Web ilind.net

September 24, 2005 - Saturday

Meda was swept along in a convoy of cars braving the flooding along Kamehameha Highway. They crawled through flooding in Kahaluu and Waikane before being stopped for a half hour or so by the aftermath of a pedestrian accident in front of Kualoa Ranch. Meanwhile, it had been raining heavily here in Kaaawa since late morning with occasional thunder and lightening. Meda was calling with periodic updates on progress, and I was so happy when she finally arrived home safely that I didn't even get upset to see the left front tire slowly deflating in the garage after apparently picking up a nail somewhere close by. So I suppose that defines what I'll be doing later this morning.

We're up high so flooding isn't our problem, but I'm sure there are lower parts of Kaaawa that have a lot of standing water this morning. We'll soon see.

From the Columbia Journalism Review, expressions of fear and loathing in the news business.

Hurricane Rita is again driving interesting developments in blogging. I've been checking several different blogs. Here are a few: One focusing on the oil industry, the Houston Chronicle's blog for citizen reporting, "Stormwatchers" (don't miss the report on the survival of the portapotti), and the excellent Subterranean Homepage News from the Providence Journal (yes, really).

The Joy of Tech currently features a bit of cat humor, which could get shifted into their archive any time now, so you might want to check right away for these examples of "Deciphering cat body language".

And Bloomberg's review of the expanding circles in the Abramoff probe in Washington is an excellent choice for your morning coffee reading and just as entertaining as the cat humor.

Time to head out to greet the dawn.

September 23. 2005 - Friday

We received a letter this week from Milton Leitenberg and Nicole Ball, arms control researchers who I met nearly 30 years ago and manage to be in touch with from time to time. This letter wasn't the normal personal update, but a personal appeal on behalf of the train platform schools in rural India, featured in a PBS documentary last month.

These schools are primarily intended for young girls aged 6-10 who would otherwise never go to school. WHen girls from the families living near the railroad stations who are not going to school reach the age of about 12, they are frequently abducted and raped by gangsters and then sold into prostitution by these same organized crime groups....The Train Platform Schools were designed by their founder as a means of interfering with this process. If the girls can be induced to attend the schools (by a daily meal, and some food to take home) and hten to stay in school, it apparently makes this sequence of indigent female child, rape, and passed to prostitution more difficult to carry out.

With an annual cost for one school estimated at $1,166, Milton and Nicki believed a list of 50 friends giving just $200 each could pay for ten of these schools for a year. Hence their letter.

It seems like a worthwhile idea, and one worth passing on for your consideration. Here are a few additional links:

(a) For more information and documentation
(b) To donate online via Global Giving
(c) FAQs about New Heroes and Global Giving

You never quite know what you might see while walking through Kaaawa in the early morning. Yesterday morning it was this little band of guinea fowl quietly gathered on the side of Kekio Road. They are handsome birds and didn't seem overly alarmed by our appearance.

click for larger photo

If you haven't had your storm fix for the day, you might want to check out the Wall Street Journal's "Storm News Tracker", or the latest from the Times-Picayune, which has reported a 30-foot wide "wave of water "pouring over one of the New Orleans' levees earlier this morning. Or try the Weather Underground for an overview of all the storms, including those in our part of the world.

September 22, 2005 - Thursday

Here we go again. E.W. Scripps has announced that the Birmingham Post-Herald, a p.m. newspaper, will dissolve its JOA with the morning Birmingham News and shut down following tomorrow's edition. I'm not sure how they get away with this short notice, but it makes any attempt to block the move, such as happened here in Honolulu, next to impossible.

An old friend now living in Oakland was the first to respond to yesterday morning's section of Google ads, which, by the way, I have little or no control over.

I would have to rate your google ad project a success, just from the one banner currently at the top of your page at the moment:

"Meet Republican Singles. Free to join. 1000's of Beautiful Republican Singles"

Whoa, baby! How did they figure out your site was visited by streams of furtive Republicans who might be single? That is one hot algorithm!

A former Star-Bulletin colleague put it this way:

It's good to see you're helping to provide hope for single Republicans out there, who perhaps have been looking for love in wrong places!

And, for the record, those Republican ads produced the lowest response in the last week and a half. Even curious clickers couldn't make a difference. Whew. I was starting to think that maybe Google knew something about visitors to this site that just isn't obvious to me, but the results say otherwise.

The Federal Election Commission is trying to restrict the free play of so-called 527 groups, which were allowed to pour millions in "soft money" into the last presidential election. The commission filed suit this week against the pro-Republican Club for Growth. The FEC has posted a copy of the lawsuit.

Here's an extended report from Best Friends Animal Society, one of the animal rescue groups working on the hurricane front lines. And the Best Friends web site links to a recent Dateline NBC segment featuring their work.

Revival Animal Health, one of the places I shop online for pet products, has listed its own suggested set of agencies offering animal relief in this disaster. With the next huge storm moving towards Texas, there's more need to come.

September 21, 2005 - Wednesday

More from the campaign front. I spent some time yesterday looking over the campaign contribution lists for Gov. Lingle and Mayor Hannemann, and finally decided it might be interesting to just list out their top donors. So here is a listing of the Top 25 contributors to the mayor and governor. The lists include contributions for their last successful campaigns and so far in the current campaign period. Amounts reflect the higher contribution limit for the statewide governor's race ($6,000 per election) versus for the county-level mayor's race ($4,000 per election).

Eleven of Gov. Lingle's top 25 contributors are from out of state, while just two of Hannemann's top givers reported a mainland address, including his sister in New York. Lingle's top contributor, Robert J. Creedon of Sacramento, appears to have exceeded the contribution cap with two reported contributions totalling $7,500 during the latest period.

It should be noted that these contributors are treated as individuals. If families or business partners making coordinated contributions are combined, the list will take on a different look. For the time being, though, this simple approach will have to suffice.

Both the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser followed today with stories on the tax problems of newly appointed state representative Bev Harbin, and both showed good form in crediting KITV for breaking the story.

I just ran across an excellent web site, "Grade the News", a project of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University which evaluates San Francisco area media. There's lots of intelligent stuff here for your morning reading.

These two dogs were players in our latest morning tale of danger and escape. They're talented escape artists who quickly learned about my morning bag of doggie treats, resulting in a couple of disrupted mornings and several harrowing moments of highway danger. Click on the photo to get more of the story.

Ruby & Daisy (and their person, of course)

September 20, 2005 - Tuesday

Retired Star-Bulletin editor Chuck Frankel called deserved attention to a story broadcast last night:

 Keoki Kerr had an outstanding story on KITV Monday night, outlining the tax problems of the new state representative who replaced Ken Hiraki. She and her husband, owners of a car repair business, failed to pay excise taxes and other obligations for several years, Kerr reported. Where were the investigative reporters from the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin?

Kerr also noted the new Rep, Beverly Harbin, became a Democrat after the seat became vacant. Perhaps she had been involved in party issues before but never got around to signing a card, although I haven't seen published accounts indicating anything of the kind. Lingle may have met the letter of the law requiring the appointee to be of the same party, but I'm sure she would have been among those to raise a big fuss if Gov. Cayetano had appointed an instant Republican to a similar seat. It seems the Democrats are being very mellow about the whole thing, perhaps because it was already a done deal.

I enjoyed the initial offerings of the local PBS Hawaii interview program, Island Insights, a joint project of the station and the Star-Bulletin. But the program appears to have relinquished its journalism credentials. Last night's performance by City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle and host Dan Boylan was a new low. Boylan allowed Carlisle to say some outrageous things without challenge or meaningful follow up. Carlisle, for example referred to the ACLU as "the (civil) rights Taliban" because of its challenge to expanded police powers backed by the prosecutor.

At one point, Carlisle attacked ACLU's successful procedural challenge which led to the Hawaii Supreme Court overturning the vote on a controversial constitutional amendment changing the way criminal indictments are made. I wish I had the exact wording, but Carlisle said something like this: "We've learned in the Middle East what can happen if you require dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's."

I thought Carlisle was saying that an insistence on higher standards of civil rights and legal procedures than those found in emerging democratic systems such as Iraq will cause lawlessness and unrest. Perhaps he meant something totally different, but we don't know because Boylan as host failed to perform the basic functions of an interviewer.

Another highlight was Carlisle's spirited but shallow attack on term limits being applied to the prosecutor's office, which was so devoid of substance that it quickly turned into a joke, with Carlisle indicating general support for term limits applied to everyone else "but not to me". Mr. Law and Order should have been pressed on seeking special treatment for himself, but again the opportunity was lost.

I can't tell if the SB-PBS Hawaii sponsors want to keep this light and empty, offering up what is essentially free time for untested statements by a variety of officials, or if this just reflects inadequate resources to allow proper preparation for the interviews. In either case, the result has been a decline in the value of these Island Insights. Viewers deserve and should expect more.

It must have been a Freudian slip in yesterday's UH newsletter, which reported the Board of Regents has approved a supplemental budget request including $45 million in operating funds and $187 for capital improvements.

Maybe they were thinking of the repair and maintenance budget, which sometimes feels like it could be just a couple of hundred a year. In any case, here's the way it looked to readers as late as this morning. Perhaps it's been corrected by now, or else it will be when folks up there in Manoa read this.

There's been lots of labor news from the media world. There has reportedly been talk of trying to organize a Newspaper Guild chapter at the Miami Herald, but observers don't appear to give the effort much of a chance of success. Reuters reporters organized a five-day byline strike, the latest round in a long-running battle with the news organization. Editor & Publisher reports more than 200 staffers at the San Francisco Chronicle have signed up for a voluntary buy-out package offered by the paper, which had been seeking to cut at least 120 positions.

Highly recommended! "Even before the Watergate-related explosion in investigative reporting, Hillerman, through his protagonist John Cotton, was advocating following the paper trail." •Steve Weinberg, author, Investigative Reporter's Handbook.

September 19, 2005 - Monday

The week begins with forecasters predicting the two hurricanes heading our way will weaken over the next three days and are not expected to bring hurricane force winds through the islands. That's good news after an unsettling weekend.

I wonder whether University of Hawaii officials have been giving any thought to the flood of faculty retirements that will hit starting in 2008 and continue for several years? There's going to be sort of a perfect storm of professorial turnover, the coincidence of the cohort hired in the 70's hitting retirement age, and the three years of substantial raises that come at the end of the current six year contract. There's a 5 percent raise due next July 1, followed by 9 percent in 2007 and 11 percent in 2008. With retirement income calculated on an employees "high three" earning years, those add up to a huge incentive to postpone retirement at least until 2008 and preferably 2010. But then expect the ranks of faculty to be decimated by departures.

Cartoonist Daryl Cagle got a boost last week from the Online Journalism Review, which called his web site "one of the best-known editorial cartoon archives on the Internet." Cagle should be familiar to folks here in Hawaii, where he previously worked for MidWeek and the Honolulu Advertiser. One of the fun collections on his site is a page devoted to the cartoons that MidWeek refused to run. Some of these are hilarious!

I ran into this informative discussion of how Yahoo! has cooperated with the Chinese government's call for internet self-censorship, complete with examples of what Chinese users see (or don't see).

September 18, 2005 - Sunday

After yesterday's brief excursion into politics, I thought it might be useful to get an update on Mayor Hannemann's recent campaign efforts. I was a bit surprised to find that just 8 months since his election there are already 41 individuals and companies that have already contributed the maximum $4,000 allowed by law to the mayor's presumed 2008 reelection bid. I haven't yet checked whether any others made multiple contributions totalling the $4,000 maximum, so the number could be higher. And I haven't yet looked at the special interests these contributors represent. But you can click here to see the list of those maxing out for Mufi between November 3, 2004 and June 30, 2005.

Wouldn't you know it. No sooner had I announced my intention to abandon the experiment with Google ads than they paid off for several days. The next day actually produced enough to buy a small plate lunch, at least an inexpensive one. Now it's the slot machine effect. Remember that intro psych class. Intermittent reinforcement keeps the rat pressing the lever. So the experiment will continue through the month after all to allow a better overall assessment. And I've added a link to some suggested reading from Powells Books in Portland, one of the country's great independent book stores. Maybe something will grab your interest.

I stayed home on Friday. The gray and damp weather meant the cats were around most of the day, and I had to keep the camera ready. The result is another batch of Kaaawa cat images, including this one of Mr. Romeo in motion. Just click on his photo for more.

Now Katrina has us watching the series of storms churning across the Pacific in our direction, including Hurricane Kenneth, now a category 4 hurricane. Our hurricane kit is incomplete, so I'll have to go shopping for a few more cat carriers for use in case of emergency.

Previous week • Other