Maybe it’s an offshoot of having hundreds of digital television channels to choose from, but scanning the news these days reveals a scatter shot of issues that drive political discourse. Forget the partisan bickering that fuels political conversations in D.C., Connecticut suffers from the see-no-connection to these “solutions” that crop up as bills in the legislature. Even Governor Rell is guilty of tendency to solve for an issue instead of solving for a problem.

The legislature needs some sort of handy field guide to figure out what ails this state, because they sure don’t seem to be reading what we the citizens seem to be reading in the local newspapers. And what we are reading is that Connecticut is an expensive place to live and do business; young people don’t want to live here; we can’t get from point a to point b without sitting in traffic, or hitting a deer; and our energy bills keep going up because we have a California style circa 2000 deregulated market.

Naturally, Rell the Republican wants to raise income taxes to make it more expensive to live here and throw extra money at education presumably so that the young people will be better educated when they depart the state for cheaper living in a place with jobs. Jim Amann, the Democratic speaker, rightly defends against this tax and spend plan and vows to fight for the middle class and small businesses who are overtaxed. Naturally this might be confusing to the GOP faithful, who thought a Republican governor would follow some sort of fiscal discipline instead of announcing that the spending cap, thar she blows, full speed ahead. The Democratic wing that made its election priority, counter to the rest of the nation, to replace one Democratic Senator with another, naturally has it’s sites set on Amann who speaks too much like someone with a case of common sense. A good start might be figuring out whether Connecticut has a surplus, a deficit or something else. Let’s see the legislature get its house in order by getting the books on GAAP, like Nancy Wyman, State Comptroller, has been asking for.

Young people  leave Connecticut for the cheap living, exciting night life, 21st century job market places. This is not a hard thing to figure out, young people want to have fun and work in companies that have growth potential and other young people. You can’t have fun if most of your salary goes towards housing and transportation. Stamford has sort of figured this out, and has been busy mixing office, retail and residential of all types near its train station and pushing its local business districts to spice up the fun factor with free evening summer concerts. New Haven had this figured out a long time ago, but then with Yale, its always had a large population of young people. Is the legislature hard at work trying to replicate the successful parts of New Haven and Stamford elsewhere? Not exactly. People might be smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones in cars with children in the back seat.

To some legislators, roads are a bad thing. Coincidentally they tend to be from towns that have a high incidence of deer vs. car encounters. New Cannaan, the New York Times reports, saw its accident total involving deer shoot up to 101 from 44 the year before.  The leafy tree addled environment that some want to preserve from the common sense solution of finally building out a Super 7 is the prefect haven for deer. According to Howard J. Kilpatrick, a biologist from the DEP, there are about 76,000 deer in at last count four years ago and the deer were the most dense in Fairfield County, getting up to 50 per square mile in some areas. So it seems the priority here is to preserve young deer populations instead of figuring out how to get people to jobs located in Stamford and Norwalk from more affordable living areas in the greater Danbury area.

Maybe this all does make some bit of sense. Our legislators up in Hartford are acting like deer caught in the headlights of Connecticut’s fiscal train wreck, and just hanker to preserve groves of trees than deal with the messy issues of growing smart towns and cities that work.