The counter on this page slipped past 1.3 million sometime late last night, Hawaii time.

Did you notice the return of the pesky “Hawaii” headlines in the Advertiser on stories referring to stories concerning Honolulu? I caught this one yesterday. “Hawaii mayor” refers, in this case, to Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann.

By the way, I checked our precinct in the precinct-by-precinct results. We vote a Hauula Elementary School, and the precinct includes a big chunk of the windward coast. If the state’s voter turnout was bad, our precinct was really bad. According to the official figures, only 18.7 percent of registered voters bothered to vote, whether in person or absentee.

KHNL’s headline about the Stop Rail Now appeal was clear: “Rail debate heard in Hawaii Supreme Court”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Supreme Court. Rather, it was the Intermediate Court of Appeals, and there was considerable discussion during the oral arguments about what difference a Supreme Court decision would ultimately make. Oops.

Tucked away in a relatively pro-McCain piece from The Australian are a few interesting nuggets.

First, word of a high-level meeting here in Hawaii:

I write these words in Hawaii, where Kevin Rudd this week stopped off briefly to see Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of the US Pacific Command. I am here for a regional security conference of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, the first time it has held in Hawaii. The dialogue, founded by Melbourne businessman Phil Scanlan, is the most important private initiative in Australian diplomacy and has become a central institution in the US-Australia relationship.

Then a clear statement that the current Wall Street crisis is a national defense issue because of its inevitable impact on the defense budget (and all other parts of the federal budget).

However, it is bound to have serious costs and this must ultimately affect the US defence budget. The Bush administration has proposed making $US700 billion ($837 billion) available for financial bail-outs of key institutions. Now a $US700 billion guarantee to shore up the financial system is not the same as necessarily spending that amount. Australia guaranteed $1 billion for bailouts for each of Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea in the Asian financial crisis a decade ago and in the end we got all our money back. But this $US700billion bailout is unlikely to be so painless.

In any event, the US is going to have to go some distance towards closing its budget deficit and its trade deficit. That means lower expenditures and higher revenues. And that will affect the defence budget.

Finally, a good insight from a former Australian minister of defense who sees McCain as caught up in the old Cold War approach to the world. Some, like the author of this article, feel that’s a good thing. Hopefully many others will disagree.

Beazley, who is in no sense anti-Obama, nonetheless noted this key difference between McCain and Obama: “McCain’s (approach) is an extension in the new era of the Cold War approach. That approach was about building structures to advance Western interests and contain potential military and ideological threats. In the 1950s, Australia became situated firmly in the San Francisco alliance building system of extended deterrence. Obama is the first presidential candidate free of intellectual involvement in that world. The words from time to time may sound the same, the underlying meaning is different.”

If Obama is free to pursue his own foreign policy priorities they will be worthy goals such as reducing poverty, improving global governance, combating climate change.