This in from web commentator and blogger extraordinaire Ryan Ozawa:

I imagine you’re not a “LOST” fan, but sometimes show activity becomes news. As it did this morning, with a fabricated “media circus” at the State Capitol. I blogged it.

Of note for you, though, is how apparently a KITV crew was treated. I can imagine chasing me away (and they have!), I can imagine chasing away a competing network, but this is ABC’s local affiliate. And perhaps most relevant, isn’t the State Capitol a public building? I can imagine you should be able to get up in their business, but KITV wasn’t just chased from the area, they were pushed out of the Rotunda, and even warned after crossing the street to the Eternal Flame. That’s a bit much, I think.

That doesn’t sound like a pretty sight. I wonder what sort of permit you have to get for that kind of control of a public area?

And although KITV had a brief report on their web site this morning, it doesn’t appear that they captured the scene that Ryan has described.

From the Big Island, Kona blogger Aaron Stene made the move to the WordPress blogging system this week (the same temporarily painful switch I made earlier this year). His Kona Blog is looking great and now has a new address, so you might need to make a new bookmark for his site.

Relentless inquisitor Jeff Garland forwarded this recent list of backlogged requests still pending at the Office of Information Practices, including four that are more than ten years old.

He also provided a partial deciphering of codes which appear in the listing:

RFA Request for Assistance (usually due to a denial or non response) -P = Public -G = Gov
RFO Request for Opinion
INVES Investigation as to whether or not a violation of law has occured
CORR = correspondence or correction?
LIT = litigation?

A little reverse engineering and this list could yield some interesting stories.

News media in Utah filed suit this week to overturn a decision of the Mine Safety and Health Administration to bar reporters from its hearings probing the Crandall Canyon mine disaster.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone has a good story by Matt Taibbi on Sen. John McCain’s struggling presidential campaign. It begins with a description of a campaign panel featuring several GOP candidates who were each attempting to up the ante in the fight to appear most hawkish in the war on terror. Then it was McCain’s turn.

But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. “If we torture people,” he said sadly, “what happens to our military people when they’re captured?” After the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of America’s choicest “enhanced” interrogation techniques, water-boarding. “Do you know where that was invented?” McCain asked. “In the Spanish Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish Inquisition?”

In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain’s poll numbers dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage.

In any case, it’s a good read.

I was prowling for blog entries about Kaaawa and ran into a new and somewhat kinky Hawaii blog, “Being married is hard to do”. I thought that sometimes I wander too far into self-disclosure territory, but this one heads right past the “there be dragons” warnings into wild uncharted territory. That takes more courage than I can typically muster. Browse around some of her entries and you’ll see what I mean.

I have to forward a note about this one to my cousin, whose “Clutter Museum” blog is part of BlogHer.org.