20 October—The headline on thehill.com’s email tipsheet this morning is “Harris steps up negative attacks on Trump.” So what else is new? you may be thinking. Well, forget about politics and campaigning for a bit and just consider the headline. Have you ever heard of positive attacks?

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Holding forth in the League of Women Voters quasi-debate at the inaptly named Lakeview High School last night, incumbent Republican State Senator Stephen Harding and Democrat challenger Justin Potter agreed on a number of issues.

Among the issues Harding and Potter agreed on is affordable housing. They both saw a need for it. And they weren’t wrong. But the question is, how would they go about it? Forget about the right way. This is Connecticut. The way our triple-threat Democratically-mismanaged state is going about it is for the inept ruling party to usurp total control of local planning and zoning and force its own questionable criteria for affordable and other intrusive housing on towns. To buy the votes of cities.

Hartford already does that through arbitrary low-income-housing legislation imposed on municipalities as well as the state’s notorious Siting Council and two-year-old Clean Air Act, for example, both of which can override local authorities on things like placement of cell-phone towers and solar installations.

Bloodthirsty Harding and Potter also agreed last night that black bears deserve to be slaughtered by hunters simply because people, the apex predators and most pernicious invasive species ever known, being people, are unable, too stupid, too selfish to live with those innocent indigenous creatures.

Support the right to arm bears!

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Not incidentally, neither Stephen Harding nor Justin Potter—nor sitting Republican State Representative Karen Reddington-Hughes—has bothered to answer a very serious question I’ve emailed to them not once but three times: “Would you sponsor—not just as constituent requests, mind you, which are invariably blown off—and follow through with legislation to start the ball rolling for constitutional amendments to enable voter initiative referendums and recall of elected officials?”

The emails were to incumbent Harding’s and Reddington-Hughes’s CGA addresses and candidate Potter’s campaign address. I didn’t ask Sharon Sherman, opposing Reddington-Hughes, because she’s reachable only through social media, which I go to pains to avoid. The legislators’ and candidate’s silence indicates that despite what they may preach they just don’t give a damn.

Twenty-six states currently permit initiative referendums. Connecticut could make it 27. Except that the self-serving whores of Hartford—of both parties, to be fair—have made it clear through the 52 years I’ve been living here that they want to maintain the status quo and reserve all the meaningful power for themselves. To the people we put in office, voters are good for only two things, putting them there and keeping them there . . .