Suppose a Connecticut state employee was videotaped punching his girlfriend into unconsciousness in a casino hotel elevator, as the professional football player lately at the center of national controversy was. Elected officials, pundits, and others demanded and achieved the football player's firing. So what would happen to the state employee?

An inquiry by the Journal Inquirer the other day determined that a state employee who behaved exactly as the football player did probably would suffer nothing in regard to his job but rather would receive exquisite due process.

The football player was charged criminally where the assault occurred, in New Jersey, but the charges were dropped when he accepted counseling. While Connecticut law says a state employee can be disciplined for conduct "detrimental to the best interests" of the state, in practice state employees have so much protection under their union contracts that they can be fired only for the most extreme misconduct on the job or for a serious felony conviction off the job. There seems to be no recent record of the firing of a state employee for misconduct off the job that did not result in serious criminal charges, conviction, and imprisonment.

Indeed, only four of the nearly 100 state employees caught stealing emergency food assistance from the state two years ago were fired. Most suffered only requirements for restitution. None of the state employees was prosecuted criminally or even required to enter a diversionary program to avoid prosecution as the football player was. And no one in authority in Connecticut complained about this result.

So the position of the elected officials fuming about the football player's case, most of all Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, seems to be that off-the-job misconduct by football players that does not result in criminal conviction should end their careers but that on-the-job theft by government employees should be forgiven.

This means one of two things: Either football is more important than government, or the state employee unions are bigger than the football players union.

Courant gets a pass

Connecticut House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, says the Federal Communications Commission should investigate WTIC-AM1080 for letting former Gov. John G. Rowland, convicted again this month of political corruption, use his radio show to promote a congressional candidate who was secretly paying him.

Rowland's deception of his audience was appalling, but his program was only one of opinion and it's not clear that the radio station knew the deception was happening. Mainly the station was slow to act on Rowland later as the public evidence against him grew.

But just as Sharkey and other elected officials in Connecticut have had no complaints about the thieving state employees, they have had no complaints about the FCC's failure to enforce against two Connecticut television stations, WTIC-TV61 and WCCT-TV20, the commission's rule against ownership of television stations and newspapers in the same market.

Since 2000 the TV stations and Connecticut's largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, have been owned by Tribune Corp., which took ownership of all three media properties specifically to defy the FCC rule in expectation of getting it repealed. Repeal failed, and while Tribune recently divided ownership of its TV stations and newspapers into nominally separate companies, the Courant and the TV stations continue to coordinate their operations.

So, why Sharkey's concern about WTIC's supposed lack of mere ethics with Rowland amid the speaker's indifference to Tribune's rulebreaking with the Courant and the TV stations?

It's probably political opportunism. WTIC broadcasts talk shows with a conservative bent, while the Courant is the leading exponent of liberalism and political correctness in Connecticut, where ethics and rules are pretty much matters of who is in and who is out.