i L i n d . n e t

Checking the news…Polls are showing voters trending towards Obama, what CNN calls “a significant nationwide shift toward the Democratic presidential nominee.”

One daily update of the electoral vote map, based on state and national polling, is reporting Obama leading with 349 electoral votes to McCain’s 174, and North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes up for grabs.

Meanwhile, The Great Schlep made the New York Times today. The story reports that the video has been viewed over 7 million times in the past two weeks.

The continuing departure of doctors from the Big Island was reported by Insurance Journal. Although the headline blames malpractice insurance costs, the body of the story puts more emphasis on the low reimbursement rates doctors receive, at least in part the result of the dominant position of HMSA, which controls the major share of the overall health insurance market.

“One thing we fight in recruiting is the lack of reimbursement for doctors,” Dunne said. “That’s the obvious reason many doctors leave or don’t come. You’re looking at one of (the lowest), if not the lowest, reimbursements for doctors for all of the states. That gets difficult to battle when you put it up against having one of the highest costs of living.”

Business Week notes Hawaii’s tourism slowdown, while a longer story on Hospitality Net reports on a trip to the islands, the visitor industry’s current woes, and adds comments on both airlines and hotels.

Here’s the less than flattering wrap after a stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village:

Lasting impressions? The hotel experience was overwhelmed by all of the merchandising. No matter where you turned, there was something new for guests to reach into his/her pockets. I realize this Hilton is a large property, but how nice it would have been if someone from senior management would have been visible, recognizing and thanking guests for their patronage during such difficult economic times. Even more so, I would have liked to have seen more eye contact and smiles from management-level individuals as they passed guests every day.

And Slate looks at “Alaska vs. Hawaii” (WHY IS SEWARD’S FOLLY THE “REAL AMERICA” AND THE ALOHA STATE NOT?).

Finally, how about a couple of looks back at Sunday at our house in Kaaawa? Our regular routine is to come back from our dawn walk to the beach, read the newspapers over a cup of coffee, and then I whip up an egg white omelet. Well, I put one yolk in with the whipped whites. Toast, and this week some turkey bacon. After that feast, lunch becomes a pick-up affair. This Sunday it was a tin of sardines in hot sauce, cheese, and reduced fat Triscuits. As soon as I put the sardines on that white plate, the photo just jumped out at me. The tastes were as good as the visuals.

What do you do when you wake up to find the world’s financial system continuing to crumble? I guess you look at the positive side. Events are adding to the probability of an Obama victory in November as the electoral map appears to be swinging towards the Democrats. It’s a good bet that bad news can’t help the party of the incumbent. Of course, it also means that Obama will inherit an incredible mess on a one-in-a-century scale. Whew.

Former Honolulu Police Chief Doug Gibb, a longtime Kaaawa resident now retired and living in Iowa, has been back in town for ten days or so. We’ve run into him a few times since our morning walk takes us right past their house on Hauhele Road. This was the scene yesterday morning as Doug struck his best American Gothic pose.

More news from the Maui court case involving Akaku: Maui Community Television in which Judge Joel August has now ordered the Attorney General to produce a copy of a legal opinion that the AG had tried to keep confidential. According to a transcript of a September 23 hearing, Deputy Attorney General Rodney Tam argued that being forced to disclose the opinion would set a dangerous precedent.

Oh my god! Think about it! We might have more openness and transparency in government! Horrors! At least that was the argument Tam was dispatched to make, despite a law that’s been on the books for more than 40 years requiring opinions on matters of law requested by department heads to be filed and made public within days of being issued.

If you want to dig into the argument a bit more, here?s Akaku?s motion for summary judgement, the AG’s memo in opposition, and then Akaku’s reply. I posted Judge August’s findings of fact, conclusions of law and order earlier, but here’s the link again.

A similar legal battle is being waged at the national level as the U.S. Senate moves to subpoena the legal opinions opinions prepared by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

According to Secrecy News, prepared by the Federation of American Scientists:

“During this administration, OLC has been misused to provide legal justifications for misguided policies,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “That advice has been deeply flawed, sloppy, and flat out wrong but it has been permitted to happen because secrecy has prevented our oversight.”

“Unjustified secrecy continues to prevent the review by this Committee that would provide a check and some control on how the administration is interpreting the law that is Congress’s constitutional responsibility to write. That obsessive secrecy even prevents us from knowing the subject matter on which OLC has written opinions,” Sen. Leahy said.

And, from the same blog, a note about Sen. Inouye’s attempt to maintain intelligence oversight in the Senate.

As usual, we walked to the end of the beach on the other side of Kaaawa yesterday morning, then turned around and headed back towards home. We were walking with Ms. Amedine, one of our regular morning dogs, and her people. I was surprised when the light changed and the early morning colors were replaced by the full colors of daylight. Luckily, I had a camera ready at the right time. Don’t forget to click on the photo for a larger version.

Okay, I know that it’s Sunday and time to keep it light and lively. But my friend, former Hawaii resident Chuck Smith, sent along this sobering missive and link which I wanted to share.

This is a link to the guy who called the crisis months/years ago and was derided by the MSM as a fear-monger/doom and gloomer.

Unfortunately the MSM is literally 99% cheerleading the bailout i.e. playing the Bush Admin. hand. They are clueless. I have yet to read even one story which tracks reality more than about 10%.

For instance: the Fed has “loaned” about $600B to banks already, using the same gimmick as the bailout: giving banks T-bills in exchange for “collateral” of distressed debt/mortgages. So you have to ask: why the panic to pass the bailout, when the Fed has already spent $600B doing the same thing? Why not just have Treasury transfer another $700B to the Fed which it could do within the existing framework?

You then should ask: why was the bailout designed to avoid taking equity in exchange for fresh capital?

Even the greenest reporter on the finance beat should be asking these questions. Yet literally not one major news outlet has done even one investigative piece on this, the Rubicon of our era. They just parrot the party line about subprime and loose regulations, etc. That’s all superficial in the extreme.

If you need more of this red meat diet, check out Chuck’s Of Two Minds blog.

Meanwhile, I promised to share a little video of two of our Kaaawa dogs playing on the beach yesterday morning. Fisher and Shiloh were having a wonderful time when we ran into them. Anyway, here’s the result. If clicking on the photo doesn’t work for you, try clicking here. Remember, both versions are large files so may take time to download.

Poor Ms. Wally!

I trundled her off early yesterday morning to VCA in Kaneohe where she was due for what we thought was going to be routine teeth cleaning. But Dr. Sakamoto called me late in the morning with the news that she found much more damage than she had thought and ended up having to extract five teeth. Wally, who’s almost 11 years old, spent the night at VCA and I’ll be picking her up shortly. She’s coming home with pain meds, antibiotics, a week’s worth of canned cat food, and a mouth with less in it than before.

And now we’re feeling guilty for failing to catch the problems earlier.

Let’s see. I just added the Christian Science Monitor’s Global Credit Crisis Blog to my reading list, along with this story on AIG that appeared in the New York Times last Sunday, a Washington Post story on the political power of its CEO, and this analysis of the credit crunch by Kevin Hall of McClatchy Newspapers.

And did you catch NPR’s interview with the former chief financial officer for Washington Mutual, who claims that he tried to warn the S&L five years ago of the dangers of being too deep into the housing bubble.

But it’s Saturday. Time to think about other things for a few precious moments. This morning we had fun watching Fisher and Shiloh chasing a tennis ball out into the water. I’ll work on the little video of it all and try to post it later today. In the meantime, you can see how happy they are in this photo.

I got whiplash during yesterday’s VP debate. On the one hand, there was Sarah Palin saying the GOP now backs “strict oversight” by the federal government of the systems we rely on.

We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt.

Oversight, of course, is a polite way to say “regulation” without actually uttering the word. This, of course, despite John McCain’s long record of backing deregulation.

But, later, Palin leaves the impression that we don’t really want those mean government regulators mucking with our lives after all.

Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you’re not always the solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper.

I guess it’s “take your pick” time. Whichever view you want, you’ll find a bit of it there.

And I was surprised to hear Linda Lingle among Palin’s list of luminaries.

Look at Lieberman, and Giuliani, and Romney, and Lingle, and all of us who come from such a diverse background of — of policy and of partisanship, all coming together at this time, recognizing he is the man that we need to leave — lead in these next four years, because these are tumultuous times.

I got up this morning and found the NY Times live blogging the House debate on the bill addressing the financial situation.

Another interesting story in today’s NY Times on an SEC rule that made a large contribution to today’s crisis.

A friend forwarded a column explaining the dynamics of the situation which I found useful for some of its specific examples of critical parts of the system that are melting down. It may be written by a Republican, but it offers specific examples of why and how markets have panicked. It’s not necessarily the best analysis, but it gets beyond ideological views of “big government” or “wall street” to specifics about the technical problems we’re facing.

Oh, speaking of Main Street. I predict that a lot of Honolulu condominiums are going to be mired in financial problems soon. Already, soaring electrical costs and required maintenance on Honolulu’s many older condo buildings are pushing up monthly common area maintenance fees at double-digit rates. I understand many condominium owners will see their monthly fees go up 20 percent or more in the next budget year. This is likely to trigger a rise in delinquencies as fees are paid late or not paid at all. In a condominium situation, if some owners don’t pay their fees, the slack has to be made up by the remaining owners. It takes many months or longer for delinquencies to begin to be visible in foreclosure statistics, so they are a leading but hidden indicator of financial stresses. Anecdotally, it’s already an issue. Down the road a few months, we’ll see where it goes.

Let’s see. In response to my comments the other day about the fine Star-Bulletin front page illustrating the plunging stock market, a reader commented:

Meanwhile, you might be interested to know that the later edition of the Star Bull yesterday had a totally different from page - highligting the morning’s developments in the bailout saga - not quite as dramatic graphically, but as up-to-date as a print-edition newspaper can be. Their layout people are busy, pay-attention folks.

It took me a while to figure out what’s wrong with this picture of the Hawaii State Capitol. The street in the foreground is disorienting, because this appears to be the corner of the building closest to the State Library and there is no street there. There’s a nice grassy mall and walkway alongside the capitol, running from Punchbowl Street past the library and the archives, then behind the palace and over to Richards Street.

Ah, but it wasn’t always that way. This photo was apparently taken when Hotel Street extended right through that same corridor. This web page has a photo of the State Capitol while it was still under construction, which shows Hotel Street still running through.

I don’t recall what year Hotel Street was closed and landscaped, but it must have been after 1970 or so.

And it is, after all, another Feline Friday. This lovely calico is Ms. Pilikia, who lives next door. When I noticed her rolling in the sun in our driveway several days ago, I went for the camera. She was glad to oblige. And so Ms. Pilikia joins the regular cast in this week’s photo gallery. Just click on her photo and enjoy.

It started pouring this morning as we were walking past Kaaawa Fire Station and we were pretty wet by the time we took shelter over at Swanzy Beach Park, despite our deployed umbrellas. But as the rain passed, the clouds reflected the rising sun and it was a new day.

…Time’s been taking a toll on our roster of Kaaawa morning dogs. We already lost Axel and Malama, two of our favorites, in the past few months.

Yesterday morning I luckily stopped to see three of our regular dogs who live just around the corner from us. I walked in and was told the tearful news that it was “time”. Not unanticipated, really, but still a shock. But it gave me the chance to say a sad goodbye to Maleke. He’s been crippled by hip and knee problems. Expensive surgery a couple of years ago initially offered hope but eventually failed. He’s been living in pain and, yesterday, his time had come. I offered him the regular dog biscuit after hearing that he was on the way to the vet, but he had no appetite for it. He did accept a goodbye scratch on the head as I bid him farewell.

I tracked down this photo of Maleke, taken at the end of 2003, when he was in his prime. Maleke was a big dog (over 100 pounds), strong, solid, and excited, and although he never threatened, he was like a brick on legs and strong enough to easily knock me off my feet just out of excitement. And in this video, taken just a few months ago, he was still able to get to his feet in order to collect a morning treat. In recent weeks, though, he wasn’t able to stand and I would take a dog biscuit over to where he was lying. Not a good situation.

So goodbye, Maleke. Now I’ll be spending some time printing photos to give to his people.

In the meantime, I’m still struggling to identify the appropriate level of care and best living situation for my parents who, at 94, are reaching the limits of living independently. It’s all part of that same flow of time, although dog years certainly pass more quickly. It would be easier if the financial meltdown hadn’t suddenly made planning future care more difficult for the less than wealthy.

But that’s another story.

I wanted to give the Star-Bulletin credit for yesterday’s fine front page which featured a large chart of the plunging stock market in orange-brown ink across the top of the page, partly overlapping the headine, “What Now?”

That’s when I discovered that the redesigned Starbulletin.com eliminated the familiar and user friendly list of the last week’s issues and a simple access to the online archive extending back through the history of Starbulletin.com.

In the redesign, there’s no “back issues” or “archive” link visible on the main page. After fumbling around for a while, I discovered “Archives/Historical” in tiny print among options in drop down menus that appear if you happen to move the curser over the section names at the top of the page.

But that archives option isn’t working properly and didn’t display the past week’s issues, at least not in my look this morning.

So I’m sorry, S-B, I won’t be able to give yesterday’s design the full credit it deserves. But maybe it will encourage the web designers to restore “back issues” to the main visible page.

Let’s see. If you have a university affiliation, you can now download a copy of Stanley Ann Dunham’s 1067 page dissertation done at the University of Hawaii, “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and thriving against all odds”.

A full text PDF (52 MB) is available in the Dissertations & Theses database, formerly known as ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

It’s available to UH students and faculty through the online library collection, and to many universities and colleges around the world as well.

Dunham, of course, also known as Ann Dunham Soetoro, was Barack Obama’s mother who received her PhD from the University of Hawaii.

At first I thought The Great Schlep was mostly a joke (you’ve got to watch the video!). Then I found out that my brother-in-law is schlepping down to Florida to do his part in the last month of the campaign! Go, Peter! And good luck to all the schleppers.

The Star-Bulletin’s Craig Gima has been slowly uncovering the unraveling of the UH West Oahu deal.

Last week, Gima reported that Texas-based Hunt Building Corporation has financial problems in its mainland operations.

In another story today, Gima reports a key fact that was missing in the earlier story. Seems Hunt had submitted a “notice of termination” back in July and the contract to build the new campus legally expired yesterday.

UH-West Oahu Chancellor Gene Awakuni continues with happy talk.

“We’re giving them one last opportunity to come back with a deal that we can find acceptable,” Awakuni said. “If they come back with an offer that is not acceptable, then we go on to plan B and find another partner.”

Perhaps Awakuni hasn’t noticed that the country is experiencing the largest credit crunch since the Great Depression, making it difficult for any developer to replace Hunt in this somewhat speculative deal, at least any time soon.

And up at the Manoa campus, economists have been projecting a worst case analysis of possible revenue shortfalls based on the downturn in excise tax collections, with some now describing a dire scenario with up to a 30 percent budget cut for the UH system along with retrenchment, elimination of some programs, and layoffs.

That scenario would follow a continuing downtrend in travel to the islands. If the economy and travel rebound soon, it may never come to pass.

But I can’t believe we’re still pressing the ultra expensive new campus in West Oahu in such economic circumstances.