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Recently democratic political consultant Jon Pelto penned an op-ed for CT News Junkie chiding the democratic candidates for governor for going negative. This was followed with some press and most recently a column by Colin McEnroe in the Hartford Courant raising similar issues. Specifically McEnroe has stated:

I know what you're thinking: Is there no candidate who has managed to rise above all this petty squabbling, no candidate who can stop bickering long enough to address the massive and extremely boring structural financial problems pushing this state to the brink of ruin? Well, no. There isn't. And I can't believe you would bring up such a trivial and personal concern as the future of Connecticut while the candidates are working so hard to thrash out the incredibly difficult and knotty matter of which one of them is a bigger toolbox.

A great video from the 1 for All campaign working to raise awareness of the first amendment.

I wanted to start a topic to discuss the issue of Connecticut and transparency. Both candidates for governor have talked about transparency a little. Lamont mentions it in regards to procurement and Dan Malloy talks about the expenditure database. Meanwhile the right-leaning Yankee Institute has been leading a transparency charge. Using disclosures obtained in cooperation with the Comptroller’s office they developed CT Sunlight.org. The CT Mirror had an article about the legislature’s reaction to the database. Concern about the accuracy of the Yankee Institute data lead to an act directing the state to create its own version of the database.

Via the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog I discovered that Fastcase has a free legal resource called Public Library of Law that lets you search recent court cases and statutes. A welcome addition to using Google Scholar to search federal cases for free. These still won’t completely replace WestLaw and Lexis anytime soon but they’re certainly getting there. I tried a free trial of the paid version of Fastcase a while back and was actually rather impressed. The interface was less clunky than WestLaw and Lexis and it was in fact faster. The downside is the lack of those time saving headnotes. Either way these resources are worth checking out and adding to your bookmarks.