Values

Republicans have been promising to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act ever since it was passed.  There were votes in the House over the last few years, but they were largely symbolic.  They addressed repealing the current legislation, but they didn’t propose a replacement.  And everyone knew that the repeal bills would fail in

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Independence Day

There was a time when people came together every year on the Fourth of July to hear someone read the Declaration of Independence.  They stood in town squares, on village greens, in front of court houses, by general stores, in grange halls, in union halls.  They were young and old, rich and poor.  Some were

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Changing the World

When I was a kid, maybe six or seven, a man stopped his car on the side of the parkway and helped my mother change a tire.  It was a long time ago, long before cell phones.  We were in an awkward position.  The shoulder was narrow, and the ground sloped down away from the

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Full Video of Russia Forum

Video by Joe Dowdell. A capacity crowd attended an informative public forum sponsored by the Ridgefield Democratic Town Committee (“DTC”), Saturday afternoon, June 10, at Ridgefield Library. The forum focused on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US election. Susan Cocco, former DTC chair, moderated the discussion, with  Congressman Jim Himes who represents Connecticut’s 4th

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The Election of 2017

There’s an election this year.  You may not have recovered from the last one, and you may be looking forward with anticipation or dread to 2018 or even to 2020.  You may not think local elections are important, but they are.  The results affect our lives every day. Ridgefield, like many towns in Connecticut, has

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Policies for the Future

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much. They especially don’t agree on economic policies and what will be necessary to grow the economy. The GOP view at the national, state and local levels is pretty much limited to cutting taxes and gutting regulations. Do these things, they say, and economic growth and prosperity will follow.

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Rolling Up Our Sleeves

Two years from now, Connecticut will have a new governor to grapple with old challenges: cutting expenditures and finding new revenues to balance the budget. But positioning the state to benefit from a global economy based on innovation, collaboration and automation is the key to reviving Connecticut’s vitality. It behooves voters to recognize the structural

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Winning the Peace

American military might was crucial to the Allies’ victory in World War II. But so were the military efforts of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and others. America was cemented as the single “indispensable nation,” because America led the efforts that won the peace. America became preeminent by championing the Marshall Plan, the United

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Local Elections

Some people will start to pay attention to a local election after Labor Day. Some people will start around Columbus Day. Some people will wait until Halloween. Some people will remember that there was an election after it’s over. And some people will never think about it at all. There’s an old joke that only

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A Free Press

In this age of “fake news” brought to you by Breitbart, InfoWars and even the President himself, a free and unfettered press is more important than ever.  The very existence of a free press is has long been a tenet of our democracy, making President Trump’s assault on it deeply troubling. At a time when

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A Nation of Immigrants

We’re a nation of immigrants, some more recent than others.  People have come here for a long time.  Some were looking for opportunity, a chance to own some land, to find work, to learn a trade, to practice a trade they’d learned somewhere else, to have choices they’d never had before.  Some were looking for

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Why Not the Best?

The United States was founded on the notion that all men are created equal and have some unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The part about the pursuit of happiness is a particularly American idea.  It’s something we should be proud of. We’ve made mistakes.  We’ve gone off in the wrong

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Town Meetings

Ridgefield, like many towns in Connecticut and in other parts of New England, has a Town Meeting form of government.  Its roots go back to colonial times when people would meet and make decisions about local issues by voting.  They didn’t choose representatives to vote for them.  They did it themselves. There are some other

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Pursuing the Promise

The Declaration of Independence sets forth America’s essential promise: that we are all created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted by and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In the 240 years since the signing, that essential promise

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Civic Responsibility

There are people who believe that government can make a difference, a positive difference, in people’s lives.  I’m one of those people.  And there are people who think government is the enemy and that it should be resisted at all times and thwarted at every opportunity.  It looks as if those people have at least

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Principled, Loyal Opposition

Most voters, including most Ridgefield voters, rejected Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton won Ridgefield with 55.3% of the vote, while Trump received just 39.7%. Clinton’s national lead is 2.7 million votes, about 2%. For context, Clinton matched Obama’s 2012 national total, while Trump underperformed Romney’s 2012 national total. But, owing to structure of the Electoral College,

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