June 12, 2004 - Saturday

Not a moment too soon....Air America Radio, the "liberal" talk radio alternative, hit Hawaii's airwaves yesterday, according to The Buzz column by Star-Bulletin business writer Erika Engle. In Honolulu, tune into KUMU-AM (1500) during the 6-9 a.m. or 5-8 p.m. drive time periods.

And over on the right...A Baptist news site reports that Hawaii's Log Cabin Republicans, the local chapter of a national organization of gay Republicans, has disbanded because of the local group's opposition to gay marriage. The story cites a June 3 column column in the Hawaii Reporter by Malia Zimmerman (you have to scroll down the column a ways to find the Log Cabin entry).

Governor Lingle's trip to Israel is still getting news coverage, the latest from JTA, an international Jewish news service. The JTA story, datelined Washington, notes Lingle's strong ties to the Bush administration:

As one of few prominent Jewish Republicans, Lingle says she hopes to play a role in garnering Jewish support for President Bush’s re-election in November.

Lingle already has touted Bush to Jewish audiences in Los Angeles. She says she hopes to do it more. Republican officials are hoping the same of her, but there may be logistical problems given that Lingle is two time zones away from Los Angeles.

Facing a re-election battle in 2006 in a largely Democratic state, Jewish Republicans said she ought to reach out to the larger Jewish community this election year to help gain financial strength for her own battle ahead.

With Democrats across the country more united than ever against Bush, Lingle must be banking on public apathy and the two years she will have to distance herself again from Bush before her own reelection battle, which will most likely again depend on crossover Democratic voters.

A holiday weekend. Wife's out of town. Time to par-tee!! So what do I do? Hey, make time for another round of dogs and cats. A few of each. Just click on your choice for the latest batch of photos. Strange photo of the day is the self-portrait as reflected in a dog's eye.

Kaaawa cats

Morning dogs

June 11, 2004 - Friday

I'm resigned to "all Reagan, all the time" today as far as the news media is concerned, even if it is Kamehameha Day in Hawaii. There are a few holdouts like The Nation, which has been doing more than its fair share to combat the collective amnesia, but they're outside the mainstream in any case.

Last night, in Meda's absence, I sat down and watched "Fog of War", the academy award winning documentary on the life and lessons of Robert McNamara. It is truly extraordinary. If you lived through McNamara's seven years as Secretary of Defense--and even if you didn't--it is a must see. Who would have thought that this was a man who would seize an opportunity at age 85 to reveal his errors as a young man and the lessons that should be learned form them? I can't imagine Donald Rumsfeld doing anything similar. The DVD was at Costco on our last visit, and is available at Amazon.com via the link above.

You might take a few minutes to check out the results of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which found what it calls a "crisis of confidence" among professional journalists.

Sizable majorities of journalists (66% nationally and 57% locally) think "increased bottom line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage." That is a dramatic increase from five years ago, when fewer than half in the news business felt this way.

The full report on the survey is available at the Pew Center web site. Follow their link to "datasets" and you'll find raw data from earlier surveys on a variety of subjects, which you can use to draw your own conclusions.

I'm late today. It's 7:45 a.m. and the last of the cats has shown up for breakfast. Harriet was the laggard, even behind Mr. Silverman, who arrived more than five minutes ago. With nine cats, you have to maintain a mental check list and deliberately keep track of their comings and goings. It's the only way to spot an absence which could mean a health problem, actual or potential. The burdens of pet parenthood.

And if another person sends me the story about the brilliant dog with the extended vocabulary, I'll scream. Cats probably know those words, too. They would just never admit it, even under extreme questioning of the kind President Bush never personally approved (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

June 10, 2004 - Thursday

I'm sorry. Despite the best efforts of Dan Rather and the rest of the big time press corps, I can't confirm a nation "united in grief" at Reagan's passing. His time has passed, and it doesn't make much sense to think ill of the man at this point in time. But I've got a copy of the Iran Contra report on the bookshelf next to our bed, and it is a heck of a read. Frightening for those who believe in constitutional authority. And I can't shake the view that Reagan's administration in California began the erosion of what was once the world's premier system of public university education into the economic train wreck that exists today. And there's a lot between those two issues. So do I grieve his passing? I'm sorry. I don't.

Meda's off on an early flight to Los Angeles this morning, where she will be on an afternoon panel with Tom Hayden as part of a week long program for crime writers presented by the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. And I'll be here tending the cats. Yee haw!

An article in today's Seattle Times offers some food for thought, describing the big money entering or rumored to be entering that state's gubernatorial campaign.

Several things worth noting. First, the same rumors that money raised nationally by Bush and the Republican Party will be flowing into local races have been heard here. There's a widespread belief that Republican money raised on the mainland will be dumped into dozens of House campaigns here, part of the R's strategy to take a significant share of the House.

But more startling is the comparison of campaign spending in Washington and Hawaii. According to the story, Gov. Gary Locke set a spending record with a $3.8 million campaign in 2000. But Linda Lingle reported spending $5.4 million in her successful 2002 bid.

The per capita figures would make Hawaii look even worse, since Washington State boasts a population of about 6 million compared to Hawaii's 1.2 million. You do the math.

The rain continues, at least mornings and evenings. We're coming up quickly on the solstice, but that summer weather hasn't really hit with full force yet. The sun's coming up very early but it's been masked by morning clouds and rain. Still beautiful, though.

Click for a larger photo

June 9, 2004

I've been having software problems this morning. No, not my brain. Wrong soft ware. I'm talking Adobe. GoLive has been going dead. Crashing into some unseen wall whenever I try to type the first letter into this entry. This is about my sixth attempt, and I had to make a change somewhere else before jumping back here to the beginning and trying again. I'm holding my breath, but so far, so good.

While waiting for the program to restart many times, I noticed that the sky is already getting light before 5 a.m., and by a few minutes after five you can see just enough that it appears to qualify as twilight.

I'm up this early because Ms. Miki has reshaped my days. She's our elder cat, 17 going on 100. Her body is failing but she's still got her attitude. Bad arthritis limits her mobility, despite ongoing doses of a new pain killer called Metacam and, as is common in older cats, her kidneys are slowly fading. So she spends most of her time on our bed, occasionally laboriously dismounting for a trip to her sand box and a brief walk out onto the deck.

She still has an appetite, but can't manage a lot at one time. Smaller but more frequent meals seem to be what she can handle. But it also means she doesn't quite make it through the night on that getting-ready-for-bed feeding. Somewhere along about 3 a.m., sometimes as late as 4, she's standing between us on the bed and clawing the comforter to let us know that it is time. Food time. And I'm the designated feeder. So I drag myself out of bed and down to the kitchen to find something that she will eat. If I choose well, she has her early snack and goes back to sleep, allowing Meda to at least grab another hour or two of sleep. But by that time I'm awake and reluctantly ready to sweep the various email accounts, check the day's headlines, and contemplate the daily entry.

But awake doesn't necessarily mean alert enough to cope with or diagnose balky software. Hence today's bad beginning.

One substantive note of the morning: I've been assured that the Advertiser's new font may be different but it is not smaller. Despite that, at least one regular reader said she and her husband find it "just plain hard to read" for a number of reasons, as yet unspecified.

Another reader notes: "The 'new' Tiser looks surprisingly like the redesigned West Hawaii Today which started printing in broadsheet on June 1st. " I'll have to stop by a library and check out the similarities.

June 8, 2004 - Tuesday

The Honolulu Advertiser introduced its new look yesterday, a redesign aimed at taking advantage of their new presses, which will be phased in over the next two months. The redesign doesn't appear to have made a ripple in the online edition, but was explained in a two-page spread in yesterday's print editions. They're moving to the narrower and cost-saving paper that is becoming the new industry standard. Color throughout, more front page stories, heavy use of "breakout boxes" to summarize stories, and so on. More photos and graphics. A new typeface that appears smaller, although I haven't measured it as yet.

Have any comments on the new design? Let me know.

White House staffers refer to Bush and Ashcroft as the "Blues Brothers" because they're on a mission from God, according to an article at Capitol Hill Blue, a wonderful web site in both content and style. Of course, their style of religion includes orders to aides to "fuck over" those who oppose the mission.

And after checking out Capitol Hill Blue, take at look at editor Doug Thompson's personal and professional site, DougThompson.com. Another visual treat.

PR Watch linked to an interesting story on the corporate counterattack against the new documentary, Supersize Me.

Now from the "there go our property taxes" file--there's another house for sale a couple of blocks away. An older house, apparently nicely maintained, with a nice lot landscaped in local fashion on the flatlands of Kaaawa, one house back from the highway. It's being offered at $733,000. Hard to believe it can sell at such an inflated price. I hope it doesn't. It would signal that our taxes will likely double in the next couple of years, not welcome news for those of us uninterested in selling and moving.

Not my normal Kaaawa photo...As we arrived home a few days ago, an apparition appeared near the top of our driveway that sent me scurrying for a camera. I got back in time to get the picture of our neighbor, Elizabeth, "mother" of cats Pilikia and Anna Banana, at her front door. Turns out she had improvised an outfit for chemical warfare of a household variety--an attack on the Kaaawa mold. Click on the photo for a larger version.

June 7, 2004 - Monday

Ronald Reagan's death has prompted lots of writing seeking to balance the emptiness of mainstream news coverage. Today's Smirking Chimp gathers many different examples. There's David Corn's short piece, reprinted from The Nation, "66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan" which he calls sort of a "cheat sheet" for those willing to maintain a critical perspective on the Reagan presidency. But Sherrie Gogerty Geeting notes that "as Governor he signed the bill legalizing abortion in the state of California BEFORE the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade....You won't hear the Republicans talking about that little factoid, but it's something I won't forget."

How did I miss the story of journalist Elena Lappin's detention by Homeland Security agents while coming into the U.S. to do several interviews for The Guardian newspaper? It is profoundly disturbing to see how we have forced our way into a small circle of nations (Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) which enforce special procedures to restrict the movement of foreign journalists. Worse, of course, is the manner in which our agents carry out their task with a special enthusiasm.

Happy Monday.

June 6, 2004 - Sunday

The Ethics Commission's recent opinion, which faulted Gov. Lingle for her use of state employees and resources to operate a nonprofit group set up to lobby for her education reform proposal, is still making waves. Here's a link to Informal Advisory Opinion 2004-02 (be careful if you're using a dial-up connection--it's a 740 kb file in pdf format).

The University of Hawaii system has launched a redesigned web site at it's regular address, www.hawaii.edu, and also posted some frequently asked questions about the redesign.

While most newspapers seem to have highlighted the Pope's sharp criticism of President Bush during their brief meeting this week (like this one from the London Daily Mirror, "Pope gives Bush a right ticking off", or the NY Times "Bush Meets Pope, Who Voices His Displeasure Over Iraq"), the Honolulu Advertiser's story headline on page A3 yesterday made it sound like a love-in: "Pope praises plan to leave Iraq".

It is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. It is also the 17th anniversary of Ms. Kua's acquisition day, the day back in 1987 when Meda got "kitten fever" and called all the pet stores in Honolulu to find one that had kittens. We ended up driving to Kalihi and came home with a beautiful little calico who matched Ms. Miki, but who turned out to have all sorts of problems, from mange to intestinal parasites that left her temporarily unable to control certain bodily functions.. We went through several very long weeks--maybe more--of cleaning up after Ms. Kua before all the medications took hold and she slowly recovered. But what a sweetie she was.

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