Starting out a holiday-shortened work week, have you checked out the Federal Election Commission’s new disclosure data catalog and disclosure blog? Suddenly it’s much easier to find and download significant chunks of FEC data.

These are just part of the Obama administration’s open government initiative. Check out progress so far at data.gov and the data.gov blog.

The Sunlight Foundation is doing as much as anyone to track and encourage these moves towards increasing openness. They’re a great resource.

There’s a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Maui News challenging an editorial about the future of A&B’s sugar operations. It puts sugar in the context of Hawaii’s water wars.

For more than 100 years, Alexander & Baldwin has invested in diverting water from East Maui to Central Maui to operate a sugar plantation, dewatering streams that fed a vibrant Hawaiian culture and jobs of other kinds – taro farming, fishing and subsistence gathering that put food on the family tables throughout East Maui. The diversions caused untold suffering to our families, who for many decades were no longer able to feed or support themselves. Of necessity, many abandoned ancestral lands that could not be made productive.The foundations of our culture, allegedly revered by the people of Hawaii, were destroyed. Restoring streams is but a small measure toward repair of inestimable damage the diversions have caused.

The full letter is worth reading.

Meanwhile, UH Professor and Tinfish Press editor Susan Schultz followed up on the situation at UH with a thoughtful essay of her own.

Here’s just a snippet.

The ever-increasing numbers of administrators in higher education, with their high salaries and insistence on assessment, are like lunas in plantation era Hawai`i (ok, that’s my simile, not his). The university is now managed to make money, increase “efficiency” and raise the numbers of untenurable labor even as the tenured class remains as a dying relic of the old order. If I, at my office desk where I look at a dying computer and dead printer, feel that my system is breaking, it’s because someone else’s version of this system is succeeding. If my husband and daughter get many Fridays off this year, it’s not that the education system is floundering, but that the governor is “saving money” and hence de facto privatizing schools and the child care system.

And a comment to her post points to data showing that the number of full-time faculty at UH Manoa fell between 1999-2007, while numbers of part time faculty rose 30.6% and graduate assistants were up 40.8%. More students, more classes, fewer full-time experienced professors, and more reliance on part-timers. Not a pretty picture.