The Chris Powell Column

People praying over football may not appreciate their luck

As he lies dying in Tennyson’s epic poem, “The Idylls of the King,” Arthur offers encouragement to his knights: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

Government cannot use union contracts with its employees to nullify its basic obligations to the public, a federal appeals court ruled last week in a case about the Connecticut state police union contract.

As was demonstrated by the crude and disgraceful disruption of last week’s back-to-school forum in Cheshire, many people in Connecticut are sick and tired of the coronavirus pandemic and government’s steps against it, however necessary they may have seemed.

Without taking much notice, Connecticut lost a hero of journalism and justice recently: Donald S. Connery, 94, who lived in Kent for almost 60 years even as he traveled and reported from around the world for United Press International and Time magazine and its related publications.

Employees of Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, cleaned out their desks recently as the newspaper left the building at 285 Broad St. where it had operated for 70 years.

Sailing against a heavy political wind, Republican candidates for the General Assembly were heartened by the vigorous endorsements they received from police unions, which this year broke away from the government employee union apparatus in the Democratic Party.

While Connecticut’s new police legislation is questionable in one respect — its vague reduction of the “qualified immunity” officers have against lawsuits — its broad objective is plainly in the public interest: to improve the work of the police and increase their accountability to their departments and the public.

Having itself failed to perform for most of this year, abdicating amid the virus epidemic, the General Assembly is gearing up to punish Connecticut’s two leading electric companies, Eversource Energy and United Illuminating, for supposedly failing to restore power fast enough after the recent tropical storm.