Vox clamantis in deserto
‘The Beat’ in New Britain: ‘Harmony and dissonance’
John Hitchcock’s “We Are Defined by the Beat’’ show at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, through Nov. 29.
The museum says:
“Home to artist, educator, and musician John Hitchcock (b. 1967), the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribal lands of Medicine Park, Oklahoma, lie between the sacred Wichita Mountains and Wildlife Reserve—a refuge for buffalo, deer, and elk—and Fort Sill, a United States Army post and artillery range established in 1869 during the Indian Wars.
“Within this environment, the sounds of cicadas, birds, and wildlife mingle with the percussion of artillery and helicopters, while the songs of Kiowa and Comanche people echo in counterpoint to military anthems. This coexistence of harmony and dissonance—of nature, culture, and conflict—is central to Hitchcock’s evocative work.
“For over three decades, Hitchcock has transformed the sonic and cultural rhythms of his homeland into a distinct visual language. An enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma with Comanche and Northern European ancestry, Hitchcock merges personal expression with references to intertribal powwows, the Wichita Mountain landscape of his youth, and the symbols and languages of Great Plains Native populations. Working across printmaking, neon, textiles, sound, and video, he merges traditional and contemporary art forms to pay homage to his ancestors, confront histories of Indigenous displacement and trauma, and celebrate community, resilience, and survival.’’
John Lowrey: How to get more food from grocery stores to food banks and pantries
Volunteers sorting food for Greater Boston Food Bank.
From The Conversation (excepting image above)
BOSTON
Low-income Americans need more help getting enough to eat, but not much of the food retailers that sell groceries could potentially donate is given away. Only 13% of it ends up at food banks, according to a 2026 report produced by ReFED, a nonprofit that studies and tries to prevent food waste.
The rest is composted; turned into animal feed, biofuels and other industrial products; sold at a deep discount shortly before its use-by date; or disposed of in landfills and incinerators.
Given that millions of Americans are losing access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and grocery prices are rising, why isn’t more food sent to food banks?
I’m a supply chain scholar who studies food banks. I conduct research about how food retailers and food banks work together to save food that would otherwise be wasted. I’ve found that those retailers don’t regularly tell food banks how much food they have available. That lack of communication, combined with capacity constraints at food banks, limits the volume of what food banks can get from supermarkets and similar stores.
No way to plan with precision
Food banks are large-scale warehouses that procure, store and distribute donated food from businesses, including supermarkets. Food pantries, by contrast, are smaller nonprofits that distribute food directly to those in need, such as faith-based soup kitchens and community food assistance programs.
Food banks are largely responsible for picking up food that retailers wish to donate and would otherwise discard. The donated food is then distributed to food pantries, where it is ultimately provided to low-income individuals and families.
This arrangement is mutually beneficial. Food banks generally want more donations, and retailers often have strong social and economic reasons to provide them.
Food banks manage fleets of vehicles of various sizes. Food bank logistics managers design routes and dispatch vehicles to visit as many retail store locations as often as possible. A food bank’s procurement territory could stretch across 20 counties and include hundreds of stores.
However, a big problem is that retailers rarely tell food banks how much food to expect, making all logistical decisions even more complicated than you might expect. For example, food banks usually don’t know how big a truck to send, how many staff members and volunteers will be needed to load and unload, or the quality and remaining shelf life of the donated items.
Consequently, food banks set somewhat arbitrary schedules.
A standard pickup schedule might involve dispatching a tractor-trailer to the local Costco store each day, while sending a smaller box truck to a rural Kroger supermarket once per week. This approximately matches the food banks’ pickup capacity with the stores’ demand for pickups or the expected volume of food available to donate.
Not enough trucks or labor
Scheduling pickups week in and week out helps food banks make long-term plans. They can figure out, for example, how many trucks they need in their fleets to haul donations.
But it doesn’t help with short-term planning. Without accurate information about what to expect, there’s no way for food banks to change course to accommodate any unexpected change in the volume of food available to donate.
Food banks also manage the flow of food from other sources besides retailers, such as federal commodity programs, items that food banks buy from wholesalers and donations from farmers, manufacturers and distributors.
Managing this diverse portfolio of food sources tends to exceed what a food bank’s fleet and staff can handle. Because every pickup requires trucks, labor and time, capacity constraints often prevent food banks from collecting donations from every retail store on a daily basis.
A food bank truck is parked outside a Weis grocery store in Pennsylvania in 2021. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
Food pantries join the pickup game
Over the past decade, I’ve seen most U.S. food banks adjust their supply chains to boost donations
.
Starting in 2016, the usual system began to change. Many stores now donate directly to food pantries, bypassing the food bank altogether. A hybrid model, with both food banks and food pantries picking up food from stores, is especially popular with the high-volume, big-box retailers that are located far from any food bank warehouse. In those cases, local pantries are often closer by.
Operations management scholar Ken Boyer and I studied what happens when food pantries begin to pick up donated food directly. We observed what happened at five big-box stores from April 2017 to March 2018 as food pantries began to directly pick up more donated food.
We found that while food pantry pickups can increase donations, it also shifts and intensifies bottlenecks down the food donation supply chain.
The best-performing store increased its average monthly donations from 972 pounds (441 kilograms) across five pickups to 2,066 pounds (937 kilograms) across 16 pickups, a 110% increase in donation volume alongside a 220% increase in pickup frequency. But we couldn’t estimate the donation rate at that store or the other four due to a lack of data on how much food was available for those in need.
Unpredictable staffing was also an issue. Since food pantry pickups often relied on volunteers with their personal vehicles, rather than a food bank’s paid staff driving its own trucks, those pickups were much less reliable. And when a food pantry missed a scheduled pickup, it significantly disrupted in-store donation processes and undermined the store managers’ confidence that donated food would be collected as planned.
This uncertainty affected whether food was set aside for donation or thrown out.
Today, most food banks across the country have incorporated at least some pickups by food pantries from retailers into their donation systems. Yet data on what food will be available, at what time and at which store is still missing. This data could go a long way in closing the gap between the amount of food that’s available to donate and what actually is donated.
It is worth noting that food pantries have tighter budgets than food banks, with stronger preference than food banks for certain kinds of food, such as meat and produce. They also have less storage space than food banks, compounding the capacity constraints that were already limiting donations when only food banks were picking food up from stores.
Better data and more reliable staffing would go a long way in making sure that more donated food gets to those who need it the most.
John Lowrey is an assistant professor of supply chain and health sciences at Northeastern University and the founder of Food ALERT, a B2B SaaS platform that helps retail grocers achieve 100% donations. He is also on the Board of Directors for the Arizona Association of Food Banks.
Incited by ‘distance and absence’
“White Elephants, Gajasimhas and Buildings” (visuals drawn by students in Cambodia, silk threads, printed and woven), by Linda Sok, in her show “Linda Sok: Warped Archive’’ at the Brattleboro, Vt., Museum and Arts Center, July 11-Nov. 1.
Sok says she "engages with French-colonial documentation of disappeared textiles at the National Museum of Cambodia ... [to] imagine new designs for contemporary tapestries….Distance and absence become inciting moments; my practice emerges as acts of weaving, rituals, and translations of physical materials.’’
Llewellyn King: An immigrant from Britain and Africa’s defense of immigration
Net migration rates per 1,000 people in 2023. On net, people generally travel from redder countries to bluer (and richer) countries. (Russia gets a lot of immigrants from Central Asian nations.)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught.
Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.
There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.
I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia ( now Zimbabwe), to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later.
I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.
I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.
In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state of “turpitude” wasn’t described.
To me, America was more than a country, it was, and remains, a state of mind.
At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.
America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress.
Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see.
Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense.
About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of the impact of immigration on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.
Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.
I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real-and-present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.
Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.
Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries.
In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.
Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and at the apex of its leadership sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.
Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness, some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. But overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.
From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.
When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.
People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.
We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and and an international energy consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Patriotic faith
On Traverse Street, Providence
- Photo by William Morgan, Providence-based architectural historian and photographer.
By ‘exaggerating details’
“Purple Shimmer” by Leah Barranco, in her show “Color & Scale,’’ at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts, July 10 through Sept. 12,
The arts center explains:
“In ‘Color & Scale,’ Leah Barranco translates the physical world, examining and exaggerating details found in nature and illuminating the overlooked beauty of the wilderness that surrounds us. Using pattern, varying brushstrokes, opacity, and vivid colors, Barranco presents nature through a new vibrant lens.
“Focusing on the aquatic creatures found within the waterways of Vermont, the visible qualities of moving water mask an elusive underwater realm. Barranco explores a microcosm that is filled with life, color, and radiance – each creature with their own brilliant color palette and unique pattern. Through the medium of paint, we can experience the world from a new perspective.’’
Bram Sable-Smith: Will they take a Lyme disease vaccine?
Federally reported cases of Lyme disease in 2023. The disease got its name from the towns of Lyme and Old Lyme, Conn. In 1975, physicians at the Yale University School of Medicine investigated a cluster of mysterious, severe arthritis cases in children and adults in this coastal region, which led to the official characterization of the illness. Beware summer vacationers! The ticks that carry the disease remain rampant on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island and Long Island.
Edited from a Kaiser Family Health News article (not including image above)
It’s tick season, possibly the worst in a decade.
More and more Americans are being exposed to these parasites as climate change expands the range where they can survive. That means more people are also exposed to the bevy of health conditions they can cause, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the alpha-gal-triggered red meat allergy, and, most common of all, Lyme disease.
For the latter, there may be some additional protection on the horizon. Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva announced this spring they plan to seek regulatory approval for a vaccine to protect against Lyme disease. A previous vaccine for Lyme became available in the late 1990s but was pulled only three years later due to lawsuits, public fear of side effects, and a lack of interest.
It’s unclear whether this latest stab at a Lyme disease vaccine will get a warmer reception if it’s approved, especially in the postcovid era of vaccine skepticism.
For a sense of how it might go over with rural populations at high risk of Lyme, KFF Health News spoke with a group of hunters.
Few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks and exposure to Lyme disease
At the same time, as a collective, hunters skew conservative, rural, and male, according to a survey from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And these are identities associated with increased hesitancy about or resistance to vaccines, according to Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for Public Opinion and Survey Research at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Left untreated, Lyme can cause a variety of symptoms, from fevers, chills, and headaches to arthritis, shooting pains, and inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 476,000 people in the U.S. may be diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, the CDC says; that’s at least in part because the range of places where cases have been reported has “expanded significantly” since 1995.
So would hunters get the Lyme vaccine if it became available?
“Given my proclivity for the outdoors, absolutely,” said Jess Manganelli, one of seven hunters (and one hiker) who spoke with KFF Health News on a recent Saturday at the Busch Shooting Range in Weldon Spring, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis.
Of the eight, Manganelli, who had been hunting turkeys the weekend before, was the most positive toward the vaccine. Six others said they would consider it but would want more information about its safety and effectiveness as well as their risk for contracting the disease.
But Manganelli was the only one who believed she may have previously contracted Lyme disease, although she was never formally diagnosed with it. Two years ago, she experienced muscle weakness, tiredness, fatigue, swelling, and headaches after a tick bite, but when she went to urgent care she was told they didn’t test for Lyme.
Nearly all the hunters knew someone who had had Lyme disease — an old roommate, a family member, friends, a former student. Lyme can be difficult to diagnose and to treat and is often misdiagnosed at first. Many of the hunters witnessed their acquaintances navigating those challenges and struggling with sometimes debilitating symptoms.
That familiarity among the hunters in Missouri was unsurprising to author and conservationist Steven Rinella, host of the hunting show MeatEater.
“I’m a turkey hunter. In talking about turkey hunting, you talk about ticks as much as you talk about turkeys,” Rinella said. “Just the nature of turkey hunting puts you into exposure. You’re sitting for long periods of time trying to use vegetation for concealment.”
In fact, both Rinella and his older son contracted Lyme disease 13 years ago during a bluegill fishing trip in the Hudson Valley in New York. His son developed Bell’s palsy, a sudden paralysis on one side of the face, but recovered quickly after a course of oral antibiotics. Steven Rinella’s symptoms, on the other hand, lingered for months, leaving him unable to walk down stairs without a handrail or to ride a bike. He ended up receiving intravenous antibiotic treatments for a month.
“I thought my life had changed,” Rinella said, “but I recovered, as far as I know.”
That experience is one reason Rinella said he would absolutely consider getting a Lyme vaccine if it proved safe and provided considerable protection against the disease. Unlike with some other diseases, prior infection does not provide permanent immunity, so a person who has had Lyme could still benefit from a vaccine.
Knowledge of similar challenges influenced the thinking of the hunters in Missouri as well.
Jeremy Hollingshead said he may be less inclined to take a vaccine owing to his former roommate’s experience with Lyme disease, which is not to say the experience was pleasant. In fact, Hollingshead said he thinks his old pal is still dealing with lingering effects of it 10 years later. But Hollingshead has spent his whole life in the woods, and of hundreds of people he knows who have done the same, he knows of only one of them contracting Lyme.
“I know it was a bad outcome for him,” Hollingshead said, but he thinks the odds of getting Lyme himself seem pretty slim.
Meanwhile, Julian Barnes said seeing a relative struggle with Lyme makes him more open to a potential vaccine. It took a long time for doctors to come to that diagnosis, and finding a good treatment has been equally difficult.
“I would say I am vaccine-hesitant, generally speaking,” Barnes said. “But Lyme, I’ve seen the way it affects people in my life.”
“I would definitely have to really understand the vaccine, how it works,” Barnes added.
The new, four-dose vaccine candidate technically missed one of the bars set out in trials because not enough participants contracted Lyme. Still, the companies say it’s about 75% effective in reducing cases, and they plan to submit it to regulators for approval. A Pfizer spokesperson said there were no updates to share on the company’s regulatory efforts when contacted by KFF Health News in June.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a noted anti-vaccine activist before taking over as head of the agency that oversees vaccine approvals, and he’s remade it in ways that have prompted some vaccine makers to pull back on development.
But he’s also been an advocate on Lyme disease. In May, he announced an initiative to combat Lyme disease. And during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said his family had been deeply affected by Lyme disease and that nobody would work harder than he would to find a vaccine or treatment.
If the vaccine is approved by the FDA, an endorsement from Kennedy would go a long way, according to KFF’s Kirzinger, particularly among supporters of his Make America Healthy Again movement, who tend to be more vaccine-skeptical.
“They trust him as much as they trust their own doctors to tell them what to do with their health and for health information,” Kirzinger said. “If he comes out as a strong proponent of this vaccine and says, ‘Look what my administration did, and we made this available,’ I would imagine there would be less vaccine resistance among that group.”
Kirzinger also said this vaccine could be ripe for misinformation. New polling from KFF shows people who don’t have a trusted medical provider as well as those who use social media and AI for health information are more likely to believe common vaccine myths.
Only one of the hunters who spoke with KFF Health News said they definitely would not be interested in a Lyme vaccine if it became available.
“I kind of hand it off to God and the body he gave me. I’m pretty durable,” JP Cummings said. But even while he’s not interested in it for himself, he’s curious to see what his fellow hunters do as more information comes out.
“Hunters care about the wildlife; hunters care about health,” Cummings said. “They love the wildlife, they love their deer, and they love their fellow hunters.”
Bram Sable-Smith is a KFF reporter.
Seek shelter immediately
“The American Dream” (color etching from six plates on one sheet), by Grayson Perry, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.
Lifeguard watching
“Sun Child’ (photograph printed on Hahnemuhle photo rag, in a white modern floater frame), by Berkeley Brooks, at Samuel Owen Gallery, Greenwich, Conn.
Ken Burns, Sen. Shaheen among New England Council honorees
The New England Ensign, one of several flags historically associated with New England.
Edited and excerpted from a New England Council report.
BOSTON
The New England Council, the nation’s oldest regional business association, has announced three recipients of its prestigious “New Englanders of the Year” awards, as well as two recipients of its “Legacy Award.” The awards will be presented at the council’s 2026 Annual Celebration on Oct. 29 at the Encore Boston Harbor, in Everett, Mass.
The New Englander of the Year Award—first presented in 1964—honors natives or residents of the New England region for their contributions to economic growth and quality of life in the region. Past recipients include members of Congress, U.S. Cabinet secretaries, CEOs of some of the region’s most well-known and respected organizations, prominent journalists, and a variety of other cultural and philanthropic leaders.
The 2026 New Englanders of the Year are:
Eliza Dushku Palandjian, mental-health counselor, advocate and philanthropist.
Pamela D. Everhart, senior vice president, head of regional public affairs and impact at
Fidelity Investments.Angus King, U.S. senator from Maine
The council also announced two recipients of its Legacy Award. The Legacy Award was established last year as the council celebrated its centennial, and recognizes past New Englanders of the Year for their ongoing legacy of excellence and contributions to the region. The inaugural Legacy Award was presented to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
The 2026 Legacy Award recipients are:
Ken Burns, Emmy-award-winning documentary filmmaker
Jeanne Shaheen, U.S. senator from New Hampshire
But she built America?
“Shakespeare Sacrificed: Or the Offering to Avarice” (1789), by James Gillray.
“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.’’
xxx
“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”
― William James (1842-1910), philosopher, psychologist and Harvard professor
And coffee is an anti-depressant
“Little Things Mean a Lot,’’ by Marian Dioguardi, a Boston-based painter, in her show “Still Reflections,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Aug 2.
Keep it there
— Photo by H. Zell
“As for what you’re actually
hearing this morning: think twice
before you tell anyone what was said in this field
and by whom.’’
— From “Daisies,’’ by Louise Gluck (1943-2023), Massachusetts-based Nobel Prize-winning poet
Wrapping it all up
“The Declaration of Independence” (1950 offset lithograph), by Polish-Jewish-American artist Arthur Szyk (1994-1951), who battled fascism.
The stuff that students leave behind
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI News article by Frank Carini
PROVIDENCE — Two Providence East Side women have a concept of a plan to stop clothes, vacuums, furniture, and books from being buried in Johnston, site of Rhode Island’s state landfill.
After our publisher and my wife, Joanna Detz, and I recently spoke with the duo, at Coffee Exchange on Wickenden Street, ecoRI News agreed to work with them to find a solution. I volunteered to be a grunt.
College move-out carelessness is a problem that mars the state capital every spring. Neighborhoods around Brown University are routinely littered with abandoned clothing, comforters, sheets, electronics, picture frames, books, unused notebooks, plastic shelving, shoe racks, cleaning supplies and other household items, food (some 42 tons nationwide), and beat-up furniture in need of a little TLC.
The average college student living in a dormitory generates an estimated 640 pounds of waste annually, with extreme waste coming at the end of the academic year, according to a study published in March. These spring spikes are what concern Sara Dorsch and Carolyn Birnbaum.
Chris Powell: Looks like some Democrats oppose ANY immigration enforcement
Immigration cases in Connecticut are handled in this Hartford building.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
______________________________________________
Many Democrats in Connecticut are always looking for opportunities to deplore the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But this week they jumped on what looked like an opportunity before determining what it was really about. They might have been embarrassed if journalists followed up about it.
It began when U.S. Rep. John B. Larson called a rally outside West Hartford Town Hall in support of a local businessman, Seyo Cecunjanin, who had been arrested and taken away by ICE agents nine days earlier as he exited a doughnut shop with his sons. Larson, joined by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, some state legislators, and a few others demanded Cecunjanin's release, and Larson and one of the arrested man's sons described the arrest's circumstances, which included guns and big black cars with covered license plates.
But WTIC-AM1080 talk show host Reese Hopkins also had shown up and unlike everyone else had brought a critical question: Did anyone know exactly why ICE had arrested Cecunjanin?
No one did -- not Larson, not Blumenthal, and none of the rally participants, including former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who is challenging Larson in the Democratic primary for the party's nomination in the 1st Congressional District, charging that Larson is too old and tired even as the rally was another proof that Larson is furiously running circles around him.
As good Democrats, they didn't care why Cecunjanin was arrested. They came to the rally on the principle that any arrest by ICE is to be protested and in the confidence that as more illegal immigrants are admitted to the country or exempted from immigration law enforcement, the next census will lead to the creation of more Democratic-leaning congressional districts and fewer Republican-leaning ones. (It doesn't matter that non-citizens aren't supposed to vote; the Constitution requires that they be counted in the federal census for apportionment of congressional districts, and illegal immigrants concentrate in the Democratic "sanctuary" cities and states that subvert immigration law, states like Connecticut. With enough illegal immigrants, Democrats will have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives forever.)
But if the rally had been postponed until Cecunjanin's arrest was clarified, the Democrats might have not been as strident about it. ICE is usually slow to explain itself, but by the end of the day WFSB-TV3 had gotten a response. The agency said Cecunjanin, a native of Montenegro, was arrested because he came to the United States in March 1997 using a fraudulent Dutch passport and six months later an immigration judge had issued a final order of removal for him. Cecunjanin apparently had been violating the order for 29 years until last July, when he left for Serbia, returning two weeks later despite the removal order. In the meantime he racked up a conviction for drunken driving.
"Cecunjanin has made a mockery of our immigration laws on several occasions for more than two decades," ICE said.
What do Larson, Blumenthal, Bronin, and the other rally participants think about that? What do they think ICE should have done about Cecunjanin's repeated violation of immigration law? Should ICE have ignored them because the people at the rally say Cecunjanin is a good guy, or because they think all immigration law violations should be ignored until the violators are convicted of mass murder?
There was plenty of journalism about the rally. But it is unlikely to extend to critical follow-up questions. For critical follow-up questions about illegal immigration are politically incorrect in Connecticut.
No one would have needed any explanation from ICE to put a critical follow-up question to Blumenthal at the rally. He remarked that the immigration system is "gridlocked and dysfunctional." He wasn't asked why the system is overwhelmed and whose control of the federal government overwhelmed it with millions of illegal entrants and for what purpose.
Another follow-up question might be why the Democrats don't just attempt candor and admit that their preferred solution to the problem they created is another mass amnesty, along with permanent Democratic control of the House.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Stalactites into the sea
“The middle part of Maine, all the way from Bar Harbor to Portland, hangs down like stalactites that drip little islands into the Atlantic. It's divided by rivers and harbors with cozy names that sound like brands of bubble bath or places boats sink in folks songs.”
— Linda Holmes, American author and podcaster
A place to hide?
“Ocean Inlet” (photographic pigment print), by Jim Westphalen, at Front Four Gallery, Stowe, Vt.
Weep and bear it
“There Was No Remedy’’ (acrylic on canvas), by Chris Gollon (1953-2017), British artist.
For further information, see: