Recent photos: Vieques (Puerto Rico) 1978 • Malaekahana 1959 •
Historic Kualoa sugar mill • Kaaawa in November •

April 21, 2007 - Saturday [ permalink ]

Robert Meyerowitz, who briefly served as Honolulu Weekly editor a few years ago, is heading from Alaska to another warm climate, this time in Palm Beach, Florida. He is scheduled to take over as editor of the New Times Broward-Palm Beach newspaper in mid-May, according to their announcement.

About his short time in Hawaii, the announcement quips with remarkable bad taste: "Additionally, he briefly served as editor of the Honolulu Weekly before deciding that one man can stomach only so much Don Ho music."

The Star-Bulletin reported this week on the sale of ResortQuest Hawaii LLC and its numerous hotel properties. But PBN added a bit of significant news to the story:

Interval Acquisition Corp.'s $109 million purchase of ResortQuest Hawaii from Gaylord Entertainment Co. of Nashville, Tenn., places ultimate management of 26 hotels and condominium resorts in the islands in the hands of media mogul Barry Diller.

Interval Acquisition Corp. is an affiliated company of Miami-based Interval International, a leading provider of vacation services and an operating business of IAC (Nasdaq: IACI). IAC is Diller's New York-based InterActiveCorp., an online retailer that owns companies including LendingTree, Ask.com, and Ticketmaster.

There's a lot of interesting stuff floating around about Diller, including this recent interview in Financial Times.

A former island journalist, now in Oregon, had a brief comment on yesterday's quote from John Radcliffe (Quote-"Some people think that Ian is a big pain for always pointing out the real and/or imagined shortcomings of others."):

John's comment cracked me up. Speaking as a journalist, being referred to as "a big pain," is a high compliment.

So it is!

It's gray and cloudy again this morning, although there doesn't seem to have been any significant rain overnight. By the time we get down to the beach, it will probably look much like this photo, taken a couple of days ago. Nice walking weather.

April 20, 2007 - Friday [ permalink ]

I eventually did find a list of those HMO providers yesterday after complaining here about the difficulty of doing so. The trick is that I needed to start at the EUTF web site rather than trying to jump directly to HMSA.

But my comments drew a quick and attentive response from John Radcliffe, a member of the Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund board, who flagged them for EUTF administrator Jim Williams.

Some people think that Ian is a big pain for always pointing out the real and/or imagined shortcomings of others. However, he is also a hell of a researcher,  and anybody who knows him will respect that. If he can't readily find out information that he is seeking, for sure others will be even more in the dark. 
 
Ian, if after we get your questions sorted out (if we do), please publicize the new plans, etc.  on your blog. This is a huge undertaking and it has been incredibly difficult to do.  Had we been good little bureaucrats we would have just re-upped Kaiser and HMSA and paid more of your money to them. It sure would have been a lot simpler. No "good deed"  in government ever goes unpunished.

Williams responded a few minutes later:

We were aware of this deficiency and in the process of fixing it.  Unfortunately, for those like Mr. Lind, we were a day late and a provider short.  As of a few minutes ago the EUTF web site at www.eutf.hawaii.gov has links to HMSA, VSP and the NMHC pharmacy list at the link per below.  The HMSA link has provider information for the different plans, including "HPH," which stands for Health Plan Hawaii which is the HMSA HMO.  Now we need to ask HMSA to revise the wording on their page, so that EUTF participants can readily understand that HPH means the EUTF-HMSA HMO plan.

So that problem is well on its way to being solved.

Then a reader working in state government added this comment.

I concur that the EUTF is not doing an effective job of communicating with public employees in its materials.  I got a letter today saying that the EUTF is discontinuing its dual dental and vision plans.  Then it says that according to its records I was enrolled in the vision service supplemental plan and that to maintain benefits for the next year, I must complete an enrollment form electing vision coverage and that the cost will be communicated once the State and the unions reach an agreement. The enrollment form was something totally separate from the package that is given to all state employees.

This letter left me totally confused.

If you're interested in all this, check out minutes of the EUTF board meetings, which are available online. These will give you some flavor of the amount of work and the technical issues that had to be worked out in order to get these plans in place in time for the annual open enrollment period. You've got to come away with more appreciation for the process and the products.

The National Popular Vote bill has been flying under the public radar for most of this sesion and is now among the bills passed by the Legislature and awaiting the governor's signature. This bill (SB1956) would move the country to the election of the president by popular vote without having to amend the constitution. It accomplishes this by seeking an agreement by states representing a majority of electoral votes to have those electoral votes cast for the candidate winning the national popular vote.

"The purpose of this Act is to require the State to enter into an interstate compact with other states that would obligate Hawaii's chief election officer to certify to the governor the names of the presidential electors of the same political party as the candidates for president and vice president receiving the highest number of votes in the national popular vote."

It's a serious and radical move which appears to be gaining traction. It will be very interesting to see if the governor lets this become law.

Another Feline Friday and another small batch of photos of, yes, our cats. This is Ms. Annie, another of the rescued cats. She was just a kitten when we found her one morning down on the beach, just a few feet from Kamehameha Highway. She's grown into quite a beautiful cat.

click for more

April 19, 2007 - Thursday [ permalink ]

I know that I shouldn't pick on Joe Moore, but last night at the end of the 6 p.m. news he blithely announced that only "zero point six percent" of the world's population speaks English as their first language. Interesting statistic, but wrong by a decimal point. The correct answer is .06 (point zero six) of the world's population or, simply put, six percent.

Okay. This one has nothing to do with Joe Moore. The state's Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund just started it's open enrollment period with a number of new options. This means that nearly 90,000 state and county workers have to quickly check out the options and decide which of the available health plans best meets their needs and finances. And that choice has to be made by May 16. Sounds good. Then I tried to get details about at least one of the new options. Not so good. Can't find anything. Total frustration.

According to the basic information available in the booklet delivered to all public employees, HMSA is now offering an HMO plan similar to Kaiser. It says the HMO plan is offered through groups of physicians. Which ones? That's very basic info, but the answer isn't in the basic booklet. So I tried the EUTF web site, where you can read minutes of EUTF board meetings but won't find these vital details. A link to frequently asked questions (FAQ) doesn't get anything about the health plans but instead links to a retirement guide. HMSA's own site has a link to its preferred provider program but nothing about its EUTF HMO.

Searching on the HMSA web site finally located basic information on their Health Plan Hawaii HMO, only it is not clear whether this is the EUTF plan, and to find out what physicians or groups are part of the system appears to require a visit to HMSA or a telephone call to their office, a prospect which leaves me in a fit of anxiety.

Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, but if I'm doing that then so are tens of thousands of others. Attention EUTF folks--this is extremely poor customer service at a lot of different levels. Your members shouldn't have to guess about the coverage that's available. Health care is too important for that.

I had fun working on two short stories for the current issue of Honolulu Weekly. One looks at BlueEarth Biofuels, a company proposing to build a large biodiesel plant on Maui in conjunction with Hawaiian Electric. Turns out Hawaiian Electric has been trying unsuccessfully for at least four years to find a partner willing to commit to this Maui deal. BlueEarth is the first to agree. But the company is brand new and its principals, while able to point to their roles in prior energy projects, have not previously done a project on their own, much less a very large project like this one. There are some other interesting details. Pick up a copy of the Weekly for more.

The second story updates the saga of Plan Compliance Group, which was administering investments in tax deferred annuities for Hawaii teachers and UH professors until 2005, when more than $2 million disappeared before being invested in the proper retirement accounts. The state has been chasing its money in a civil suit filed in California, and in a federal bankruptcy court proceeding. Last month, PCG president Francis "Bill" Reimers entered guilty pleas to six counts of mail fraud and one count of money laundering. Seems he had private clients who turned over millions so that he could personally manage their investments, but instead he did the old Ponzi thing and lived off their largess, paying back just enough in "dividends" and "profits" to keep everyone ignorant and happy. No real investments were ever made, according to the federal charges. That wasn't the case with the teachers' annuity accounts, where everything appears to have been proper until millions in deposits went missing in September 2005.

UH had to eat the $420,000+ in losses and covered the missing sum from a risk management fund it sets aside for such situations. The Department of Education refused to respond to questions about how where they got the money to cover all those teachers' retirement payments, and referred questions to the Attorney General's office, which did not respond.

Speaking of fun stories, I enjoyed Rick Daysog's account of the current whereabouts of Barry Bellefontaine, who sailed out of town in 1995 leaving behind a lot of unhappy investors and a lot of missing money. Rick tracked him down in Bali. I have to credit Rick with persistence. He says he has searched the web periodically for any news of various folks who formerly made news and might again, including Bellefontaine. Until recently, nothing turned up. Then he happened to see an online plea for information about Bellefontaine's wife in the aftermath of the deadly tsunami of 2005. One thing led to another until Rick caught up with the Bellefontaine's by telephone at their home in Bali. What a interesting moment that must have been!

What else...when I made my somewhat dismissive comment about the Advertiser's special Don Ho coverage on Sunday, it looked to me as if their special section had been largely prepared in advance. I half expected to see that Gannett's crew had ben selling Don Ho memorial ads as part of their broader effort. When I finally got around to inquiring directly, though, Advertiser editor Mark Platte responded that "80% of the section (and all of the layout) was prepared in just a few hours."

"Our online Do Ho coverage generated more than 100,000 hits over the weekend," Platte said. "We sold an extra 4,000 Sunday papers too."

I still think the Star-Bulletin had the killer headline, but I have to eat my former words and give the 'Tiser credit for a pretty thorough job on short notice.

April 18, 2007 - Wednesday [ permalink ]

What is the story with KHON's news anchor Joe Moore, who appears to go out of his way to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party"? His regular use of the term is jarring, since this usage is widely seen as pejorative.

From an entry in Wikipedia:

Democrat Party is a political epithet used in the United States by some conservative commentators and by some members of the Republican Party in speeches and press releases instead of the name (or more precisely, the proper noun) Democratic Party.

Many members of the Democratic Party object to the term. New Yorker Magazine commentator Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: "There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. 'Democrat Party' is a slur, or intended to be - a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but 'Democrat Party' is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams 'rat.'"[1]

I don't know if Moore is just unaware of the terms connotations or intentionally expressing his personal political bias. In either case, he should stop.

A reader forwarded a link to Chriskcon.com, "Study Centre for Chris-nah Consciousness : Science of Identity Exposed". It's loaded with information about the cult of Chris Butler, also known as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa."This website is dedicated to exposing the truth that Chris Butler is determined you do not have a right to know."

The person who forwarded the link commented: "Hurt & Angry Disciple sets up web site." Yes, I would say that's the case. Complete with photos and video.

Among those identified as current or former members of Butler's Science of Identity followers is Sen. Mike Gabbard, and the site dredges up quite a bit of previously published material about Gabbard's background.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of this stuff and have just spent a few minutes looking over the site, but there's quite a wide range of information here.

Time for another food foto. This time it's turkey leftovers, which last night were transformed into a Mexican themed feast. I mixed up a bit of leftover turkey with onion, garlic, raisins and salsa, then wrapped it in a mostly-nonfat flour tortilla, with beans, cheese, lettuce, and home made salsa. A glass of wine. Not bad for leftovers.

April 17, 2007 - Tuesday [ permalink ]

After hearing the first news of yesterday's shooting on a university campus in Virgina, my first reaction was shock. Meda, of course, teaches at the UH Manoa campus, so hearing a student describe how the gunman burst into a classroom and shot the professor before turning on the students was intimately disturbing.

After processing more of the news, including the suggestion that the shooter was going after a former girlfriend, I backtracked. Does our Department of Education have a curriculum for anger management and domestic violence? Does it reach all students? And does it reach them at the key times in their development? It would be hard to get a clearer message that learning to handle interpersonal relationships without violence needs to move right up the priority list.

Oh, and what about the gun question? Yes, I know you think this guy had every right to go out and add a personal Glock to his collection. What if a crazed shooter broke into his room? He was the crazed shooter? Oh. Time to rethink.

Another reader had this advice for Karen Waygood in response to her question about huli huli chicken.

I looked it up just now and found a site where Karen can order both the Huli Huli sauce and kiawe wood.

If I recall from my college fundraising days, it's that sauce that we sprayed onto the chicken rather than plain shoyu. I'm guessing it's probably a little sweeter and may contain other ingredients like garlic, garlic salt or other spices.

The chicken experiment, however, went forward before this latest advice. Karen reports: Chef Ed marinated the huli huli chicken last night (in one of three recipes I printed from the internet) and left it for the morning chef to cook today.  THAT chef poured sweet and sour sauce all over it and then baked it.  Sigh.   The haupia was perfect.  Chef Ed added the cantelope "for color."

Here, allow me to really irritate my friends in the bait and bullet crowd. I've already made my gun comment of the day. Now let me pass along a link to this Alternet story describing how a public relations company developed a strategy for sabotaging the influence of scientific findings against the tobacco industry. It's timely, since pro-smoking lobbyists had an aggressive presence at the legislature this year, complete with daily delivery of flyers that promoted the same kind of pseudo-science or anti-science described here. The whole approach is similar that that taken by fishing interests in trying to discredit the scientific evidence that strongly favors conservation measures to protect and restore Hawaii fish populations. One bill would have required an endless series of research hurdles before any new conservation rules could be adopted. After all, those studies aren't really comprehensive, even though there are a lot of them, and they can't prove that there aren't other contributing factors, etc., etc.

Hey, guys, don't take it personally. We're still friends, right?

April 16, 2007 - Monday [ permalink ]

I've got to give the Star-Bulletin a nod for the best front page Don Ho headline yesterday, a simple "Don Ho-We'll Remember You". The phrase operated at so many levels, expressing a direct statement at the same time that it immediately stirred musical memories of times past. Sometimes less is more, and this was one of those times. The headline spoke far more powerfully than the Advertiser's "Don Ho Dies, Beyond 'Tiny Bubbles,' entertainer touched many lives."

What the Advertiser lacked in finesse, it tried to make up in shear firepower with its obit as special section.

And in the midst of all the Don Ho reminiscences, will there be any mention of the entertainer's rubbing shoulders with organized crime?

According to Land and Power, the classic book by Gavin Dawes and George Cooper, Ho's career was linked with organized crime figures.

During Wilfred “Nappy” Pulawa’s tax trials there was testimony that some noted local entertainers were friends of Pulawa’s and others implicated in organized crime. Roy Ryder, for example, testified that on at least one occasion a syndicate meeting was held in the Waikiki apartment of Donald T. L. Ho – entertainer Don Ho.

Ho told reporters, though, that he had “nothing to do with the underworld.” He said the association went no further than the fact that the reputed syndicate leaders “are friends of mine from before,” and that therefore his “doors are always open” to them.

However, the man who at the time was vice-president of Ho’s theatrical productions company, Ho-Brown Productions Inc., was reputed to have had long-standing ties to mainland organized crime:

Marcus Lipsky was born in Kiev, Russia, in 1905 and raised in Chicago. While he was an officer in Ho’s firm he lived in Beverly Hills, California. According to US Senate testimony in 1958, Lipsky had been an associate of Al Capone’s in Chicago in the 1930s....

Lipsky was also said to have associated from the 1930s on with known Cosa Nostra members in various businesses that dealt in dairy products.

According to Dawes and Cooper, business registration records listed Lipski as officer of Donho Inc., which in 1971 changed its name to Ho-Brown Productions, until 1975.

If I recall correctly, this information was also reflected in some of those now infamous Firebird documents, so-called because of the name given to an underlying law enforcement investigation of organized crime in Hawaii.

Hmmmm...after Saturday's SPJ bloggin panel, I was interested to check out Advertiser writer Capitol Notebook blog written by Derrick DePledge and Treena Shapiro at the newspaper's capitol bureau, which has had several entries about the confirmation hearings for land department director Peter Young.

On Friday, April 13, for example, the blog quotes several descriptions of the administrator of DLNR's Historic Preservation Division, a former assistant to state auditor Marion Higa said to have ties to the governor's office.

The blog cites several statements which pretty much summarize the problem in very blunt fashion.

State Sen. Clayton Hee, D-23rd (Käne'ohe, Kahuku), in questioning former state archaeologist David Brown under subpoena, referred Brown to a September 30, 2005 entry in Brown's work journal with some salty descriptions of conversations with his boss, Melanie Chinen.

"Melanie gave tips on handling employees you want to "f&^& with their minds" -- set up a meeting, and NOT give any idea on what the meeting will be about. She says it's mean but effective, and will evoke fear."

Now that makes the problem crystal clear, although it unofrtunately sounds like a lot of Department of Education bureaucrats. Maybe that's being too hard on the DOE, since a lot of this has been tolerated in management ranks in the state and counties.

But on the same day, DePledge's story in the Advertiser was satisfied with this description:

Employees in the historic preservation division, backing up claims made on Wednesday by private archaeologists, said persistent staff vacancies and mismanagement had hampered the protection of burial sites.

The testimony pointed to problems that in some instances predated Young's tenure as director, such as the use of the boating money, or focused more on management issues involving Young's deputies.

The next day, April 14, DePledge wrote about the closed hearings.

The committee has heard from an investigator from the state Attorney General's office, an investigator from the state Ethics Commission, and several workers from the department's Bureau of Conveyances in closed session.

The testimony apparently relates to separate criminal and ethics probes into the bureau; the investigations do not target Young.

But the blog has more specifics, citing a letter from the Ethics Commission:

It is evident and credible from what our office has been told over the years that bureau employees are receiving gifts by individuals, lawyers, and corporations who hope to obtain special favors or believe they must provide gifts in regard to the handling of their submittals to the bureau.

I'm scratching my head and wondering why I should read the Advertiser stories when the critical details are have been appearing only in the Capitol Notebook blog?

Whatever you can say about your Sunday, it probably didn't start as badly as this driver's morning, which began with a slow drive off the road and onto the rocks on the other end of Kaaawa.

April 15, 2007 - Sunday [ permalink ]

Here's a slightly edited version of the reply from Advertiser editor Mark Platte to Doug Carlson concerning a print ad from an outfit that has drawn criticism elsewhere previously.

As you know, editorial and advertising are separate. You should be directing your questions to Jason Taylor, our top advertising guy.

That is not to say that I don’t sometimes object to certain advertising that I find offensive or confusing or smells like a ripoff. I have made my objections known to Jason or Mike Fisch, but I’m not going to air my differences outside this building.

As for this particular ad, I believe we have run it before and I’ve been told that nobody has every complained about not receiving what they ordered. I do remember a customer some years back not receiving a specialty coin and I called myself several times to make sure the coin was delivered. The customer was satisfied when he got his merchandise.

I am always concerned about ads that purport to resemble news stories or news pages with bylines etc. and I would like to see the word “advertisement” in bigger, bolder type.

As for our policies, again, please direct your questions to Jason. I couldn’t quote his guidelines for accepting ads any more than he could quote our ethical guidelines for journalists and I would like to keep it that way.

Mark added later: "By the way, you do know the Bulletin ran the same ad, right?"

There was more bad news on the pet food front this week, with another batch of foods added to the recall list. There's a link to the latest version of the full list of recalled pet foods in this Forbes story, and I've tried to convert it to a pdf file for online viewing. If it looks like tiny gray print, just keep zooming in to make the print larger.

Yesterday's panel on blogging at the SPJ regional meeting in Honolulu was reasonably well attended for a mid-afternoon session at the end of a conference that started Thursday evening. I enjoyed Dave Shapiro's description of himself as "an ink stained wretch" from the old school of mainstream journalism who has gone from writing a column a week, 52 columns a year, to a blog with several entries a day, a veritable "opinion factory", fearing the loss of quality that goes with such mass production.

Only one reply received to Karen Waygood's chicken question:

Most folks who used the Ewa Brand Huli Huli chicken fundraiser use just keawe charcoal and spray Aloha shoyu on while it is cooking. Real simple. No need for fancy sauces or long marinades.

Nothing simpler than that, if keawe charcoal or its mainland equivalent can be found in Atlanta. I suppose you would look for mesquite charcoal there for the same result, although I see some for sale on Craigslist.

Yesterday continued the week's string of dark and cloudy mornings in Kaaawa. Some of that rain that can be seen offshore in this photo swept in a few minutes later.

April 14, 2007 - Saturday [ permalink ]

Here's an important message from former island journalist Karen Waygood, now in Atlanta:

I just gave CNN Diner’s Chef Ed a huge Sam’s Club-size bag of Noh brand haupia mix to whip up on Sunday.  I tried to find him a recipe for Huli Huli Chicken on the internet.  What I found was a metric boat-load of recipes.  So, I ask you and your readers: what is the most onolicious recipe for Huli Huli chicken?
 
Mahalo plenty

I'll share all of your suggestions and forward them to Karen (send your recipes to ian(at)iLind.net).

The Star-Bulletin's Burl Burlingame wrote a day or so ago:

Interesting ... I was listening to the radio this morning and the subject touched on how business at the Legislature is screwed up because the House PCs are virus-riddled. Apparently Carol Fukunaga uses a Mac with a wireless card and never has a problem!

I'm told that Rep. Herkes is the Mac guru on the House side, although several others use Macs as well. As for the virus situation with the legislative computer system, at least from a user's perspective it seems to have been under control this week.

And Doug Carlson sent along a copy of the following email to Advertiser editor Mark Platte:

I'm writing about the paper's acceptance of ads that have the appearance of a news story -- such as page A17 of today's (Thursday, April 12) Advertiser.

Doesn't this ad violate a "best practices" standard for newspaper advertising? And if the Advertiser has no such standard, shouldn't it have one?

The ad is objectionable on multiple levels; one that jumps off the page is the "free" angle. How can something be free if there's a requirement to "cover the $8 claim plus shipping for the Official Presidential Money Gallery"?

A little checking on the Internet turns up numerous hits on the World Reserve Money Exchange of Canton, OH, and the Universal Media Syndicate.

According to this site, the Syndicate is an ad-placement agency. Both the Syndicate and the World Reserve are registered to the same person in the Canton area, the site says.

The same ad -- with the same photos and text -- ran on March 26, 2007 in Penn Hills, PA, apparently an advertising supplement.

(The three-day deadline seems to be specific for each community where the ad runs.) On the positive side, Hawai`i residents get a break in having to send only $8 to cover the claim; Pennsylvania residents had to fork over $18.

CoinCollector.org has written derisively about the Exchange as recently as last month -
and earlier .

The Roanoke, VA Times had a story in December 2005 about the WRNE and its practices:

These sites and more add up to the WRNE being a shady operation. I'd be interested in reading your rationale of accepting ads that appear to be news stories, notwithstanding the small Advertisement disclaimer, especially when they're placed by notorious operations that seem to be in business to rip off the consumer, according to numerous critiques.

Ouch. Of course, the Advertiser isn't alone in selling space to questionable outfits like this one, but these seem like fair comments nonetheless. I'll share any reply that comes my way.

April 13, 2007 - Friday [ permalink ]

Another pesky Friday the 13th. I'll just hope for the best.

It's already Friday the 13th at the Capitol, it seems. When I tried to check the Legislature's web site (www.capitol.hawaii.gov), my browser returned the error message: Safari can’t open the page “http://capitol.hawaii.gov/” because it can’t find the server “capitol.hawaii.gov”.

Hopefully it's just a brief outage and not a return of the dreaded virus that hit a couple of weeks ago, but you never can tell these days.

Larry Geller responded last night to yesterday's comments, but I'm going to digest his reply for another day or so before sharing it. I'm not snubbing you, Larry, I just want to be able to respond substantively.

For now, I'll just add a personal observation. A couple of decades ago, I was deeply immersed in the legislative process while serving as executive director of Common Cause. We had an office just across the street from the capitol and I spent much or most of my time there. Later I prowled the capitol while unraveling the mysteries of campaign money, and then as a reporter. It was, and continues to be, a learning experience, and the lesson is that legislative politics--and it is quite the essence of politics--is a complex and multilevel game. There's a whole constitutional framework behind the scenes, that legal world that has to be tapped only occasionally but that defines the essential powers, and separation of powers, that makes our democratic system work. Then there are the substantive issues entailed in proposed legislation which can be complex indeed, with seemingly minor word changes sometimes carrying huge and unanticipated changes in a bill's practical impact. Interactions between laws, like interactions between drugs, can produce strange, unexpected, and dangerous results, and these are constantly being guarded against and discovered anew.

But there are additional layers of equally complex dynamics. History is at work, and if you don't know or understand the background of a law or proposed law and what's happened to it in the past, where careers may have been built or destroyed pushing or resisting particular policies, you're likely to fall into a predictable pothole. There are interpersonal dynamics, politics between parties, between the House and Senate, between parties, between the governor and the legislature, the counties, etc. There's the pressure from lobbyists and interests, and I include both "inside" lobbyists, those who walk the halls of the capitol, and "outside" lobbyists, those who rally public opinion to one side or another. Then there are matters of etiquette and decorum which are really methods for creating a space in which people who might be at war politically can work side by side while maintaining a semblence of order. There's the pressure of time, which is artificially compressed within a three and a half month period, where most legislators have calendars filled literally from dawn to bedtime. And looming behind it all is the next election, always a catalyst for ambitions, power plays, and fears.

It's reallly a remarkable setting and system, one that is always dynamic and full of drama, although sometimes it's the drama of watching a chess game rather than the action of a footbal game. I concluded that in order to play it well, and to play it successfully, requires more than casual attention, the same that can be said for most professions or sports, for that matter.

Whew. I'll have to continue this thought over the weekend as I wrap my brain around Larry's continuing comments. Hopefully it will continue to be productive.

In the meantime, I admit it. I've gotten hooked on the Rochester Falcon cam, where a Peregrine falcon is currently sitting on four eggs. It's a quiet little spectacle with multiple live views accessible 24 hours a day. There's some drama, such as the disappearance of egg #5, and occasional action. So click on Ms. Falcon, known as Mariah, and check it out. It's worth a bookmark.

Another week, another Feline Friday. I haven't managed to get a full family portrait, but I did get this shot that includes two-thirds of the crew. This was taken last night shortly after we got home and served up the canned cat food. I usually split a couple of cans among the nine cats, which isn't quite a full meal but is enough to be a treat.

April 13, 2007 - Thursday [ permalink ]

Yesterday morning I was able to help rescue a turtle that had gotten tangled in a fisherman's line. The guy was fishing alone, and I realized he was going to have a hard time dealing with the turtle without help. So I took off my shoes and waded into the water to carry the turtle up onto the beach. Luckily, it didn't appear to be injured, just badly tangled in the nylon line. Luckily, this turtle wasn't too big, maybe 12-15 inches long, and we were able to cut it loose and release it in a couple of minutes, although it seemed longer at the time. We were both relieved, and I hope the turtle was as well.

There hasn't been much attention given to the House decision to kill SB 1283, which would have given UH the ability to spend part of the tobacco settlement special fund on operating expenses for the medical school. Currently, UH is authorized to a portion of the tobacco money to pay off the construction costs that it was stuck with after former President Dobelle failed to deliver on a promised $150 million external funding. But the med schools financial problems run deeper and now entail an annual deficit currently being taken out of other program budgets. UH makes a good case that this isn't just a university problem because the medical school is really a state asset that addresses the critical shortage of physicians in many parts of the islands. Is there some other med school funding being tucked away in the university's budget to address issue now that SB1283 is dead?

This could end up having major repercussions, especially as the foolish push for a large West Oahu campus begins to suck off all extra resources in a long process that probably means starving the rest of the UH system for the next 20 years.

Speaking of the House, I have to disagree with my friend Larry Geller's criticism of the legislative process. Writing on his DisappearedNews.com blog, Larry lambasts the House for failing to make the text of floor amendments available to the public prior to those amendments being offered during session.

Larry wrote:

If you wanted to have some last words with your Senator before they went in to debate a measure, you had all the information you needed. If you wanted to communicate with your Representative, you were given nothing. Nothing. Forget about it.

And he continued:

The House did not make their amendments public. They remained secret. If you are concerned about a particular bill, I'm sure you'll appreciate what this means to you. You were left out of the legislative process for that bill. Your Representatives just did their own thing on it.

The fact of the matter is that last minute floor amendments that close off the opportunity for all comment, as Larry implies here, are not allowed. The House did not take final action on any of the bills where floor amendments were offered or adopted. Instead, bills with floor amendments first had to be "decked", or put on the table, for at least 48-hours as required by the State Constitution.

Article 3, Section 15 of the constitution provides, in part: "No bill shall pass third or final reading in either house unless printed copies of the bill in the form to be passed shall have been made available to the members of that house for at least forty-eight hours."

Two things to note here. First, that the 48 hours provides more than enough time for any of the last minute lobbying Larry refers to.

The second thing to note is that, at least in terms of constitutional structures, the 48-hour delay is to accomodate "members of that house". The public enjoys collateral benefit, but it is the members of the legislature who are the intended beneficiaries. They are the ones who have the right and responsibility to get things done.

"Your Representatives just did their own thing on it." Well, yes, Larry, that's what the Legislature is all about. Elected representatives who, ultimately, do their own thing. That's what they're supposed to do because that's the system created by the constitution.

But all that aside, whether or not floor amendments are generally available in advance, the legislature is a far more open place than 20 years ago, that's very clear. The public's ability to influence decisions is probably greater than it has ever been, although there's less public attention to the legislature via the news media than in the past.

And here's a photo taken earlier this week. It was one of those "Gawd, what a magnificent morning!" kind of days. Enjoy.

This is the current exchange rate:
1.00 CANADIAN DOLLAR (CAD) = 0.8686 US DOLLAR (USD)
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