Michael Massey is the Republican nominee for the House of Representatives from Connecticut’s Third Congressional District. On Monday, Massey joined conspiracy crazed nihilist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).

Massey traveled to Danbury to show support for Donald Trump ally and podcaster Steve Bannon as he reported to federal prison in Danbury to begin serving a four month sentence for contempt of Congress. The former Goldman Sachs investment banker and film producer used the opportunity to rail at the nation’s “ruling elite.” The Supreme Court declined to consider the 70 year old Harvard Business School graduate’s appeal to stay his sentence.

On his final day in office in 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon for all charges arising out of an alleged fraud scheme that duped donors into supporting Trump’s proposal to build a wall at the nation’s southern border. Bannon’s Danbury sentence arises from his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House’s special committee investigating the January 6th attempt to prevent the House and Senate from counting and certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes.

Massey was inspired to become involved in politics, as he tells the tale, when he heard a Trump speech while serving a prison sentence for a 2008 armed robbery of a Naugatuck bank. He will face incumbent Democrat Rosa DeLauro, who is seeking her 13th term.

Published July 3, 2024.

Governor Ned Lamont is expected to announce Tuesday morning that Jonathan Dach, Lamont’s third chief of staff, is leaving the administration, Daily Ructions has learned. The governor will appear at the State Capitol at 10:15 a.m. to make the announcement.

Dach has been with Lamont since the governor took office in 2019. He joined the administration as a top advisor and has continued in that role with different titles.

Matthew Brokman, also senior advisor, is expected to replace Dach. Brokman is considered politically savvy and his appointment will unleash a holiday week round of speculation on what the change means for the popular Lamont’s likelihood to seek a third term in 2026.

Dach’s departure and his replacement by Brokman will ease tensions in the executive suite.

Published July 2, 2024.

On June 21, 2004, Governor John G. Rowland announced in a brief speech broadcast to the state from the Governor’s Residence that he would resign his office on July 1st. Rowland’s decision came as the legislature’s impeachment inquiry was growing closer to removing the three-term Republican from office.

At the same time, a federal criminal probe was gathering momentum. It would conclude with Rowland entering a guilty plea for corrupt practices six months later, on December 23rd.

The anniversary of the Rowland scandals provides a moment to reflect on the essential role a free press plays in reporting acts of the powerful to the public. Hartford Courant reporters Jon Lender, Dave Altimai and Ed Mahony were indispensable in altering the public and law enforcement officials to the betrayal of the public trust that came to mark the Rowland administration. While a hot tub and cabinets in a lakeside cottage came to symbolize the scandal, it was about much more. High ranking officials in Rowland’s office also went to prison for corruption, as did state contractor William Tomasso.

The far reaching scandal included revelations of gold coins and an attempt to persuade the Mark Twain House foundation to publish a children’s book.

Some learned lessons from the public ordeal, others did not. One that endures: subscribe to a newspaper that is not afraid to find and follow a trail.

Published June 21, 2024.

Retired teachers opposing a switch in their healthcare benefits from traditional Medicare to Aetna Medicare Advantage scored a landslide win over a slate associated with United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Michael Mulgrew, who leads 200,000 educators and others who work in the public school system.

At stake in the election were 25 leadership positions and 300 seats reserved for retirees in the 3,400 member city union assembly, its legislative body. The insurgents, the NY Post reports, appear to have swept the contest by a 2-1 margin.

A New York judge ruled last year that the switch to Medicare Advantage violated city agreements with retirees, writing in July, “have shown that numerous promises were made by the City to then-New York City employees and future retirees that they would receive a Medicare supplemental plan when they retired, and that their first level of coverage once [they] retired would [be] Medicare.”

The healthcare contract for 250,000 retirees was a big catch for Hartford-based Aetna, owned by CVS. The process of awarding the deal was mired in several years of litigation between and among health insurers fighting to overturn city decisions and retirees arguing Medicare Advantage does not provide the benefits they were promised. City officials estimated the Medicare Advantage plan would save $600 million a year.

Published June 17, 2024.

Middletown Democratic registrar of voters Patricia Alston has referred primary petition signatures she deemed possible forgeries to the State Elections Enforcement Commission. The signatures appeared on petitions submitted by Reverend Robert Kyle Hoggard’s campaign. Hoggard is seeking to challenge incumbent Democrat Brandon Chafee.

Hoggard needs 298 valid signatures from registered Democrats residing in the 33rd House District. According to his Facebook page, Hoggard submitted more than 400. Local Democrats have been collecting affidavits and statements from purported signatories casting doubt on the petitions. Mike Fallon, head of Middletown’s Democratic town committee, released a statement Friday and described the petitions as including “multiple voters who stated that they did not sign a primary petition for the candidacy of Robert Kyle Hoggard and that the signature listed on the documents turned into the registrar’s office is fraudulent.”

Hoggard responded to an inquiry by Daily Ructions with his own statement:

The process of collecting signatures for a primary challenge is almost always more difficult than a campaign anticipates. Connecticut is the state with the laws most hostile to ballot access. It is not by happenstance that those laws endure. The establishment of each political party fears its primary voters more than it does the opposition party.

Hoggard is not expected to reach the 298 verified signatures for an August primary.

Published June 14, 2024.

As President Biden’s father might have said to him, “Joey, you can tell a lot about a man’s priorities by the bills he wants passed in a special session of the legislature.”

Governor Ned Lamont is shining a light on his own sense of urgency with what he does not want the legislature to consider in a special session later this month. The governor has no interest in fixing the appalling invitation to corruption in the school construction bill he signed into law this month. The legislation allows school construction managers to bid on contracts they are overseeing. Lamont says the legislature can get around to fixing the dangerous change in the law next year.

Next year may be months after former top Lamont adviser and school construction financing overlord Kostantinos Diamantis’s trial on corruption charges. Diamantis is accused in a federal indictment of extorting bribes from school construction contractors.

Instead of addressing corruption, Lamont and Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Dan O’Keefe want some changes in the state’s banking laws for Innovation Banks. Who would know more about money than two of the co-hosts of Biden’s high-dollar Greenwich fundraiser earlier this month?

Building public schools free of graft? That’s for other people–who send their children to those schools.

Published June 13, 2024.

Speaker of the House Matthew Ritter complained in May that he and other leaders struggle to find the best people to serve on state boards and commissions. Ritter’s bemoaning the quality of hundreds of volunteers was a stinging admission of failure by the Hartford Democrat.

Governor Ned Lamont signaled his agreement with Ritter on Wednesday when he elevated Massachusetts resident Martin Guay to serve as chair of the Board of Regents of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) system. Lamont nominated Guay to the BOR in March. Guay’s nomination referred to him as a resident of Bedford, Massachusetts.

Guay is an executive at Connecticut-based Black and Decker.

This is the first time a governor has felt no Connecticut resident was qualified to serve as the head of a higher education board of trustees or regents. Chancellor Terrence Cheng is said to spend much of his time at his New York home.

Guay’s first task will be to explain why Cheng did not inform regents and others in a timely way of the “Notice of Concern” issued to Western Connecticut State University in March by the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE). The ominous letter appears not to have roused the regents, dominated by a supine majority, out of their torpor.

Published June 13, 2024.

State Senator Paul Cicarella has some explaining to do. Hearst Connecticut’s Jacqui Rabe Thomas peels another layer off Ciccarella’s curious and lucrative history of worker’s compensation benefits.

Rabe’s first investigation of Cicarella’s disability claim and subsequent work history was published in March.

Cicarella, a North Haven Republican, declined to respond to Thomas’s subsequent questions about earning $123,000 while also receiving worker’s compensation benefits from an injury suffered as a corrections officer. Cicarella made a further blunder when he sent a state employee to provide cover in the growing controversy. Cicarella used Johnny Angel, also known as John Healey, to offer more than one version of events in response to Thomas’s questions. It is not the job of the Senate Republican Caucus chief of staff to intervene in a member’s personal matters. This is what is often referred to as misuse of public resources.

Questions about Cicarella’s receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars in worker’s compensation benefits while he appears to have been earning income are a personal matter. The litigious Ciccarella appears to do business with a constellation of lawyers.

On May 23rd, Cicarella filed a document in Superior Court offering to settle a motor vehicle collision claim for $490,000.00. The second term legislator claims to have suffered injuries to his neck, left arm, thoracic spine, pain radiating down his shoulders, more pain extending down his left arm and hand, trouble sleeping, anxiety, pain to the top of his head, and continues to endure “great pain to the mind and body.” Cicarella also underwent a surgical procedure on a toe.

Cicarella alleges that as a result of the collision he endures the burden of photophobia.

With so many injuries dating from 2008 to today, do not look for Cicarella to participate in many sign waves during his campaign re-election campaign this year. He’ll have to make up ground by appearing at public forums, and there may be plenty of those. The prospects of a Cicarella victory in the Republican-leaning district are becoming less certain with each revelation. Republicans may find themselves having to divert resources from three endangered Republicans to the Cicarella race. Choices must be made.

Published June 12, 2024.

Four Bridgeport Democrats were arrested Tuesday in a long running but slow moving absentee ballot fraud investigation arising out the close run 2019 Democratic primary for mayor between incumbent Joseph Ganim and state Senator Marilyn Moore.

Moore won the most votes on the machines in the September primary. Ganim eked out a win when the absentee ballots were counted. A Hearst Connecticut investigation of absentee ballots cast in the primary revealed widespread abuses that prompted the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) to intervene. It referred the matter to state law enforcement officials a year ago.

Bridgeport Democrats Wanda Geter-Pataky, Alfredo Castillo, Nilsa Heredia, and Josephine Edmonds were arrested. Geter-Pataky, Castillo, and Heredia were Ganim supporters. Edmonds was a Moore booster. Castillo is a member of Bridgeport’s city council. In addition to election law violations, Geter-Pataky, Castillo and Heredia were also charged with witness tampering.

Geter-Pataky figured prominently in video recordings that played a prominent role in a Superior Court ruling overturning the September 2023 mayoral primary.

The story continues but the conclusion that Marilyn Moore likely won the 2019 mayoral primary seems inescapable.

Published June 11, 2024.

President Roosevelt wrote the prayer he includes in this historic broadcast made 80 years ago today.

“They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”

Published June 6, 1944.