Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's state budget proposal is so awful, a legislator of his own party remarked privately the other day, that the General Assembly will have to try to build a budget of its own.

Even as the governor's budget would raise taxes by almost a billion dollars and borrow $300 million for current expenses, the latter being something that not long ago was considered immoral, it still would slash support to the desperately needy, from the mentally ill and disabled to the drug-addicted and the elderly, largely to finance salary and benefit increases for state and municipal employees.

Meanwhile the governor is telling Time magazine: "I think we have to talk about Democratic values in this country again."

Judging from the governor's budget, "Democratic values" consist largely of using the needy as a pretext for winning elections before dumping the needy into the street and moving on to coddle the government class.

People aggrieved by the governor's disregard for the needy will be complaining about it at hearings of the General Assembly's Appropriations Committee and other committees, but legislators have heard it all many times before. Legislators know that social needs and wants are infinite. They also know that most of their campaign contributions, in money and volunteers, comes from government employees and others riding the government gravy train, and that the neediest in society are useless politically - that the neediest and their advocates don't make campaign contributions and are not even regular voters.

What legislators don't know is how to set government's priorities in the public interest rather than in the special interest. Since the special interests, such as the government employee unions, have many full-time lobbyists operating at the state Capitol around the clock, and since there is so little advocacy for the public interest, legislators have to be really motivated to stand up for the latter, and they won't do it out of the goodness of their timid hearts.

They will have to be shamed.

This will require advocates for the needy to specify some of the politically sound but actually sick choices of the governor's budget - require advocates for the needy to make choices themselves and show legislators where money should be taken from.

It will require these advocates to ask legislators to explain, for example, why University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst should be getting a $300,000 raise on top of a half-million-dollar salary and two mansions, why state government employees still should get Columbus Day off with pay, and why the New Britain-to-Hartford bus highway should be extended to Manchester, as the governor proposes, while treatment for the mentally ill is reduced and elderly people have to care for their mentally disabled children because state government won't appropriate for group homes.

There is no chance that most legislators will deduce the right thing on their own. But some might deduce it if the public was disgusted enough by how state government operates. Disgusting the public requires hurling the budget's many sick specifics at everybody until enough people are shamed into shaming their legislators.

Elite druggies

Wesleyan University in Middletown is supposed to be an elite institution. But last weekend 10 Wesleyan students and a few of their guests got terribly sick after partying with hallucinogenic drugs, causing them to need emergency medical treatment, at least two of them even sinking into critical condition at a hospital.

Maybe the students were trying to work off the stress of taking heavyweight Wesleyan courses like "Queer Studies" and "Alfred Hitchcock," or maybe they were worried about how their parents will keep earning enough to pay Wesleyan's $48,000 annual tuition.

Or maybe once they get past the political correctness for which Wesleyan is renowned, the students don't have much to do at all.