Transgenderism craze is mangling language; lawyer joke in Bridgeport

Transgender pride flag

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Languages belong to those who use them. Dictionaries standardize language on the basis of prevailing usage. If users want to be clearly understood, they will follow those standards pretty closely.

But the transgenderism craze that is sweeping politically correct circles, which include many news organizations, is upending and mangling the English language here and there, especially in regard to pronouns.

People who don't want to be recognized by their biological genders, some of whom claim that there are many other genders, are clamoring for new pronouns and have devised more than 70. But it is hard to imagine that many people will take the time to learn them all, much less abase themselves by trying to use them when hardly anyone else will understand them either and when using them will imply that the user believes that there really are more than two biological genders.

The recently invented pronouns hamper rather than facilitate understanding. That may be why some gender deniers or concealers want to scrap the individual gender-specific pronouns "he" and "she" and be cited with the plural pronoun "they," English lacking a gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since "they" signifies plural, its use in regard to an individual is silly and can only cause confusion.

In a free country people are free to invent words and use euphemisms to advance their politics. Already in politically correct circles "illegal immigrants" have become "undocumented people," as if they inadvertently left their passports and visas at home before heading to the border. People undergoing sex-change surgery or therapy are said to be getting "gender-affirming care," as if they had no gender at birth. Homosexuals are now "men who have sex with men."

Maybe heterosexuals will become "people who have sex with people of a different gender."

But in a free country people also are free to reject using euphemisms for perfectly good words and phrases and to reject denial of biology.

Besides, it's simple to avoid mangling the language when dealing with people who don't want their gender presumed upon by pronouns. That is: Just avoid pronouns where people don't want "he" or "she" and, instead, use names repeatedly, making them possessive as necessary. It will sound awkward but will preserve clarity without offending anyone, even though people increasingly want to be offended, since it confers power over the easily intimidated.

Iranistan, the residence of circus impresario P. T. Barnum, in 1848. The circus continues in poor old Bridgeport.

Lawyer jokes may be the funniest, most cynical and most accurate about the human condition, and the material for another one is gathering in Connecticut's courts.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim is trying again to recover his license to practice law, which he lost in 2003 upon his conviction for 16 federal corruption felonies committed during his first term as mayor, for which he served seven years in prison before persuading the voters of Bridgeport to return him to the scene of the crimes.

Ganim's first request to get his law license back was approved by a court committee of lawyers in 2012 but rejected by a three-judge court, which disapproved because it felt that Ganim had not shown enough remorse.

At a hearing last week before another court committee of lawyers, Ganim was more contrite, if not necessarily sincere. So presumably his next committee of judges will reinstate him, as other felonious lawyers have been reinstated in recent decades.

But the previous practice of Connecticut's courts was better. In the old days a felony conviction was enough to disbar a lawyer for life, so as to maintain the honor of the courts and the honor of the office every lawyer holds, commissioner of the Superior Court.

After all, lawyers who commit crimes, especially crimes of corruption, know better, having taken the lawyer's oath to "do nothing dishonest."

The honor of Connecticut's courts and those who would practice law here is no longer so rigorously defended. As a result, corruption is increasingly suspected about courts and lawyers. So maybe it will be better if Ganim returns as a commissioner of the Superior Court and confirms the suspicion, the public's remaining illusions are shattered, the law and the legal business are covered with more shame, and some of those who continue in the business may be more motivated to try cleaning it up.\
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).

Sterling Block-Bishop Arcade, a Victorian-era shopping arcade, in downtown Bridgeport.

Chris Powell: Plenty of voter fraud in Bridgeport; piling on Purdue Pharma

Iranistan, the residence of P.T. Barnum, in 1848

According to Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, the Nutmeg State has too little voter fraud to worry about. But she doesn't really know, because until last week few people had ever seriously looked.

But last week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers looked into the extraordinary level of absentee voting in Bridgeport's recent Democratic mayoral primary election, in which the challenger, state Sen. Marilyn Moore, won on the voting machines but was defeated as Mayor Joe Ganim overwhelmingly carried the absentee ballots.

The Hearst investigation found that fraud was extensive among its limited sample of voters. Ineligible people -- including people who were not registered to vote, people who were not Democrats, and felons and parolees -- received and cast absentee votes. Elderly people were coerced or pressured to complete absentee ballots for the mayor by Ganim supporters who came to their homes. Absentee ballots were sent to people who did not request them. Record-keeping by Bridgeport election officials is sloppy, maintaining incorrect birthdates for some voters and mistaken receipt dates for absentee ballots.

Secretary Merrill has forwarded the Hearst report to the state Elections Enforcement Commission and asked it to investigate because her office lacks the commission's powers. But the secretary should be chastened by what already has come out, for she has been advocating legislation to deny public access to voter registration data

With her legislation Merrill claims to be supporting individual privacy. But voters are not entirely private citizens, for they hold the most basic public office -- elector -- an office established by the state Constitution. Nobody has to become an elector. You volunteer, and election fraud cannot be detected by the public or news organizations unless the names, addresses, and birthdates of electors are as public as they long have been in Connecticut.

Since, as her legislation signifies, the secretary denies the possibility of voter fraud, the law should not hinder the press and public in detecting it as the Hearst papers have just done.

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PILING ON PURDUE PHARMA: If there was an award for piling on, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong would be a leading contender. Practically every day he announces a lawsuit his office is joining to challenge some policy of the Trump administration.

Those policies may be questionable but it is also questionable how much Tong's office is really doing with the lawsuits beyond providing pro-forma endorsements that get publicity for him.

Tong has worked up his greatest indignation for the lawsuit he has joined with many states against Stamford-based Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, to which many people have gotten addicted, many of them dying from their addiction. Tong wants the company liquidated and the proceeds somehow distributed to the drug's supposed victims.

But the country's worsening addiction problem long preceded OxyContin, and nobody could have gotten addicted to it if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration hadn't approved it 24 years ago and if thousands of doctors had not prescribed it too heavily to their patients. The FDA and those doctors bear the immediate responsibility for abuse of the drug, not the manufacturer, since from the beginning OxyContin has been a controlled substance.

Of course suing those who uncontrolled the drug would be a tougher and fairer fight for any attorney general who enjoys piling on.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Racism doesn't explain why the white guys won these mayoral primaries

In downtown Hartford

Since sometimes, as Freud is supposed to have said, a cigar is just a cigar, maybe sometimes an election for mayor in Connecticut is just an election, not part of a longstanding scheme to keep uppity women and minorities in their place.

But more than ever these days such complaints of prejudicial discrimination can intimidate, and last week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers pandered to them. The papers proclaimed disappointment that white men had won the Democratic primaries for mayor in Connecticut's three biggest cities -- Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport -- even though those cities are full of women and minorities.

The most mistaken complaint about the primary results came from state Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven. "It's just hard for people to accept change," Porter said. "White men have ruled this country since its inception, so the barriers we're talking about bringing down are so entrenched that it's going to take time. That it's going to be all white men representing majority-minority cities is something that needs to be addressed."

But as even Porter acknowledged, in those three cities white men themselves are a minority, since barely a third of the population of the three cities is white and only about half of that third is male.

Yes, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a white guy, defeated a black candidate and a Hispanic one, but Bronin did not win because the two minority candidates split the minority vote. Instead Bronin won with 59 percent, signifying he had support from many blacks and Hispanics. Of course it helped Bronin that one of his rivals, former Mayor Eddie Perez, had been convicted of corruption in office. But good for Hartford that integrity could trump mere ethnicity.

Besides, Hartford already has had black, Hispanic and women mayors. Despite Porter's hallucination, nobody in Hartford is being excluded because of race, ethnicity, or gender.

Yes, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, a black woman, was defeated in the Democratic primary by another white guy, Justin Elicker, after a campaign in which Elicker was challenged about his ability to represent black people when he doesn't look like them. This challenge was racist but it was taken seriously. To oblige his doubters should Elicker have put on blackface instead of sticking to the issues?

Like Bronin in Hartford. Elicker could not have won in New Haven without support from blacks and Hispanics, and there was plenty of reason for everybody to vote for him, from Harp's recent 11 percent tax increase to the frequent reports of expensive incompetence and arrogance in her administration. Harp long has seemed to think that facilitating illegal immigration is what her constituents care about most. While Elicker probably will pose as politically correct, too, at least he may realize that good public administration is more compelling.

"Hard for people to accept change"? But change is exactly what New Haven's Democrats voted for.

And yes, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, another white guy, narrowly won renomination in his primary with state Sen. Marilyn Moore, who is black. But Ganim won because Moore's campaign failed to corral absentee ballots as well as everyone knew Ganim's would, being backed by the city's Democratic machine.

Moore still would have had an excellent chance to become mayor if her campaign could have obtained 207 valid petition signatures to gain an independent ballot line in the general election. That should have been easy, but Moore's campaign submitted only 168. That wasn't racism but incompetence.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer ,in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Trump's illegal attack on Syria; city supervision

Among Connecticut's members of Congress, only U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy seems to have a firm position on President Trump's attacking Syria without a declaration of war or other authorization from Congress. Murphy says the attack was not only unconstitutional but also unlikely to help end Syria’s civil war.

The other members of the delegation are straddling the issue, applauding Trump's attack while acknowledging the lack of authorization. That seems likely to be the end of the issue for them.

For not even Murphy is doing what any responsible member of Congress should do -- introduce legislation to forbid unauthorized attacks and filibustering everything else until the rule of law is restored.

Syria is no threat to the United States, and the Middle East, with its ethnic and religious hatreds and gangster politics, will always be barbarous. But if the chief executive of the United States is to be free to lob missiles at whoever offends him, this country will be no better. "Collusion" with Russia, trysts with porn stars, and treachery and corruption in government, the issues lately consuming Washington, are nothing compared to unilateral warmaking.

A few weeks ago Trump was musing about becoming president for life, a leader like Communist China's. Now he claims the power to wage war on his own. Thus he would overthrow the Constitution. Yet some people who purport to be appalled by him are clamoring to outlaw civilian possession of guns.

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WHO MOST NEEDS SUPERVISION?: Gov. Dannel Malloy is dismissing complaints about his plan to have state government assume Hartford city government's $550 million debt while leaving other distressed cities, such as Bridgeport and New Haven, without any special financial assistance. Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, is making a campaign issue of this favoritism.

Rebuking Ganim, the governor notes that the assumption of Hartford's debt is conditioned on the city's submission to a state financial control board. But Bridgeport and New Haven also might be glad to submit to the board if state government would assume their debts too.

That isn't likely, since state government can't afford even Malloy's commitment to Hartford. Indeed, the governor's rationalization for the Hartford bailout is ridiculous because state government is even more insolvent than the city is and can't balance its own budget. With its tens of billions of dollars in long-term unfunded liabilities, state government needs a financial control board more than the cities do.

Financial control is the job of the governor and General Assembly. They have failed spectacularly. Their replacement is urgent.

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HOW ETHICAL OF McDONALD: Interviewed by the Connecticut Law Tribune after the state Senate's rejection of his nomination for chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Associate Justice Andrew J. McDonald impugned as potentially bigoted every state legislator who voted against him.

“I do believe that my sexual orientation was a factor for some of those who opposed me," McDonald said. But he declined this writer's request to identify any such legislators, asserting through a spokeswoman that his position imposes "constraints on public commentary.”

That is, judicial ethics allow McDonald to smear his critics wholesale but exempt him from having to support the smear. Nice work if you can get it. Keeping it should be in question.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
 

Chris Powell: Of contempt and credentialism

The P.T, Barnum Museum in Bridgeport.

Joe Ganim for governor? At first the idea might seem as ridiculous as the idea of his again becoming mayor of Bridgeport seemed when he got out of federal prison after serving seven years for exploiting his city with racketeering, extortion, bribery, and tax evasion.

But of course Ganim is indeed mayor again and his recent musing about running for governor may be no more ridiculous than Donald Trump's running for president. Many voters throughout the country saw Trump as the perfect mechanism for signifying their contempt for politics and government. Might many voters in Connecticut view Ganim the same way, even though, unlike Trump, Ganim himself may have been a major cause of that contempt?

In any case Ganim's return as chief executive of Connecticut's largest city has signified more than any contempt felt by voters there. It has signified the catastrophic failure of urban policy in the state for the last 50 years, represented most horribly by the collapse of Bridgeport, once the thriving center of the state's industry, now a swamp of poverty, social disintegration, corruption and political patronage. Ganim's restoration also has signified the demoralization of the city's voters, their desperate belief that a crook's return to office might be an improvement over a mayor who, however ineffectual, at least had stayed out of prison.

That is, Ganim is a symptom of Connecticut's steady impoverishment by mistaken social policy, policy in which state government persists though it only worsens living conditions. No one in authority ever answers for this, and it now seems to be accepted as the natural order of things in the state, beyond discussion in politics.

Indeed, this week Gov. Dan Malloy actually reveled in that mistaken social policy, touting what he said was a sixth year of increase in the state's high school graduation rate. But this increase is meaningless in a public education system that even school administrators have begun to acknowledge is entirely one of social promotion, a system in which there are no standards for advancement from grade to grade and for issuance of a high school diploma.

Congratulating themselves this week, the governor and Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell seemed never to have read the decision issued last September by Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher in the latest school-financing lawsuit, wherein the judge found the financing system unconstitutionally irrational because it fails to deliver education to many students.

The judge's decision recounted testimony by school administrators that schools, especially in Connecticut's cities, are giving diplomas to many students who are essentially illiterate after 12 years of social promotion.

The measure of education is not the mere credentialism celebrated by the governor and the commissioner this week but actual learning. By that standard education in Connecticut is little better than it is in most states, since here, as there, standardized tests show that half of high school seniors never master high school English and two-thirds never master high school math but are graduated anyway.

Worse, many students who have not mastered high school are then sent on to public colleges where they require remedial high school courses and end up with degrees of little value, in subjects like social work, women's studies and sociology, as if this final bit of credentialism will prepare them any better for making a living in the private sector, where they find a terrible shock, since, unlike education in Connecticut, in the private sector results count.  

If mere credentialism is to be policy in education because it lets everyone feel good, state government could accomplish just as much and save a lot of money by issuing high school diplomas with birth certificates, thereby achieving a 100-percent graduation rate.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn.
 

Conn. Democratic Incumbent Mayors Drubbed; Now What?

In three large Connecticut cities, incumbent Democratic mayors were drubbed by primary challengers. Hartford’s Mayor Pedro Segarra was outhustled and outspent by Democratic Party endorsed challenger Luke Bronin, formerly general counsel for two years to Gov. Dannel Malloy. In Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, former mayor and felon Joe Ganim defeated Mayor Bill Finch in a three-way primary. And in New London, Mayor Darryl Finzio, more progressive than Leon Trotsky, lost to Councilman Michael Passero. One publication noted that the primary defeats of the three incumbent Democratic mayors indicated a “hunger for change” in cities long dominated by the Democratic Party. Three questions arise: What changes are in the minds of Democratic voters who turned a frozen face to incumbents? To what extent is change possible within cities dominated for decades by a single party? And why has the hunger for change not moved more voters toward the Republican Party?

The answer to the last question should be obvious: There is no serious and permanent Republican Party presence in large Connecticut cities. So small has the Republican Party footprint been in the three cities mentioned above that, it has been acknowledged by both major parties, Democratic primary elections in large urban areas determine victors in general elections.

Mr. Finch has taken the precaution of allying himself with an all-purpose third party and may challenge Mr. Ganim in a general election. However, the still intact Democratic Party machine in large cities gives Democratic Party endorsed candidates a leg-up over their competitors. Mr. Segarra is not likely to challenge Mr. Bronin in the upcoming General Election. Mr. Bronin had been blessed with a friendly nod from Mr. Malloy, the nominal head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, during the primary and a fulsome endorsement after the primary. Mr. Malloy declined to endorse incumbent Mayor Finch, but lately he has signaled his disapproval of Mr. Ganim, without announcing that he would support Mr. Fitch over Mr. Ganim in any possible third-party challenge.

Following the election returns in Bridgeport, Mr. Malloy, according to a piece in CTMirror, hedged in response to Mr. Ganim’s victory. Was he willing to embrace Mr. Ganim’s, or would he support a challenge from Mr. Fitch?

“I’m not doing anything on that race today. I have to have some conversations and take a look at it,” said Mr. Malloy, “tersely acknowledging that Mr. Ganim’s return as mayor of Connecticut’s largest city would be awkward.”

Awkward indeed: Mr. Ganim, convicted of bribery, had spent seven years in prison before he audaciously sought to recover the position from which he was expelled. And his endeavor will likely be successful. In a one-party Democratic town, a party endorsement is tantamount to election. After the Great Fire at Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world, the Queen was asked what she thought of the fire. “Awkward,” she said.

“Obviously,” Mr. Malloy added, “the situation is an unusual one by national standards,” but not, presumably, by the operative standards in Connecticut’s larger cities, many of which have been run by the state’s dominant Democratic Party for decades.

A report by WNPR noted: “Bronin raised over $800,000,” about twice as much as Mr. Segarra, “which allowed him, among other things, to advertise heavily on television and to send out an impressive number of political mailers. (Some recent ones included images of and praise from Governor Dannel Malloy, who campaign aides say hadn't approved their use.)”

This disclaimer – that Mr. Bronin’s former boss had not approved the subtle gubernatorial endorsements included in the mailers – follows hard on the heels of a suit brought against Mr. Malloy by the State Republican Party that claims the governor made use in his own campaign of mailers that may have run afoul of Connecticut’s stringent campaign finance laws.

Bridgeport, labeled by Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post, formerly the Bridgeport post, "a seething mass of patronage," presents Mr. Malloy, the Queen mother of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, with a taxing problem. Should the father of the state’s “second chance” society torpedo Mr. Ganim’s march to the mayoralty perhaps, as columnist and Managing Editor of the {Manchester} Journal Inquirer Chris Powell has suggested, by threatening to turn off the patronage tap in Bridgeport? Or should Mr. Malloy simply bow to the fait accompli Mr. Ganim has managed to pull off and count himself lucky that the Republican Party is so weak and inconsequential in Democratic cities that, taken together, have assured both his election and re-election to office?

Either way, Mr. Malloy wins. But one can see in Mr. Malloy’s furrowed brow his political conscience tousling furiously with his political opportunities. Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt, tortured by such tugs and pulls of conscience, most often yielded to his opportunistic good angel: “I seen my opportunities, and I took’em.”

Don Pesci is  Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.