Today, a few mid-week odds and ends.

I ran into a reference to the consultants working on Senator Dan Inouye’s campaign web site. Crossroads Campaigns is headed by John Miyasato, and the firm has worked on both Inouye’s campaign site and the web site of DanPac, Inouye’s “leadership PAC”.

Here’s are lists of DanPac contributors (both individual contributors and corporate/pac contributors) and candidates supported from the Federal Election Commission. It all makes for some fascinating browsing.

Former UH president Evan Dobelle was mentioned in a Massachusetts newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, in an obituary of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Berkshire Eagle columnist Milton Bass said he was lucky enough to meet Kennedy twice in the Berkshires — once during a private party at the home of former Pittsfield Mayor Evan S. Dobelle in 1982, and once during Kennedy’s 1962 run to fill his brother’s Senate seat, which was vacated after JFK became president….

Bass said Ted Kennedy was the consummate politician — amiable, astute and quick on his toes. Recalling the 1982 meeting at Dobelle’s Pittsfield home, Bass said that Kennedy’s handlers had inquired about the assembled guests ahead of time to assure a smooth reception for the would-be senator. After aides identified Bass as a local newspaperman — he was The Eagle’s entertainment editor at the time — the genial candidate managed to charm the scribe.

“He had no idea who me and my wife were. But when he got to me in the line, he said, ‘I don’t get to read The Berkshire Eagle often, but I always read your column,’ ” Bass said with a laugh. “He was the ultimate politician.”

I didn’t get around to mentioning Greg Wiles’ two stories on Sunday concerning $1 billion in state funds tied up in presently-unmarketable auction-rate securities, and broader concerns about the state’s accounting systems.

Wiles notes:

“Kami said the state bought its SLARS through Salomon Smith Barney, a unit of giant investment firm Citigroup Inc., which last year agreed with the SEC to repurchase $7.5 billion of auction-rate securities from small investors with less than $10 million in holdings. “

I can’t help wondering whether there was a particular broker or representative of Salomon Smith Barney who got credit for the sale and the resulting commission?

These are often deals reserved for those with lots of political ties to the administration in power. There might not be anything there, but these are the kinds of places where I would expect curiosity to yield interesting results.

Wiles reports on an audit of the state’s accounting system, which is apparently 30 years old, inefficient and obsolete, like so many other management systems throughout state government. I’ve previously flagged audits of DLNR’s enforcement division, which ran on index cards, and the UH facilities maintenance office, which lacked any effective way to track and respond to requests for repairs.

Too often, in my view, unionized state workers are blamed for government inefficiencies, when it is the management side of things that remains stuck almost back in Territorial days.

Noted: Ron Youngblood’s retirement from the Maui News, although he will still write a weekly column.