March 19, 2005 - Saturday
I don't like playing this "Find the Rat" game, especially when the rat is not an active participant because it is deceased. No, I'm not talking about an investigation of any former official. I'm sitting in the semi-darkness of a cold Kaaawa morning, flashlight in hand, attempting to cope with wind velocity, air currents, and some kind of particle physics to locate the origin of that still faint but unmistakable odor here in the living room. As to causation, well, Ms. Kili is my prime suspect after being caught in the act delivering small rodents through the cat door and into the house where she promptly releases them for the pleasure of the lazy males. They normally don't expend the energy to hunt, but they'll get right into the act if prey is miraculously delivered to them. Romeo has been the latest beneficiary of Kili's largess. All that aside, it's less than an ideal way to start a weekend morning.
The e-mail was flying yesterday after headlines on Kauai reported the arrest of Jay Robertson, manager of the island's public access television provider, Ho'ike. Reportedly 10 pounds of marijuana was recovered in or under his house after being tracked by narcotics officers. Under Robertson's management, the access provider has been accused to resorting to secrecy and closing out the community of public access producers, leading the League of Women Voters to ask for assistance from the Office of Information Practices in challenging the internal secrecy. The latest turn of events is sure to generate a new round of calls for change in the organization's mode of operating.
A reader notes: "The Star-Bulletin ran virtually the same Page One story by Greg Kakesako in the afternoon editions of March 16 and 17 on a Hawaii battalion commander -- a Kamehameha Schools graduate -- fired after a fight with a subordinate in Iraq."
I can't confirm this because (a) we receive the morning edition here at home, and (b) we didn't get our Wednesday Star-Bulletin.
Early tomorrow, Hawaii time, will mark the end of winter and beginning of spring, the the vernal (spring) equinox. Here's quite an exhaustive description of the "event" courtesy of Sky & Telescope.
March 18, 2005 - Friday
While we're waiting to hear whether the Carlyle Group will proceed with it's purchase of Verizon's operations in Hawaii, the company certainly has no lack of other active investment options. Among the deals Carlyle is considering or recently completed: the takeover of a shipyard that refits British submarines in Plymouth, England; the purchase of Insight Communications Co., a cable provider in parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky; purchase of Wall Street Institute, which teaches English in locations around the world; purchase of a 25 percent stake in China Pacific Property Insurance; a stake in French software firm, Trema; and opening new offices in China, India and Australia in addition to existing offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo. All it takes is money, as someone once sagely explained to us.
If the vote on oil drilling in Alaska was enough, further evidence that Hawaii's Dan Inouye and Alaska's Ted Stevens are joined at the hip comes from a study of pork barrel spending included in the 2005 defense budget.
It seems that I caught the city's online access system in the midst of a major upgrade when I couldn't find the new budget several days ago. The Star-Bulletin this morning describes the expanded document retrieval system. Bravo.
I was fooling around with Googlism.com, which uses the Google search engine to compile instant profiles of people and places. But this answer to "who is Mufi Hannemann" surprised me (oops--early readers got this far and found the image missing--hopefully it is "fixed" now):
On the other hand, try doing the same for Linda Lingle and see what you get.
March 17, 2005 - Thursday
I realized some of you might not have clicked through to yesterday's St. Patrick's Day story, expecting it to be too Kaaawa-centric. But do check it out. You will be rewarded with a bit of high-class trivia just right for today.
The Advertiser buried a whopper of a correction in the fourth paragraph of it's front page headline story this morning.
"The Advertiser incorrectly reported yesterday that the four screeners had been arrested and that the FBI had taken them into custody. An FBI spokesman said yesterday that the agency was not involved in the case."
Yesterday's version of the story, also the front page lead story, seemed definitive. Here's the lead paragraph:
"Four screeners with the federal Transportation Security Administration were arrested yesterday on suspicion of stealing money and other items from the suitcases of Japanese tourists, a TSA official said....The official said the FBI took the men into custody."
As far as I can tell, the retreat from yesterday's report of arrests is not identified as a "correction" elsewhere or noted in the Advertiser's "Getting It Straight" section.
And the online version of yesterday's story has been "updated" (read "rewritten") to eliminate the incorrect items. It now reads:
Four screeners with the federal Transportation Security Administration were put on leave yesterday on suspicion of stealing money and other items from the suitcases of Japanese tourists, a TSA official said.
The official declined to be identified because Department of Homeland Security policy calls for all media inquiries to be forwarded to Washington.
Sidney Hayakawa, federal security chief at Honolulu Airport, said yesterday he could not confirm or deny any details and declined further comment.
We're left wondering whether Hayakawa was the unnamed "TSA official" cited in the original story? Which version did that official actually tell? Was the first official's version wrong but reported without other confirmation? Or was this a wild misquote? It would be interesting to know more.
It was a pleasure to hear Boston Globe correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Bill Dedman urging "a documents state of mind" at yesterday's luncheon sponsored by the Honolulu Community-Media Council. He advocates increased use of public records in reporting to get beyond anecdotes, see patterns, and get a jump on the competition.
Dedman rightly criticized mainstream reporting for relying too much on what people say ("99 percent of what we write").
In one telling example, he jumped from a police reporters view of useful records (daily blotter, arrest log, etc.) to a view of the police department as a bureaucracy, where documents crossing the chief's desk would include budgets, directories, contracts, property inventories, and so on, all providing promising leads to stories that don't typically get reported.
He also chided several stories he's read since arriving in Honolulu which, in his view, gave no evidence the reporter actually attended the event.
Dedman is also responsible for his exhaustive compilation of sources, PowerReporting.org, which received a good plug.
All in all, a useful and provocative hour.
And yesterday's entry was updated mid-morning to include the photos (below).
March 16, 2005 - Wednesday
| 10:30 a.m.--The Honolulu Community-Media Council and others convene at the East-West Center in an hour for their annual Freedom of Information Day program. |
Student services bldg.
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Outside Hawaii Hall
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Meanwhile, just across the UH campus, protesters are leaving messages opposing secrecy and classified research on campus. These photos courtesy of the camera in my new Treo 650 PDA/phone.
5:30 a.m.--The second issue of Kaaawa News went online yesterday afternoon. With St. Patrick's Day upon us, the lead story serves up an appropriate dish of previously hidden Kaaawa history. It's a tidbit Dave Donnelly would have loved to hear. So take that with your green beer where ever you are, Dave.
| When we moved to Kaaawa in 1988, I had little or no recollection that it had been a part of my past. But here's a photo that proves the point--believe it or not, that's your's truly on the grass in front of what was then the new Crouching Lion Lodge. The year--1952. It was just days before my 5th birthday. And just about a lifetime before we moved back to Kaaawa. |
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Don't miss cartoonist Daryl Cagle's biting column on the Newspaper Guild's decision to award the Herbert Block Freedom Award to the New York Times.
Cagle writes:
The Times has not employed a political cartoonist for nearly fifty years and editors at the Times have been quoted saying that they would never hire a cartoonist because "you can't edit a cartoonist like you can a writer," and, "we would never give so much power to one man." The arrogance with which the haughty Times dismisses our art form really sticks in the collective cartoonists' craw. So, imagine my surprise when I read that The New York Times was winning the "Herbert Block Freedom Award," a prize bearing the name of a great political cartoonist.
And so on.
And it's interesting to see how other Newspaper Guild locals operate. Here's the web site from Minnesota--check it out.
March 15, 2005 - Tuesday
Welcome to the Ides of March, wary or not.
Doug White, over at poinography.com, pounded on Campaign Spending Commission Director Bob Watada yesterday for his opposition to the bill moving through the legislature to provide taxpayer financing to candidates.
White concludes with this jab: "I wonder if the real reason Watada doesn’t like the idea is because it would make him much less of a celebrity."
The problem is that Watada is stepping down after the session. He'll be an anonymous retired public employee, not even the anonymous bureaucrat White envisions.
Libertarian Tracy Ryan makes her case against this public financing scheme over in Hawaii Reporter, arguing that qualifying for public funding under this legislation will be impossible without backing from large special interest groups.
I haven't carefully compared the two bills, SB1689 and HB1713, but both would require a heavy layer of complex administration and red tape that will drive costs far above the subsidies paid directly to candidates. I've said before that I'm not a fan of this specific legislation because of those administrative burdens. I think Ryan makes a reasonable case for retaining the current criteria for qualifying for public funds while boosting the amounts available to more substantive levels.
And, of course, Watada is correct that no system is going to eliminate influence. It may alter the kinds of special interests who are able to hold sway, but this legislation won't instantly create independent legislators, assuming that this would be a good thing. The hype is one thing, the reality another.
| Poor Ms. Harry (a.k.a. Harriet). The fur hasn't completely grown over the place on her front leg where she was wounded in a fight just after the first of the year. Now she's been at it again, this time ending up with an oozing wound on her left rear. I can't figure out who she is fighting with. In the meantime, I'm treating her with stockpiled antibiotics and tlc. |
Ms. Harry at breakfast
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March 14, 2005 - Monday
The thermometer in our living room puts this morning's temperature down around 56 degrees (F). This is cold.
Credit the Advertiser for launching a wide-reaching series on freedom of information and open government with a well-done batch of stories and columns yesterday, and followed today with a report by Mike Gordon on problems with the state's open meetings law. I appreciated Jerry Burris' column on the old dilemma of personal privacy-government sunshine and will be looking for what might be coming next.
From the folks at Nomoola.com comes Eating In Public, which chronicles their from Nov 2003 to Oct 2004 - from planting food without permission to the opening of their first free_store. Free copies are also available while they last from TinFish Press.
Nomoola is an anti-capitalism project in Hawai'i nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Unlike Santa and the State, they give equally to the naughty and the nice. They do not exploit anyone's labor. And they do not offer tax-deductions. They are, in all the word's various definitions, free. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people's homes and plant food on public land. They currently have two ongoing free_stores and a website at http://www.nomoola.com.
While you're fiddling with access to information, try this: Pretrieve.com links to a variety of public sources in an attempt to locate information about specific individuals. Type your name in and see what happens.
A column in Boulder, Colorado's Daily Camera is reporting today that UH athletic director Herman Frazier is on the short list of finalists for a similar position at the University of Colorado as well as Arizona State. Both schools expect to announce their selections within a month. It sounds like "Aloha, Herman".
Noted: MSNBC News picked up a Pacific Business News story by former Star-Bulletin writer Pat Bigold, who reports that a translating error in a questionnaire rendered useless data collected last year on the number of Japanese traveling to Hawaii to get married.
March 13, 2005 - Sunday
