As most of you know, I am, on balance, a believer in Dan Malloy. I don’t like everything he does, but I also feel as though you can easily analogize to some of Bill Clinton’s remarks about Obama: no Governor could have cleaned up the mess Malloy inherited in two years. Ten years of Rowland corruption followed by six years of Rell indifference. That’s a very broken government. Malloy has made real progress.
I say all of the above just to place myself in a context before I say the following: Cathy Malloy could not be more wrong, and her behavior will have the counterproductive effect of inviting exactly the kind of scrutiny she claims to abhor. What was she doing mouthing off in public about her “shitty car?” (You’re the First Lady of Connecticut, not a stevedore.) And why was it so hard for the panel to get her to hush up? Why was she launching into a whole second tirade about her son and his significant problems? Particularly if she doesn’t want the press to go there?
This is the truth: The Connecticut press creates an enormous buffer around the families of public officials. We’ve done it for the Malloys. Times ten! We’ve done it for the other families. The exceptions are: when somebody gets arrested, when there’s a 911 call, when somebody winds up in the hospital, and when somebody injects him or herself into the debate. Patty Rowland became a much bigger story when she wrote and performed her famous Christmas poem.
You could even argue that we go too far with our blind eye and our light touch, but that’s fine with me. I don’t want to nose around in other people’s private garbage. Their public garbage is amusing enough.
The administration will move fast to put the pin back in this grenade, but they will be not be able to restore things to their exact former placid state. My guess is that the press will ask more pointed questions about Cathy Malloy in the next six months than they did in the previous six.
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24 Responses to A person who will be staying home next time
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You know you want to take Cathy out for a bottle of Syrah l’oca Ciuca and some Brushetta at Bin 228 and then get her on the air. “So Cathy what’s ailing you today? That’s right, let it all out….don’t hold back now….”
I like her. She’s not manufactured.
I notice that she’s apologized. What I found interesting was not her potty mouth (mine is far pottier), but her suggestion that she was treated like a second class citizen by the cops, the suggestion that if her husband were to have been with her she wouldn’t have been ticketed. Is the fine for that really $92? I begged off a ticket a few years ago with an apologetic letter, and my recollection is that it was only $35. It’s a dumb law, and both she and her husband should talk less.
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“First let me say that I apologize for my remarks. I was trying to convey a certain sentiment, and I didn’t do a good job of expressing what I really feel. Although I don’t always agree with what’s written by members of the media, I do believe that they’ve been fair to my family and me…”
Not manufactured AT ALL! And to Peter: I took her comments to mean she wasn’t treated like a second class citizen, but rather they initially didn’t buy that it was the governor’s wife because her car was a POS. Sounds like to me she was pissed at herself for being unbuckled–”a dumb mistake” was the undertone, and then the meaning (which was a bit disjointed, as I often am): That got attention, and my good works helping rape victims got no mention.
“…governor’s wives only get security when we’re with our husbands. We’re pretty second-class without them…”
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You could be right, Beth W., but in that case I’d have to say she’s more inarticulate than she admits. I do think Colin M.is correct, and she acknowledges as much. Neither she nor her family has been particularly abused by the press. And, to give her some credit, the answer she gave to the question presented was essentially correct. However, I’d say elected officials have it easier than appointed ones. For example, I doubt our President could pass security and background checks applied to Attorneys General or federal judges.
“For example, I doubt our President could pass security and background checks applied to Attorneys General or federal judges.”
Would you say that of ALL of our Presidents, or just the current one?
Colin,
It’s nice that you as a liberal openly admit that you have a bias and that you protect people like the Malloys. God-forbid the media did its job in finding the truth about who our leaders are.
But there is one HUGE point that NOBODY seems to be touching on.
What was Cathy Malloy doing telling the police-officer that she was the Governor’s wife? Was she trying to use the power of her husband’s office to try and either influence or intimidate a patrolman to not give her a ticket for breaking the law? Special favors?
Secondly, the arrogance of this woman…how dare a policeman doesn’t know who she is? The audacity of him not to know what she looks like and the fact that she’s driving a car and not being driven in a limo around the state on taxpayer dollars… Who does she think she is, Michelle Obama?
I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable resident in terms of politics and who our political leaders are… whether you agree with my political opinion or not is irrelevant to this point. I wouldn’t know who Cathy Malloy was if she stumbled down the stairs in my house. Who keeps track of the Governor’s wife except people in her own party that are friends of hers or her husbands…?
The entire affair is distasteful, embarrassing and more than that, potentially alarming that she was looking to influence a police officer in that manner…
This DEMANDS that the media, and even the left media, look into this incident further…
Mitch, I am sure the “I am the (fill in the blank)’s wife” line worked a lot better when Dannel was mayor of Stamford, if she had been stopped by the cops there. If her husband had been with her, no cop would believe that the guy who cannot string together a sentence without “er” and “um” every two or three words, and who has that constant “deer in the headlights” look could possibly be the Governor!
“What was she doing mouthing off in public about her “shitty car?” (You’re the First Lady of Connecticut, not a stevedore.)” Would you have been as offended if Lou Rell had made a similar remark? Or are you subconsciously influenced by the title “First Lady” and have stereotypical expectations of Cathy Malloy to act more “lady like”? And doesn’t seem to me that she was criticizing the CT press (in fact she mentioned how astounding it was that her ‘click it or ticket’ got picked up nationally) but speaking from her own personal experience and being in the spotlight and she’s right. To run for public office you need to be willing to have every aspect of your personal life open to media scrutiny and many well qualified people are not willing to do that.
Well put, K. Nice job shining a light on the gender bias subtext.
That is utter nonsense and beneath you.
The insistence that any time a woman is criticized for anything its gender bias is crying wolf.
And yes, I would have torn Lou Rell to pieces for something like this
Welcome back JWC. Could you drag along Kimi? I smell a GOP resurgence in the air and wouldn’t want to miss the beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth.
Ah,Richard,it’s as if we never skipped a beat.
Now now, don’t get so offended. Just trying to bait you so you’d pay me some overdue attention; I know you’re no sexist. And for the record, I am a very nice *lady* whose favorite adjective of late is the Fbomb.
I’m confused about where to “reply.” My last comment was, of course, for our host, the gentlemanly CM.
Yes. I would have taken Lou Rell to task for that.
I think a measure of how ridiculous these comments were is the rapid-fire apology. The story broke Wednesday night. The official apology was in our mailboxes by 9:30 the next morning. That’s, like, a record.
The Malloy staff knows how much latitude we’ve given the family and its private affairs. They do NOT want to have this conversation.
Would you say that of ALL of our Presidents, or just the current one?
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Well,I wouldn’t say it of, for example, GHW Bush. Hey, what do you want from me? I’m agreeing with Mz. Malloy. Can you imagine how Barry would survive against the treatment Biden, Kennedy, and Metzenbaum gave Justice Thomas? Sure he’s a black guy, but he never hung around with Ayers/Dohrn, etc.
Colin,
No body is saying anything, but I wonder why the Courant seems out to get Chris Murphy? McMahon went bankrupt and never paid back her creditors, yet day after day the Courant is running horrible cartoons and articles about Murphy. I have to believe the Courant is now a Republican mouthpiece. I am a registered Republican, but can SOMEONE tell the people of CT what’s really going on here? This guy has made mistakes, but nothing even slightly compared to Linda McMahon. Why oh why is the Courant going out of its way to crucufy him? You always cut through the BS. Is there anyone out there who will stand beside Chris? He is a decent, hardworking Congressman, who is being taken down by the Courant.
I agree Susane. I’m independent but lean conservative most of the time. I heard that the Chicago Tribune (a Republican newspaper) bought the Hartford Courant? I wonder if that is why the news seems to be anti-Democrats? It seems obvious, this elect particularly, that the Courant has a bias. As an independent I want fair reporting of both sides. Thanks, Colin.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed. I’m actually a registered RINO, so I got to vote in the Republican primary….for Chris Shays. My actual votes in the general elections tend (strongly) toward Dem, Working Fam, Green, etc. So, had Chris Shays won, I would be torn between him and Chris Murphy.
So — in the Htfd Courant the morning after the primaries, here’s a pic of Mr. Murphy all fired up about something, and another one of Ms. McMahon smiling and shaking hands with a bunch of women.
All the liberal Jews I talk to seem to believe that the age of anti-Semitism is over. That is often true, in countries that have mature, democratic political systems. The United States, which all good liberals learn to sneer at, has the single most mature political system in the world — 230 years of a solid Constitution, which liberals don’t much like.
Most of the world lacks a mature, time-tested and tolerant political system. Even the European Union is governed by an unelected ruling class today.
So the United States is the world home of political tolerance today. No other major country (except maybe Switzerland) has had that kind of stability and tolerance for 230 years. Naturally, the left has decided to import hundreds of thousands of the least tolerant people in the world today, so that today in London there are cases of children being sacrificed in witchcraft ceremonies; and there are cases of home-grown Muslim terrorists bombing civilian targets like the London Underground. Britain has now turned itself into a fearsome Big Brother state, with tens of thousands of CCTV cameras all over the cities. They put video cameras in garbage cans over there.
Jewish liberals are just as ignorant of history and politics as all the other liberals you know.
Vast deserts of political ignorance makes liberalism possible.
Liberal Jews love the tolerance they enjoy in this country, and they often harbor a nasty case of guilt and anger against orthodox Jews, who don’t assimilate the way liberals do.
Liberalism is a species of mental conformity. It makes thinking unnecessary.
Thinking is scary.
All you need to do is believe the 24/7 media, and you feel like a member of the herd. The herd protects. At least, it protects until it turns against you. The biggest fear of herd cattle is that crucial moment when the herd looks for a new scapegoat.
All the socially acceptable race hatred today is on the Left and in the Muslim world. I will repeat that, because it’s the biggest point of denial among liberal Jews and liberal Christians. If you want to hear really dumb criticism of Jews and Israel, go to your nearest liberal Christian, who is really just a secular socialist. Just try it as an experiment.
It’s the very leftists who shout the loudest about love of humanity who also harbor a very nasty case of the hatreds. They hate Christians for not accepting the gay political agenda. They hate Jews who are “neo-conservatives.” They hate “fundamentalists” except if they are Muslims. They hate, hate, hate, because on the left, hating has become good again. It shows how much you really care.
If you doubt that, just watch the Occupy kids and the phony anarchists rioting in black KKK outfits.
Changing the color of your KKK outfit from white to black does not make you a good human being. On the contrary. It’s just the same-old, same-old, another body tent that hides your individual identity and therefore allows you to smash a store window with a big rock. Welcome to the psychology of mob violence. Wearing black all over is just like wearing white all over.
Today, ethnic hatred is encouraged among the “protected victim classes” — there is black anti-Semitism in Jerry Wright and his good bud Louis Farrakhan; there is a huge oil-fueled web campaign of Muslim anti-Semitism, going back to Mohammed’s genocide of the Jewish tribe of the Khureishi when they refused to convert to his new religion; there is a multibillion dollar hate campaign against Israel in countries like Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia; and oddest of all, there are tons of left-wing Jews who really, really hate Israel, like Noam Chomsky.
I’ve talked with liberal Jews who have never heard of all that. They can’t bring themselves to Google Memri.org, which carries daily translations of hate speech straight from the gates of hell. MEMRI (sounds like “Memory”) is for anybody who wants to be informed today, when political hate speech has gone global, right along with Google. MEMRI also covers the heroic moderates of the Muslim world, who are even braver today, because they have to live with Obama’s “Arab Spring.” MEMRI.org tries to cover the good and the bad.
Nazi propaganda is alive and well today, and with mass media on the web, it’s streaming bigger than ever. There are people who fall for it, because even nice people cannot resist the 24/7 tide of canned hatred they hear in countries like Egypt, Saudi, and Iran. They are drowned in hate speech, just like North Korean peasants are as they stoop in the rice paddies.
Jews who forget are out of touch with reality. They are blocking out today’s scary truths. I know some Jews who tell me they never read the news because it’s too upsetting. So they choose a life of ignorance.
What’s even worse, liberal Jews have happily voted for the racial spoils system that now governs America (and Europe), where victim groups get special privileges in jobs, education, and government goodies. Blacks get special privileges, women do, gays do, liberals do especially, and Muslims do, too. The dreaded quota system from Tsarist times is back, and liberal Jews voted for it.
Nobody reminds liberals of the obvious fact that devout Muslims who attend Friday mosque get their week sermons by Wahhabi imams trained by the Saudis to peddle the most radical Muslim line available, on the Sunni side of the street. Many liberals Jews are so ignorant that they even don’t know that old game of ethnic musical chairs: Once you start playing the ethnic Russians against the Poles, the Catholics against the Orthodox, you also start playing the Muslims against the Jews. It’s the same formula for any demagogue. They don’t care who plays the scapegoat. All they care about is having a good one to beat up on. Basic mob politics.
Once you start playing musical chairs with race and ethnicity, somebody is always left standing when the music stops. At some point there aren’t enough chairs left. Gee, I’m sorry about that. I guess you’re the goat today!
Those are the Jews who forget. Like Monica’s Lewinski’s rabbi, who gave the final invocation for the Democrats who booed God and Jerusalem the day before. Because hating religious Christians is okay today. On the left it’s encouraged just like the Dixiecrats used to encourage and justify race hatred against blacks. The color doesn’t matter. It’s the hate industry that does the job.
Liberals want to worship a messianic figure like Obama because like infants they put their trust in Princes. There is a Biblical wisdom literature that anybody can learn from, even atheists, because wisdom is wisdom. “Put not your trust in Princes” is a very wise and practical saying. There are Chinese wisdom sayings and Buddhist ones that are celebrated by liberals, which is fine. It’s just odd that they ignore the vast number Western and Biblical wisdom sayings, because traditional religion is now bad. Except for the “religion of peace” of course.
Liberal Jews have shifted their faith to secular socialism. It’s as simple as that. In that process they’ve lost track of their own wisdom literature, which warns against demagogues like Obama and the rest.
We know that secular socialism can flip on a dime. Socialism turned into National Socialism in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Hitler preferred to recruit Marxists, because he could see they made good Nazis.
After World War II, socialists used to despise divide and conquer by race and ethnic identity. But today we have Third World Socialism (Obama’s kind), which celebrates revenge against imperialistic whites. Now we celebrate diversity — meaning racial, gender, and sexual divide and conquer, and racial revenge is back, just like Hitler used to cook up.
Racial revenge talk is what keeps Jerry Wright and the other Chicago demagogues rolling in the dough. Just listen to their words. It’s not a mystery, except to liberals who tune them out, because Chicago race-baiters have to be Good People. You have to understand their rage.
Liberal belief is a very odd thing.
Conservatives tend to pursue reality wherever it leads, even if it shows some pretty bad things about some people. Conservatives can keep track of the bad guys, even when they change their hats. Liberals can’t figure it out. They are the useful idiots, as Vladimir Lenin said, because they yearn to believe. They are sucker bait. Con artists can spot them at a glance.
Conservatives can tell the difference between Christians who support Israel and who love tolerance, and those who can be seduced by the nasties. Devout Christians have better things to do with their lives than follow some mad totalitarian creed. Traditional religion is in fact a great protection against totalitarian ideologies, which is why Vladimir Putin now makes a big thing out of being photographed kneeling down with the Patriarch of Moscow. The Russian Orthodox survived 70 years of Soviet persecution and they are still a force in that culture. All the traditional religions have survived persecution. They know how.
In Nazi Germany, some of Hitler’s biggest opponents and victims were Catholic priests and Lutheran clerics, as well as Jewish rabbis.
Liberal Jews don’t know that either. They foolishly believe the Nazi swastika was a Christian symbol. It’s an Aryan symbol from India, and it was flipped around by the Nazis to make it their own. The Nazis were not Christians — although there were plenty of professed Christians who joined the Nazis, contrary to their creed. Mussolini did not persecute Jews in the early days, because after all, Jews look just like Italians. Mussolini did not turn against Italian Jews until Hitler actually invaded Italy.
Jewish ignorance about the Nazi period is astonishing. It is only exceeded by contemporary ignorance about the Muslim hate propaganda industry that’s right at your finger tips. (It’s translated free of charge every day by MEMRI.org).
Liberalism is a defense against reality.
That’s why liberals are such useful idiots. Jewish liberals like Noam Chomsky can be intelligent in one part of life and abysmally ignorant in another part. They wear ideological blinders.
Holocaust survivors had one big message for the world:
Never Forget!
Their liberal children have a different slogan:
Always Forget!
It feels much better that way!
Somewhere in the universe the nasties are having a big laugh.
After all, Saul Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer, the personification of evil.
It’s right there in front of our eyes.
Liberals can’t look. It’s their biggest problem.
Love the way you just excuse the Democrats from any blame for the mess the state is in even though they controlled the state legislature for years. It is the brainless voters like you who have gotten us into this mess and continue to see CT ranked at the bottom for a business friendly environment.
Early prison releases, CT’s version of a Dream Act, legal pot, death penatly off of the books, highest gas taxes in the nation, yeah the Democrats have a long record of sticking it to CT.
A candidate for Congress drops out the race because of a scandal and the story goes no further than the local section of the Washington Post. I suppose it’s an improvement that the Democrat is labeled as such in both the headline and the lead paragraph but notice this. Her wrongdoing is something the media insists is not a real problem – vote fraud.
A Maryland Democratic candidate quit her congressional race Monday after her own party told state officials that she had committed fraud by voting in both Maryland and Florida in recent elections.
Wendy Rosen, a small-business owner running against freshman Rep. Andy Harris (R) in the Eastern Shore-based 1st Congressional District, released a statement saying that “with great regret, and much sorrow” she was resigning from the contest.
“Personal issues have made this the hardest decision that I have had to make,” Rosen said
Rosen’s announcement came the same day the state Democratic party released a letter to state Attorney General Douglas Gansler and state prosecutors reporting the allegations against Rosen.
“The Maryland Democratic Party has discovered that Ms. Rosen has been registered to vote in both Florida and Maryland since at least 2006; that she in fact voted in the 2006 general election both in Florida and Maryland; and that she voted in the presidential preference primaries held in both Florida and Maryland in 2008,” wrote Yvette Lewis, the state party chair.
How many voters do what Rosen did? Anecdotal evidence suggests the number may be substantial. College students have the opportunity to do so. So do individuals who own second homes. When it is across state lines it can be hard to catch. In this case a whistle blower seems to have informed Democrat officials of a potential October surprise in time for them to move to replace Rosen on the ballot.
A senior Maryland Democrat said the party had been tipped off this weekend by someone within the party about Rosen’s potential issue. After checking the allegation, the party contacted Rosen on Monday morning and urged her to quit.
Local Democratic committees in the 1st district will now meet and vote on a new candidate to replace Rosen on the ballot. The new name must be submitted to the state by Sept. 27.
I have to wonder how she was caught. Given the rather breathless quality of her facebook page, could she have actually bragged to someone about having voted twice?
I see nothing wrong with what Cathy Malloy had to say. She was pointing out some of the difficulties of public life and is appropriately protective of her family. My understanding is that no one in the room objected either. The reporter who made a big deal of this proves her point. Cathy is a passionate speaker and a strong advocate for causes like the Sexual Assault Crisis Center. I will always want Cathy on my side in a fight.