state by state speak your mind about......connecticut

[Chan790]

17. For the western half of the state, it applies.

The half of the state east of the Connecticut River, once you get outside the Hartford suburbs and off the shoreline, is by no measure wealthy. It's rural and decreasingly middle-class like most of the rest of the country. It is narrowly Democratic (mostly due to blue-collar union labor), that entire half of the state is the 2nd Congressional District and it (along with the 5th district in the NW corner of the state) is one of only two CDs that the Republicans seriously-contest. The primary employers are military manufacturers and to be blunt, you can't win there unless you're willing to put "bread on the table" (by which I mean a staunch supporter of defense spending and things that increase defense spending...like war. Combined with out-of-state money and pandering to the wealthy Gold Coast elites and white-collar moralists(people whose biggest concern is the filthiness of modern-culture) it becomes obvious how Lieberman keeps getting reelected and no Congressman in the 2nd in 50 years has been as popular as retired CIA man Rob Simmons(R.))

Overall, and this is interesting, CT has a growing film industry because its proximity to NYC makes it a convenient shooting locale and its' "diversity" in terms of terrain and development. Depending on where you are in the state, we can reasonably stand-in as locale backdrop for almost anywhere in the US. New Haven is a frequent stand-in for street-level shooting of larger cities because it's cheaper and easier to shoot in downtown NH than midtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago. Hartford looks like a generic east-coast city. The NW hills with the Berkshire mountains on the horizon frequently stand in for western locales like Wyoming and Colorado. (The mountains are not big mountains but film-scale makes it impossible to judge that.) I also know of scenes that were supposed to be South Beach being shot on Hammonasset Beach in southern CT in the dead of winter (think girls in bikinis) and I think that had to be cold as hell. The more rural sections of the CT River Valley frequently stand in for the rural South. The areas around New Haven likewise make a passable Pacific NW during the dreary perpetually-overcast (but rarely rainy) early spring and the western edge is nothing but vast unbroken forest. Heck, CT has even been used to pass for New Jersey before. (I used to work in film in NYC and grew-up in CT so this all always amused me...except the NJ thing.)