Its early but our new Governor of Connecticut has already picked up the Lying Ned honorific.

A tale of two States, both with high taxes and meddlesome legislatures yet one fixes and builds its transportation infrastructure quickly, the other doesn't.  When the Northridge earthquake destroyed portions of Los Angeles freeways it took a year to repair. When the bridges tying Oakland to San Francisco where damaged in an earthquake one was completely replaced and the others repaired in about a year. On the other hand putting in extra lanes on I 95 between Stamford and Norwalk Connecticut took eleven (2007 through 2017, yes eleven count them) years. Time is money! When Connecticut's Department of Transportation is criticized for being nine times more costly than others, its because of this example. 
Its early but our new Governor of Connecticut has already picked the Lying Ned honorific. He waffled on tolls while campaigning which he now makes clear were always his intention.  Better for him to have had courage declare for highway tolls and openly talk about the need to restructure the clearly dysfunctional DOT that spends the money to be collected. Ned's legacy will be after spending his personal fortune to become Governor as the clown facing the tsunami crashing over Connecticut. 

Republican's tired mantra untethered from Milton Friedman's original free market precepts

GOP, Democrats are miles apart on Drug Pricing 

Ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) dismissed the proposal as “the seizure of medicines by an unhappy government.” Such an approach, he said, was “best left to socialist regimes and not the United States of America.” 

“On what planet is this a free market?” asked Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) in regards to drug companies that are guaranteed years without competition when they patent a new drug or device.

This exchange shows Republican's current and very tired mantra untethered from Milton Friedman's original free market precepts that transformed Washington and converted Democrats, to the point where Democrat Blumenauer has a better understanding of markets than Republican Nunes. 

ETFs are a collective grouping of securities where valuable knowledge at the extremes of opportunity or disaster is washed out into an average.

The previous financial crisis was precipitated by a trend where perceived value broke from reality. Then it was mortgage backed securities (MBS) breaking the link from a banker's knowledge of his customer and local real estate conditions and substituting it for a financial rating agency's grade. One could posit that today's market decline and impending crisis will be identified as coming from electronically traded funds (ETF) which break the link from an investors knowledge of an individual security and substitutes it with a description of a collective grouping, an index, of securities where valuable knowledge at the extremes of opportunity or disaster is washed out into an average.
Luring Investors into even Narrower Niches reports on a trend to a particularly wrongheaded assumption that results are enhanced  by focused rather than scatter shot investments in a new and upcoming field such as robotics.  What is the investor's hurry? Buying early into a group of companies dissipates the advantage of having bought early and inexpensively by mixing a possible winner among outright going out of business failures especially when time and analysis can cull out the losers and direct you to a real chance of finding the winner.
   

Can Connecticut afford The Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD)?

Reason Magazine listed as one of the five worst decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, Kelo v. The City of New London, where the court approved the city’s use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another to further a developers idea for economic development. Pfizer, for whom the project was proposed, unfortunately for New London’s progress and the Supreme Court’s reputation exited from the deal made to make the hardship endured by Kelo and other property owners into a cleared waterfront now used as the city’s dump. Leaving well enough alone was the better course for economic development and it’s a lesson the DECD can never learn because of its mandate to meddle. And it continued. In 2015 they proposed to help move with a $100 million tax credit mega rich hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from its plush campus in Westport to a Stamford waterfront development. Thankfully Stamford residents rejected the project because it already had suitable buildings near its rail center and were not as concerned about the fund's chief yacht access. Talk about steal from the poor and give to the rich mind benders these economic development agencies go on.

 

What would amendment convention propose in a hundred words or less worthy of our Constitution and withstand the test of time?

It is a mistake to call a convention to propose an amendment on campaign financing reform to resolve the Supreme Court’s  “Citizens United” free speech decision because one man’s free speech is another’s big money influence. Partisans declare George Soros, Labor Unions, ACLU and the Sierra Club  of exerting undue influence on one side and the Koch brothers on the other. The Roberts court is correct to retrieve free speech from the litany of campaign reform laws testing the intent and clarity of the First Amendment. And it is clarity that is the issue.  What would the convention propose in a hundred words or less as an amendment worthy of our Constitution that could withstand the test of time?

Rod Hanscomb the @LibertarianCT candidate for governor honors conservatives versus the dishonor of affirming an amoral President

Among states Connecticut ranks among the most reckless for its level of unfunded pension liabilities. That GE moved its headquarters to what was formerly called Taxachussetts is an indication that it is more than taxes that ails Connecticut, rather miserable prospects for its economy because of cowardly and irresponsible Governors and legislature on both Democrat and Republican sides of the aisle. Connecticut will kick its economy down even further by electing a candidate from either of the major parties.

Democrats have nominated Ned Lamont who from his television ads appears not to care that Connecticut’s costly structure to educate, provide healthcare and maintain transport infrastructure needs reformulating. He is as beholden to municipal and teachers unions as the current Governor, Dannel Malloy and should he get his way would add to these unions membership and benefits and further aggravate Connecticut’s precarious position with unfunded pensions.

Republican Bob Stefanowski says he would cut programs, spending and taxes but is aligned with an amoral President who is destroying our democracy and the fiscally reckless national party that supports him, so it’s doubtful he can garner the political goodwill necessary to accomplish the necessary restructuring and bloodletting.

There are two other candidates currently petitioned validated as gubernatorial candidates: Oz Griebel an independent and Libertarian Party candidate Rod Hanscomb, with the same cut cut cut proposals as Stefanowski. But Libertarians are a full fledged party in the making with the fiscally conservative small government ideology the Republicans use to have before they lost their moral compass. Unlike the other minor parties that are solely dependent on a personality without coherent ideology, Libertarians have a core belief in Federalism, a system devised by our forefathers when writing the Constitution whereby the States share power with a carefully constrained central government. And its through Federalism that Connecticut could start disentangling itself from central government edicts that control our health and education and pare down expenses while improving services. Rod Hanscomb, the Libertarian Party’s first candidate for Governor of Connecticut can argue for a smaller less burdensome government unencumbered by crony deals and scandal of the of two major parties.  

Will he win? No, but his candidacy helps establish the Libertarian Party, a party worthy of being the loyal opposition to Democrats.  A party which nominated 2016’s most credible national candidates, Gary Johnson former Republican Governor of New Mexico and William Weld former Governor of Massachusetts as its team and unlike Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, people who had governed! William Weld, as governor redirected Massachusetts toward the vibrant economy that GE now wants to be a part of, is vying for the Libertarian Party’s 2020 top spot. A ticket which would attract honorable Republicans the likes of Mitt Romney, who followed Weld as Governor of Massachusetts, to peel away from their amoral party and begin the replacement of the lost GOP much like Lincoln replaced the Whig party. A vote for Rod Hanscomb will not be a wasted one for conservatives. Its one which they can build on because the legacy of Trump is dishonor and by affirming him and those that follow him dishonors conservatism.   

Sanctions are like a vaccine which when overly or misapplied lose their effectiveness

Sanctions are like a vaccine which when overly or misapplied lose their effectiveness. Trump's unilateral decision to discard the Iran Nuclear deal and reimpose the sanctions regime that Europe, Russia and China had agreed to bring Iran to the table to make the deal in the first place and with the full expectation they would be imposed again only with their agreement.  Now we have Russia in disagreement with sanctions altogether and Europe and China partially so. Europe’s disagreement will test U.S. based financial sanctions because they have the wherewithal and currency to counter them given a little time to tinker and develop workarounds just like a good microbe would. China can ignore the sanctions and buy oil at a discount from those rejecting it by blindly following U.S. demands to cease business dealings in Iran. And most dangerously for American power all three spheres of influence are aligned against the U.S.