Utensils at ten paces

Many years ago, a mentor watched me struggling to achieve something that, when I did, I literally had no idea what to do next. So much had I devoted of my thoughts and energies to simply achieving the goal that applying what I now possessed to assist me and others was difficult to grasp.

'When you sup with the devil,' he offered, 'you must use a long spoon.' Our Connecticut legislators should have learned this, no later than Tuesday, when, having been summoned back for a special session by Governor M. Jodi Rell, to pass her package of budget adjustments for this current fiscal year, they declined to do so and suggested they will have a special, special session before Christmas to flex their majority muscle and pass what is, in essence, one party's vision of how to fill the growing budget chasm for the current fiscal year.

They have the votes to do so, and I wish them well, because while it's their budget, it impacts all of us who live here. Lost in all of this noise is that the current fiscal year budget was more blue smoke and mirrors than anything else to begin with and relied more on Wimpy's "I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Securitized Today." (Suspect Simsbury's Representative Linda Schofield wasn't invited to lunch and we all know the 47th District's Representative Chris Coutu is brown-bagging it).

If you have had trouble finding securitization in your Funk and Wagnalls it's because it's a somewhat whimsical (at best) notion in which magic elves count make-believe dollars in just the right amount to make sure we all have a happy ending. Except, of course, this year in The Land of Steady Habits where the budget that was finally enacted, and never signed by a Governor who less than two weeks later announced she would not seek another term, wasn't real or happy in the first place. And as it turns out, it has no ending.

So Tuesday our representatives didn't get their jobs done, for themselves or for us. While we wait to see what additional day they choose to probably NOT get anything rectified again, check out the public statements of both Schofield and Coutu and a far too small number of other representatives and don't be surprised if:
a. they make more sense than where we are now;
b. aren't all from the same political party and
c. your representative probably isn't among them.
I leave you to draw your own conclusion on that last point.

With the way we've been spending money in The Nutmeg State I'll be amazed if those hamburgers that we were hoping to have for lunch on Tuesday, and now today, haven't already been eaten by the time the grill is hot enough to cook 'em. Guten Appetit!
-bill kenny