What do you do when you wake up to find the world’s financial system continuing to crumble? I guess you look at the positive side. Events are adding to the probability of an Obama victory in November as the electoral map appears to be swinging towards the Democrats. It’s a good bet that bad news can’t help the party of the incumbent. Of course, it also means that Obama will inherit an incredible mess on a one-in-a-century scale. Whew.

Former Honolulu Police Chief Doug Gibb, a longtime Kaaawa resident now retired and living in Iowa, has been back in town for ten days or so. We’ve run into him a few times since our morning walk takes us right past their house on Hauhele Road. This was the scene yesterday morning as Doug struck his best American Gothic pose.

More news from the Maui court case involving Akaku: Maui Community Television in which Judge Joel August has now ordered the Attorney General to produce a copy of a legal opinion that the AG had tried to keep confidential. According to a transcript of a September 23 hearing, Deputy Attorney General Rodney Tam argued that being forced to disclose the opinion would set a dangerous precedent.

Oh my god! Think about it! We might have more openness and transparency in government! Horrors! At least that was the argument Tam was dispatched to make, despite a law that’s been on the books for more than 40 years requiring opinions on matters of law requested by department heads to be filed and made public within days of being issued.

If you want to dig into the argument a bit more, here?s Akaku?s motion for summary judgement, the AG’s memo in opposition, and then Akaku’s reply. I posted Judge August’s findings of fact, conclusions of law and order earlier, but here’s the link again.

A similar legal battle is being waged at the national level as the U.S. Senate moves to subpoena the legal opinions opinions prepared by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

According to Secrecy News, prepared by the Federation of American Scientists:

“During this administration, OLC has been misused to provide legal justifications for misguided policies,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “That advice has been deeply flawed, sloppy, and flat out wrong but it has been permitted to happen because secrecy has prevented our oversight.”

“Unjustified secrecy continues to prevent the review by this Committee that would provide a check and some control on how the administration is interpreting the law that is Congress’s constitutional responsibility to write. That obsessive secrecy even prevents us from knowing the subject matter on which OLC has written opinions,” Sen. Leahy said.

And, from the same blog, a note about Sen. Inouye’s attempt to maintain intelligence oversight in the Senate.