeed amid millions of people Murphy serves. I’m guessing that night at Chez Flaks, Murphy did not harangue his generous supporters. He probably said nothing about each one having blood on their hands for spending their careers in insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, or nursing home businesses. Or condemn them for lobbying for those industries.

No, no, no, Murphy took all that money and likely delivered a few standard remarks about what a good and sometimes weary shepherd he tries to be in a hostile world. A year later, those affluent supporters fit Murphy’s definition of monsters. With the help of those contributions Flaks helped raise and millions of other dollars, Murphy won a third six-year term. He will not need them again for a year or two.

Murphy, as I have written before, enjoyed highlighting in detail his friendship with the member of the royal family who serves as both prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar. Murphy and the sheikh, the senator wrote, both have children around the same age. The Qatar emir’s enforcer and the Connecticut Democrat are contemporaries. Qatar, a refuge for terrorists, relies on millions of foreign workers to extract the natural gas that makes it one of the world’s richest nations. Little of that money sees its way into the hands of exploited foreign workers. Some die in their servitude. Who wants to bet that Murphy has never accused Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani of not giving “a sh*t” about those foreign workers—or any workers—in Qatar?

Murphy was careful not to excuse the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, or any violence, but he said nothing to exempt Thompson from his broad indictment of heartless healthcare executives. Instead, Murphy says we need to listen to what people are feeling. That seems to include what one social media commentator described as the person who used a silenced 3D printed untraceable handgun to execute Thompson.

In the public discussion of violent murders, an informal rule has evolved. We don’t elevate the manifestos of alleged killers. Magnifying their nutty tirades encourages other violent maniacs to take up arms. Another reason is that we need some context that is not immediately available.

Brian Thompson’s alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, who on Thursday was extradited from Pennsylvania to New York, is from a wealthy Maryland family. He was not a United Healthcare insured. We know that some of the family’s vast fortune comes from owning and operating nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The nursing homes, according to media reports, have been frequently cited for safety violations.

Those tuition checks for one of the nation’s most exclusive boys prep schools didn’t write themselves. Neither did the ones for the University of Pennsylvania. They were the fruits of the remarkable capitalist system that Mangione appears to rage against. It’s the same system that paid for a Honolulu penthouse for Mangione to live in and for Murphy’s re-election campaign.

We will learn more, much more. Mangione’s  privilege will allow him to be represented by a skilled and expensive team of lawyers who will hire talented mental health professionals and public relations professionals to explain what he did or did not do.

We will be reminded that chronic pain, which Mangione may have endured, can alter your brain. Mangione’s team may even tell a jury why their client was found in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in possession of a gun that New York officials say matches the gun used to execute Brian Thompson.

Did no one in his enormous family (the indicted defendant’s father is one of 10 children) see his photo soon after Brian Thompson, 50-year-old father of two, died and say, “That guy looks like our Luigi. Has anybody talked to him lately?”

One day we may have answers. What we will never understand is why Chris Murphy would take all that money from people he used this horrifying moment to paint in such an ugly way.

Reach Kevin F. Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

Gov. Ned Lamont said of Jodi Rell in his affectionate eulogy of the late former governor at her December 3 funeral. The Greenwich Democrat could transform words into action by following the Brookfield Republican’s example in the next three weeks.

The two months between the November election and the start of the legislative session on January 8 ignites intense personal calculation for a few legislators. They decide if they can wangle an appointment to a full-time pension boosting job in the state’s judicial branch. If they can, they will not take the oath of office for the position they were elected to on November 5.

Once a two-year term begins, a legislator is precluded by law from taking a position in one of the other two beaches of government until their term ends. Some legislators, having won a seat in the House or Senate, decide it’s not, after all, the best fit. Instead, they would like to be a judge. If they have not already, they needed to win approval of the secretive Judicial Selection Commission at its November or December closed meeting. Once approved, the legislative-candidate-turned-judicial-hopeful is placed on a list from which the governor makes nominations to the bench.

With a promise from the governor, the legislator notifies the Secretary of the State that he (it’s usually a man) will not be taking the seat he spent much of the year asking thousands of voters to re-elect him to. The seat remains empty for weeks until a special election to fill the vacancy. Public campaign funds become available to qualifying candidates and towns hire poll workers.

Jodi Rell rejected this distortion of democracy. When a recently re-elected legislator told Rell he would not take his seat in the legislature in order for her to make him a judge early in the next year, she said no. Serve your term, do not run for re-election, and I will appoint you after you have left the legislature in the normal way.

The word went forth. Judicial hopefuls could not hedge their bets by running for re-election while hankering to don a robe. To Rell, who served a decade in the House, if you ran and won, you served the people. This was the proper procedure that fortified our democratic traditions.

The Rell rule on serving your term has fallen into disuse. The two governors who followed her, Dannel P. Malloy and Lamont, revived and sustained the democratic ruse of allowing a politician to run for re-election, decline to take office, and win a judgeship. Lamont would honor Rell’s memory by reviving her simple practice: You run and win, you serve.

The governor could propose some reforms. He could ask the legislature to require the JSC to publish its agendas and minutes of its meetings. The list of lawyers who have applications pending or have been approved to be made public. Voters ought to know if a person seeking their support has an eye on a judgeship. The commission could prohibit a candidate for the legislature or other state office from submitting an application between May of an election year and the start of a new legislative session.

But do not be surprised if a re-elected legislator announces soon that he will not be honoring his promise to voters to serve them for two more years, beginning on January 8.

A tougher item on Lamont’s to-do list is addressing the growing concern at long delays in patients receiving radiology test results. In the Hartford area and beyond, Jefferson Radiology dominates the landscape with seven hospital partnerships. Media reports have confirmed anecdotes that reports are allegedly not being read in a timely manner by radiologists.

Jefferson Radiology’s marketing director, Caroline Leger, blamed the delays on “unprecedented demand,” according to NBC CT and other media. Or it may be that Jefferson Radiology has more business than its shifting number of doctors can handle. The Department of Public Health was unable to provide answers to what Commissioner Manisha Juthani is doing to resolve the growing problem.

It is time to worry. No one should have to wait a month to learn the results of a radiology study, especially in a state that ballyhoos its reputation for excellent health care.

Governor Lamont enjoys access to a unique asset in health care policy. Ann Huntress Lamont, his wife, is one of the nation’s top investors in innovative healthcare. Even the Saudis have made an investment of an unknown amount in her venture capital firm. Mrs. Lamont’s philosophy of success ought to find a place in state health care policy now.

Healthcare investors, Mrs. Lamont writes on her business website, “find it exciting, not frustrating, when someone flips the rules of the game because dislocation creates opportunity. They embrace that the world changes and seek to understand how political, social, and economic dynamics evolve with each other. Their prepared mind can recognize a transformative idea before it becomes obvious to everybody else.”

Someone in Connecticut government ought to possess a mind prepared to address the current crisis before the state becomes known for expensive but inadequate basic healthcare. It is not enough to claim without ceasing that the nation’s best pizza is found here. People need their x-rays read.

Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com

His father promised again and again and again he would not pardon his 54 year old hedonist son.

The outgoing president chose the Thanksgiving holiday to abandon his pledge and issue an angry and accusatory pardon.

Hunter Biden cashed in on his crimes when he was paid to write his raw 2021 memoir of drug addiction and extravagant spending, “Beautiful Things.” The audio version of the book, read by its author, provided devastating evidence at Biden’s gun trial this year. He gave them the sword in exchange for another payday and was convicted.

Booze, drugs, a pet snake and foreign dealings: Families can cause headaches for a White House

The wayward Biden pleaded guilty in a separate case to evading $1.4 million in federal taxes. President Biden’s pardon claimed that his son failed to file or filed false returns due to his drug addiction. That is not true. Hunter Biden admitted in his September guilty plea that he had filed false returns after he was no longer addicted to drugs and alcohol. He had the money to pay his taxes but chose to spend it on his louche and luxurious lifestyle.

Between 2016 and 2019, Hunter Biden enjoyed gross income exceeding $5.7 million.  The 2017 Republican tax cuts were awfully good to Hunter Biden, but for him it was never enough.

Between 2016 and 2020, Hunter Biden, prosecutors pointed out, spent “money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.” A presidential pardon should not be used to allow a son to disregard his tax obligations by renting a Lamborghini while awaiting the delivery of his Porsche to his new $20,000 a month West Coast rented mansion.

Despite President Biden’s claim, it is not unusual for federal authorities to prosecute taxpayers who fail to pay $1.4 million in taxes they owe.

Anyone whose life has been marred by someone else’s addiction lives with fear of a relapse every day. When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he made no secret of his son’s addiction. Instead, he sought to turn it into a campaign asset by broadcasting his pride in his son’s recovery. That always seemed like a risk. The consequences of addiction know no limits, and now we must pay them.

United States Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy, both D-Conn., don’t blame Hunter Biden. They blame President-elect Donald Trump for this blow to our democratic norms. Trump is responsible for many damaging acts and far worse await us. Trump may have paid only $750 a year in federal taxes for several years, but he did not make Hunter Biden engage in eye popping tax evasion.

Blumenthal, who was a U.S. Attorney more than 40 years ago, is sympathetic to the Biden pardon, attributing it to “a father fearing that his some would be a target of political retribution…President Biden is using [the pardon] to protect a son who was prosecuted for crimes that had nothing to do with his office.” Blumenthal pledges to continue to seek to place limits on a president’s pardon power.

Murphy wrote in a statement Wednesday, “Under normal circumstances, you can’t defend pardoning a family member like this. You can’t.” But Murphy does. “As a father, it is hard not to relate to someone who has already tragically lost two children and knows the incoming Trump Justice Department plans to relentlessly hunt his remaining son. I hate that Trump’s election is forcing norms to change, but it is.”

Both are wrong, but neither Democrat wants to challenge the demands of party loyalty.  Hunter Biden’s criminal indictments were about to be concluded. His father issued a pardon that included those and any other criminal acts between January 1, 2014 and December 1, 2024, far more than what was required to save Hunter Biden from a stretch in the hoosegow for his two convictions. The reach of the pardon will extend far beyond its 10 years and 11 months of immunity. It will be cited as an excuse to justify the nightmares the next four Trump years hold.

President Biden was not the only parent attempting to rescue an embarrassing son this week.

Penelope Hegseth appeared Wednesday on Fox News to explain a scathing 2018 email she sent to her son, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. Mother Hegseth’s email, written during her son’s second divorce, said, ”You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.”

Mrs. Hegseth now says she wrote those searing words in “haste’ and her son, in his third marriage at 39, is doing great, “redeemed, forgiven, changed.”

A 2020 Hegseth payment to a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2017 has caused some consternation among a handful of Republican senators who will vote on his nomination. Hegseth defenders criticize anonymous tales of his alcohol abuse and sexual violence. We deserve something other than a mother’s love in timely retreat.

There’s an easy way to shed some light on these serious allegations: Hegseth should release the woman from the non-disclosure agreement that accompanied his payment.

Reach Kevin F. Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

The Brookfield Republican’s instincts were tested for more than a year when then-Gov. John G. Rowland’s perversions of the public trust began to emerge into the light in 2003. As lieutenant governor for nine years, Rell was appropriately loyal but knew not to become a slavish cheerleader.

Some in Rowland’s inner circle were long dismissive of Rell. As Rowland’s grimy crimes became apparent, Rell offered no endorsements and, as an engaged mother of two, knew how to signal disappointment free of theatrics.

Former CT Gov. Jodi Rell to lie in state at Capitol

In early 2004, a federal criminal proceeding against a Rowland stooge made it clear that Public Official Number One was doomed to disgrace and worse, Rell briefly expressed her anger as she walked up Capitol stairs to her office. By then, one survey showed 88% of Connecticut voters did not trust Rowland. The remaining 12% had not been paying attention.

Connecticut mourns the death of former Gov. M. Jodi Rell: ‘ She had a magnificent life’

When Rowland resigned and Rell took office on July 1, 2004, she was prepared. Her crafty plan was to be herself. She required no remake, beginning by holding a series of public meet-and-greets open to the public around the state. They were a sensation. She firmly jettisoned the worst of Rowland’s enablers, but she was not cruel in taking essential action. No one was humiliated.

I served with Rell in the state House of Representatives for six years, assigned to sit near her in the Hall of the House in my first term, her third. She set a fine example that I appreciated but did not always follow. Jodi was a natural conciliator. When unity in the Republican caucus began to fray, leaders would send Jodi to gently quell a nascent rebellion.

In the 1991 summer of the income tax, Jodi and I were assigned to keep the brutes of the Weicker administration away from one of our wobbly colleagues during an all-night session. Together we did, and not long after dawn the tax was defeated. The weak link held. We were pleased with our tedious work. A few hours later, relieved of guard duty, it was our own leader who sent that Republican and another home, allowing the catastrophic tax to pass.

When a fellow House Republican, the author, mostly, of his own misfortune, was on the ropes, meetings were convened to try to concoct an explanation and create an escape hatch from scandal. Jodi offered the simplest advice: stop lying. It was ignored.

A year later, Jodi was Rowland’s running mate, an exemplar of familial stability providing a reassuring contrast to reports of Rowland’s tempestuous personal life. She vouched for him in a critical campaign ad, her credibility on display before the state for the first time. Sadder and wiser, Jodi would not repeat that as the deluge approached nine years later.

When she sought a full term of her own in 2006, Jodi won 162 of the state’s 169 cities and towns. Abraham Lincoln never came close to that feat in 1860 and 1864. In a year when veteran Republicans across the nation suffered stark defeats, Rell made short work of hard driving Democrat John DeStefano. In a suspicious age, Jodi Rell did what few others have managed: She restored our faith.

In 2007, John Rowland, between stints in prison, could not resist giving an extended interview to a Washington Post reporter. In it, Rowland’s delusions were on garish display when he accused Rell of “throwing him under the bus” by distancing herself from him. Not long after, she saw Rowland for the first time since his resignation and imprisonment at a public event. She embraced him and called him her friend.

Her full term brought the Great Recession. She was reluctant to expend her considerable balance of political capital. She did little harm but declined to champion essential reforms. Voters continued to embrace her and she could have won again in 2010. Instead, she became the first governor in more than 50 years to take a bow and exit the stage while the public still wanted her to remain.

My role as a political columnist for the state’s largest newspaper meant we would inevitably fall out. Before we did, we were talking and she mentioned someone approached her to thank her for supporting the civil unions bill while she was standing in line at T.J. Maxx. Of course she got in line after finding some bargains.

The last person to helm a winning Republican statewide campaign, Kevin Deneen, her 2006 campaign manager, told me last week that Jodi warned her handlers she would not cut a line at a wake, funeral or other event. This is a test that many of us observers quietly administer to our leaders. Few pass it. Jodi always did because she was normal. And normal is often in short supply in the upper ranks of politics. Lately, it has fallen into disrepute.

This week as we celebrate her life and mourn her death at 78, let us resolve to remember the power of a woman who was resolutely normal.

Reach Kevin Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

Three donors serve as trustees of the union. Who those trustees are remains a secret. The badge is familiar. It looks like what a police officer would show you under a variety of circumstances.

Union Executive Director Andrew Matthews said the union gives donors “the badge out of our generosity.” Law enforcement badges should not be gifts. They signal the presence and authority of a police officers. Providing them to police donors is a prescription for trouble. They represent power and they can misrepresent power in the wrong hands.

The brass badge says “trustee” above “Connecticut” over the state seal. under the seal are the words “state police union.” All the lettering is in blue capital letters. The identification card includes the name Connecticut State Police Union, the state seal, a member number, the member’s name, the year the card is issued, and a photograph of the badge.

The donations from the trustees, according to Matthews, go to the union’s fund for the families of state police officers who die in the line of duty or as a result of their service. It pays for, among other expenses, taking a fallen officer’s family to the National Law Enforcement Memorial on the first and fifth anniversaries of the officer’s death.

The trustees, Matthews says, go through a vetting process, including a police background check.

While the union leaders may be satisfied with the donor’s character, they nevertheless add to the back of the identification card that it does not relieve the holder of his responsibility as a law abiding citizen. That’s an odd qualifier that most of us would not require a reminder of, but badges can do things to the holder. A driver with that generously provided Connecticut State Police Union badge and card that came with the $10,000 annual donation might when, say, stopped for exceeding the posted speed limit on a state highway, show it to the officer at the scene when producing his license and registration.

Worse, a donor might not always know where the badge and card are. He could lose it and not know because it’s not like a bank card. You may receive it, put it somewhere, and never look at it again. But someone else might get his hands on it and use it for nefarious purposes. Police always know where there badges are. Friends of the police with badges should have no need to.

A person with bad intentions could use a badge that looks and is intended to look like the real thing, could fool others into believing he or she is in the presence of a police officer and, as most of us would, follow his instructions. Let him into our home. Get out of our car on a dark road.

In 2000, then-Central Connecticut State University President Richard Judd used a brass badge and an emergency light on his university car to pull over a 24-year-old male driver on Route 9 in Newington. Judd flashed a badge and berated the driver, who possessed the sense to realize something was not right, made note of Judd’s license plate, and called the real police. Judd was arrested for impersonating an officer. 

The badge Judd flashed had been provided to his predecessor, John Schumaker, when he arrived at the school in 1987. He’d never touched it, The Courant’s Jon Lender reported. Schumaker left if behind when he took a job in Kentucky. Judd was not so responsible, humiliating and bewildering the university community with his bizarre misuse of the badge. 

The badge the state police union provides to its three unnamed trustees does not say it’s honorary. Its holder is a trustee. Someone who is shown it under the tense circumstances that often accompany an encounter with the police might not read English or understand what it means to be a trustee or that the badge is issued by the union. It is a show of authority that should be limited to the possession of a real police officer.

Someone who is giving $10,000 a year to the union’s Line of Duty Death Fund is likely doing it to help others, not himself. The badge and card ought not be included.

The competition for donations to help fallen police and fire fighters is more ferocious than I knew when I began working on this piece. Matthews blamed The Hundred Club of Connecticut for my inquiries. The Hundred Club raises money for the families of those who fall in the line of duty, including local police and firefighters. “People are territorial,” Matthews said of The Hundred Club, which has been performing its good works since 1967 and provides a medallion for some donors’ cars.

There are some sensible changes that the ill-advised use of badges should prompt. The secretary of the state could more aggressively exercise her authority over the use of the Great Seal of the State of Connecticut. The legislature could require any organization issuing badges with the seal to disclose who receives them.

Or the union could abandon the police badges and give their favorite donors decoder rings instead.

Reach Kevin Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com

Secrecy continues to corrode the administration of the four universities and 12 community colleges. Chancellor Terrence Cheng declines to uphold one of the essential attributes of higher education: transparence.

According to documents obtained from CSCU, high ranking employees of the 85,000-student state agency signed employment separation agreements that included non-disparagement clauses. Public agencies should not be permitted to bar candid accounts of their former employees’ experiences.

The Board of Regents raised Cheng from his perch as director of the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus to CSCU’s president in 2021. He requested the Board of Regents change is title to chancellor last year. Cheng began clearing out the upper ranks of the vast CSCU bureaucracy in 2022, making room for some Cheng favorites.

The people targeted for “non-renewal” (the crimes against language never end in higher education) of their contracts might have some tales to tell under Cheng. The agreement ending their employment included this:

“The parties to this Agreement recognize the sensitive nature of this matter and agree to handle this matter with the highest degree of professionalism and prudence. Nothing herein shall prohibit [the booted employee] from responding to inquiries or comments by third parties relevant to his past employment, any investigation and/or the terms of this Agreement. [The employee], CSCU, and the Board of Regents shall refrain from initiating public or private disparaging remarks about the other, but this provision shall not interfere with any other applicable legal rights or obligations.”

There was no reason to include the Board of Regents in the prohibition of disparagement. Cheng viewed the process of booting executives out of the system as so sensitive that they did not see the agreements. Inquiry was discouraged, as has been Cheng’s way. The public’s interest in knowing how the public higher education runs or stalls or puts students last was blocked in the employment separation agreements.

Some of the people who were let go received one year of severance, “per the terms of the executive management policies at the time of hire.” That explanation comes from an email sent by Vice Chancellor Adam Joseph to The Courant on Tuesday. The message summarizes the terms of departure by seven employees who reported directly to Cheng. One of them was former state budget director Benjamin Barnes. He served in the Malloy administration for nearly all of its eight years of financial turmoil. As the Malloy years approached a merciful end, Barnes was parachuted into CSCU with a raise.

Barnes, who famously declared the state was in a permanent fiscal crisis shortly after Malloy won a second term in 2014, was much better at guarding his own finances than he was the state’s. According to Joseph, Barnes left CSCU in July 2023. Two weeks after Cheng notified Barnes his contract would not be renewed, the Chief Financial Officer of the system resigned with a sweetener. Barnes was entitled to three months of pay, $68,779.75. Joseph notes that Barnes negotiated double that and walked out the door with $137,559.50.

Less than a week after Barnes left CSCU with six months of salary in his pocket, Mayor Caroline Simmons announced Barnes was returning to Stamford as the city’s director of administration. Between 2019, Barnes’s first full year at CSCU, until he left in 2023, his annual salary increased from $212,00 to $289,000 in 2023. Most of that increase occurred in the Cheng years as tuition rose and Cheng complained ceaselessly about inadequate funding.

An executive assistance received $101,669.16 in a lump sum payment in August. The former president of Western Connecticut State University, John Clark, has received $300,000 when his contract was not renewed in 2022. In some instances, employees were allowed to have the notice that they were being let go replaced by a letter of resignation and the agreement that precluded them from “initiating private or public disparaging remarks.”

The former employees likely have much to say about Cheng, and he must know it. It is hard to know if Cheng’s contempt for the public is greater than his determination to cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace employees out of favor. The former English professor has lavished titles and generous raises on his favored few at a time, of course, when he complains about insufficient state funding of the system and has cut back on essentials such as library hours.

Lamont orders audit of CT CSCU system after allegations of controversial spending

Cheng’s use of his expense account is the subject of several investigations in the aftermath of reporting by CT Insider. Cheng delayed providing documents for months. The extent of his spending system on fellow state officials at expensive restaurants ought to have elicited an apology as a start. Instead, one of his top minions insists in disjointed pronouncement that all will be explained. We are far past that.

Proof that secrecy continues to rule came in an update on press inquiries and one investigation from Vice Chancellor Joseph to the chairman and vice chairman of the Regents. The Regents themselves, however, were not included because “Shhhhh” continues as the CSCU motto.

Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com