Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal earns $110,000 annually, 28 places and tens of thousands of dollars behind highest paid AG Jerry Brown of California, according to LegalNewslist.com's ranking of pay for all 50 state attorneys general.

Brown, a former governor and presidential hopeful, rakes in $184,301. A minimum wage and some overtime behind him is Alabama's Troy King, who pulls in $163,744. Winning the bronze is New York's Andrew Cuomo at $155,500.

 

See the List

 

Chaz and AJ of WPLR proved today that they are the state's best morning radio show. They confronted a critic head on, and while they haven't won me over, they did the next best thing - they offered me four one-minute spots over the next four weeks to discuss pressing issues that they fail to cover.

 

What Luck! And now, I am trying to figure out how to use that time. I need your help to determine the best ideas for it.

 

But first, let's review how I got there, what I said and how listeners responded, and try to craft 240 seconds worth of message that resonates and potentially grows into something larger.

 

Twice since May, I've written posts critical of Chaz and AJ and their kid-gloves handling of elected officials. They've let the likes of Gov. M. Jodi Rell, Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain talk without answering a difficult question.

 

This morning, they gave me ten minutes of rebuttal time, after reading on the air some of my complaints about them. They found my posts on Myleftnutmeg.com and at the40yearplan.com, and they mentioned both websites prominently. Big up for MLN!

 

Then they asked me what I thought. I had a lot I wanted to say in 10 minutes, but basically, I said that the airwaves are public property, that Chaz and AJ are lucky to be doing the job they do, and that they have a responsibility to represent all points of view equally.

 

Link- and email your ideas for a minute a week on FM...

 

Scene: The back room at Hartford's Wood-n-Tap pub, Monday July 7, 2008. A group effort moneymaker, aimed at achieving public financing thresholds for state representative Kelvin Roldan and candidate for state representative Hector Robles.

 

Organizers advertised it on a Facebook page. More than 35 people, including City Hall's usual suspects from City Council, like Lieber-crat Cal Torres, from the mayor's office, like Glendowlyn Hall, and from the Registrar of Voters office like Sammy Vazquez paid to populate the room. They noshed on hors d'oeuvres with members from the Democratic Town Committee and others in political circles.

 

I. Rep. Kelvin Roldan

Roldan, the 29-year-old state representative, maintained I am not fair to him. In March 2007, I wrote a column about him landing a plum $90,000-a-year job at the Hartford Board of Education. He also makes $30,000 or so a year as a state representative.

 

In total, Roldan slurps in $120,000 at the public trough – a pittance compared to what Dick Cheney's pals take from the U.S. treasury, but still, Roldan is part of Eddie's coterie and your friends are your mirrors.

 

And I think that $120,000 in taxpayer salary for a 29-year-old man, no matter how accomplished, is too much. Roldan could argue that it is the same salary as a Superior Court Judge, and I would argue back that hey, a Superior Court Judge has to have had at least three years of school and another decade as a lawyer in practice.

 

Roldan swears that he works hard for his money. And he uses his salary for good. Like he said he financed exactly half of his trip to Kalamazoo, MI last month to learn about Promise Zones, a program that helps a municipality to borrow money through bonds to pay for high school graduates to go to college.

To Finish Parts I through VII...

 

It appears that Chaz and AJ, Connecticut's self-proclaimed number one morning show, are open to criticism.

 

Tomorrow morning, July 16, the morning show at 99.1 FM WPLR has invited me to appear on their show for 10 minutes to talk about alternative news and views. It's not much, but hey, they're trying.

 

I'll be sure to blog about it when it's all over.

Link...

 

Montreal calls. Here's a summer reggae break. Enjoy the hell out of your weekend.

 

"Rally Round" by Steel Pulse

 

"Enjoy Yourself" by the Specials

 

Link...

 

Yusuf James Yee graduated West Point in 1990. He went to Syria, studied Islam, and soon was a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Army. He later attended to the spiritual needs of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Then he began challenging U.S. military policies on the ground.

 

The Army accused him of spying. Superior officers threatened him with the death penalty. When treason failed to stick, they threw charges of adultery at him. For 76 days, the Army held him in the same Navy brig in South Carolina with Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi.

 

Yee didn't see Padilla or Hamdi because they were all isolated, and all were tortured with sensory deprivation tactics. Yee was never tried, charges were dropped, and he received not just an honorable discharge, but a commendation, too.

 

Sometimes, I get angry that I spent 13 hours in jail for blogging about a sitting governor's misguided policies. So when I saw Yee this past weekend at Hartford's Connecticut Convention Center for the Islamic Circle of North America conference, I asked him how he handled his anger.

 

"When I feel the bitterness, the anger, the frustration," he said, "I try to channel it into positive activities."

 

Yee humbled me. He survived the solitary confinement and torture tactics doled out by the U.S. government from lessons learned at West Point, and he is calm, at peace, almost, when discussing his ordeal.

 

Nor is he merely preaching positive change. He has channeled his angry energy into social organizing and change – he earned a selection to serve as a Washington state delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

 

Electoral change is the best avenue not just for Muslims, but for everyone, to reclaim our civil liberties, according to not just Yee, but the five other panelists who shared ideas with him during a discussion Saturday morning entitled "Stand Up and Claim Your Rights: The State of Contemporary Civil Liberties."

Link...

 

Independence Day is universal. All people want to be free. So I liberated this photo from the old print photo archives at the Waterbury Republican-American more than a decade ago, when I was but a cub reporter.

 

I figured my good readers might enjoy this picture. Remember, Thomas Jefferson was 32 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

 

Link...

 

The funny pages have not been the same since Berke Breathed quit the daily Opus routine almost 20 years ago.

 

I wish I could see what story lines he would cook up around the Obama-McCain campaign. McCain talking into a dead cell phone line for 18 minutes the other day takes the cake for me.

 

The Sunday-only version of Opus or Outland or whatever Breathed calls it now lacks the daily wit and topical humor of the old Bloom County.

 

Take, for example, this prescient cartoon panel from 1988, when Frank Jones, the father of Oliver Wendell Jones, accurately predicts the political leaning of the first black American president.

 

Did Frank think it would be two decades before America saw a black man even come close to the White House? Who knows the recesses of Berke Breathed's imagination?

 

In 1988, Obama has just entered into Harvard Law School. He was just beginning his storied rise to the top of the law review to community organizer to U.S. Senate seat. But did he know he would someday be an American dauphin? As a conservative?

 

If I am a liberal, then Obama looks more and more like conservative. I wouldn't expect any other analysis of him at Counterpunch, especially from a civil rights attorney whose son is three-time national Ralph Nader presidential campaign staffer.

 

Yet when the Nation goes after Obama's economists, and the critique is reprinted at the Huffington Post, Obama's rightward tilt isn't a figment of the leftist imagination:

The economic advisors who are assisting Senator Obama's campaign are helping him stake out a position on the subprime lending crisis 'to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.'

Link...