There’s a problem when candidates who are running for office don’t get the issue they are being asked about. That’s quickly apparent after reading the Advocate article on the State Senate race in the 26th District. That would be the Westport, and northern lands who don’t support Super 7 territory. Er, Wilton, Weston, Ridgefield, Bethel etc. for those keeping track.

[Read more →]

State Representative Jason Bartlett, it is safe to say, likes to speak his mind. He’s not afraid of controversy, in fact he sometimes courts it. While at the Democratic National Convention last week, he called on U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman to leave the Democratic Party.

In Bartlett’s view, the media is going easy on Sarah Palin, and Rep. Bartlett makes no bones about why:

… if the situation was reversed and this was an African American whose seventeen year old daughter was unwed, pregnant, and still in high school…

First of all, that person would not have been picked for the [Vice Presidential spot on the] ticket.

Second, the national media would have blown this up to much greater proportions than they seem to be doing now. And the right wing would be unforgiving - disparaging, then castigating; and stereotyping the black family.

It’s just unbelievable to me.

Bartlett went on to say that the Palin selection itself is entirely based on the issue of abortion. In his view it was this issue alone that was decisive in preventing McCain from selecting Joe Lieberman as his running mate. And had McCain wanted to select a woman with the gravitas to derail the Obama train, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson would have been the choice. The reason she wasn’t, he says, is she’s pro-choice.

Meanwhile, apparently conflicting accounts of Palin’s position on the issue of birth control appeared online.
First, CNN reported Palin backed abstinence education

Posted: 02:00 PM ET
(CNN) – Sarah Palin, who announced on Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, indicated during her run for Alaska governor that she was a firm supporter of abstinence-only education in schools.

In a 2006 Eagle Forum questionnaire, Palin indicated that she supported funding abstinence-until-marriage education programs instead of teaching sex-education programs.

“Explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support,” Palin wrote in the conservative group’s questionnaire.

Then, this report from Time

… Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can’t tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.

The issues then - media bias, right-wing hypocrisy, Sarah Palin’s true position on birth control, or identify another.
But not Bristol Palin; thank you.

[Read more →]

With long time State Senator Judith Freedman- R Westport retiring, a shift in local races is today’s news. State Rep Toni Boucher is jumping into the 26th Senatorial district race, which will now pit Boucher against John Hartwell. The 26th covers the towns of Bethel, New Canaan, Redding, Ridgefield, Weston, Westport and Wilton.

Boucher read this statement at the press conference held yesterday in Wilton.

[Read more →]

In one of the more bizarre twists coming out of the binding vote today, $2.5 million is headed to Bethel & Danbury despite opposition from current Bethel First Selectman Bob Burke. In the waning days of the bonding package, State Senator David Capiello-R Danbury removed both the $500k for a library expansion in Bethel and $2 million for Danbury to use towards purchasing Terre Haute, undeveloped land in Bethel. Capiello maintained in his caucus that it was his funding requests to cut. The funding was actually requested by State Rep. Jason Bartlett-D.

[Read more →]

This is Politics at work. There is a struggle going on in the little town of Bethel. Bethel is a great small charming town and the struggle over keeping Terre Haute preserved as open space.  There is a lot of misdirection and it has taken me about six months and a lot of conversations to try to understand the issues. The property is part of a larger chain of open space stretching from Bethel through Danbury’s Tarrywile Park, Wooster Mountain State Park and Ridgefield’s preserved lands. You can check out this site for maps and boundaries www.ctpath.org.

[Read more →]