14 April—What was the Democrat-majority Connecticut State Senate thinking when it voted 19-13 to allow striking union members to collect unemployment insurance, with only one Democrat voting to oppose along with all the Republicans? Need I ask?

In approving Senate Bill 317, those whores obviously were pandering to their usually loyal base that they fear could be motivated to vote Republican this November if Connecticut Republicans can finally get their act together.

The very thought of paying unemployment benefits to workers who voluntarily refuse to work is absurd, to put it mildly. If put into practice, it surely would destroy the state’s already weak economy. But why should that stop any legislation? Or any politicians?

Napoleon is said to have opined that in politics, stupidity is not a handicap. But is offering unemployment benefits to strikers stupid? Certainly not to strikers and potential strikers. Nor to pols who need their support. So just because it stinks to high heaven, hold your nose but don’t dismiss it.

More than one Connecticut Democrat has admitted, however reluctantly (and never for attribution), that it’s a giveaway to organized labor, a bribe for labor’s support. Another Democrat rationalizes that it’s not anti-employer or anti-small business, but pro-worker.

That creep, Democrat Senator Jorge Cabrera of Hamden (who just happens to be a union organizer as well as Senate vice chairman of the Labor and Public Employees Committee—talk about a conflict of interest) is full of it. Of course it’s anti-employer, because under Senate Bill 317 workers would have more incentive to make unreasonable demands of employers in order to foment strikes and collect unemployment paychecks for doing nothing.

The Lamont administration opposed the questionable legislation before Cabrera’s committee. But Gov. Ned Lamont won’t commit himself to anything less bland than, “I think it sounds pretty novel.”

If the travesty makes it through the Connecticut House of Representatives, we’ll see if Ned has the principle and scrotal content to veto it.

In the meantime, for something completely different, maybe Ned should do something about the roads. In the half-century I’ve been living here, I’ve never but never seen Connecticut’s state roads in such god-awful shape. The pot-holier-than-thou divided highways, for instance, have begun to resemble the surface of the moon. Usually in an election year—especially in a gubernatorial election year—we see strategic repair and repaving. So where’s the paving money being diverted this year?

Maybe Ned’s having ConnDOT do the work only where he hopes to get the most votes. Because they certainly aren’t doing anything worth mentioning around here. And I don’t think it’s ConnDOT’s fault . . .