With Connecticut businesses facing a General Assembly session fraught with proposed mandates and tax hikes, advocates say the legislature’s relative lack attention to an expensive new unemployment assessment is not a good sign. As the legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee voted Tuesday to again raise a controversial measure to mandate paid sick leave for […]

In three press briefings, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy gave Connecticut a glimpse Tuesday of his style as storm-watcher-in-chief: With a Nor’easter expected to blanket most of the state with at least a foot of snow Wednesday, his stance was less warm and fuzzy and more of the don’t-be-stupid school. “I am urging people to complete […]

State lawmakers will soon have to deal with the hangover of passing a sweeping and expensive education reform law and then failing to capture the federal Race to the Top grant to pay for it. Up first for reconsideration: increased graduation requirements. “It is painful for me to say, but if we don’t find the […]

By delivering a more-than 200-page report to state legislators last week, members of the SustiNet board opened the next chapter in the debate over a proposed state-run health insurance plan. It’s a fight that will likely hinge on cost. Supporters say the proposed health plan, envisioned as a public option that would combine state employees […]

There is good news and bad news for state employees. Many of them can sleep in Wednesday, thanks to the storm. But there’s a catch: the sleepy heads have to accept the fact they are non-essential, a label to be worn uneasily in these tough fiscal times. “No state employee except essential state employees – […]

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, already reeling from this weekend’s shooting of her congressional colleague, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, got more terrible news on Monday. Her former chief of staff, Ashley Turton, a longtime Capitol Hill aide turned lobbyist, was found dead in her car on Monday morning. She was apparently involved in a low-speed crash that resulted […]

After a tragedy like the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last week, the immediate impulse to is figure out why it happened, says Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. Was Jared Lee Loughner fired by political rhetoric? To what degree was mental illness a factor? Was he liberal or conservative? Was he influenced by the Tea Party? […]

WASHINGTON-There was no extra security at the Milford Senior Center this morning when Rep. Rosa DeLauro spoke to a small crowd about the Republican effort to repeal health reform. Similarly, Sen. Richard Blumenthal hasn’t altered the arrangements for his two-week “listening tour” across Connecticut. And Rep. Chris Murphy hopes to hold one of his usual […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s transition team presented more than 1,800 pages worth of policy recommendations Monday, including sweeping proposals to overhaul education funding, institute universal pre-kindergarten, find new transportation revenues and end the regional tourism district system. And while Malloy thanked his team’s Policy Committee for developing a report that offers guidance his administration will use […]

WASHINGTON–As House Republicans make their first run at the health care reform law, Democrats say the GOP is doing the bidding of big insurance. “Why are they engaged in this effort?” asked Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District. “Because, quite frankly, I believe it’s what the insurance companies want.” It just ain’t so, comes the response […]

Advocates for the poor came to the State Capitol today to resuscitate an idea for a discounted residential utility rate that was buried in the sweeping electric regulation bill vetoed last year by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. The concept is one adopted by every northeast state other than Connecticut: authorize utilities to charge the poor […]

The State of Washington has wiped out funding for early childhood education. Arizona no longer covers the cost of organ transplants for low-income residents. Some public defender offices in Missouri won’t take new cases because they are overworked and understaffed. “From Oregon to Rhode Island, state governments today are smaller, stingier versions of what they […]

For obvious reasons, the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., is horrifying to her fellow members of Congress. But the location of the shooting will cast a special chill for many congressmen, inluding Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who advises politically vulnerable Democrats like Giffords. Giffords was shot outside a supermarket performing one of the […]

One 13-year-old girl came from distant Bethel to get Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s signature on a petition. A neighborhood cobbler came looking for business. Others simply wanted a moment with the new governor without the expense of going to an inaugural ball. For two hours on a snowy Saturday, Malloy and Lt. Gov. Nancy S. […]

The state’s new chief elections officer says she plans to promote changes to ensure that the Election Day fiasco of 2010, when polling places in Bridgeport and a half dozen other communities ran out of ballots on Election Day, doesn’t happen again. “There are some common sense solutions,” Secretary of the State Denise W. Merrill […]