And after today, everyone will pretend it's great to be in NH in January, when it's 8° without the wind chill. What a country! Dress in layers, Kossaks.
Things will be quiet in CT as the pols and lawyers gear up for a brutal hardball impeachment fight. The gloves are coming off (New Haven paper for a change):
Rowland feeling the blows
Gregory B. Hladky , Capitol Bureau Chief 01/19/2004
The gloves have come off, and the first bare-knuckled blows landed in Gov. John G. Rowland's increasingly desperate fight to stay in office.
Rowland probably doesn't have much choice if he intends to keep his often-repeated promise never to resign.
The pressure on him continues to intensify. The state House is now organizing an impeachment investigation; a federal grand jury is sniffing at his heels; and new questions are being raised about possible gifts from subordinates. Polls show Rowland has lost the public's trust and that support within his own Republican Party is eroding.
In the face of those developments last week, Rowland and his allies offered a glimpse of the kind of tough tactics the governor clearly believes will be necessary for him to survive.
Rowland's lawyers made a successful bid to have the state Ethics Commission keep its own executive director from talking about Connecticut's law prohibiting state officials from accepting expensive gifts.
That's the law many lawmakers believe Rowland broke when he accepted thousands of dollars in gifts in the form of renovations to his summer cottage on Bantam Lake.
The governor has admitted taking those gifts. But he insists he never did anything in return to help the state contractors, staff members and friends who helped him out so generously. Rowland also maintains that he broke no laws. Although he is the subject of that federal criminal investigation, Rowland hasn't yet been charged with anything.
Rowland's legal counsel, Ross H. Garber, and his personal lawyer, renowned criminal attorney William J. Dow III, also managed to get the ethics panel to postpone action on an advisory opinion about that gift ban.
The ethics commission's executive director, Alan Plofsky, released a draft of the proposed opinion last week. In it, although he never specifically cited Rowland's current case, Plofsky wrote that the ethics code does prohibit state officials from taking expensive gifts from state contractors and subordinates.
Plofsky had followed the routine practice of the ethics commission in releasing the draft opinion. But Rowland's lawyers immediately accused Plofsky of "leaking" the document in an attempt to prejudice the commission's upcoming decisions.
Plofsky called it a "smear campaign."
Dean Pagani, Rowland's chief of staff, argued that Plofsky shouldn't have followed the normal routine because of the special circumstances of Rowland's situation, such as the impending impeachment investigation.
Meanwhile, another GOP operative named David Boomer was busy copying the public financial records of the Democratic legislative leaders organizing the impeachment drive. A former Rowland staffer, Boomer insisted he was merely doing a little routine research on his own and that he never intended to try and intimidate anyone.
Rowland, however, has been arguing for weeks that lawmakers should be careful of judging his admitted financial errors too harshly because the same standards could well be used on them.
But a very unhappy state House Minority Leader Robert M. Ward, R-North Branford, warned that such tactics "set the wrong tone as we go into this bipartisan investigation." Ward's well-intentioned warning may be too late. The tone of this particular contest already has all the gentility of a knife-fight in a dark alley.
Rowland's getting the message out about loyalty and retribution (more to folllow).
